Excerpted From the Introduction

Every spring for the past 45 years, the most distinguished names in journalism have gathered in New York City for the George W. Polk Awards, commemorating an American reporter murdered during the Greek civil war. But for all the honors they have bestowed in his name, George Polk's fellow journalists failed him when they accepted as truth a sham investigation and murder trial. The story of how and why that happened is the subject of this book.

On Sunday, May 16, 1948, a boatman discovered the body of CBS correspondent George Polk floating in the bay of Salonika in northern Greece. He had been shot in the back of the head at point-blank range. The Greek government declared that it would spare no effort to find the murderer. The United States, which was spending a million dollars a day to help the conservative Greek regime suppress a communist rebellion, promised to monitor the investigation closely.

The list of possible murder suspects was long. Polk had relentlessly criticized players on both sides of the Greek civil war. He had called the communist guerrillas thugs, accused the Greek government of greed and corruption, branded a former minister of public order a gangster, and blasted Washington for supporting the repressive, right-wing Greek government.

Journalists in New York City attempted to raise funds to send an independent team of reporters to Greece to look into the murder. Their efforts were soon eclipsed by more powerful, mainstream Washington journalists who formed a committee and chose Walter Lippmann as its chair. With the creation of the Lippmann Committee--which was content to work through official channels--any hope for an independent journalistic investigation into George Polk's death vanished.

Who killed George Polk?

From the start of their investigation, the fiercely anti-communist Greek security police planned to convict a leftist for Polk's murder. Four Greeks were eventually accused. The first, a mid-level official of the Communist Party, was hundreds of miles from Salonika at the time of Polk's death. The second, a Greek newspaper reporter and alleged communist, was in his office at the time police said Polk's body was dumped in the water. The third, the reporter's aging mother, confessed to save her son from torture. The fourth, a member of the Central Committee of the Greek Communist Party, had died four weeks before Polk was killed.

The Lippmann Committee and CBS endorsed the assertion of the Greek security police that communists were responsible for Polk's murder. With the conviction in April 1949 of three of the four suspects, they were satisfied that justice had been served. More than 40 years after the trial, however, the case mounted by the Greek government--and largely unquestioned by the American press--has collapsed.

• In 1956 the American intelligence operative assigned to the case--who had repeatedly warned the Lippmann Committee that a coverup was taking place--told Walter Lippmann that the "whole truth never came out." In 1978 he characterized the trial as "a show to cover up the real perpetrators of the crime."
• In 1976 the journalist convicted in the case appealed for a new trial, charging that he "confessed" only after two months of torture by the Salonika security police. The Greek Supreme Court denied his request.
• In 1977 experts proved that the only physical evidence produced at the trial, a handwriting sample used to indict the journalist's mother, was written by someone else. The original sample has since disappeared.
• In 1978 one of the two men convicted in absentia, living in exile in Rumania, proclaimed his innocence of any crime and asked for permission to return to Greece to stand trial. The Greek government refused his request.2

A 15-year search of U.S. government archives and an examination of the personal papers of some of the central figures in the case have documented that the Greek Government and the United States Department of State played a role in framing innocent men for George Polk's murder. And that some of the most respected names in American journalism stood by and let it happen.