A Web Note: The following article (Kathimerini, English Edition, Thursday, March 19, 1998 p. 3), written shortly after the death of Gregory Staktopoulos, is a brief overview of the George Polk case.

The review of the various conspiracy theories regarding the CBS correspondent’s death should not be interpreted as giving them any credence–they are all wide off the mark, and unfortunately, they often cast suspicion on individuals whose actions were both innocent and inconsequential. The implausibility of these theories–and my opinion of what most likely happened–can be found in Chapter 9 of Who Killed George Polk: The Press Covers Up a Death in the Family.

Man wrongly convicted of journalist's murder dies before clearing his name
Greece's Unfinished Business in the George Polk Affair

Grigoris Staktopoulos, the Greek journalist wrongly convicted and jailed for the 1948 murder of CBS correspondent George Polk, died on February 28 at the Evangelismos Hospital in Athens where he was being treated for an acute pulmonary infection at the age of 88.
Staktopoulos will not be remembered for what he did but rather for what he did not do: murder the prominent American radio correspondent. Thirty-eight when he was arrested, tried and convicted of killing Polk, Staktopoulos spent 12 years in prison as punishment for a crime he did not commit and the remaining 38 years of his life trying to clear his name.
At the time of his death his attorney, former socialist public order minister Stelios Papathemelis, had been preparing to petition the Supreme Court to reopen the Polk file.
The brief had drawn heavily on evidence presented in a recent book on the case, Who Killed George Polk: The Press Covers Up a Death in the Family," by Elias Vlanton, a Greek-American researcher-writer.

By Elias Vlanton

Forty-nine years ago a promising young man's life was destroyed. He pounded on the doors of Greek justice for years, but never lived to see Greek justice let him in.

The story begins in 1948, a year when the Truman Doctrine was pouring a million dollars a day into Greece to defeat the communists and place it permanently in the Western political orbit.

On August 14, Salonika journalist Gregory Staktopoulos left his job at the newspaper Macedonia. On his way home a plainclothes policeman asked him to come to the police station to answer a few questions about George Polk, the recently murdered CBS correspondent. By the time the journalist finally left police custody 12 years later, his mother would be dead, his family destroyed, and his life ruined.

A Salonika boatman had discovered Polk's body floating in the Bay of Salonika in May, 1948. Missing for a week, Polk had been blindfolded, his hands and feet bound before his murderers shot a single bullet through his head. After the body had been identified, Greek, U.S., and British officials in Salonika entered Polk's room at the Astoria Hotel, where they found a letter written the day Polk disappeared and addressed to Polk's superior, Edward R. Murrow. "With a contact through a contact" Polk wrote Murrow, he had finally found a way to go to the mountains and interview General Markos of the Democratic Army. Officials in Salonika immediately released the letter to the press and announced that the communists must have killed Polk.

The following weeks were spent trying to find evidence to fit this theory, but months passed without results. Salonika security police chief Nicholas Mouscoundis played for time, hoping that if the crime remained unsolved it would be eventually forgotten. But the American press, outraged that a young American correspondent was killed in a country whose government was receiving massive U.S. aid, demanded action. In July General "Wild Bill" Donovan, the former head of the OSS, arrived in Greece and told Greek officials that nothing less than American aid itself was at stake in solving this case. Meeting with Mouscoundis, he was more blunt: "An arrest was desired," he said.

It was two weeks later that Staktopoulos never made it home from Macedonia. After weeks of humiliations, beatings, and torture, Staktopoulos confessed to being Polk's contact with the communists and to bringing the CBS correspondent in touch with Adam Mouzenides, a member of the Central Committee of the Greek Communist Party, and Evangelos Vasvanas, a mid-level official of the Communist Party.

The police also arrested Gregory's 68-year-old mother, Anna. One night Mouscoundis took her to a room to show her her only living son being tortured, hanging by his feet. She too, admitted to a fabrication, that she had addressed the envelope in which Polk's identification card had been sent to the police.

A trial was held the following April whose aim, as the U.S. Counsel General in Salonika Raleigh Gibson wrote in a confidential cable to Washington, was to convince the American people that the "conspiracy against Polk was indeed communist planned and executed and that the Government to which the American people have granted their support is not a government which silences critics with shots in the back of the head." Despite the fact that some prosecution witnesses clearly lied on the stand, that witnesses called by the defense were too scared to testify, and that even Staktopoulos' defense lawyers agreed with the prosecution that Staktopoulos had been Polk's contact with the communists, the American government and press announced to the world that the trial was been fair. Adam Mouzenides and Evangelos Vasvanas were convicted in absentia and sentenced to death, and Gregory Staktopoulos was given a life sentence.

For years after Staktopoulos was not transferred to prison but kept in a small room at Security Police headquarters, where Mouscoundis could control access to him. He hardly cared whether he lived or died when in 1953 a courageous journalist for Apogevmatini, Vassos Tsimbidaros, began writing articles about the many unresolved questions in the case. As more and more journalists began to be raised douts the case, Staktopoulos was told that it might help his release if he were to write an article confirming the case against the communists. He refused, but the Greek government reduced his sentence to 12 years and quietly released him in 1960. At first scared for his life he refused to talk, but in 1976, after the junta fell, he told a press conference that he had nothing to do with Polk's murder and had confessed only after being tortured. Also in the 1970s, thousands of pages of secret U.S. documents were declassified, revealing in great detail the shortcomings of the police investigation and the pressures which had been applied so the case would be solved.

Since then, three books published in the U.S. and dozens of articles have all concluded that Staktopoulos was innocent, while in Greece Staktopoulos' claim of confessing only after weeks of torture has never been challenged, even by the policemen he openly names as his torturers.

Who Killed Polk?

Until recently four theories have been advanced: that Polk was killed by the communists, the British, the far right, or the CIA.

Certainly the KKE, fighting for its very survival in 1948, could have ordered the execution of a foreign journalist. But what would the motive be? While no communist, Polk had condemned the disparities between rich and poor in civil war Greece, a disparity he blamed on the greedy and corrupt government in Athens. Why kill one of the few journalists who might have given the left badly needed publicity? And even if the communists had wanted to kill Polk, anyone who has studied the conditions in 1948 realize that the communists in Salonika were too weak and disorganized to have slipped into the city, organized the assassination of a well-known American journalist, and then vanished again through Greek army lines back to the mountains.

Members of the far-right, perhaps working with government officials, had the freedom of movement needed to stalk and kill the CBS correspondent. But in 1948, when Greece was being sustained through U.S. aid, which Greek official would dare to organize the murder of an American correspondent? Further, anyone who had been following Polk during the days before his death would have known that he was leaving Greece in 12 days. Wouldn't it be better to let him leave unharmed than to risk the exposure his murder might have brought? American journalist Kati Marton elaborated on this theory by claiming a high-level Greek government conspiracy, but her evidence is so weak that so serious scholar of the case gives it any credibility.

Starting with Polk's closest Greek colleague, the journalist Constantine Hadjiargyris, those who have rejected both a Greek government and communist conspiracy have concluded that the British did away with Polk to create trouble in U.S.-British relations. They point to the suspicious role of the British information officer in Salonika, Randoll Coate, one of the last people Polk met in Salonika. The departure of Coate and his secretary days after Polk disappeared seems suspicious. But Professor Edmund Keeley has uncovered formerly secret British archives proving that Coate had been ordered to leave Salonika long before Polk even decided to take his last swing through northern Greece.

Predictably, some have blamed the CIA of killing Polk to dispose of an independent journalist when the fate of the civil war was still in the balance. But no one has ever produced any evidence to support this charge, and no one familiar with either U.S. foreign policy in 1948 or the origins of the CIA can believe that the U.S. government would ever murder a prominent American correspondent, much less do so for a vague motive.

In all these years no one has produced evidence to support any of these theories, nor to explain the most enduring mystery of the Polk case, the speed with which it was carried out. Polk had boarded a plane in Athens on Friday, May 7 headed for Kavalla, not Salonika. He decided to disembark in Salonika only once told that the airport in Kavalla was flooded. He was last seen alive 8:00pm the next evening. If Polk's murder was the result of a complex conspiracy, the conspirators had less than 36 hours to realize Polk had disembarked in Salonika and that he intended to stay in the city for a few days. They had to make contact with him and to gain his confidence enough to lure him to a quiet spot for dinner (he was killed minutes after having eaten a large meal of lobster and peas), to shoot him , bind his body, and take the bleeding corpse to the middle of the bay of Salonika where it was dropped into the water. All this needed to be done without being noticed by either Polk's acquaintances in the city or by other witnesses. The conspirators would not only have had to carry out such a complex operation, but to have planned it so perfectly that no details have emerged during the last four decades.

One possibility has been overlooked, that the crime was not the result of grand conspiracy, but an impromptu act by local people in Salonika. Since the Greek police would have wanted to blame the crime on the communists no matter who had committed it, the coverup itself does not indicate any official government involvement in the crime itself.

The Case Against Staktopoulos

Legally, the most important development in the case since 1949 occurred on January, 1977, when Staktopoulos' lawyer, Stelios Papathemelis, managed to discredit the only piece of "hard" evidence presented at the trial connecting his client to the murder--the analysis by graphologists that Anna Staktopoulos had addressed the envelope in which Polk's identity card had been mailed to the police.

Papathemelis found a retired dock worker, 82-year-old Efthimios Bamias, who said that he had found Polk's wallet lying on the street in front of the American consulate one morning on his way to work. The illiterate Bamias gave the wallet to his friend Savvas Karamichalis, who addressed the envelope that was sent to the police. By 1977 Savvas Karamichalis was dead, but a new analysis revealed his handwriting to be a perfect match for that on the envelope. The two graphologists who had incriminated Anna Staktopoulos were still alive in 1977 but refused to discuss the case with Papathemelis. Armed with this new evidence, Papathemelis filed a petition with the Greek Supreme Court to reopen his client's case. The Court rejected his request in 1979.

Since then at least one other key document in the case has been proved to be a forgery. Early in my study of the case, which began with Yiannis Roubatis, then a journalist of Ta Nea, we sent Polk's famous letter to Murrow  and other copies of Polk's signature to a retired FBI graphologist, who confirmed that Polk's signature on the Murrow letter was a forgery. If Polk had never established a "contact" with the communists, then the Greek government's case against Staktopoulos as that contact is certainly a farce. The indictment and Staktopoulos' confessions, all based on the "contact" theory, can be seen for what they are, pure fiction.

If the story that Polk had a contact to go to the mountains was just an elaborate facade to direct the investigation towards to communists, then why was Polk killed? Even before arriving in Salonika, the CBS correspondent was obsessed with the rumors of a network that smuggled guns, drugs, and other contraband in and out of Greece. He had told acquaintances that he had the names of people in Salonika who could supply him with more information.

This would have remained little more than a possible motive had not a woman living in Salonika, Soula Karanthou, walked into the American Embassy in January, 1953. In a declassified CIA report, Karanthou shares her suspicions that her neighbor, Zissis Nikzas, was involved in Polk's murder. She reports that Nikzas had a taverna in a remote area along the coast in Nea Krini and that around the time Polk was killed she had observed him taking his rubber raft out from the apartment one day before he leaving for the taverna. She also said that after returning from work that evening he and his wife had a terrific fight during which she yelled: "Zissis, why did you do it?" And that even later he was visited by men late in the night, but pretended not to be home.

What Karanthou did not know but which further research confirmed was that her neighbor was not simply a taverna owner, but that he led one of Salonika's right-wing groups. And a long-time resident of the area knew Nikzas and confirmed that his group (name) and several others in the the area had been engaged in a variety of criminal enterprises.

Put together, it is likely that on the day he arrived in Salonika Polk contacted members of the criminal underworld in the city . Worried about a foreign journalist asking too many questions about their operations, they decided to lure Polk to the remote Nea Krini restaurant, shot him, and the used the raft to row out into the bay and dump his body overboard. This explains how the crime could be carried out so quickly and, since perhaps no more than four or five people knew about it, why the truth was so difficult to piece together. As intriguing as this evidence is, at this late date all the probable participants are dead and the leads too old for the standards of a court. But this information does further indicate that the promoising leads in the crime point to others, not to Staktopoulos.

The Polk Case Today

The file on the Polk case is closing. Adam Mouzenides, the alleged triggerman, had been killed in the mountains before Polk even arrived in Salonika. Evangelos Vasvanas spent most of his life in exile in Romania. His request in the mid-1970s to return to Greece and stand trial for the murder was turned down by the Greek government. He returned after the general amnesty and died in Salonika in the 1980s, continuing to maintain his innocence. Anna Staktopoulos died shortly after Gregory was condemned to a life in prison.

Mouzenides and Vasvanas were convenient police targets because they were communists and because, not being in Salonika, they could not defend themselves. Why was Gregory Staktopoulos chosen for his nightmarish role? At the time of the trial he was attacked as being either an agent of the British, a Nazi, or a communist. Staktopoulos' only crimes were to have fulfilled the qualification of a scapegoat by speaking English well (he graduated from Anatolia College), having worked at one time as a part-time translator for the communist Laiki Phoni, and having dropped by the Mediterranean Hotel bar and been introduced to Polk on the night he arrived in Salonika.

Gregory Staktopoulos never lived to see the Greek state exonerate him, but even posthumously the Greek judicial system must clear his name. It must do so not for Staktopoulos, but for the integrity of Greece itself. Exonerating Staktopoulos provides Greece with an opportunity to exonerate itself. It will demonstrate to future generations that there is no shame in acknowledging the mistakes of the past, and allow Greece to finally end the drama of the George Polk affair in a way that will help prevent its repetition.