Unsolved Mysteries
A half-century after George Polk's murder,many questions remain.
By Christopher Lydon

George Polk, covering the Greek civil war for CBS news, could feel the crunch coming in the spring of 1948. "Now that many correspondents are writing such critical stories on the dominant right-wing faction of the Government," Polk reported in his last long dispatch, "there are any number of vague hints that 'somebody is likely to get hurt.' " A few weeks later he was dead.

Dauntless, Polk had recounted the cruelties of the Communist campaign, but his specialty was the corruption and brutality of the Royalist regime in Athens, which the United States, under the Truman Doctrine, was fortifying with $300 million in foreign aid. Face to face in a shouting match with one strongman of the right, Polk had boasted that his revelations would "break" the Government. The next news of George Washington Polk, age 34, was the discovery of his blind-folded body floating in the bay off Salonika--hands and feet rope-bound, the back of his head blown off, execution style. The crime has never been definitively solved, and probably won't be.

Elias Vlanton, a freelance journalist who has followed the Polk case for many years, does no more than guess at an answer to his own question in "Who Killed George Polk?" Nor is the main argument of the book, written with Zak Mettger, an editor and writer who lives in Washington, a new one. The heart of the book's thesis is that George Polk was the victim of two crimes--first murder, then abandonment by CBS and the American news establishment, which acceded in Greece's official frame-up and preposterous trial of absent Communists as his killers.

Mr. Vlanton makes the most of the hypocrisies abounding in this oft-told tale. In his regular CBS broadcast, for example, a shaken Edward R. Murrow celebrated George Polk's "reverence for fact and indifference to criticism--which gave him the respect of the men in his trade." But in truth, by 1948 the glory years of "Murrow's boys" and the CBS news division were mostly past. Mr. Vlanton notes that while the network pledged $10,000 (never spent) to solve the Polk murder, it was at almost the same moment signing away Jack Benny from NBC for $1.3 million.

In the news business at large, George Polk was instantly sainted; his name has been immortalized in one of journalism's most cherished prizes, awarded every spring for truth telling. But his name seems destined to stand as a strangely double byword, recalling not only his own straight talking but the fecklessness of a profession cowed by the cold war. Walter Lippmann and the blue-ribbon journalists' committee self-appointed to inquire into the murder squelched all but the official Greek investigation, and swallowed the badly cooked verdict even though the best evidence, as Lippmann himself observed, "sounds as if it might have been invented."

The main lines of Mr. Vlanton's book parallel Kati Marton's much racier, more novelistic account, "The Polk Conspiracy," published five years ago. The general reader may wonder if another treatment was necessary. Mr. Vlanton nitpicks many of Ms. Marton's judgments and rejects the conclusion she constructed: that Greece's Deputy Prime Minister, confronted by Polk with a record of cash deposits in a New York bank, had the reporter bumped off. He offers his own, equally vulnerable hypothesis: that George Polk was killed by smugglers or other common criminals in Salonika, and that politics may have had nothing to do with his murder but everything to do with the aftermath. The Vlanton and Marton books end, in any event, with much the same scorecard of heroes and villains, and with the same sense that George Polk was a finer hero than midcentury journalism deserved.

The thematic American bad guys in "Who Killed George Polk?" are Walter Lippmann, the credulous pundit, and, worse, William J. (Wild Bill) Donovan, the wartime spy chief retained by the Lippmann committee to second-guess the Greek investigation. But Donovan's real interest was not in fact-finding but in expediting a trial, any trial, to save the client Government in Athens further embarassment, and he was "furious" that George Polk's 20-year-old brother, William, kept asking him questions: why, for example, had the right wing never been suspected or accused? "Don't you understand we are in the middle of a war?" Donovan railed. "You are a smart young man from a good family. If you keep on you will ruin your career."

Lippmann had to prod Donovan for three years to get delivery of the counsel's report on the case, a whitewash. And by then Lippmann had given away his leverage. His biographer, Ronald Steel, in a long review article on Kati Marton's book in 1991, said that Lippmann and his committee "should have been more skeptical. ... They failed in their responsibility. But this is not the same thing as a cover-up. Here Donovan is the far more likely candidate."

The good guys in Mr. Vlanton' book, as in Ms. Marton's, are James Kellis, an Air Force colonel who was removed as Donovan's undercover investigator when he first sniffed foul play on the right, and the independent journalist I. F. Stone, whose incisive prose matched his detective's instincts and who blew a whistle that too few Americans heard. Kellis, who had served underground in Greece during World War II and later in the C.I.A., and who was the only American near the case who spoke Greek fluently, described himself as "firmly convinced that the rightists were involved in the murder." In ignoring lapses in the investigation, he wrote privately, "we are becoming silent partners in the crime." For his impolitic suspicions the Greek police and the American Embassy had Kellis barred from the country. His superiors, he wrote publicly, though a quarter-century later, had never wanted to know who killed George Polk.

Only I. F. Stone can be said to have seen and said it all at the time. He commented at the start that Donovan was "too easily reachable by government officials" and "too susceptible to considerations of high policy" to be the right sleuth. And he recognized instantly that in his final report in 1952 Lippmann had given a high-class lesson in "how to be a willing sucker instead of a real reporter." Elias Vlanton's 20 years of research have spiced this mournful story with many fresh details, but there is no improving on I. F. Stone's succinct judgment.

Christopher Lydon is the host of National Public Radio's political talk show "The Campaign Connection," from WBUR in Boston.