Iatrides 2018

Assassination and Judicial Misconduct
in Cold War Greece

The Polk/Staktopoulos Case in Retrospect
✣ John O. Iatrides
History is not what happened but what the surviving evidence says happened. If
you can hide the evidence and keep the secrets, then you can write the history.
David Hackett Fisher1
The Setting: From Liberation to Civil War
Greece emerged from the Second World War devastated and demoralized. A
heroic but ultimately doomed struggle against the Axis invaders in 1940–1941
was followed by a crushing defeat and triple occupation (German, Italian,
Bulgarian), which severely undermined institutional authority, seized meager
resources, and caused much human suffering. A highly politicized resistance
movement accentuated prewar political divisions and sparked widespread vi-
olence. The guerrillas’ attacks on the occupiers often resulted in horrendous
reprisals and atrocities.
The end of the occupation did not bring relief. A “government of national
unity,” established under British auspices at the Lebanon conference in May
1944, arrived in Athens on 18 October 1944. The newly formed government
was an assortment of mostly aging prewar politicians claiming to represent
the principal political and resistance factions. They engaged in endless debate
and mutual recriminations but were too divided and inept to constitute an
effective governing body. Moreover, the government lacked the resources to
tackle the country’s daunting problems, particularly insofar as its authority
did not extend much beyond the limits of the major urban centers.
1. David Hackett Fisher, quoted in Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and
the CIA (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), p. 297.
Journal of Cold War Studies

Vol. 20, No. 4, Fall 2018, pp. 65–126, doi:10.1162/jcws_a_00823
© 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology
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During the war British authorities had funded and advised the Greek gov-
ernment in exile and sought to control the resistance organizations hoping to
restore in postliberation Greece a democratic order loyal to Britain and outside
Moscow’s orbit. For some British officials, including Prime Minister Winston
Churchill, the restoration of King George II, whom many Greeks blamed for
the hated Ioannis Metaxas dictatorship (1936–1941), was the best guaran-
tee that postwar Greece would be secure in Britain’s sphere of influence. In
September 1944, the principal resistance armies, the Communist-controlled
Greek National Liberation Army (ELAS) and its main rival, the National Re-
publican Greek League (EDES), were placed under British military command
(Gen. Ronald Scobie), and ELAS was ordered to remain outside the Athens
region (Caserta agreement). The following month, in Moscow, Churchill and
Iosif Stalin reached an understanding under which Greece was consigned to
Britain’s zone of responsibility (“spheres of influence” agreement).
In December 1944, after the resignation of leftist ministers in protest
over a plan to disarm the resistance armies caused the cabinet to collapse, a
Communist-organized mass demonstration in central Athens escalated into
an armed uprising (the Dekemvriana). The fighting, which continued into
January, was finally suppressed primarily by British units hastily reinforced
from Italy. Following the withdrawal and disarming of ELAS in the capital
region, a comprehensive peace agreement (the Varkiza agreement) provided
for a plebiscite on the monarchy’s future, the holding of national elections
for a constituent assembly, the creation of a new national army, amnesty for
political crimes, and punishment of wartime collaborators.
The peace agreement ended the fighting in Athens but settled little else.
With British advisers continuing to involve themselves in Greek affairs, suc-
cessive weak and unstable cabinets lacked the authority and the means to
establish order across the country, revitalize state institutions, and rebuild a
crippled economy. The new national currency soon became almost worthless,
black market activity continued to flourish, and basic public services, includ-
ing health care, sanitation, and transportation, were scarce and often totally
unavailable. The state bureaucracy, largely a holdover of the prewar and occu-
pation years, remained inefficient and corrupt.
In the face of mounting uncertainty and fear, public unrest and lawless-
ness intensified. Mob demonstrations, mostly organized by leftist groups and
often turning violent, demanded laokratia (people’s power) and “death to the
monarcho-fascists,” a popular reference to royalists and other conservatives.
On the opposite side, right-wing extremists unleashed a wave of murderous
“white terror”—which the authorities appeared unable or unwilling to curb—
targeting leftists, especially cadres of the Greek Communist Party (KKE),
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Assassination and Judicial Misconduct in Cold War Greece
veterans of the wartime ELAS, and their sympathizers. Fearing for their lives,
some of the persecuted fled to the mountains with their weapons, forming
small bands of guerrillas and plundering nearby villages. To create a more sta-
ble environment and restore the government’s authority, elections were held
on 31 March 1946 under Allied supervision in which the Soviet Union re-
fused to take part. The elections were boycotted by the KKE and its allies,
thereby assuring the victory of the Right. They were followed by a plebiscite
that returned King George to his throne by a wide margin.
On the eve of the elections a large Communist guerrilla band attacked
the village of Litohoro at the foothills of Mt. Olympus, killing most of its de-
fenders, seizing weapons, and burning down numerous homes. The incident
appeared to signal a decision by the KKE, now led by Moscow-trained Nikos
Zachariadis (who had spent the war years imprisoned in a Nazi concentra-
tion camp) to pursue its revolutionary goals through armed force. In Octo-
ber 1946, Zachariadis ordered Markos Vafiadis (kapetan Markos), a wartime
leader of ELAS, to establish a military command and build up a guerrilla force
by recruiting ELAS veterans in Greece and Yugoslavia. This time the Com-
munist leadership, having decided to seize the country by force, counted on
Stalin’s endorsement and on material support from the Communist regimes
in East-Central Europe.2 By year’s end, KKE’s Democratic Army of Greece
(DAG) was staging guerrilla attacks on isolated communities defended by
poorly armed and demoralized security forces as the country descended into
full-scale civil war.
Until the defeat of Nazi Germany, officials in Washington had regarded
the Balkans as beyond the sphere of U.S. interests and wished to avoid en-
tanglements in that troubled region. They were critical of British efforts to
retain a dominant presence in postwar southeastern Europe, where Moscow’s
influence was expected to increase. President Franklin Roosevelt objected to
the “spheres of influence” agreement arranged between Churchill and Stalin in
October 1944, and U.S. diplomats blamed the Dekemvriana crisis in Athens
on Britain’s interventionist tactics. Except for humanitarian assistance, pro-
vided through the United Nations (UN) Relief and Rehabilitation Admin-
istration, official Washington confined its role in Greece to that of a passive
2. On wartime and postliberation Greece, see David H. Close, ed., The Greek Civil War, 1943–1950:
Studies of Polarization (London: Routledge, 1993); John O. Iatrides, ed., Greece in the 1940s: A Nation
in Crisis (London: University of New England Press, 1981); John O. Iatrides, “Revolution or Self-
Defense? Communist Goals, Strategy and Tactics in the Greek Civil War,” Journal of Cold War Studies,
Vol. 7, No. 3 (Summer 2005), pp. 3–33; Nikos Marantzidis, “The Greek Civil War (1944–1949) and
the International Communist System,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Fall 2013), pp. 25–
54; and Sotiris Rizas, Ap’ ten apeleftherosi ston emfylio (Athens: Kastaniotis, 2011).
67
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observer. This despite dire warnings from the U.S. embassy in Athens that
the severe economic crisis and the resulting paralysis of government author-
ity were paving the way for a right-wing regime that could easily lead to a
Communist dictatorship.3
The Truman administration’s basically passive attitude toward the es-
calating turmoil in Greece was gradually abandoned largely in response to
rapidly deteriorating U.S.-Soviet relations over developments in other coun-
tries and regions. U.S. officials were angered by the imposition of Communist
regimes across Eastern Europe and protested Moscow’s refusal to withdraw its
troops from Iran. They were particularly alarmed by persistent Soviet pres-
sures on Turkey to accept significant changes in the regulation of the Straits
of Bosporus intended to expand Soviet military power in the eastern Mediter-
ranean and the Near East. For U.S. policymakers these ominous developments
cast new light on the strategic location of Greece and the ramifications of its
civil war. In mid-1946, a War Department study asserted that the Greek in-
surgents were “an apparently well organized and armed Communist minority
supported by the USSR and Soviet satellites”; it concluded that
The strategic significance of Greece to US security lies in the fact that Greece
stands alone in the Balkans as a barrier between the USSR and the Mediter-
ranean, in a position similar to that of Turkey farther to the east. . . . If Greece
were to fall into the Soviet orbit, there could not fail to be most unfavorable
repercussions in all those areas where political sympathies are balanced precari-
ously in favor of the West and against Soviet Communism.4
Accordingly, “The United States should make it clear to the world that our
desire to see Greece remain independent and in charge of her own affairs is no
less firm than our position on Turkey.”5 The State Department soon followed
with its own conclusions. In September 1946 it proposed to assist Greece
based on political and economic considerations and emphasizing the need for
military support.6
3. On U.S. policies toward Greece in the early years of the Cold War, see John O. Iatrides, “The United
States and Greece in the Twentieth Century,” in Theodore A. Couloumbis, Theodore Kariotis, and
Fotini Bellou, eds., Greece in the Twentieth Century (London: Frank Cass, 2003), pp. 69–110; John
O. Iatrides, “George F. Kennan and the Birth of Containment: The Greek Test Case,” World Policy
Journal, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Fall 2005), pp 126–145; and Bruce R. Kuniholm, The Origins of the Cold
War in the Near East: Great Power Conflict and Diplomacy in Iran, Turkey and Greece (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1980).
4. Attachment, “US Security Interests in Greece,” September 1946, in National Archives and Records
Administration (NARA), Record Group (RG) 59, File 869.00/9-646.
5. Ibid.
6. The proposal is reproduced in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946,
Vol. VII, pp. 223–226 (hereinafter referred to as FRUS, with appropriate year and volume numbers).
68
By February 1947 the Truman administration’s sense of urgency was un-

mistakable: a new State Department memorandum, titled “Crisis and Immi-
nent Possibility of Collapse in Greece,” which the president approved on 25
February, recommended U.S. support for the regime in Athens. State De-
partment activity intensified after the announcement that Britain’s program
of assistance to Greece and Turkey would end on 31 March. At a White
House meeting on 27 February, Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson ar-
gued forcefully that Soviet pressures on Turkey, Iran, and Greece “had brought
the Balkans to the point where a highly possible breakthrough might open
three continents to Soviet penetration.” He continued,
Like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece
would infect Iran and all to the east. It would also carry infection to Africa
through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe through Italy and France, already
threatened by the strongest Communist parties in Western Europe. The Soviet
Union was playing one of the greatest gambles in history at minimal cost. . . .
We and we alone were in a position to break up the play.7
On 12 March 1947, President Harry Truman presented to a joint session

of Congress a bland but clear version of what was soon dubbed the “Truman
Doctrine.” Without mentioning the Soviet Union or Communism, he com-
mitted the United States to support “free peoples who are resisting attempted
subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” so that they could
“work out their own destiny in their own way.” Although the immediate bene-
ficiaries of U.S. assistance were to be Greece and Turkey, the president’s speech
in effect launched the policy of “containment,” a strategy of global dimensions
designed to block the further expansion—real or perceived—of Soviet Com-
munism. Aware of criticism that the Greek government was undemocratic
and corrupt, Truman sought to reassure Congress and the public that the as-
sistance program would be administered under direct U.S. supervision.8
The new U.S. policy toward Greece was comprehensive and ambitious.
Its central goal was to promote the establishment of a broad-based anti-
Communist coalition government that would inspire confidence, bring about
stability, and restore the country’s economy and social services. To make
this possible, an inefficient and demoralized civil service would have to be
thoroughly reformed and turned into a dynamic, efficient, and impartial
instrument of state authority and social progress. A massive program of
7. Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: Norton, 1969),
p. 219.
8. Joseph M. Jones, The Fifteen Weeks (New York: Viking Press, 1955), pp. 3–27, 67–78.
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reconstruction and economic development was to be undertaken across the

entire country, providing for electrification, road building, irrigation, and agri-
cultural improvements.
Some progress was in fact achieved on most of these projects, particularly
in urban areas. However, almost from the outset the destabilizing effects of
the civil war forced the Greek authorities and their U.S. advisers to concen-
trate their efforts primarily on defeating the insurgency and establishing law
and order across the country. As a result, the largest portion of U.S. assis-
tance was devoted to strengthening Greece’s security forces by increasing their
size, improving their equipment and training, and cleansing them of leftist
sympathizers and defeatists. For the most part, infrastructure projects were
designed to improve the army’s mobility and facilitate its capacity to pursue
and defeat the insurgents. U.S. advisers played a major role in all such activ-
ities. A large economic mission staffed with hundreds of administrators and
specialists handled the funding and supervision of assistance, and an equally
large military mission, headed by General James Van Fleet, who had distin-
guished himself in the war against Germany, assisted in the planning and
execution of military operations. Although officials in Washington discussed
sending combat troops, this did not turn out to be necessary. The Greek
armed forces proved themselves capable of achieving a decisive victory over the
insurgents.9
Combined with the activities of the much-expanded embassy in Athens,
the U.S. missions exercised a powerful influence over all aspects of Greek pub-
lic affairs and did not hesitate to intervene whenever they thought it necessary
to do so.10 Even though the direct interventions were consistent with U.S.-
Greek agreements implementing the Truman Doctrine, they were no less of-
fensive for Greek officials who had to endure them. It did not help matters that
pervasive U.S. involvement in Greece attracted large numbers of U.S. journal-
ists, most of whom had no previous familiarity with Greek realities and made
no effort to conceal in their reports their views on the Greek government’s
many and all too obvious shortcomings.
Although Britain’s assistance was severely curtailed as the United States
took charge in Greece, British officials in and out of uniform continued to
play a major role in training and advising the police and gendarmerie, and
in gathering intelligence on the Communist insurgency, especially in areas
9. Iatrides, “George F. Kennan and the Birth of Containment,” p. 133.

10. A. A. Fatouros, “Building Formal Structures of Penetration: The United States in Greece, 1947–
1948,” in Iatrides, ed., Greece in the 1940s, pp. 239–258; and Paul F. Braim, The Will to Win: The Life
of General James Van Fleet (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2001), pp. 151–223.
70
where some of them had previously served as liaisons with the wartime ELAS.
In one case, in March 1947, when UN observers set out from Thessaloniki
to investigate armed clashes along the Albanian and Yugoslav borders, the
small British consulate in Florina abruptly and inexplicably closed down, and
the consul left the country.11 Escorting the UN observers to meetings with
Communist insurgents was the press and the information officer of the British
consulate general in Thessaloniki and agent of the Secret Intelligence Service
(SIS) Randoll Coate, whose name would be linked to the story told in these
pages.
In May 1948, at the height of the civil war and of the interventionist
presence of the United States in Greece, the assassination of a prominent U.S.
journalist and the conviction for that crime of a virtually unknown Greek
newspaperman shocked public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic. The
case raised questions about nearly everyone involved, some of which linger to
this day.
Political Murder, Cruel Injustice
The murder of CBS reporter George Polk in Thessaloniki in May 1948 had all
the characteristics of a political assassination. In the weeks after the recovery
of his body off the city’s waterfront, rumors circulated, including some em-
anating from the U.S. embassy in Athens, that the 35-year-old Texan might
have been killed because of his allegedly violent temper, or had fallen victim
of a love triangle, or had been murdered by a narcotics ring he had suppos-
edly uncovered.12 Soon, however, such speculation was dismissed as baseless
and even deliberately deceptive. Almost from the beginning, in Greece as else-
where, many people believed that Polk had been killed execution-style because
of what he had reported, what he might yet make public, or because, in the
reckless pursuit of a journalistic coup, he had entrusted his life to extremists
who disposed of him for their own nefarious reasons. Whatever the identity
of the assassins and their particular motives, the immediate context of his ter-
rible end was almost certainly the Communist insurgency in Greece, which,
11. A. W. Sheppard, Britain in Greece (London: The League for Democracy in Greece, n.d.), p. 14.
Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest city, is also called Salonika or Salonica in English. I have
used Thessaloniki but have preserved “Salonika” and “Salonica” in quoted material and titles of
publications.
12. Rankin memorandum, “Murder of George Polk,” 15 August 1948, and Embassy Dispatch 860,
Enclosure No. 1, 26 August 1948, both in NARA, RG 59, 811.91268/6-1048.
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viewed as an opening skirmish in the East-West conflict, made him the first
Western journalist to become a casualty of the Cold War.13
Since his arrival in Greece from the Middle East in 1946, Polk, a protégé
of CBS’s influential newsman Edward R. Murrow and a veteran of the war
in the Pacific—where he was severely injured when his fighter plane was shot
down—had been busy reporting on that war-torn country based on his own
aggressive investigations. Ignoring official news briefings and press handouts,
he quickly became harshly critical of what he saw. In his sharply worded arti-
cles and radio broadcasts he portrayed the Athens government—a weak coali-
tion of conservatives headed by Konstantinos Tsaldaris and of centrists under
Themistocles Sofoulis—as repressive, incompetent, corrupt, and indifferent
to the plight of ordinary people. Polk had no sympathy for the Communist
insurgents and their foreign patrons and had referred to the Soviets as the
“new barbarians from [the] north again threatening to invade and subjugate
Greece.”14 However, he blamed the authorities and ruling elites for the abject
poverty and growing violence that engulfed the country. Soon after his sudden
death, his views on the civil war were summed up by his younger brother in a
letter to a friend and fellow journalist:
He long ago felt sure that the guerrillas were completely Russian-dominated yet
were always Greeks first and Communists second. He felt that most of them
had been forced into the hills by stupid and savage government work and as a
newsman he did not jump to the conclusion that they were per ce [sic] “bad.”15
Polk’s criticism extended to the Truman administration, which he accused

of spending millions of dollars in Greece to bolster an oppressive and cor-
rupt regime and trying to defeat the insurgency while doing precious little
to improve economic conditions and alleviate human misery. An article he
published in Harper’s in December 1947 on the Greek conflict incurred the
anger of Greek government authorities and made him even more unpopular
13. For an authoritative account of the crime and its aftermath, see Edmund Keeley, The Salonika Bay
Murder: Cold War Politics and the Polk Affair (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). Among
the many Greek publications, especially useful are Athanasios G. Kafiris, E Ypothesi Polk-Staktopoulou:
Mia anthropini kai dikastiki tragodia (Athens: Proskinio, 2010); Eleftherios A. Vourvahis, Poios skotose
ton Polk: Mia politiki dolofonia kai dikastiki plani (Athens: Proskinio, 2003).
14. Rankin memorandum, 10 June 1948, in NARA, RG 59, 811.91268/6-1048.
15. William Polk to William Price, 8 June 1949, in Papers of Kati Marton (Marton Papers). I am
grateful to Kati Marton, author of The Polk Conspiracy: Murder and Cover-Up in the Case of CBS News
Correspondent George Polk (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990), for giving me access to her
research collection.
72
in the U.S. embassy.16 Greek right-wing elements accused him of being a

Communist, and there had been reports of threats against his life.
In the spring of 1948, preparing to return to the United States with his
young Greek wife, Rea, to receive a Nieman fellowship in journalism at Har-
vard University, Polk approached fellow journalists as well as several Greek
and British officials to solicit information on how he might travel to the in-
surgents’ headquarters in the mountains to interview their military leader,
“General” Markos. At the peak of the civil war, such an interview would have
been the crowning achievement of his journalistic posting in Greece.
On 7 May, Polk flew to Thessaloniki (the plane’s original destination, the
town of Kavala, had to be abandoned because of bad weather), checked into
a downtown hotel, and over the next two days spoke with several individuals,
Greek and foreign, seeking advice on how he might travel to Markos’s com-
mand post. He also wrote a letter to Morrow and another to his mother. He
was last seen on the evening of 9 May, leaving his hotel. Seven days later, his
body was found floating a short distance off the city’s pier, a bullet-hole in
the back of the head, hands tied with rope. There were no signs of robbery,
but Polk’s press card had already been received by a downtown police station
through the mail in a handwritten, unstamped envelope.
Given the violence of the escalating insurgency, the natural assumption
was that Polk had been murdered by the Communists to highlight the gov-
ernment’s failure to protect civilians and strike a blow at Washington’s policy
of supporting a repressive and corrupt regime. This was the official view of
Greek authorities, a view that the Truman administration was eager to em-
brace, despite publicly demanding a thorough and impartial investigation.
However, from the outset, the paucity of forensic evidence and the absence
of tangible proof of responsibility for the crime gave rise to several other
theories that remained in circulation long after the case had been officially
closed. According to one such theory, whose prominent advocates—at least in
private conversation—included the centrist Minister of Public Order Con-
stantine Rendis, Polk had been killed by the extreme right to silence his
anti-government reporting, prevent him from interviewing Markos and air-
ing Communist propaganda, and as a warning to other foreign journalists who
might be inclined to be sympathetic toward the insurgents. Rendis confided
to U.S. officials his suspicion that the murder of a prominent Communist
leader, Giannis Zevgos, in March 1947, in the center of Thessaloniki, may
have been committed by an “extremely secret and militant group of royalists”
16. George Polk, “Greece Puts Us to the Test,” Harper’s Magazine, December 1947, pp. 529–536.
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in the army and police. According to Rendis, the same group “were the most
logical suspects” in Polk’s death.17
For many Greeks in and out of government the suggestion that Polk’s
murder was the work of right-wing extremists represented a plausible if night-
marish thought. One of them, George Vlahos, the prominent owner and
publisher of the influential conservative Athens daily Kathimerini, wrote an
emotional editorial conceding the possibility that the killers might have been
rightists. In that case, he bemoaned, foreign observers would assert that the
entire Greek state should be held responsible: “And the State, powerless, in-
competent, weak, barely able to stand on its feet, trembles that this story may
be added to its many sufferings. And [the state] makes the sign of the cross:
‘God Almighty, grant that the murders are Communists, because if they are
not, all is lost.’”18
Other speculation, promoted behind the scenes by, among others, the
chief of the gendarmerie, Giannis Panopoulos, blamed the murder on British
agents intent on silencing Polk’s criticism of British policies in the Middle
East, which the CBS reporter had covered extensively before coming to Athens
(Polk was reportedly completing a book on that subject), and in order to cause
friction between the United States and Greece from which Britain might de-
rive unexplained benefits. Alarmed by the rumor, British diplomats in Athens
appealed to their U.S. colleagues for help in quashing “these fantastic al-
legations.”19 But suspicions of a British connection to the crime persisted,
fueled by speculation and fragments of puzzling evidence in British official
documents.
Polk may have been a maverick, impetuous, aggressive in his investiga-
tions, and harsh in his reports, but he was hardly alone in his criticism of offi-
cial Greek and U.S. policies. The majority of U.S. journalists covering Greece
17. Oliver Marcy, memorandum of conversation, 15 July 1948, in Marton Papers; and Driscoll, Marcy,
and Rendis, memorandum to Marshall, “Polk Investigation—Possibility of Rightist Guilt,” n.d., in
Marton Papers. Zevgos had been observing the work of the UN committee on the Balkans.
18. See the front-page editorial in Kathimerini, 28 May 1948. The Communist Party vehemently
denied responsibility for Polk’s murder. On 30 May 1948 the insurgents’ “provisional government”
announced that Polk’s “execution” had been planned by the “American service in Greece” and carried
out by top Greek government officials (including Rendis, Athens police chief Angelos Evert, and
Thessaloniki senior security official Nicolaos Mouskoundis) to prevent the journalist from traveling to
“Free Greece” and revealing “the truth” about it. The same announcement proposed the formation of
an international committee to visit the insurgents’ “Free Greece” to investigate the murder. There is
no evidence that the Greek authorities considered the proposal. Insurgents’ radio bulletin, 19 October
1948, in Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Archive (AYE), File Polk, 1948, Section 5.1.
19. Embassy memorandum to Foreign Office, 26 August 1948, in The National Archives of the
United Kingdom, (TNAUK), Foreign Office Archives (FO), 371/85679; and P. Reilly to G. Wallinger,
31 August 1948, in TNAUK, FO, 371/85679.
74
at that time, as well as some officials of the embassy and the economic mission,
were openly critical of the Athens government and troubled by Washington’s
determination to prop up an incompetent and corrupt regime. Other jour-
nalists had also let it be known that they were eager to visit Markos to get the
Communists’ side of the story in the civil war. Significantly, several foreigners
who were captured by the insurgents, including two members of the U.S. eco-
nomic mission and the British journalist Kenneth Matthews, were treated well
and eventually released unharmed. Matthews, whom the guerrillas escorted on
foot across much of the Peloponnese, finally received a personal radio message
from a senior Communist leader that read in part,
When you think that your journalistic mission in the Free Peloponnese has been
completed, ask our people to guide you back behind the fascist road-block.
Please help out in this transit [sic] because we do not need to have a second
Polk case. The fascists are capable of anything.20
One month after Polk’s murder, his friend and colleague at CBS News,
Homer Bigart, wrote to William Polk, the slain journalist’s younger brother,
that he was going to Greece, “hoping to get the story your brother went after
and to find out if the guerrillas can shed any light on the murder.” He added:
“If I have any luck I hope that the stories I send will be regarded as a sort of
memorial to George who never forgot that there were two sides to every story
and who gave his life trying to get “the other side.”21 Contacted secretly while
in Belgrade and taken on a prearranged route chosen to avoid detection by Yu-
goslav authorities, Bigart and an escort traveled southward by train to Skopje
and then by truck, on horseback, and finally on foot, crossing into Greece
and guerrilla-held territory northwest of Thessaloniki. Years later Bigart spec-
ulated that his strange and arduous trip, which coincided with the split be-
tween Stalin and Josip Broz Tito, had been arranged by the Soviet Union in
an effort to generate sympathy for Markos and the insurgents, especially after
Polk’s murder had been widely blamed on the Greek Communists.22
Escorted by armed guards, Bigart spent a week visiting insurgents’ staging
areas, training camps, and hospitals, at times within sight and sound of major
20. Kenneth Matthews, Memories of a Mountain War: Greece 1944–1949 (London: Longman, 1972).
The message from the Communist cadre Kostas Karagiorgis, dated 23 October 1948, is reproduced
opposite p. 241. The insurgents’ radio bulletin of 19 October 1948 (see note 18 supra) warned that
“the monarchists are plotting to repeat the Polk story with the journalist Matthews.”
21. Homer Bigart to William Polk, 13 June 1948, in New York University, Tamiment Library, 159:
Newsmen’s Commission Collection, Box 3, Folder “Homer Bigart.”
22. Ole L. Smith, “The Tsaldaris Offers for Negotiations 1948: A Lost Opportunity or a Canard?”
Epsilon, No. 1 (1987), pp. 86–87.
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battles. At the end of the tour, Markos, in the presence of the Communists’
“foreign minister” Petros Roussos, gave Bigart the standard party line, deliv-
ered through an incompetent translator: The insurgents were strong, well-
armed, and supremely confident of their victory, he said; they had nothing
against the American people, whom Truman had deceived into helping a fas-
cist regime; they wanted U.S. help to rebuild their country; and their only
ambition was to end the civil war. Concluding the brief interview, Markos as-
sured his U.S. visitor that he would be safely escorted to the town of Yannina
for his return to Athens.23
Thirty years later, interviewed by a Greek journalist in Tetovo, Yugoslavia,
Markos recalled his meeting with Bigart, which he asserted had been arranged
by the Soviet embassy in Belgrade and lasted only fifteen minutes. As in-
structed by Zachariadis, he had told Bigart that the Communists were pre-
pared to end the civil war and enter into negotiations with anyone, provided
that the members of the Greek government were declared “criminals.” Bigart
reportedly responded with a smile, “That’s a point of view.” Markos told the
Greek journalist that he and his staff had not known that Polk wanted to in-
terview him and had not been aware of the correspondent’s death until they
heard about it on radio reports. He added that, had they known about Polk’s
wishes, the Communists would have helped him travel to the mountains,
from either Athens or Thessaloniki: “We were interested in and encouraged
such things: to have them come to the mountains, learn about our struggle,
and contribute to the enlightenment of world public opinion. Why Polk was
murdered we could not know at that time.”24
In 1983, Markos returned to Greece as a hero of the Communist Left
and was soon appointed a member of parliament. In April 1991, during a
brief visit to New York in connection with the presentation of the annual
George Polk awards in journalism, a frail and wizened Markos met with a
panel of specialists on the Polk case—including Edmund Keeley, Kati Mar-
ton, and Elias Vlanton—and gave cryptic answers to questions put to him
about the murder. Asked by Keeley, “In your opinion, who killed George
Polk?” Markos responded, “A non-Greek.” When Keeley pressed him, “You
mean, maybe British or American?” Markos replied, “I didn’t say ‘a foreigner.’
I said ‘a non-Greek.’” Turning to Vlanton, Keeley whispered, “Who do you
think he means?” Vlanton responded with a smile, “I think he means his rival,
23. Bigart’s four-part report was published in The New York Herald Tribune, 25–28 July 1948. Possibly
at the request of the paper’s editors, the article makes no mention of Polk.
24. Dimitris Gousidis, Markos Vafeiadis (Thessaloniki: Epikairotita, 1983), pp. 31–34.
76
Zachariadis.”25 Markos promised to give a more substantial answer about the

Polk case in a forthcoming book, but he died the following year without hav-
ing fulfilled his promise. At meetings with Greek journalists during the visit
to New York, Markos sought to absolve Tsaldaris of responsibility for Polk’s
death and claimed that the murder was committed by agents of “non-Greek
dark forces” opposed to the country’s pacification and reconciliation. Pressed
to explain, Markos would not go further than to say that anyone who was an
agent of a foreign power was not a Greek.26
At a conference in Athens in October 1999, during which the Polk case
was briefly discussed, I was approached by an elderly man who claimed that
in 1948 he was a sergeant in the insurgents’ Democratic Army in the Mt.
Olympus region. In June of that year he received a handwritten card with in-
structions (which he produced for me to examine) to escort safely to Markos’s
command post the “American,” so that what happened to Polk did not hap-
pen to him also. According to the man’s account, the American was to be
blindfolded (with a white kerchief ) and taken under escort to meet Markos.
Almost certainly, the “American” was Bigart.27
In the decades following the KKE’s crushing defeat in the civil war, the
party split into factions that, scattered across much of East-Central Europe,
engaged in endless mud-slinging and vitriolic recriminations, accusing for-
mer comrades of committing terrible mistakes and crimes of every kind. In
this cacophony of charges and countercharges, much of it repeated endlessly
in print, there has been not a single claim or even oblique hint that Polk’s
killers were rival Communists. The few leftist publications that mention the
crime blame it on the Right, the British, or on a conspiracy of the two. In
the spring of 1948, as the civil war escalated and casualties mounted on both
sides, Communist elements might have been tempted to murder a foreign
journalist whose nationality, despite his reporting, might identify him with the
government side. Yet, there is no evidence that the KKE and the insurgents’
command structure targeted journalists or other civilians working for the U.S.
missions in Greece. The only U.S. casualty of the civil war was an Air Force
officer who in January 1949 was beaten to death after the Greek military plane
25. I thank Edmund Keeley and Elias Vlanton for their accounts (emails to author, 24–25 February
2017) of Markos’s remarks at their meeting on 18 April 1991. In 1948, following major battles in
which the insurgents suffered defeat, Zachariadis removed Markos from military command and had
him expelled from the KKE and sent to the Soviet Union.
26. See the interview transcribed in Ethnikos kyrix (New York), 18–19 April 1991, pp. 1–2.
27. Conference on the Greek Civil War, Panteion University, Athens. 20 October 1999, author’s pri-
vate collection.
77
Iatrides
in which he flew as a volunteer observer was shot down by Communist-led

guerrillas.28
Despite endless speculation and questionable arguments at the Thessa-
loniki criminal court on the Polk case, no credible explanation has been of-
fered of why the Communists would wish to assassinate Polk, an outspoken
critic of the KKE’s enemies. Would the KKE, as the prosecution claimed, have
employed as the killers two of its more prominent cadres, Adam Mouzenidis
and Vangelis Vasvanas, both well known in Thessaloniki, a city under tight
security and flush with police informers, where the party’s underground net-
work had recently been penetrated and dismantled? British intelligence offi-
cers in Thessaloniki, who reportedly alerted Greek security authorities to the
impending arrival of suspected Communist saboteurs, claimed that Vasvanas
had been under their surveillance during his visit.29 If so, how could he have
been in the boat in which Polk was killed, as the prosecution claimed? More-
over, why was Vasvanas not captured before or after the crime, and why was
he allowed to escape to the mountains?
Other questions also abound. Why would the Communists implicate in
the murder a small-time local newsman and briefly KKE member, Gregory
Staktopoulos, and leave him behind to fend for himself and most likely re-
veal to the authorities and the world everything he knew about Polk’s death?
The prosecution’s explanation, that Staktopoulos was instructed by the KKE
to make contact with Polk, deliver him to his killers, and remain to serve as
interpreter, is only part of the government case that lacks credibility, if only be-
cause, according to several reliable accounts, Mouzenidis knew English. Why
have Staktopoulos mail Polk’s press card to the police, as he was made to testify
at his trial, when someone else could have performed that simple but highly
incriminating task? Would Staktopoulos have implicated his widowed mother
in the crime by having her address the envelope that carried Polk’s press card to
the police? What was the purpose of sending the press card to the authorities
or of dumping Polk’s body in the water so close to the center of Thessaloniki,
where it was certain to be found? None of these questions was addressed, let
alone answered, before Staktopoulos was tried and found guilty of complicity
in Polk’s murder.
28. Greece, Sec I, 24 February 1949, in NARA, RG 165, Army General Staff, Plans & Operations,
091; and “Re: Lt. Col. R. S. Edner,” 3 February 1949, in NARA, RG 165, Army General Staff, Plans
& Operations, 091.
29. James Kellis to Donovan, 22 July 1948, in Marton Papers. Kellis’s British source was Captain
Stacey of the Thessaloniki “Balkan Counterintelligence Section.”
78
On the opposite side of the debate, those who blame Polk’s murder either
on right-wing groups or on British operatives, have also failed to produce a
credible motive and hard evidence to substantiate their theories. Admittedly,
they do have one major fact in their favor. In 1948, the all-powerful security
authorities in Thessaloniki worked closely with British advisers and other of-
ficials and were known to have ties with militant and clandestine right-wing
elements as well as informers among the city’s underworld. Once a decision
was taken to have someone murdered, carrying it out without leaving behind
incriminating evidence would have been relatively easy. But such rational rea-
soning is no proof of culpability in the Polk case. It is difficult to imagine
that ordinary extremists or rogue henchmen of the Right would have taken
it upon themselves to assassinate a prominent U.S. correspondent, no matter
how offensive his reports and journalistic activities. It is even more difficult
to suppose that Greek officials or persons in authority would have decided to
instigate such a crime, given the political risks involved and severe repercus-
sions for Greece, whose very survival as an independent state in the Western
camp depended on U.S. assistance and goodwill. Finally, despite the puzzling
facts and fragmentary evidence, a credible explanation of why a British offi-
cial might have been involved in Polk’s death must be presented with great
caution.
The Investigation
If by all indications Polk’s murder was politically motivated, what followed

the recovery and identification of the body was a travesty of justice. The in-
vestigation, questioning of witnesses, detention and interrogation of a single
suspect, and every detail of the prosecution’s case and the public trial were
handled by state officials anxious to dispose of the matter quickly and protect
the government’s image as well as their reputations and careers. Their task was
made easier by the absence of meaningful forensic evidence, allowing the in-
vestigating authorities almost unlimited latitude in channeling their efforts in
directions of their choosing. In turn, their work was affected by the capacity of
influential foreigners to intervene and demand that the investigation pursue
particular leads and, above all, produce quick results.
Greek officials were especially deferential toward General William (“Wild
Bill”) Donovan, the gruff head of the wartime Office of Strategic Services
(OSS), who was chosen to monitor the case by a special committee of promi-
nent U.S. journalists headed by the distinguished columnist Walter Lipp-
mann. After arriving in Athens on 10 June, Donovan launched his own
79
Iatrides
investigation and asserted to a senior Greek official that “the people of the
United States would judge Greece from the manner that the Greek Gov-
ernment handled the Polk murder case.”30 According to published police ac-
counts, Donovan was impertinent and abusive and once had to be restrained
from slapping Major Mouskoundis, the police officer heading the investiga-
tion.31 Greek officials also found Raleigh Gibson, the U.S. consul general in
Thessaloniki, intimidating with his stern demeanor, impatience, and sharp
questioning that dominated their frequent visits to his office. The chief pros-
ecutor, Attorney General for the Court of Appeals Panayiotis Constantinidis,
regularly called on Gibson to brief him on the investigation and frequently
apologized for its slow progress. After one such meeting Gibson reported to
Washington that Constantinidis “is definitely afraid of the government’s abil-
ity to secure a conviction,” particularly because he did not have enough ev-
idence against a possible suspect, Mouzenidis. “I told the Attorney General
that I was not in agreement to [sic] his plan which would necessitate post-
poning the trial, and that I felt he was making serious mistake.” Before the
meeting was over, “the Attorney General stated that he had reconsidered his
position” and that the trial would not be delayed.32
The U.S. embassy’s “intelligence and security officer,” Frederick Ayer, Jr.,
a one-time FBI agent employed by the U.S. economic mission in Athens, had
been instructed by the State Department to devote himself full-time to the
Polk case and wire to Washington daily reports. Brassy and self-important,
Ayer did not hesitate to question Greek officials and lecture them on their
work.33 Apparently at the instigation of Col. Thomas Martin, a senior offi-
cer of the British police mission in Thessaloniki, Ayer succeeded in having
Mouskoundis placed in charge of the investigation.34 Claiming to have nu-
merous informants among the Communists, Ayer periodically offered bits
of unsubstantiated “information” while charging that the interrogations by
Greek investigators in Athens were poorly conducted and ineffective.35 Greeks
at all levels were frequently reminded that their handling of the Polk case and
30. Memorandum of conversation, 11 June 1948, in US Army Military History Institute, Carlisle,
PA, Donovan Papers, Folder “Personal Investigation of Polk Murder 1947–1948.”
31. Konstantinos Antoniou, Istoria Ellinikis Vasilikis Horofylakis, 1833–1967, Vol. 4 (Athens: Ladias,
1967), pp. 2356–2363; and Apostolos B. Daskalakis, Istoria tes Ellinikis Horofylakis, Vol. 2 (Athens:
Tsiveriotis, 1973), pp. 935–959.
32. Gibson to State, memorandum of conversation with Constantinidis, 16 February 1949, in Marton
Papers.
33. Frederick Ayer, Jr., Yankee G-Man (Chicago: Regnery, 1957), pp. 275–299.
34. “Polk Case,” Marcy memorandum to files, 25 August 1948, in Marton Papers.
35. “Polk case report 11,” Rankin to State, 20 August 1948, in Marton Papers.
80
its final disposition would determine not only the future of U.S. assistance
to their country but the fate of their careers as well. Donovan in particular
missed no opportunity to criticize the Greek authorities for their handling of
the investigation, which he regarded as too slow and inept. In late Septem-
ber 1948 he reported to the State Department that “what progress had been
made in the solution of the case had been due to the pressure of Americans on
the Greek Government and to the rivalry between [Minister of Public Order]
Rendis and [Minister of Justice] Melas.”36
U.S. pressure on the Greek authorities was apparently not exerted consis-
tently. James Kellis, a Greek-American veteran of the OSS and an officer of
the U.S. Air Force who, as Donovan’s assistant, conducted his own search for
clues, informed the general that:
While the investigation was directed against the left[,] most State Department
officials were cooperative. When I received information that this is a “rightist
crime” and expressed my views some State Department officials became con-
cerned, to put it mildly. I believe that as long as our people show reluctance
to press the investigation against the right we can not expect much from the
Greeks.37
The extent to which Donovan’s views in the Polk case were influenced by his
assistant can be only a matter of speculation. There is no evidence that the old
spymaster ever responded in writing to Kellis’s numerous letters cited in these
pages.
The investigation of the crime was entrusted to Major Mouskoundis, the
staunchly anti-Communist head of the Thessaloniki branch of the General
Security (Geniki Asfaleia), who during the war and enemy occupation had
reportedly been in contact with British intelligence operatives in the coun-
try.38 The decision to place Mouskoundis in charge of the case came as a
disappointment to several other senior police officers, including the head of
the Thessaloniki branch of the National Security (Ethniki Asfaleia), Lt. Col.
36. Memorandum of conversation between Donovan and William Guy Martin of Donovan law firm
with William Baxter, 27 September 1948, in Marton Papers. The conversation took place on 24
September.
37. Kellis to Donovan, 10 August 1948, in Marton Papers. According to a Greek official, even though
Kellis was not a Communist he was among the “dangerous leftist advisers” who had undermined
Donovan’s conviction “that the crime had been committed by the Communists.” Responding to senior
police officials’ claims that Polk had been killed by Communists, Kellis reportedly insisted “that’s all
theories for little children.” See George Drosos report to Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 3 July 1948, in
AYE, File Polk, 1948, section 5.1.
38. “Polk Investigation—Possibility of Rightist Guilt,” Memorandum of conversation between
Driscoll, Marcy, and Rendis, 15 July 1948, in Marton Papers.
81
Iatrides
Georgios Stefanakis, who subsequently protested to his superiors that he had

not received proper credit for identifying the journalist Staktopoulos as the
prime suspect.39 For his part, Mouskoundis, who was known to have inform-
ers among Thessaloniki’s underworld and right-wing groups, spared no effort
to produce his own solution to the crime.40 Under his overall supervision, si-
multaneous investigations were conducted by the City Police, the General Se-
curity, the National Security, the military police, the Thessaloniki-based Third
Army Corps, the Ministry of Public Order, and the Ministry of Justice. Inde-
pendent investigations were also carried out by the British police mission, by
Donovan’s personal assistants Kellis and Theodore Lambron, and by various
journalists and representatives of U.S. press organizations.
According to Greek official reports, the search for evidence was massive,
involving hundreds of police and military personnel. Among those questioned
and temporarily detained in Thessaloniki were the management and staff of
the hotel Astoria, where Polk had stayed, and employees of the pastry shop
across the street and of the hotels Olympus and Mediterranee, where Polk
had eaten or met with colleagues. Also questioned were the sentries guarding
the hotel Astoria (whose first floor was occupied by air force pilots engaged in
operations against the insurgents in the mountains) and government buildings
and military installations near the Thessaloniki waterfront. Guerrilla prison-
ers were interrogated about possible assassination squads in northern Greece,
and special efforts were made to arrest KKE cadres who might be able to
shed light on the murder of the U.S. journalist. All telephone and telegraph
messages between Thessaloniki and Athens during the five days before Polk’s
death were checked for clues. Air and sea travelers between Thessaloniki and
Athens for a ten-day period were identified and questioned. Because the au-
topsy showed that Polk’s last meal had included lobster, peas, and meat, special
teams searched all seaside restaurants and garbage bins from Thessaloniki to
the coastal town of Mihaniona, questioned their staff and their seafood sup-
pliers, and looked for records of sales of lobster or traces of discarded lobster
shells. Other teams checked rowboats and caïques (fishing vessels) along the
coast from Thessaloniki to Mihaniona for bullet holes or signs of recent deck
repairs. (According to the prosecution’s charges and Staktopoulos’s courtroom
confession, Polk had been shot at close range while in a rowboat.) Particular
39. Lt. Col. Georgios Stefanakis, report to the Directorate of Police on the Polk murder investigation,
10 April 1949, transmitted to the Ministry of Justice on 28 April 1949, in Archive of Michael Melas,
Athens (Melas Archive). I am grateful to Michael Melas for granting me access to his family’s historical
archive.
40. “Polk Investigation—Possibility of Rightist Guilt.”
82
attention was paid to caïques that had sailed from Thessaloniki to the nearby
coastal Halkidiki region and to the town of Katerini in the foothills of Mt.
Olympus with reduced crews or without cargo during several days following
Polk’s disappearance.41
In Athens the police searched Polk’s apartment, questioned servants, and
seized his correspondence (some of his papers, including copies of correspon-
dence, were found to be missing) to be examined for possible clues. More than
200 rolls of film found in his Athens apartment (the roll in his camera left be-
hind at the Astoria hotel was blank) were developed, and the photographs were
distributed to investigators across northern Greece in the hope of identifying
places and persons of possible interest in the case. Among those questioned
in Athens were Polk’s mother (just arrived from Texas), his Greek wife, Rea,
his father-in-law, his maid, and numerous professional colleagues, including
Steven Barber of the London News Chronicle and Barber’s wife, Mary Cavadias
Barber, of Time-Life magazine, the only female correspondent known to be
covering the civil war. Costas Hadziargyris, a correspondent for The Christian
Science Monitor who also worked for Reuters in Athens and was Polk’s close
associate, was reportedly subjected to a 14-hour interrogation. In all, more
than 100 individuals were questioned.
Aware of U.S. concerns about fairness and impartiality, the authorities
were careful to show that their investigation was not driven by political mo-
tives. The Thessaloniki offices and archives of the royalist organization “X”
and of obscure right-wing clandestine groups were reportedly searched and
their leaders placed under surveillance. Graphology experts looked for papers
with handwriting matching that on the envelope in which Polk’s press card
had been mailed to the police, and handwriting samples were also obtained
from leaders of these groups.
It was all to no avail. As Thessaloniki Attorney General Constantinidis
reported at length to the Ministry of Justice in late August 1948, the search
did not produce a single worthwhile lead.42 In a state of physical and emo-
tional exhaustion, a tearful Mouskoundis told his superior officer that he was
considering early retirement; to others he mentioned contemplating suicide.
According to published police sources, he felt humiliated and abused, espe-
cially by Donovan’s persistent interference, frequent outbursts, and demands
for quick results. Urged to carry on, he went on a pilgrimage to the island of
41. T. S. Constantinidis report, “Investigations and Police Activity Regarding the Case of the Murder
of G. Polk,” 21 August 1948, submitted to the Ministry of Justice on 23 August 1948, in Melas
Archive.
42. Ibid.
83
Iatrides
Tinos, in search of solace and divine inspiration at the cathedral of the Virgin
Mary. Returning rested and more self-confident, he convinced his superior to
make the trip to Tinos too.43
As the police work produced no useful physical evidence or promising
leads, and as U.S. pressure for holding a trial intensified, officials in charge of
the case turned the investigation in a new direction. Several of the journalists
questioned had speculated that Polk’s murder might be related to his inten-
tion, which he had made known to individuals in Athens, Thessaloniki, and
elsewhere, to establish contact with the insurgents in the mountains in order
to interview their leader, Markos. Daniel Thrapp, a United Press (UP) corre-
spondent, stated that he knew a person in Thessaloniki (whom he would not
name) who could take him to Markos’s headquarters and who could conceiv-
ably have offered to do the same for Polk.44 Based on this clue, investigators
concluded that the key to solving the crime was probably (1) someone (pos-
sibly a journalist) to whom Polk had revealed his wish to travel to the moun-
tains to interview Markos, (2) English-speaking, insofar as Polk did not know
Greek, (3) someone with connections to the Communist underground, and
(4) someone whom Polk had met in Thessaloniki before his disappearance
and death. Although speculation persisted that Polk might have contacted
the Communists from Athens, and leads were pursued in the capital without
results, the focus of the search was clearly on Thessaloniki. In sum, the inves-
tigators’ new thinking was simple: find the person who might have provided
Polk with a contact to the Communists, who in turn could identify those who
were supposed to escort Polk to Markos’s headquarters but murdered him
instead.
This arbitrary and problematic conclusion, which Donovan apparently
endorsed, conveniently allowed the authorities to narrow their investigation to
four individuals: Hadziargyris of The Christian Science Monitor and Reuters;
Helen Mamas, an Associated Press stringer whom Polk had met in Thessa-
loniki just before his disappearance; Rea Polk, the victim’s young Greek wife;
and Gregory Staktopoulos, a Thessaloniki journalist who was known to have
met Polk briefly through Mamas. In addition, the authorities were particularly
43. Antoniou, Istoria Ellinikis, Vol. 4, p. 2361.

44. Thrapp statement, Rome, 26 May 1948 (Greek translation). I am grateful to Elias Vlanton for a
copy of this document. According to the Athens embassy, “Thrapp, in an angry letter to Donovan,
again refused identify Salonica contact. . . . Says, however, believes only guilty party is Markos.”
See Rankin telegram to State, “Ayer re Polk Case Report No. 15,” 8 July 1948, in NARA, RG 59,
File 811.91268/7-848. Polk had told several colleagues, including a CBS reporter in Istanbul, that
he intended to interview the insurgent leader Markos in the mountains. See Komotouros report to
Ministry of Justice, 4 August 1948, in AYE, File “Polk, 1948,” Section 5.1.
84
anxious to have Thrapp, the UP correspondent, identify the person who he

claimed could get him in contact with Markos’s men.
In late July, Attorney General Constantinidis expressed to Consul General
Gibson his confidence that the crime “hinged on triangle Polk-Hadziargyris-
Astoria Hotel.” He wanted Mamas brought back to Thessaloniki from Athens
and planned to have Staktopoulos arrested.45 Two weeks later Gibson re-
ported that Constantinidis was “confident handwriting evidence will solve
case,” but added, “I am of opinion other authorities not as confident.” Gibson
concluded:
While the Attorney General has indicated that the investigation must be expe-
dited, I doubt if he will take any further action unless directed by the Minister
of Justice. He is positive that the case will be solved by the interrogation of Stak-
topoulos and that Major Mouskountis must not be interfered with. As far as can
be determined the other lines of investigation have been practically stopped.46
In mid-November, Gibson added:

The Government’s case depends mainly on the confession of Gregory Staktopou-
los, and his mother. . . . Weakness of the Government’s case is the failure to find
the boat in which Staktopoulos states the murder was committed. The Gov-
ernment is not in a position to prove that Staktopoulos and George Polk dined
together at the restaurant Luxemburg, since no one will testify to this effect.
It is evident judicial and police officials are not continuing the investigation of
the murder . . . but are placing all their endeavors toward securing information
regarding the Communist Party.47
Given the new theory regarding the crime and its perpetrators, the gov-
ernment’s case now rested on its ability to connect one or more of the four
principal targets of the investigation to the KKE’s subversive network. Yet
despite the virtually limitless power of state agencies to investigate and in-
timidate, the task proved to be anything but easy. All four suspects were
questioned extensively, their arrests were repeatedly considered, and strong
suspicions about them continued to linger long after the trial.
When Hadziargyris was serving with the Greek navy in the Middle East
during World War II, he had participated in a leftist-republican mutiny, a fact
45. Gibson to State, report on conversation with Constantinidis, 31 July 1948, in Marton Papers.
46. Gibson to State, report on conversation with Constantinidis, 11 September 1948, in Marton
Papers; emphasis added.
47. Gibson to State, report on conversation with Constantinidis, 18 November 1948, in Marton
Papers.
85
Iatrides
that was later used as proof that he was a Communist and possibly Polk’s liai-
son with those who might take him to meet Markos. As an enterprising jour-
nalist he cultivated professional contacts with all political camps, including
the Communists. His work was widely respected at home and abroad, and
he had friends among U.S. officials monitoring journalistic reporting from
Greece. In addition, the Greek authorities had given assurances to the British
embassy that Reuters would not be mentioned in the Polk investigation and
eventual trial.48 Above all, Hadziargyris was the stepson of Prime Minister
Sofoulis and presumed to enjoy strong political protection. Following Polk’s
murder, Hadziargyris informed U.S. and British diplomats and journalists
that Mouskoundis was trying to extract from Staktopoulos a confession im-
plicating Hadziargyris in the crime. “They have the hose on their side but I
have innocence on mine,” he told one U.S. official.49 He thought his career
and even his life were in danger but, while already searching for employment
outside Greece, he was determined to defend himself and his reputation. Al-
though Hadziargyris was compelled to testify at Staktopoulos’s trial and was
continuously harassed by the authorities, in the end he was not charged in
the crime. Nevertheless, even after Staktopoulos’s conviction and sentencing,
Constantinidis declared to Gibson that Hadziargyris was “no less satanic than
Staktopoulos.”50
Helen Mamas, an aspiring if little-known Greek-American freelance jour-
nalist and, briefly, part-time teacher of English at Anatolia College in Thes-
saloniki, came under suspicion because she had met with Polk at least twice
shortly before his disappearance. She had also introduced him to Staktopou-
los. Although no concrete evidence against her was ever produced, she was
said to be a leftist and to have Communist connections. In the course of in-
tense questioning she was pressured to implicate Staktopoulos in the crime,
threatened with arrest, and compelled to testify in open court.51 Nevertheless,
despite treating her as a hostile witness and accusing her of withholding vi-
tal information concerning Polk’s murder, the lack of incriminating evidence
48. British embassy, Athens (D. P. Reilly) to W. L. C. Knight, Consul General, Thessaloniki, 31 August
1948, in TNAUK, FO, 371/72215, R 10499.
49. Gibson to State, “Mr. Hadziargyris and the Polk Case,” report on conversation, Gibson, Marcy,
Hadziargyris, 19 October 1948, in Marton Papers.
50. Gibson to State, Memorandum of conversation with Constantinidis, 26 May 1949, in Marton
Papers. According to Gibson, Constantinidis believed that the accused (Staktopoulos, Mouzenidis, and
Vasvanas) “were all connected with the murder plot” and that Hadziargyris “may be trying to involve
Coates [sic] as the fourth person to have participated in the murder.” Coate was the information officer
of the British consulate general in Thessaloniki.
51. Mamas’s court testimony is quoted at length in Keeley, The Salonika Bay Murder, pp. 234–240.
86
deterred the authorities from arresting her, a U.S. citizen thought to have good
connections in the United States and Greece.
Understandably, the authorities were anxious to question Polk’s widow,
hoping that she might provide information concerning her husband’s con-
tacts in Athens and Thessaloniki and his plans to travel to the mountains to
interview Markos. They also expected her to display great emotion and pub-
lic grief and to be eager to cooperate. When instead she remained composed
and aloof and insisted that she had no useful information to offer, they con-
cluded that she was hiding the truth. Soon rumors arose, some from Ayer’s
unnamed informants, that Rea Polk, a former airline stewardess from Cairo,
had been an active Communist in Egypt, had joined the KKE upon coming
to Greece„ and had “played a part” in her husband’s murder. Ayer advised the
Greek authorities that it was “essential Rea not leave country.”52 An officer of
the U.S. embassy whom Rea considered a friend tried to trick her into reveal-
ing to him what she would not tell the Greek authorities about her husband’s
movements in the days before his trip to Thessaloniki, but she insisted that
she had nothing more to say. Reporting the exchange, the embassy warned
the State Department that if Rea were prevented from leaving for the United
States, “members Polk family and certain other groups in US would almost
certainly raise hue and cry against ‘persecution’ of Rea by ‘monarcho-fascists’
Greek Govt.” Accordingly, her “initial visit” to America should be “of the
shortest possible duration” in order to prevent her from “making irresponsible
and unfortunate statements to US press.”53
In the end, after subjecting Rea to grueling and humiliating questioning
about her husband and her personal life, the authorities chose not to charge
the young widow, who belonged to a respectable Greek family and had an
influential and dynamic American mother-in-law by her side. Permitted to
leave for the United States (a visa had been secured for her by her husband),
Rea entered Barnard College and in October 1948 gave sworn testimony to
William Colby, Donovan’s assistant and later director of the Central Intelli-
gence Agency (CIA). In it she charged that Athanasios Tsaldaris, the politi-
cian’s son who was then a student at Columbia University, had tried to coerce
her into stating publicly that her husband had been killed by the Commu-
nists. She refused to do so and, according to her deposition, begged him to
leave her alone: “Please stop. If you knew how miserable I am. . . . If only I
52. Gibson to State, “Ayer re Polk Case Report No. 8,” 14 June 1948, in Marton Papers. The same
informant had told Ayer that the crime had been committed “probably on orders and through agents
[of the] Cominform.”
53. Rankin to State, telegram 1,127, 21 June 1948, in Marton Papers.
87
Iatrides
had a gun I would kill myself.” To which the young Tsaldaris reportedly re-
sponded, “It is so much easier to jump out of a window. . . . You are so weak
that you disgust me.”54
Four years later, in an article she published under the title “The Truth
about My Husband’s Murder,” Rea claimed that, days before his death, Polk
told her he had information concerning the “misappropriation of Marshall
Plan funds in Greece ‘that would blow the lid right off.’”55 Elsewhere, accord-
ing to an interview she gave in 1990, what Polk had supposedly uncovered
was “black marketeering to the rebels and graft at lower levels of the gov-
ernment,” as well as “dealing with arms and selling to the rebels.”56 Neither
story mentioned Constantine Tsaldaris. Finally, in a deposition she provided
in November 1990 at the request of Athanasios Tsaldaris (the English transla-
tion makes for rather strange reading), Rea testified:
It is my belief that the murder of my husband George Polk may not relate with
the matter of the alleged bank account of your father Constantine Tsaldaris in
the United States. My husband never told me that your father had threatened
him in their discussion about the alleged account and I exclude any relations or
involvement of your father in the tragic murder of my husband.57
In short, we simply do not know what information, if any, Rea Polk had
concerning the circumstances surrounding her husband’s murder.
Building the Case against Staktopoulos
Of the four prime targets of the investigation, the least prominent, with the
fewest professional, social, and political connections and therefore the most
vulnerable, was Staktopoulos. His unexceptional career, brief wartime affili-
ation with the KKE, knowledge of English, and frequent if routine contacts
with foreign journalists passing through Thessaloniki made him a convenient
suspect.58 Floyd Spencer, a U.S. military intelligence officer who had lived in
54. Sworn statement to Wm. Colby for Donovan, 21 October 1948, in Tamiment Library, 159, Box
3, File 8.
55. Elias Vlanton and Zak Mettger, Who Killed George Polk? The Press Covers Up a Death in the Family
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), pp. 177–178.
56. Ibid., p. 178.
57. Documents provided to Edmund Keeley by Athanasios Tsaldaris, cover letter, 11 December 1990.
I am grateful to Keeley for giving me access to these documents.
58. Graduate of Anatolia College, a U.S. secondary school in Thessaloniki. The school’s dean (later
president), Carl C. Compton, was the only defense witness to testify in support of Staktopoulos’s good
88
northern Greece for many years and was intimately familiar with Greek cul-
ture, sent a report to Walter Lippmann indicating that, as a Pontian refugee,
Staktopoulos was “an appropriate person to have [been] chosen or to have cho-
sen himself as a ‘fall guy.’” Because many Pontians spoke Russian, “they are
often designated by Greek police and Greek rightists as ‘Caucasians,’ and such
elements are not very much trusted or liked, being considered quite wrongly
to be largely collaborators with the Communists.” Spencer, who had known
Polk and considered him a friend, characterized Staktopoulos’s trial confession
“psychopathic fantasy” and his account of Polk’s murder “a fantastic yarn.”59
For the investigating authorities, Staktopoulos became the hapless key
to the mystery they had failed to solve. They now believed the most credi-
ble explanation for Polk’s murder was that the crime had been committed by
the Communists, possibly on orders from the Soviet-dominated Communist
Information Bureau (Cominform), with Staktopoulos serving as the naïve if
willing tool. At the trial, the prosecution’s theory of the crime was built en-
tirely on such a hypothesis, based on Staktopoulos’s brief encounters with
Polk, his short wartime affiliation with the KKE, and much uncorroborated
speculation. Most importantly, the case was built on the self-incriminating
words of the suspect himself, which he would recite—and repeatedly revise—
after a long period of incarceration and interrogation in the dark basement
of the General Security. In early July 1948, as his arrest became imminent,
the U.S. embassy reported confidently to Washington that the suspect had
“numerous contacts [with] highly placed KKE and possible espionage activi-
ties.” There was no mention of any solid evidence connecting Staktopoulos to
Polk’s murder.60
character, see John O. Iatrides and William R. Compton, eds., Carl C. Compton: The Morning Cometh:
45 Years with Anatolia College (New Rochelle, NY: Caratzas, 1986), pp. 98–99.
59. Lt. Col. Floyd A. Spencer, US Army Intelligence, Alexandria, VA, “Comments on Testimony of
Gregorios I. Staktopoulos” (at his trial), submitted to Walter Lippmann through Elmer Davis, 15
April 1949, in Marton Papers. Spencer had met Polk in 1946, in Cairo.
60. Rankin to State, telegram 1281, “Ayer re Polk Case Report No. 15,” 8 July 1948, in Marton
Papers. The Greek journalists Mihalis Ignatiou and Kostas Papaioannou maintain that, at a special
meeting of the Ministry of Public Order’s Service Council on 10 August 1948, Minister Konstantinos
Rendis announced that Staktopoulos “was the most suitable” suspect in Polk’s murder. The authors
base their account of the meeting on a statement made in April 1956 by one of the participants,
Athens police chief Ioannis Panopoulos, at a defamation trial unrelated to the Polk murder. Accord-
ing to Ignatiou and Papaioannou, Panopoulos claimed at the trial that “Staktopoulos was arrested
and convicted because someone had to be arrested and convicted” under pressure from the U.S. gov-
ernment. No record of the meeting of 10 August 1948 has been located at the National Archives
of Greece. See Mihalis Ignatiou and Kostas Papaioannou, Oi Exi Thanatoi tou Dzordz Polk (Athens:
Pataki, 2018) pp. 183–186, 439. An earlier version of Rendis’s purported announcement to the Ser-
vice Council appears (unattributed) in Athanasios G. Kafiris, E Ypothesi Polk-Staktopoulou, 2nd ed.
(Athens: Proskinio, 2010), pp. 92–93.
89
Iatrides
The Greek authorities sought to bolster their case by portraying the nearly
unknown Staktopoulos as an important Moscow-trained KKE cadre whose
local instructors had included Markos himself and who was said to have mur-
dered an unnamed police officer during the occupation—an accusation and
an alleged crime never confirmed or investigated by the Thessaloniki author-
ities. His self-confessed brief membership in the KKE and routine part-time
work for the Communist daily Laiki Avgi were highlighted, whereas his em-
ployment during the war years as a writer by the local Nazi tabloid and, after
liberation, his work as a translator for the British Information Service and
reporter for the centrist daily Makedonia were ignored. A small-time newspa-
per jack-of-all-trades who took any job he could find to support his widowed
mother and sisters (his older brother had been killed in the Greek-Italian war
of 1940–1941) was now portrayed as a hardened and dangerous Communist
party stalwart capable of complicity in the cold-blooded murder of a U.S.
journalist.
At trial, Staktopoulos’s attorneys, whom he neither chose nor trusted,
made no attempt to challenge any part of the prosecution’s case, which
was based entirely on the accused’s wildly contradictory serial confessions.
The only corroboration came from his mother’s brief, grudging, and halting
admission that, at his request, she had addressed to the police the unstamped
envelope containing Polk’s press card. The “expert testimony,” procured by
Mouskoundis, that the handwriting on the envelope (the envelope disap-
peared sometime after the trial) was indeed that of Mrs. Staktopoulos, was
anything but conclusive. The fact that handwriting experts employed by
Donovan and the U.S. embassy contradicted the prosecution’s case remained
undisclosed.61 For many who followed closely the court proceedings, includ-
ing Donovan, the stoic demeanor of Staktopoulos and his mother was proof
that they were guilty. Others, including several U.S. journalists and William
Polk, the victim’s younger brother, were troubled by the way in which the
trial had been conducted, particularly the absence of any serious attempt to
challenge the prosecution’s case, but kept their doubts to themselves at the
time. In the words of the younger Polk: “The whole thing was a mass of con-
fusion. Nothing was proved except that Staktopoulos was in it working for
someone—who, we don’t yet know. It may be that the government case is
61. Colby to Donovan, 7 August 1948, in Donovan Papers, Folder “Drafts and Duplicates, 1947–
1949.” Colby transmitted a graphological report on the envelope in which Polk’s press card had been
sent to the police in Thessaloniki. According to the report, the handwriting was that of a “highly
educated man, not over thirties [sic] . . . shows a masculine hand, much will power and a basically
strong constitution.”
90
Okay, but I have a suspicion it isn’t. . . . I realized that the only thing to do
was to express doubt and wait . . .”62
That Staktopoulos’s oral testimony had to be changed several times to fit
certain facts as they were gradually brought out in court went unchallenged.
When the court found Staktopoulos guilty of complicity in the murder but
acquitted his mother, no one objected that, with her testimony nullified by
the not-guilty verdict, the only remaining basis on which to convict Stak-
topoulos was his own unsubstantiated, contradictory, repeatedly “edited,” and
self-incriminating confession. In retrospect, there is considerable irony in the
report that Gibson wrote after one of his regular conversations with Constan-
tinidis: according to the defense attorneys, Staktopoulos “will probably give
further details of murder at his trial.”63
In April 1949, after being convicted for complicity in Polk’s murder and
for weapons possession, Staktopoulos received a life sentence and was kept in
solitary confinement in the basement of the General Security for four years.
He was finally transferred to a state prison when a journalist discovered the
extraordinary—and almost certainly unlawful—conditions of his incarcera-
tion. In 1956, after his emotional pleas of innocence appeared in an Athens
newspaper, his sentence was reduced to twenty years. In 1960 his sentence was
reduced again, to seventeen years. and he was soon released. His co-defendants
in the trial who were never apprehended, Adam Mouzenidis and Vangelis Vas-
vanas, prominent Communist cadres, were found guilty of first-degree murder
and sentenced to death in absentia.
In a book Staktopoulos published in 1984, he bitterly recanted his trial
confessions and provided a graphic and detailed account of his long solitary
incarceration.64 He gave the names, official titles, and physical characteristics
of scores of officials who interrogated him (most of whom he had known as
a journalist) and described the various forms of prolonged psychological and
physical torture to which he had been subjected. He claimed that he tried to
kill himself to end the suffering he could no longer endure. He insisted that
he was totally innocent and that Mouskoundis had masterminded the charges
against him, and he offered vague hints as to who might have been involved
in the crime.
Is Staktopoulos to be believed? For many who have followed his tragic
story, his published account appears much too specific and consistent with the
62. Polk to Price, sent from Paris, 23 May 1949, in Marton Papers.
63. Gibson to State, Memorandum of conversation with Constantinidis, 17 November 1948, in Mar-
ton Papers.
64. Grigoris Staktopoulos, Ypothesi Polk: E Prosopiki mou Martyria (Athens: Ekdoseis “Gnosi,” 1984).
91
Iatrides
known facts of the case to be a fabrication. Moreover, none of those he named

as his torturers ever came forward to challenge or repudiate his accusations.
Equally convincing is his charge that his self-incriminating and often theatri-
cally delivered court confessions were forced upon him by his interrogators.
For example, at one point during the trial he declared:
I was a Communist of the KKE and I declare that my country Greece is innocent
of the crime of the murder of George Polk that has been attributed to her. I
accuse and charge the KKE and the Cominform and Moscow as perpetrators of
this crime. . . . When one becomes a Greek, he discloses everything and I have
decided to become a Greek. In the detention cell where I was held during this
period my eyes were opened and I became a Greek.65
What Staktopoulos describes in his book about his imprisonment is far more
credible than the account of Polk’s murder he recounted in court. In this
connection, his book contains an interesting “clue” that remains unexplored.
As he was being transferred from his isolation cell to a regular prison, he
was warned by Mouskoundis’s deputy, Efthimios Kamoutsis, to keep quiet
about the conditions of his incarceration; otherwise his family would suffer.
Ten years later, Major Kamoutsis, the new head of the Thessaloniki General
Security, was one of the senior security officers implicated in the murder of the
leftist deputy Gregoris Lambrakis, carried out in the city’s center by right-wing
thugs with close ties to the police.66
In retrospect it is clear that Staktopoulos could not have been Thrapp’s
unnamed contact in Thessaloniki capable of putting a foreign journalist in
touch with Markos’s headquarters in the mountains of northern Greece. Nor
could he have participated in Polk’s murder, as he had been forced to confess
at his trial. His hectic daily work schedule at several jobs with tight press
deadlines, in a city under strict martial law where he was well known, could
hardly afford him the time and opportunity to accompany a foreign journalist
and his Communist would-be assassins on a boat trip to the distant shores of
Salonika Bay in search of Markos’s command post.
For his part, Thrapp, who left Greece soon after he was questioned by the
authorities investigating Polk’s murder, at first did not name his Thessaloniki
contact and refused to return to Athens for further questioning. On 8 July
1948, the embassy reported to Washington that “Thrapp, in angry letter to
Donovan again refused [to] identify Thessaloniki contact and said would be
65. Vourvahis, Poios Skotose ton Polk, p. 229.

66. Giannis Voultepsis, Ypothesi Lambraki: E Mahi, Thessaloniki (Athens: Alkion, 1998).
92
returned to Greece only after long legal battle, not in a box.”67 A month later
the embassy reported that a letter with enclosure from Thrapp to Donovan
had “never been submitted in evidence to the Greek authorities and its exis-
tence was unknown until the present time, despite the great concern which
has been expressed both to the embassy and to General Donovan by the Greek
Ministers of Justice [and] Public Order.”68 In late September Gibson reported
from Thessaloniki that Attorney General Constantinidis “feels essential that
Thrapp testifies. . . . If his contact was Staktopoulos this strengthens the case
against Staktopoulos, if not officials desire to know what other person was in
close contact with Markos headquarters.”69
On the other hand, according to a memorandum of conversation between
Donovan, Colonel Martin of the British police mission, and William Baxter
of the U.S. embassy on 27 September, “Donovan stated he had obtained all
information of value from Thrapp—no reason ask him return to Greece be-
cause he had nothing further to contribute.”70 Although no written proof has
surfaced, Thrapp, in his “angry letter” to Donovan, more than likely revealed
that his contact with connections to those who might take him to Markos’s
headquarters was the British diplomat in Thessaloniki, Randoll Coate. In that
case, the old spymaster, a known Anglophile, could have decided to keep that
vital information from reaching Greek and U.S. investigators in Athens out
of concern that it might undermine the case against Staktopoulos and embar-
rass the British authorities. The only morsel of inconclusive evidence on this
matter is a conversation in which Donovan told Mouskoundis, “I have heard
that Randoll Coate, . . . is supposed to be the best-informed man in northern
Greece on the Communists. I understand he’s left town. . . . Did anyone talk
to him on time?” “No,” was Mouskoundis’s one-word response.71
67. Rankin to State, telegram 1281.

68. Athens embassy to State, “Transmitting Correspondence at Request of General Donovan,” 7 Au-
gust 1948, in Marton Papers. The “enclosure” was probably Thrapp’s statement of 26 May 1948,
which he submitted to Donovan from Rome.
69. Gibson to State, telegram 344, “George Polk Murder Case,” 29 September 1948, in Marton
Papers.
70. Memorandum of conversation, Donovan, Martin, Baxter, 27 September 1948. On 2 October
1948, Gibson reported from Thessaloniki that “Donovan gave Consulate no information to give
any local police or judicial official regarding former contact of Thrapp.” Donovan told Moustakis,
“nothing was to be gained from Thrapp but I will forward letter containing information that should
be followed up by the authorities.” Gibson concluded, “Donovan did not state what the letter would
contain. No letter from Donovan has been forwarded to Consulate or any local authorities.” Gibson
to State, telegram 421, 2 October 1948, in Marton Papers.
71. Marton, The Polk Conspiracy, p. 253.
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Iatrides
Randoll Coate: A “British Connection”?
Sometime after his exchange with Donovan, Thrapp confided to colleagues

that in fact he had two contacts in Thessaloniki with good connections to
the Communists: one Greek whom he would not name and Coate, the press
and information officer of the British consulate general. Thrapp also disclosed
that he had received from Coate an invitation to visit Markos which involved
travel by caïque across Salonika Bay to the Pierria region and then on foot
toward Mt. Olympus, accompanied by someone whom the insurgents’ bands
along the route would recognize and trust.72 In the end, Thrapp did not make
the trip because Consul General Gibson warned him against it and also be-
cause he was soon transferred out of Greece. After Polk’s body was found,
Thrapp speculated that, while in Thessaloniki, his U.S. colleague may have
contacted the crew of a caïque friendly to the Communists and crossed the
bay with them. However, once ashore, those who were supposed to take Polk
to Markos’s base became fearful that it would not be safe for them to escort
their foreign visitor and ordered him taken back. On the return trip the crew,
afraid for their own fate if the authorities in Thessaloniki learned of the clan-
destine operation in Communist-controlled territory, killed Polk in a quick
and painless way. Thrapp did not believe that right-wing thugs or govern-
ment agents would murder a U.S. journalist for political reasons. Rather, he
suspected that the killers were Communist sympathizers.73
Although Thrapp’s theory is plausible, it does not explain why and by
whom Polk’s press card was mailed to the Thessaloniki police or why the body
was dumped—or allowed to float—so close to Thessaloniki’s downtown pier.
But by naming Coate as his non-Greek contact to the Communists, Thrapp
intensified lingering speculation about a possible “British connection” to the
crime. Nor is Thrapp the only source of a possible link between Coate’s name
and Polk’s disappearance and violent death.
Foreign Office documents confirm that soon after arriving in Thessa-
loniki Polk visited Coate at his consulate office and solicited his help in
traveling to Communist-held territory to interview Markos. Sometime later,
questioned by his superiors, Coate admitted that he may have been the last
person to see Polk alive in Thessaloniki but denied giving the U.S. journalist
72. C. Hadjiargyris to Constantinidis, 3 May 1949, with copy to British embassy, Athens, 6 May 1949,
in TNAUK, FO, 371/78404 77610. Thrapp’s theory regarding the circumstances surrounding Polk’s
murder was repeated to the author by Newsweek Athens correspondent John Rigos at a conference on
the Greek Civil War, Panteion University, Athens, Greece, 20 October 1999.
73. Thrapp statement, Rome, 26 May 1948 (Greek translation), in Marton Papers.
94
information about how to reach Markos. The relevant documents also show
that Coate had previously been reprimanded by his superiors for involving
himself in unspecified clandestine activities.74
Born in Switzerland, educated at Oxford University, and fluent in Ger-
man and French, Coate had served with a secret wartime military organiza-
tion, “the London Cage,” interrogating prisoners of war. In December 1941
he took part in Operation Archery, a commando raid on the Norwegian port
of Vaegso. In spring 1942 he went on a clandestine operation to Bordeaux,
and in 1944 he made his way to the Riviera to help prepare the local re-
sistance for the Allied landings in southern France. Later that year he was
delivered by boat to the coast of southern Peloponnese near Kalamata to join
an Anglo-American intelligence team in touch with the local Communist-
controlled resistance (ELAS). According to a subsequent account, on shore
he was captured by guerrillas who took him for a German spy and were pre-
pared to execute him, but his life was spared when he produced a small Greek
medallion with the Lord’s Prayer engraved on it in Greek. He was taken to
the British intelligence team to which he had been assigned, and, following
the retreat of German troops from the area, his unit accompanied Communist
resistance bands in their attack and liberation of Kalamata from men of the
collaborationist Security Battalions, many of whom were massacred. For his
activities with the Greek resistance he received a “Mention in Despatches,” a
British military award for “gallantry in action or for a wide range of services
on and off the battlefield.”75
Following the liberation of the Greek mainland in October 1944, Coate
joined the Foreign Office, which often provided diplomatic cover for intelli-
gence agents, and was posted to the consulate general in Thessaloniki, where
he headed the press and information desk. Several sources, including one of
his wartime colleagues, confirmed to me that Coate was an operative of the
Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).76 Regarded as the best-informed foreigner in
northern Greece, especially on matters pertaining to the KKE and its clandes-
tine activities, he was the main contact person for foreign journalists visiting
74. A. G. R. Rouse memorandum, 23 May 1949, in TNAUK, FO, 371/78404 77610, R

5102/10139/19 G; and Randoll Coate to E. H. Peck, 12 August 1949, in TNAUK, FO, 371/78404
161007.
75. Based on Coate obituaries published in The Daily Telegraph (London), 15 December 2005, p. 31;
The Independent (London), 14 January 2006, p. 14; The Times (London), 18 January 2006, p. 18;
Remote Enquiries, 20 February 2010, TNAUK and the UK government’s The London Gazette: Official
Public Record. Because the German troops had already withdrawn, the “battle of Kalamata” took place
between superior ELAS forces and defending Greek “Security Battalions” whose slaughter was finally
stopped by British liaison officers, including Coate’s team.
76. Michael Ward, email message to author, 28 January 2010.
95
Iatrides
the region. In March 1947, Coate accompanied the UN Balkan Commis-

sion that was part of the Security Council’s investigation of the causes of the
Greek Civil War and border clashes. They set out from Thessaloniki to meet
the insurgents’ military leader, Markos. Although Markos proved to be un-
available, several of his senior officers spoke with commission members and
with journalists traveling with the group. As confirmed by British diplomatic
documents, during this encounter Coate obtained an “invitation” for foreign
journalists to visit the insurgents. In addition to the UP reporter Thrapp,
Coate sent an invitation (written on British consular notepaper and hand
delivered by a young Frenchman) to the Reuters correspondent in Athens,
Robert Bigio, suggesting that he could visit Markos’s headquarters whenever
he wished. Bigio, who knew and mistrusted Coate, chose to ignore the in-
vitation. Years later Bigio recalled that he had subsequently learned from a
highly reliable source that Coate was a member of a special anti-Communist
intelligence unit.77 Immediately after Polk’s disappearance and before his body
had been found, Coate left Greece for a new assignment in Oslo; his British
secretary left Thessaloniki a few days later. His superiors in the Foreign
Office subsequently claimed that his sudden departure had been a routine
transfer.
In May 1949, in an internal note apparently intended to end official con-
cern about the matter, Coate’s supervisor in the Foreign Office Southern De-
partment, A. G. R. Rouse, dismissed as “fantastic” allegations (circulated by
Hadziargyris among others) that Coate had somehow been involved in Polk’s
death. Rouse, who had himself served with British intelligence in occupied
Greece, conceded that Coate and one of his British assistants in Thessaloniki
named Stappard had been “inclined to dabble in spurious intelligence work,”
for which they had been reprimanded, and that “this was one of the reasons
for my asking for his [Coate’s] transfer long before this case ever arose.” Ac-
cording to Rouse, Coate had been reprimanded “as far back as 1946,” but his
transfer from Greece was carried out only in May 1948, days after Polk’s dis-
appearance. Rouse concluded: “I need hardly add that I exonerate Coate and
refute” the charges against him. As for Hadziargyris, who had been accusing
Coate of complicity in Polk’s murder, Rouse warned that he was “not only
a dangerous man but a frightened one and will go to any lengths to extri-
cate himself from suspicion.” The original handwritten draft of Rouse’s note
carries several notations by Foreign Office personnel, one of which inexplica-
bly (and probably facetiously) reads: “‘Coate the Murderer’ certainly sheds a
77. Bigio letter to author, 11 August 1992.
96
fascinating new light on Mr. C’s character as seen by his former colleagues in
EEID.”78
Coate’s new assignment proved to be of short duration. Evidently, he did
not keep the Southern Department of the UK Foreign Office fully informed
of his whereabouts and activities. In July 1949 the British embassy in Athens
advised the Foreign Office that, according to a U.S. source, Coate had given
U.S. officials in Oslo an oral statement regarding his alleged involvement in
the Polk case. Surprised by this development, the Foreign Office instructed
its embassy in Oslo to question Coate about his statement, only to learn that
Coate was actually in London and on his way to a new assignment in French
West Africa. Asked to put in writing what he had told U.S. officials, Coate
confirmed that he had spoken to Polk, who had solicited information about
reaching Markos. But Coate denied helping the U.S. journalist in any way,
because he considered the 35-year-old veteran correspondent “a keen young
U.S. student in search of adventure.” (Coate was four years older than Polk
and, as press officer, must have been aware that Polk, who had been in Thes-
saloniki before, had a reputation as a serious journalist.) Coate added that, on
an earlier occasion, he had been prepared to give such information to another
U.S. journalist (probably Thrapp) “whose record of daring exploits and cool
courage with the Greek national army” he admired, but in the end the trip
did not take place.79
The fact that at the height of the Greek civil war amid mounting East-
West tensions a British official would consider assisting any non-Greek jour-
nalist to visit the Communist insurgents’ headquarters in order to interview
their military leader is only one of the many strange twists of the “British con-
nection” in the Polk murder case. It is no less peculiar that Coate’s superiors
had reprimanded him not for his unnamed intelligence activities but for being
“rather indiscreet” about them. For his part, Coate requested that the Foreign
Office officially absolve him of any involvement in the Polk murder. In re-
sponse, he received a letter, dated 22 August 1949, acknowledging “[your]
explanation . . . that you had attempted to dissuade the American journal-
ist George Polk from contacting the Greek rebel forces.” This statement was
curious insofar as Coate’s own written statement regarding his conversation
with Polk contained no such “explanation” or any indication that he had tried
to talk Polk out of his plan. Coate’s superiors assured him that “no account
78. Rouse note, 23 May 1949, in TNAUK, FO, 371/78404 161007. The agency in question was the
East European Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office.
79. Coate to Peck, 12 August 1949, in TNAUK, FO, 371/78404 161007. Peck had been British
consul in Thessaloniki in 1946, when Coate was also stationed there.
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Iatrides
has been taken” of accusations made against him in the Polk case. The let-
ter was addressed to Coate “care of the Foreign Office Information Research
Department.”80
According to a study of British intelligence services, the Foreign Office
Information Research Department (IRD) included in its ranks “mavericks”
who “waged a war of propaganda and dirty tricks against the Communists.”
In the 1940s and 1950s the IRD regularly collaborated with F Division (po-
litical parties, research, agents) of the Security Service (MI5) in clandestine
operations targeting Communist groups in Britain and elsewhere.81 More ag-
gressive than MI5, whose primary focus is on domestic security, since 1944
the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) had carried out an undercover
war against the Soviet Union and international Communism. SIS agents were
stationed from Sweden to Turkey and across Asia.82 Both secret services con-
tained in their ranks what one authority characterized as “rugged, independent
originals” and rogues capable of carrying out acts of violence against Com-
munist targets without explicit authorization.83 In countries such as Greece,
where the threat of Communism was all too real, a British police mission
and intelligence operatives worked closely with local security officials, who
provided information and cover as needed, and with clandestine groups of
anti-Communists who could carry out almost any operation, presumably in-
cluding assassinations.
Commenting on the presence of such undercover activities in Greece,
Colonel A. W. Sheppard, an Australian who during 1946–1947 was director
of the British economic mission in northern Greece, later wrote:
There was not one of our Missions or Departments in Greece but had its rep-
resentatives from one of the five “intelligence” or “special” departments. . . .
[T]hese agencies were not working for ordinary military intelligence, they were
working, directly or indirectly, for a special department of the Foreign Office
and their only duties were to report upon and investigate activities of Left-wing
elements. Investigation often meant positive action. Positive action meant acting
in concert with extreme Right-wing elements.84
In May 1948, the month of Polk’s murder, MI5 and MI6 had to decide
what to do with a Soviet intelligence officer who, after pretending to defect,
80. Peck to Coate, 22 August 1949, in TNAUK, FO, 371/78404 R 7867/10139/19 G.

81. Tom Bower, The Perfect English Spy: Sir Dick White and the Secret War, 1935–90 (London: Heine-
mann, 1995), pp. 145, 358.
82. Ibid., pp. 202–203.
83. Nigel West, A Matter of Trust: M.I.5: 1945–72 (New York: Coronet Books, 1983), p. 28.
84. Sheppard, Britain in Greece, p. 14.
98
changed his mind and demanded to be turned over to Soviet authorities in

London. Partly in jest, some MI6 representatives suggested that the Soviet of-
ficer “be taken on a flight over the North Sea and encouraged to leave the air-
craft without a parachute.” In the end, he was returned to his post in Berlin.85
Even if British intelligence agencies might have been tempted to dispose of a
troublesome Soviet agent, any suggestion that they might also have decided
to assassinate a U.S. journalist deserves to be treated with outmost caution.
At a time when the defense of Britain against the Soviet menace required ex-
tremely close collaboration with the United States—the Berlin blockade was
about to begin; negotiations on the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic
Treaty were under way—the authorized assassination of a prominent U.S. re-
porter, no matter what he had done or might do, would have been unthink-
able. Its consequences could have been disastrous for the British government
and for Anglo-American relations. On the other hand, the possibility that
an overeager “rogue” operative in the field, inspired by the aggressive “dirty
tricks” mentality of the day, might take it upon himself, with the help of
obliging local extremists, to rough up or even silence an offending journalist
cannot be totally discounted.
Speculation about a possible British connection to Polk’s murder was fu-
eled in part by the secrecy, labyrinthine organization, and anti-Communist
neurosis that marked the British and U.S. intelligence services in the early
days of the Cold War, making it nearly impossible for students of the sub-
ject to distinguish between hard facts, plausible theories, and sheer fantasy.
In a review of Hadziargyris’s 1975 book on the Polk case, Stephen G. Xydis,
a respected Greek-American political scientist, argued that neither the Com-
munists nor the Right were the culprits. Rather,
It was a “hysterical,” “anarchic,” though deliberately planned act of anti-
American character which was conceived within some unidentified section of
Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) against the messy and shifting back-
ground of conflicts that were inherent in British-American relations over Greece,
the Eastern Mediterranean, Palestine, and the Near and Middle East as a whole,
as British political influence was on the wane in the area.86
According to Xydis, Hadziargyris

takes great pains to explain that this political crime was not part of Britain’s
top-level, official, and general policy toward the United States, which was one
85. West, A Matter of Trust, p. 41.

86. Stephen G. Xydis, “The Polk Murder Case Revisited,” Southeastern Europe, Vol. 2, Pt. 2 (1975),
pp. 194–198.
99
Iatrides
of close cooperation with the U.S. government in a combined “Cold War” front
against the USSR. But this act was not a blunder either, to judge from the fact
that the British agent who was involved in it remained in the service of the
British government after Polk’s murder.87
After concluding that Coate, the agent in question, was working for “that
particular section of SIS that was responsible for anti-Communist and anti-
Soviet espionage and for counterespionage especially,” Xydis claimed that Kim
Philby, the notorious top British intelligence official who spied for the Soviet
Union and who in 1948, while station in Istanbul, “supervised the counteres-
pionage operations of British agents in northern Greece,” was the real villain.88
(Nothing in the vast and still growing literature on Philby’s life and activities
appears to support Xydis’s extraordinary theory.)89
In 1966, Polk’s one-time colleague in Athens, Hadziargyris, while living
in England, published in a Greek newspaper a series of articles repeating earlier
allegations that Coate, without his superiors’ knowledge, had been involved
in Polk’s death. Hadziargyris had originally presented his case in May 1949,
in a letter to Constantinidis, the attorney general in Thessaloniki—with a
copy to the British ambassador in Athens—claiming that Polk had not been
specifically targeted for assassination. Rather, he was the random victim of a
conspiracy, masterminded by Coate, to set up a “trap for the murder of any
foreign correspondent” who was intent on interviewing Greek Communist
leaders: “Such a foreign correspondent happened to be Polk.”90 Presumably
the motive, on which Hadziargyris did not elaborate, was to silence journal-
ists who might give favorable publicity to the Communist cause, blame the
crime on the Communists, and, indirectly, strike a blow against the spread
of Soviet influence toward the eastern Mediterranean. When Hadziargyris
went public with his theory in 1966, Coate considered taking libel action
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid.
89. Anthony Cave Brown, Treason in the Blood: H. St. John Philby, Kim Philby and the Spy Case of the
Century (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994); and Stephen Dorril, MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations
(London: Fourth Estate, 2000).
90. Hadziargyris to Constantinides, 3 May 1949, in TNAUK, FO, 371/78404 77610. A cover note
to the British embassy, 6 May 1949, reads in part: “Mr. Hadjiargyris takes this opportunity to state
that in the interests of Greece and her allies he did not disclose the information contained in this letter
at the trial of Staktopoulos. Owing, however, to the irresponsible behavior of certain Greek officials,
most particularly Mr. George Melas, Minister of Justice [who had accused Hadziargyris of complicity
in Polk’s murder] Mr. Hadjiargyris has concluded that he can no longer afford to remain silent. He
has, therefore, determined to defend himself by all means at his disposal. . . . Copies of this letter and
enclosure have been placed in the hands of certain responsible personages in Greece and in America,
who are authorized to make due use of it should occasion arise.”
100
against his accuser and sought the advice of his superiors. The Foreign Of-
fice hoped that Hadziargyris could be expelled from the UK and thought
“it would be in our interests to see (libel) action taken provided there is a
real certainty it would succeed.” Nevertheless, after considering that Hadziar-
gyris could “make fairly sensational points” at trial, the matter was dropped.
Among the points Hadziargyris “could probably show” was that Coate “did in
fact acquire a letter of invitation from the guerrilla leader Markos to foreign
correspondents to visit the guerilla headquarters.”91
Coate subsequently had a highly successful career on the European con-
tinent as a master designer of large garden mazes, and until his death in De-
cember 2005, at the age of 96, he refused to discuss the Polk murder affair
and threatened to sue anyone who attempted to link him to the crime. On
16 January 1992, The New York Review of Books (NYRB) printed an apology
to Coate after one of its contributors, Ronald Steel, had referred to him in a
review of Kati Marton’s book The Polk Conspiracy: Murder and Cover-Up in
the Case of CBS News Correspondent George Polk.92 The NYRB expressed re-
gret about “certain allegations” made by Steel about Coate that, it said, were
“entirely unfounded,” and it printed “without qualification” Coate’s statement
that “he was not: (a) connected in any way with a plot leading to the death of
Mr. George Polk in Greece in 1948 or with any attempt to cover it up; and
(b) at any time in possession of information concerning the identity of those
responsible.” Presumably, a key factor motivating the apology was the pos-
sibility of a lawsuit under British libel laws, which are much more favorable
than U.S. law vis-à-vis plaintiffs.
Almost certainly the most prominent person to question Coate about the
Polk case was C. M. Woodhouse, who, as the legendary “Colonel Chris” of
the Special Operations Executive (SOE) had headed the British (later Allied)
Military Mission to occupied Greece and subsequently had a distinguished
career in parliament and government service that included major SIS assign-
ments. In April 1992, Woodhouse recounted that Coate, whom he had just
met for the first time at my urging, claimed
he never had any communication with or from Markos’s HQ, and therefore
could not have passed on any letter or any specific information to British or US
journalists. On the only occasion when he set out for Markos’s HQ, with the
UNSCOB delegation, they never found it because Markos was continually on
91. D. S. L. Dodson memorandum, “Mr. Randall [sic] Coate,” 22 March 1966, in TNAUK, FO,
371/78404 161007, approved by H. A. F. Hohler, 23 March 1966.
92. The review by Steel, “Casualty of the Cold War,” appeared in the 19 September 1991 issue of The
New York Review of Books, pp. 17–21. It contains two paragraphs referring to Coate.
101
Iatrides
the move. His willingness in principle to brief one US journalist (whose name
he could not recall) amounted to no more than to mark his map showing his
own route into the mountains; but of course nothing came of it.
Coate insisted he had never been reprimanded by his superiors for involv-
ing himself in intelligence activities while in Greece. He dismissed as “pure
fabrication” the statement of a prominent Greek journalist, George Drossos,
that in May 1948 Coate had told him that Polk had gone to the mountains.93
After meeting with Coate, Woodhouse expressed in a different communica-
tion his own ambivalence about Coate’s possible connection to Polk’s murder.
Cautiously and diplomatically he speculated that, “accidentally, irresponsibly,
but not with murderous intent,” Coate may have played a role in events lead-
ing to the crime and that he “was then too frightened at the consequences or
was expressly forbidden to admit” what he knew about Polk’s death.94
Many years after he left government service, Coate was interviewed by
the journalist Kati Marton, who was doing research for a book on the Polk
case. During the interview, Coate sought to portray himself as the victim of
prejudice and bureaucratic expediency. He claimed that in the view of Greek
and foreign officials he had been “permanently contaminated” by his wartime
ties to the Communist-controlled resistance army ELAS and by his tendency
to be “too openly dismissive of the colonial mentality” of British officialdom:
“I despised our Greek policy and I loved the Greek people,” he recalled. Coate
apparently convinced Marton that he had nothing to do with Polk’s death
and that in 1948 he had been “a maverick diplomat” and an eccentric who
“loathed Britain’s high-mindedness in dealing with Greece, its protectorate.”
Marton concluded, “He was not the sort of man the Foreign Office would go
out of its way to defend.”95
Despite his protestations to Marton, we cannot possibly know Coate’s
true loyalties and sympathies in postliberation Greece. According to Hadziar-
gyris, Coate’s clandestine “organization” in Thessaloniki consisted of Com-
munists, and he was widely believed to have good Communist contacts in
northern Greece, where he traveled regularly by jeep without security escort.
Kellis informed Donovan and Mouskoundis that Coate was known to have
“solid contacts with the Communists from his resistance days.”96 To be sure,
“solid contacts” with Communists could well have been intelligence-gathering
93. C. M. Woodhouse to author, sent from Oxford, UK, 30 April 1992.

94. Woodhouse to Polk, sent from Oxford, UK, 14 November 1989, in author’s collection.
95. Marton, The Polk Conspiracy, pp. 23, 148, 253–256, 333.
96. Ibid., p. 253.
102
tools rather than evidence of sympathy for the insurgents. Whatever the mean-
ing of such allegations, in Thessaloniki Coate was, by all appearances, ener-
getically devoted to his official duties. If he harbored any sympathies for his
wartime comrades, as his cryptic comments to Marton might imply, he kept
them to himself. As for Marton’s conclusion that his superiors did not “go out
of [their] way to defend” him against his detractors, such a claim flies in the
face of evidence contained in Foreign Office documents.
Speculation about Coate’s possible connection to Polk’s murder may be
intensified further by a letter recently located among Coate’s few surviving
personal papers from his years in Greece. Handwritten in French and un-
dated, it is signed by Jean Durkheim, a leftist French journalist who cov-
ered the Greek civil war from the insurgents’ side and who in October 1946
was present at the conference of Communist guerrilla leaders that established
the “Democratic Army of Greece.” According to the account of a U.S. free-
lance journalist who briefly traveled with Durkheim in northern Greece, the
Frenchman was on friendly terms with many of the Communist guerrillas.97
The letter is addressed to the “Chief Guerrilla of Olympus” and after the
salutation, “My dear comrade,” continues: “I recommend to you most highly
comrade Coate Robert [sic], old member of ELAS, who wishes to renew con-
tact. I offer personal guarantee regarding the person of comrade Coate.” After
Durkheim’s signature and a hard-to-decipher phonetic reference to “our Greek
fatherland,” a footnote: “All guerrillas must escort the bearer of this permit to
the Leader [l’Archigho] without delay [and] most promptly.” Durkheim’s ini-
tials follow.98
Thus far, nothing of what is known about Coate’s years in Greece offers
a convincing explanation for such a letter of introduction from Durkheim.
Among the many questions it raises, the following are the most vexing. How
would a leftist French journalist presume to give a British official an introduc-
tion to the insurgents’ military leader? How could Durkheim vouch for Coate
97. Bob Blake, I’ll Take the High Road (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1953), pp. 40–48. After the guer-
rillas’ conference, Durkheim and Drake traveled to Thessaloniki and, at Coate’s invitation, visited
him separately to discuss their experiences and observations during their recent trip. See B. Blake,
“Thessaloniki Dull after Mountain Adventures,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, 4 April 1947, p. 9. In reports
published in prominent British newspapers in March 1947, Durkheim had described the Commu-
nist insurgents as volunteer peasants who had taken to the mountains to escape royalist terrorism and
oppression.
98. I am grateful to Pamela Moore Coate for making available to me this document and for permission
to publish it. Durkheim, a leftist French journalist, was a correspondent for the Belgian daily Ce soir
and also reported on the Greek civil war for English-language newspapers. In the late 1960s he was
editor of the French periodical Cinemonde (later Le nouveau cinemonde). Attempts to learn more about
Durkheim and his activities in Greece have been abortive.
103
Iatrides
as a veteran of the wartime ELAS unless Coate had so described himself based
on his wartime experiences outside Kalamata? Did Coate actually contemplate
a visit to Markos? If so, for what purpose? If not, why did he keep Durkheim’s
letter for the rest of his life? Could the letter have been written in jest? None
of these questions can be answered with any measure of confidence.
Further research on Coate’s years of service in Greece has yielded no
significant results. In December 1982, his service file in the records of the
War Office, Military Operations and Intelligence, Defense Intelligence Staff,
was “closed” for 75 years. Officially, the reasons for such action remain
“unknown.” As a result, the search in British government sources for addi-
tional clues concerning Coate’s possible connection to Polk’s assassination has
reached an impasse. At least for now, one can do no more than speculate
about whether Coate was entirely innocent of any involvement in the U.S.
journalist’s murder, had unknowingly and unintentionally contributed to the
crime, or was an instigator of its commission. Any such speculation ought to
be tempered with skepticism.
The Search for Answers and for Justice Continues:

Major Publications
Nothing underscores more dramatically the failure of the Staktopoulos trial

and conviction to provide credible answers to the mystery of Polk’s murder
than the number of publications on the subject. Almost without exception
their authors reject the court’s verdict that the crime was committed by the
Communists and point to others as the possible culprits. Regarding Stak-
topoulos, their specific conclusions vary widely, but there is general agreement
that he did not play the role he described in his confessions and was not guilty
of the charges on which he was convicted. Although these books and articles
include Coate in their dramatis personae, they disregard the “British connec-
tion” as a possible key to the crime, perhaps for want of concrete evidence or
fearing libel action against them. Instead, they offer few new facts and much
speculation, placing the blame either on the Right and its henchmen or on
criminals of the Thessaloniki underworld, acting on their own or in liaison
with security agencies.
In this respect, these publications are drastically different from Edmund
Keeley’s The Salonika Bay Murder: Cold War Politics and the Polk Affair, pub-
lished in 1989 by Princeton University Press, with a paper edition appear-
ing the following year. Keeley, a Princeton professor of English and creative
writing, well-known novelist, and distinguished translator of modern Greek
104
literature with close personal ties to Greece, presents methodically and in de-
tail the facts he uncovered through extensive and meticulous research, much
of it in U.S. government archives. He subjects his evidence to careful and im-
partial analysis and speculates on its possible significance regarding the crime.
He also identifies the more glaring weaknesses of the case against Staktopou-
los and of the trial that convicted him. However, unlike other authors, Keeley
does not engage in procrustean efforts to come up with a definitive “solu-
tion” to the case. As a result, the one criticism of his book voiced by some
readers, that it does not offer a concrete solution, is in fact its greatest virtue.
The Salonika Bay Murder guides the reader through the labyrinth of available
evidence to the honest conclusion that, for all the persistent suspicions, theo-
ries, and imagined scenarios, the mystery of Polk’s murder remains unsolved.
Keeley’s book is therefore the most reliable “reference work” available, against
which all other publications on the Polk/Staktopoulos case must be measured.
Several major books have appeared since The Salonika Bay Murder. Two
of them, both published in the United States, focus on the crime, its probable
culprits, and the role played by U.S. officials and journalists—central issues
on which the two books reach sharply different conclusions. Two other books,
published in Greece by legal experts, concentrate on the appeals to the Areios
Pagos (Supreme Court) to have the Staktopoulos case reopened and his con-
viction nullified.
Marton, The Polk Conspiracy

The book that probably attracted the most public attention in the United
States, in part thanks to a highly favorable report by the prestigious CBS tele-
vision program 60 Minutes, was Kati Marton’s The Polk Conspiracy: Murder
and Cover-Up in the Case of CBS News Correspondent George Polk, published
in 1990 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The Hungarian-born Marton is a former
overseas correspondent for ABC News covering Eastern and Western Europe
and at one time was ABC’s bureau chief in Bonn. She has been active in me-
dia organizations including the Freedom Forum and the Committee to Pro-
tect Journalists. Her late husband, the prominent journalist and TV anchor
Peter Jennings, was a 1991 recipient of the George Polk award, established in
1949 and administered by Long Island University. A resourceful investigative
reporter, Marton examined a wealth of private, corporate, and government
archives and interviewed many who could shed light on Polk’s life, person-
ality, and journalistic career and who could also expound on America’s in-
volvement in Greece during the late 1940s. Her familiarity with the world of
journalism serves her well, and her lively style makes her book highly readable.
105
Iatrides
Hers is the only publication to date that claims to offer a concrete explanation
of the motives behind Polk’s murder and a minutely detailed description of
how the crime was supposedly carried out. As her title indicates, Marton’s pri-
mary focus is on what she considers to have been a systematic, deliberate effort
by Greek and U.S. officials and news organizations (she is especially critical
of Gibson, William Donovan, and Lippmann) to conceal the truth about the
crime in order to protect Washington’s interests in Greece and to have the case
closed quickly by accepting Staktopoulos’s conviction.
According to Marton, Polk was murdered after a stormy interview, on 3
May 1948, with Tsaldaris, the head of the conservative Populist Party, deputy
prime minister, and foreign minister, in which Polk allegedly threatened to
reveal that Tsaldaris had secretly and illegally deposited in a New York bank
account $25,000, presumably for personal use.99 Although Marton does not
address the issue, the reader is led to suspect that the money in question might
have been pilfered from U.S. assistance funds. Similarly, she does not make
clear whether, in the wake of the confrontation, Tsaldaris actually ordered the
murder or simply knew that it would be committed by his supporters. In
this connection, Marton’s inability to read Greek and her rudimentary under-
standing of Greek political realities in the 1940s occasionally lead her to con-
clusions that are entirely off the mark. For example, she claims (p. 145) that
the murder was planned by a certain Mihalis Kourtesis, whom she describes
as a leading member of a secret right-wing group based in the Piraeus Port
Authority (OLP), which she calls Tsaldaris’s “political base.” Marton writes:
“Men like Kourtesis made possible the existence of front men like Foreign
Minister Tsaldaris,” thus reducing one of the most powerful politicians of old
Athenian society—a politician who had long been a dominant figure in Greek
politics—to a mere “front man” for a port authority flunky and a gang of dock
hands.
The suspicion that Polk’s death may have been the work of the Right is
as old as the crime itself and must be given due consideration alongside com-
peting theories. It may well be that Polk was assassinated by anti-Communist
extremists, possibly with ties to the Greek security forces. On the other hand,
the specific motive provided by Marton is hardly credible. Tsaldaris was a
wealthy man and much too proud and cautious to risk his political and so-
cial standing by having a U.S. journalist killed in order to conceal an illegal
99. On Tuesday, 4 May, Polk made arrangements to go on a tour of northern Greece, starting in
the town of Kavalla. On Friday morning, 7 May, bad weather diverted the flight to Thessaloniki,
where Polk disembarked and checked into a hotel. He disappeared Sunday night, 9 May. If, as Marton
maintains, Polk’s interview with Tsaldaris on 3 May led to his assassination, the alleged Piraeus-based
killers moved with remarkable speed.
106
foreign bank account of $25,000. (The existence of such an account, report-

edly suggested to Polk by an anonymous tipster, was never confirmed.) As
foreign minister, Tsaldaris traveled abroad and often visited New York on of-
ficial business. If such a bank account existed, it could easily have been for
personal reasons or for the tuition and other expenses of his son, Athanasios,
a student at Columbia University at the time. Besides, even if uncovered, a
secret personal bank account—hardly rare for wealthy Greeks of the day—
would not have caused much of a scandal for a powerful and savvy politician
and top government official. It is difficult to believe that the Right would have
murdered Polk because of a threat to expose Tsaldaris, or that Tsaldaris would
have been so angered by Polk’s journalistic reporting on Greece that he would
have had him killed.
Similarly, too much of Marton’s account of how the murder was car-
ried out defies logic or was physically impossible. Having anticipated Polk’s
arrival in Thessaloniki—despite the uncertainty and last-minute confusion
surrounding his travel plans—the two Piraeus-based assassins are said to have
met him, slipped a narcotic in his drink, allowed him to return to his ho-
tel room where he typed two lucid letters (to Murrow, his boss at CBS; and
to his mother), and finally succumbed to the ingested drug after putting on
his pajamas. Entering his room, the killers placed him unconscious in a large
laundry basket and then used the hotel’s tiny elevator to carry it and its heavy
human load (along with Polk’s street clothes) downstairs to the lobby. Cross-
ing the crowded lobby, they supposedly exited through the hotel’s front door,
passing by the military sentries posted on the sidewalk, onto Tsimiski Street,
Thessaloniki’s busiest; turned right onto Aghias Sophias Street (known for its
popular sidewalk cafes); went into an alley behind the hotel (no such alley
existed); shot him in the head; removed his pajamas and dressed him in his
trousers, shirt, socks, shoes, and jacket; bound his hands and feet; carried him
several blocks to the waterfront on Nikis Avenue (lined with expensive apart-
ment buildings with balconies facing the bay); and pushed the lifeless body
into the water. Marton makes no mention of what happened to Polk’s paja-
mas, the laundry basket, or why, when, and by whom his press card was mailed
to the nearby police station, where it was received several days later. Marton’s
source for this extraordinary account of the murder scene is the diary of the
wife of a U.S. Information Service officer who knew Polk, was summoned to
identify his body, and who “speculates on how the murder was likely to have
been executed.”100
100. Marton, The Polk Conspiracy, p. 343.
107
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The Polk Conspiracy is documented, and its sources are by and large
credible, although government documents are cited without file registration
numbers and the book’s endnotes are vague and unspecific, often preventing
verification of particular sources, facts, and claims. The seminal article “Who
Killed George Polk?,” which Giannis Roubatis and Elias Vlanton published in
May 1977 in the media magazine More, is not cited. Keeley’s book, published
in 1989, is also not mentioned. What is more disturbing is that Marton’s ac-
count of the motive behind the murder, of the conspiracy to carry it out, and
of the killers’ movements is based largely on what she calls “the official but
secret correspondence” of Kellis.
Chosen by Donovan as an investigative assistant in the Polk case, Kellis
was a Greek-American (born in Alexandria, Egypt) who in 1943–1944 had
served with the OSS in northern Greece. After the war he joined the U.S.
Air Force’s intelligence branch and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. On
temporary leave from his post, he arrived in Athens with Donovan on 10 June
1948 and remained in Greece until the end of July, when he returned to the
United States and his military duties. Marton asserts that she obtained Kellis’s
papers from his unnamed “former associates.” According to the book, Kellis
learned the alleged facts about the plot and the crime from a certain Lambros
Antoniou, a wartime comrade in the OSS and Kellis’s informant in the Pop-
ulist Party and the Piraeus Port Authority. Kellis presented Antoniou’s tip as
well as information from other sources to Donovan in several letters, of which
the most important was an eleven-page letter/report dated 22 July 1948. In
addition, Marton received certain of the Donovan papers from his biographer,
Anthony Cave Brown, who, she writes, claimed he had been given access to
Donovan’s records by CIA Director William Casey but chose not to deal with
the Polk case in his book because of unnamed “third party obligations.”101
Marton’s use of Kellis’s letters to Donovan, their contents, and ultimate
fate is near impossible to corroborate through independent research. Today
the Donovan Papers contain almost nothing on the Polk case and no men-
tion of Mouskoundis. The only letter from Kellis to Donovan, dated 19
June 1948, clearly shows that Kellis had no idea who killed Polk or why.102
101. Ibid., p. 332. Anthony Cave Brown’s Wild Bill Donovan: The Last Hero (New York: Times Books,
1982) effectively ends with the disbandment of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in late 1945
and the establishment of the CIA two years later. In a telephone conversation with me, Cave Brown
declined to discuss the Polk case other than to say that while examining Donovan’s papers he had
come across indications that during the war Major Nicholas Mouskoundis had had ties to British
intelligence operations in Greece.
102. Kellis to Donovan, 19 June 1948, in Donovan Papers, Folder “George Polk Murder 1948–1950.”
Kellis writes, “We are employing numerous informants, agents and officials of the government in our
108
Sometime after working as Donovan’s investigator, Kellis joined the CIA,

making it conceivable that he turned over to the agency his notes and cor-
respondence regarding the Polk case.103 Most probably the agency had accu-
mulated extensive files on the death of the CBS reporter and related topics.
However, in August 2007 the CIA announced that its records on the Polk
murder had been lost and that the files relating to Freedom of Information
(FOI) requests had been “routinely” destroyed.104 William Polk, the slain jour-
nalist’s younger brother and a prominent scholar who has filed FOI requests,
has contended that the agency documents he has seen are “almost completely
blanked out and are of no use except to show that apparently, still, the gov-
ernment is embarrassed by the case and/or has something to hide.”105
If a “smoking gun” exists that corroborates Marton’s theory on Polk’s
murder, it would have to be in Kellis’s communications to Donovan cited
in her book. In a letter from Athens dated 19 June 1948, Kellis reported to
Donovan that, “So far, Moskoundis [sic] seems to have the inside track,” that
the presence in Salonica of Vasvanas [KKE cadre and suspected assassin] at the
time of Polk’s death had been confirmed, and that “the Greek Government is
on the spot and unless they get a signal from outside this investigation would
not be derailed.”106 On 28 June, writing from Thessaloniki, Kellis expressed
the suspicion that Mouskoundis was withholding information and stressed
“the inability of the Greek police, security and the various allied intelligence
services to penetrate the Greek Communist party on a high level.” He seemed
ambivalent and resigned to being kept on the sidelines:
If the Communists, as the police seem to believe, are involved then we will have
to let them [the Greek authorities] do the best they can under the circumstances
attempts to track down the murderers. . . . All this so far is mere check on Moskoundis’ [sic] infor-
mation and activities. I double-check everything as far as possible to make sure that he or any other
Greek official is not misleading us and that the Greek authorities are impartial. . . . Moskoundis [sic]
told me he is relying heavily on government’s informants with the Communists. . . . A high ranking
officer from the ‘National Committee’ an extreme rightist organization told me that he visited Thes-
saloniki immediately after Polk’s body was discovered and contacted the organization at Thessaloniki.
He wished to assure us that his organization is not involved.”
103. Kellis left the CIA in 1953. In May 1954, while serving with the Air Force in Naples, Italy, he
sent a letter to President Dwight Eisenhower charging that “the Central Intelligence Agency is in a
rotten state.” See Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007),
p. 107.
104. List of released CIA documents pertaining to Polk and Kellis, enclosed with letter from John H.
Wright of the CIA to author, 6 November 1990; and “The George Polk Case: CIA Has Lost Records
on CBS Reporter Murdered in Greece in 1948, and Destroyed FOIA File on Case,” National Security
Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 226, 10 August 2007.
105. Polk, email to author, 3 October 2008.
106. Kellis letter sent from Athens to Donovan, 19 June 1948, in Marton Papers.
109
Iatrides
and try to solve it their own way. If the extreme Right as an organization, or
individuals are involved then the chances of discovery of the criminals would
be just as difficult. For if the Right is involved, I believe that pressure could be
brought to [sic] the police to suppress the investigation. In all fairness, I should
state that I have not detected any pressure as yet from above to impede this
investigation. . . . I contacted many persons outside the government (many of
them British Intelligence Officers) and some of them would certainly like to see
Tsaldaris and his friends crucified, but so far nobody has offered any concrete
evidence.107
Kellis’s eleven-page letter, dated 22 July 1948, his last from Athens, is at
the heart of Marton’s explanation for Polk’s murder. In it, after assuring Dono-
van that he remained impartial, “despite the efforts of certain elements who
attempted to influence me or high-pressure me from seeking what I thought is
the truth,” Kellis wrote that he could no longer trust Mouskoundis, who ap-
peared to be planting misleading information, and had therefore been seeking
the help of British intelligence officers in Thessaloniki. One of them, Captain
Victor Rich, told Kellis: “Do not listen to what the Greek police are saying.
Polk was killed not far from the place where he was found. They did not kill
him in Athens because they did not want a police shake-up down there.” The
next day, when Kellis tried to elicit more information, Rich refused to talk
further on the matter. Kellis’s letter to Donovan described in considerable de-
tail Polk’s reported movements and contacts in Thessaloniki, which included
a U.S. member of the UN commission, Gerald Drew, and a “Mr. Randall [sic]
Coate, a British information officer,” from whom he solicited help in contact-
ing the Communists. Also, according to the journalist Mamas, “Mr. Polk is
supposed to have asked Mr. Statopoulos [sic] if he could place him in contact
with the Communists.” Kellis added: “This is the only case we know where
Mr. Polk asked of a Greek and in the presence of a Greek government official
to place him in contact with the Communists. Another source stated that Mr.
Polk also spoke to Col. Kallergis, a Greek intelligence officer, if he can possibly
put him in contact with the Communists.
Concerning individuals in Athens who might be involved, the letter men-
tions a “Mr. Kavanides [sic], of the ministry of information,” who had handled
Polk’s request for a permit to travel to Kavalla, Thessaloniki, and Kozani ac-
companied by his wife and the Hadziargyris couple, and “who was mentioned
as one of the persons knowing ‘something’ about the murder.”108 Regarding
107. Kellis letter sent from Thessaloniki to Donovan, 28 June 1948, in Marton Papers.
108. George Kavounides (director of the Foreign Press and Information Department of the Ministry
to the Prime Minister, a well-known Athenian and respected senior official with ties to the Liberal
110
Hadziargyris, “[who] I believe is a leftist, he certainly has some contacts with

the Communists, it is possible that he attempted to put G. Polk in contact
with people he thought were in contact with Markos.” However, “As the facts
stand now I doubt that he knows much about this case, because Polk appar-
ently left Athens without a definite contact with a contact at Salonica.”
As an afterthought, Kellis’s letter of 22 July mentions that
some information has been received to the effect that Tsaldaris despised Polk for
his attacks on him and the Right wing leaders, [sic] the article printed at Harper’s
left a strong impression here. Furthermore we hear that he had an interview with
Tsaldaris prior to his departure for the north in which he threatened Tsaldaris
that he would expose him. (This I did not verify.)
The letter concludes: “Some names of persons who supposedly know some-
thing or are involved in the crime. . . . I have not checked on their movements
and roles they might have played as yet. They were given to me by one Pop-
ulist and two Liberals.” Kellis’s list includes the following:
Stefanakis, Chief of the Political Security, Salonica, ESA (Greek Military Po-
lice), Salonica, Drossos, liaison officer with UNSCOB, Maria Karapanayiotis, 32
Marathonos, Kifissia, Kavanides, Ministry of Information, Papas, Lt. Col. Gen-
darmerie Hq. Athens, Georgandas, Lt. G-2, Greek General Staff, Col. Verras,
G-2, C Corps, Salonica, Col. Kallergis, Intelligence Officer, Salonica, Limper-
opoulos, Greek Liaison Office, UNSCOB, and Stahtopoulos, Greek newsman
from Salonica.109
Rather than producing a “smoking gun,” Kellis’s reports to Donovan, and

in particular his long letter of 22 July, resemble smoke rings blown idly in ev-
ery conceivable direction. Yet, as we learn from Keeley, on the basis of Kellis’s
“list,” General Donovan pressed the Greek authorities to concentrate on Stak-
topoulos, paving the way for the journalist’s arrest, trial, and conviction.110
Years later, Kellis would boast: “It is possible that were it not for my basic
investigation and its screening and evaluation by General Donovan that this
crime might never have been solved.”111
In a subsequent letter to Donovan dated 10 August 1948, written after
returning to the United States, Kellis revealed that his thinking had moved in
a new direction, away from Staktopoulos and the Communists: “We might as
Party) was the government’s liaison with foreign journalists in Greece. In the mid-1950s I served on
Kavounides’s staff.
109. Kellis to Donovan, 22 July 1948, in Marton Papers.
110. Keeley, The Salonika Bay Murder, pp. 349–350.
111. Ibid., p. 350.
111
Iatrides
well face it. The people involved in this crime are powerful and ruthless. In
order to expose them, it would require patience, courage and much support
from this side.” Therefore he urged Donovan to consider a new tactic.
In regards to the investigation, I do not expect that much would be accomplished
unless you get the complete cooperation of the State Department. If Secretary
Marshall believes that the parties involved in this murder should be prosecuted
irrespectively of their political alignments, position etc. this should be made clear
to our officials on the spot. When the investigation was directed against the left
most State Department officials were cooperative. When I received information
that this is a “rightist crime” and expressed my views, some State Department
officials became concerned, to put it mildly. I believe that as long as our people
show reluctance to press the investigation against the right, we can not expect
much from the Greeks.112
Kellis recommended a new approach, consisting of “independent investiga-

tions” to be carried out “covertly” and costing an estimated $15,000. He pro-
posed that even as Mouskoundis, Panopoulos, and the police followed their
separate leads, the covert investigators would work independently, deliver their
findings to a contact in Athens, “and relay it to you (Lambron may fit in this
job) via the TWA pilots, thus avoiding other channels.” When “sufficient ev-
idence” had been collected, it would be submitted to the State Department
“with a request that the US Embassy in Athens press the arrest and prosecu-
tion of the persons involved.”113 There is no record of Donovan’s reaction to
Kellis’s proposal for this new plan of action.
Marton’s papers also include the letter Kellis received from Antoniou,
dated 20 August 1948, in which his informant relays information he obtained
from an unidentified contact in the Piraeus Port Authority. This is a crucial
document for Marton because it names the principals among Tsaldaris’s loyal
supporters (the Piraeus Port Authority director Nikolaos Yenimatas and his
right-hand man, Kourtesis) who, according to her book, planned and car-
ried out the crime. One of them is quoted as having said that “Polk deserved
his fate and that the person who committed the murder is now at Piraeus un-
der police protection.”114 Forwarding Antoniou’s translated letter to Donovan,
Kellis offered no comment on its potentially explosive contents but wrote:
In case you wish him [Antoniou] to continue his investigation, I respectfully
suggest that a sum of money $100–200 dollars be dispatched to him through
112. Kellis to Donovan, sent from Athens, 19 August 1948, in Marton Papers.
113. Ibid.
114. Antoniou letter, sent from Athens, to Kellis, 20 August 1948, in Marton Papers.
112
his uncle, with directions to proceed with his investigation until all the details of
the murder are elicited. It is worth mentioning that other investigators are also
on the job and that you would continue to check their information against his,
so as not to present us with fabrications or plants. Whoever comes along with
the real stuff would be compensated by the Correspondents Association.115
There is thus no evidence that Kellis took seriously Antoniou’s sensational tip
or that he had more to offer his employer than unsubstantiated speculation
and suggestions for funding further investigations.
The last items in the Marton papers that are of some interest in the Polk
case are letters to Donovan from Lambron, who was Kellis’s replacement as
Donovan’s investigator in Greece and his translator at the Staktopoulos trial.
(Lambron’s qualifications for this sensitive assignment are rather peculiar. An
American of Greek descent, he had been living in Greece for some thirteen
years studying medicine. His letters and notes leave little doubt that his edu-
cation and level of sophistication were limited and that his principal interest
in Greece was to explore “business possibilities.”) In a memorandum dated 10
August 1948 and titled “Items discussed with Mr. Rentis,” Lambron wrote:
“It is exposed [sic] that Coates [sic] knew several individuals who would un-
dertake to carry messages to Markos.”116 He went on to claim
It is said that within the OLP there exists an organization called constitutional
organization. This constitutional organization is similar to other rightist groups
like “X”; one of its leading members, Mike Kurtesis [sic], supposedly was taken
to Salonica by Moscontis [sic], five days after the crime and possibly before. Was
this looked into?117
In a letter dated 14 September 1948 Lambron informed Donovan that

Staktopoulos, “who had been an active Communist and worked for their press
when this was legal, has confessed now that he still is an active Communist,”
and that Staktopoulos’s mother, “a shrewd old woman, has also been an ac-
tive Communist to this date.” In addition, “Staktopoulos, who is reputed
to have worked for British intelligence and got his Reuters’ job [?] through
them, is suspected of being the middle man that American Journalists used
to contact the Andartes [guerrillas].” Finally, the U.S. “counsil [sic]” in Thes-
saloniki, Gibson, “showed interest in knowing to what extent you shared the
views of those that considered the British possibly involved in the crime.”118
115. Kellis to Donovan, 29 August 1948, in Marton Papers.

116. Antoniou notes on “Items Discussed with Mr. Rendis,” 10 August 1948, in Marton Papers.
117. Ibid.
118. Antoniou letter, sent from Athens, to Donovan, 14 September 1948, in Marton Papers.
113
Iatrides
Lambron’s letters give the impression that Donovan was getting precious lit-
tle for the money he was paying his “investigators.” (In a letter to Lippmann
dated 21 April 1949, Donovan offered his impressions of the Staktopoulos
trial and praised Lambron, who was “superior as interpreter and made possi-
ble my understanding of the proceedings.”)119
Kellis, who died in 1986, remains part of the confusion that continues
to surround the Polk case and its aftermath. His letters served as the basis for
Marton’s explanation of Polk’s murder, an explanation Kellis himself did not
espouse. In later years he maintained that his own investigation had led him to
believe that Polk had been killed by right-wing elements but that he had never
been able to identify those responsible for the crime. In March 1952, in a letter
to Ernest K. Lindley of Newsweek (and one-time president of the Overseas
Writers Committee that investigated Polk’s murder), Kellis reminisced about
his work as Donovan’s assistant: “You undoubtedly remember that I expressed
some misgivings about the whole affair and as a result of it I was pulled out of
the investigation. To be perfectly frank, I tried to be as honest as I could with
the Correspondents Association [sic] but the odds were against me.”120 Four
years later, in May 1956, he wrote,
Unfortunately in 1948 there were too many obstructing hands who made our
job very difficult if not impossible. I can tell you now that I was under consid-
erable pressure to get out of the investigation and shut up. . . . More important
yet, I did not betray the committee and the principles you stand for.121
In the 1970s I had several conversations and exchanged letters with Kellis,
who at that time was employed by the Sikorsky Corporation in Stratford,
Connecticut. In July 1975 Kellis wrote, “the Polk case was never solved and I
have serious doubts that this will ever be resolved. . . . My theory based on the
partial facts I was able to put together is that some right-wing Greeks (some
with British connections) killed Polk” and then tried to place the blame on
the Communists.122 In May 1978 he elaborated:
My investigation and leads led me to the conclusion that the Polk murder was
the work of the right-wing elements. Some people in Greece blame the British
119. The George Polk Case: Report of the Overseas Writers of the Special Committee to Inquire into the
Murder at Salonika, Greece, May 16, 1948, of Columbia Broadcasting System Correspondent George Polk
(n.pub., n.d.), p. 14.
120. Kellis to Lindley, 4 March 1952, in Yale University Library, Lippmann Papers, Series III, 1931–
1974, Unit 2 Reel 86, HM257, File 1922 (hereinafter referred to as Lippmann Papers).
121. Kellis to Lindley, 23 May 1956, in Lippmann Papers.
122. Kellis to author, 8 July 1975.
114
or the Americans. On the basis of the evidence I had at that time and the investi-
gation I did conclude that neither the Americans nor the British committed this
assassination. It is true, the British and the Americans, in Greece, tried to cover-
up the involvement of the right-wing elements, but we cannot accuse them of
anything beyond this.123
Although he came to regard right-wing elements as the probable culprits, Kel-

lis never mentioned to me a possible Tsaldaris/OLP link to the crime.
Marton’s “solution” of the murder was challenged in several unfavorable
reviews of her book and through legal action. In 1990, Athanasios Tsaldaris
sued Marton for falsely accusing his late father of responsibility in Polk’s mur-
der. The case was settled out of court. According to press reports, Marton
agreed to write a letter of apology, to refrain from publishing her book in
Greece, not to use Tsaldaris’s name in a proposed movie, and to pay the Tsal-
daris family an undisclosed sum of money.124 The actor and producer Mel
Gibson, who has caused a great deal of controversy over the years, was report-
edly interested in producing a movie based on Marton’s book, but the project
was apparently abandoned.
Before settling on a Tsaldaris connection to the crime, Marton in her pre-
liminary research had concentrated on possible British involvement. In 1987,
intent on locating and interviewing Coate in London, she visited Nigel Clive,
a veteran SIS officer who during much of the war had served as liaison with
the Greek anti-Communist resistance. After the war Clive was assigned to the
British embassy in Athens until early 1948, when he moved to a new SIS post
in the Middle East. Clive informed me that Marton told him she planned
to “show that there was a British plot to murder Polk” and asked whether
he would “kindly come clean and give details of the British plot and explain
British motives for acting in this way.” According to Clive, he responded to
his visitor with a stern lecture on the absurdity of her theory “and told her
more than once that I could not possibly envisage how British interests could
have been served in organizing the murder of an American journalist.” He
added: “Kati Marton clearly thought that I knew the truth of her story and
was covering up.” Although Clive’s letter makes clear he had known Coate,
he refused to give Marton Coate’s address, and he warned Lady Henderson,
Polk’s one-time colleague in Athens who by this point was married to a senior
123. Kellis to author, 17 May 1978.

124. Tsaldaris letter sent from Athens to Keeley, Athens, with documents, 11 December 1990. I am
grateful to Edmund Keeley for giving me access to these documents.
115
Iatrides
British diplomat, that Marton was about to visit her as well.125 Not surpris-
ingly, Coate, whom Marton apparently visited more than once, categorically
denied any involvement in Polk’s murder and threatened to sue if she ever
published anything implicating him in the crime. Following her short trip
to London, Marton’s research focus shifted abruptly to an entirely different
direction and soon settled on the Tsaldaris/OLP plot.
Vlanton and Mettger, Who Killed George Polk?

Other than Keeley, no one has contributed more to the search for answers
to the Polk murder than Elias Vlanton, a Washington-based researcher and
writer. In May 1977 in the media magazine More, he and Giannis Roubatis,
a Greek-born, U.S.-educated journalist, published “Who Killed George Polk?
The Press Covers Up a Death in the Family,” a path-breaking article in which
they presented the results of their extensive archival research in the United
States. The two authors argued that Staktopoulos was framed, that his trial was
a sham, and that, with the active cooperation of the U.S. press, a systematic
cover-up by Greek and U.S. officials prevented the truth from coming out. Al-
most twenty years after the More article, and following additional prodigious
research in U.S. government archives and press files as well as field work in
Greece, Vlanton and his new collaborator, Zak Mettger, a Washington-based
writer, published Who Killed George Polk? The Press Covers Up a Death in the
Family.
The Vlanton-Mettger book begins with a discussion of the Greek politi-
cal scene and of the anti-Communist hysteria that spread in that country and
much of the West in the late 1940s and offers a convincing refutation of the
case the Greek authorities presented against Staktopoulos. The book also of-
fers a harsh indictment of the U.S. press for its docile acceptance of official
pronouncements and for its failure to investigate Polk’s murder independently
and thoroughly, which the two authors attribute to journalists’ fear of dam-
aging their careers. In a blistering criticism of Marton’s book, they question
the value of the raw, disconnected, and uncorroborated intelligence reports
contained in Kellis’s papers—few of which they were able to locate—and con-
clude that Tsaldaris had nothing to do with Polk’s death. After briefly review-
ing theories concerning a possible “British connection,” they conclude there
was nothing sinister or suspicious about the behavior of any British officials
in Thessaloniki at the time of the murder.
125. Clive letter, sent from London, to author, 5 November 1987. According to Clive, Lady Hender-
son “firmly rebuffed Marton’s claims that Polk had been murdered by the British.”
116
In the book’s less-convincing part, the authors offer their own theory con-
cerning the crime. To their credit, they preface it with a cautionary “here is
how—and why—George Polk might have been killed.”126 Working on the as-
sumption that the murder could have resulted from Polk’s “intense interest
in criminal activities,” the authors investigated some of Thessaloniki’s clan-
destine organizations (in particular, one called Pindos) and collected oral ac-
counts concerning smugglers and criminal elements operating in and around
the city’s harbor in the late 1940s. Not surprisingly, they learned that some
of these individuals were staunchly anti-Communist and served as police in-
formers. Vlanton and Mettger contend that a gang of smugglers who feared
that Polk’s investigation of their unspecified illegal activities might lead to
their exposure and ruin lured Polk to their seaside den outside the city, killed
him, and dumped his body in the bay. They then turned to their handler
and protector in the local security apparatus, Major Mouskoundis, who gave
them cover by masterminding a plot to blame the crime on the Communists.
Anxious to “solve” the case quickly and without political damage, other Greek
officials were only too glad to go along with the scheme.
Vlanton and Mettger’s scenario, which portrays Mouskoundis as an evil
genius and the sinister puppeteer of a hellish plot that sent an innocent Stak-
topoulos to trial and conviction, contains elements that strain credulity. Even
if one accepts the premise that Mouskoundis was fanatically anti-Communist,
desperate to find a solution to Polk’s murder and capable of subjecting a pris-
oner to brutal torture, it is difficult to believe that he managed to hoodwink
everyone surrounding the case. After all, not every Greek official was anxious
to pin the crime on the Communists. Although the book provides important
new facts and contributes significantly to the search for the truth, it offers a
less than convincing solution to the mystery surrounding Polk’s tragic death.
Vourvahis, Poios skotose ton Polk?

Of the Greek books published in recent years, two are particularly important
because their authors, seasoned legal experts, discuss in detail and with au-
thority the central question in the Polk/Staktopoulos case: Why and how was
justice sacrificed in the interest of political expediency?
In the book Poios skotose ton Polk? Mia politiki dolofonia kai dikastiki plani,
Eleftherios A. Vourvahis, a prominent attorney, provides a detailed account of
the Staktopoulos trial, citing long portions of the official transcript. The book
126. Vlanton and Mettger, Who Killed George Polk? p. 185; emphasis added.
117
Iatrides
serves as a valuable reference work on key legal details of the case that can
otherwise be located only in court transcripts, scattered and hard-to-find doc-
uments, and old newspapers. It provides a guide to the relevant penal code,
includes information concerning the court’s composition and competence,
and comments on the nature of court decisions. It also examines in legal
terms Staktopoulos’s arrest, detention, charges, interrogation, pretrial testi-
mony, confessions that led to his conviction, and postconviction incarcera-
tion. A separate chapter deals with the selection and composition of the jury,
the prosecution’s tactics, and the performance of the defense attorneys. This
is followed by a detailed review of the court’s daily deliberations from 13 to
20 April 1949, including verbatim exchanges between the presiding judge,
members of the court, the prosecution’s 24 witnesses, the defense attorneys,
and the accused. Among the many oddities of this long judicial proceeding,
perhaps the most striking are the rambling and confused exchanges among all
participants, often voicing personal opinions and speculation. Although the
relevance to the indictment of much of this verbiage is anybody’s guess, the
presiding judge allowed it to go on, without the slightest attempt to keep
the proceedings focused narrowly on the charges against the accused.
Vourvahis’s criticism of what he describes remains measured and somber.
Yet it is obvious that he considers the ordeal to which Staktopoulos was sub-
jected to have been highly irregular, unfair, and at times clearly unlawful. He
regards much of the testimony of prosecution witnesses as irrelevant or im-
plausible, questions the graphologists’ findings, considers the role of the de-
fense a total failure, and maintains that Staktopoulos was forced to confess
to criminal acts he could not have committed and with which he had not
been charged. Vourvahis’s conclusion is that Staktopoulos’s behavior was the
result of extreme pressure by the authorities to make him carry out their in-
structions if he was to escape execution. Fearing for his life, his answers were
“vague, cloudy, naïve, contradictory, and some totally incoherent.”127
Vourvahis also chronicles major developments after Staktopoulos’s con-
viction, including his sentence reduction, eventual release, and failed appeal
to have his conviction nullified. At one point Vourvahis maintains that a new
defense attorney, Theodore Oikonomou, convinced Prime Minister Constan-
tine Karamanlis that Staktopoulos was innocent but that the politician’s “per-
sonal opinion” had no bearing on the situation.128 Finally, the book also gives
brief but useful summaries of two subsequent appeals to the Areios Pagos by
127. Vourvahis, Poios Skotose ton Polk, p. 311.

128. Ibid., p. 315.
118
Staktopoulos’s widow and analyzes the court’s written decisions to reject them.
Deeply disappointed by the court’s actions, Vourvahis concludes: “The only
comforting factor from the perspective of Greek justice is the correct, but also
courageous minority [dissenting] opinions of Areios Pagos justices.”129
Kafiris, Mia anthropini kai dikastiki tragodia

The other Greek book to be briefly discussed here is the most recent and
most authoritative study from a legal perspective because of the voice it rep-
resents. Published in 2008, it carries the suggestive title Mia anthropini kai
dikastiki tragodia: E ipothesi Polk/Staktopoulou. Its author, Judge Athanasios
G. Kafiris, had a long and distinguished career as a state prosecutor before
rising to deputy prosecutor of the Areios Pagos. The book concentrates on
the four appeals to the court to overturn Staktopoulos’s conviction and sys-
tematically reviews the arguments of the appeals as well as the reasons given
by the court in denying them. In the process, Kafiris examines every phase
of the case, from the police investigation and Staktopoulos’s arrest to his in-
terrogation, indictment, trial, conviction, subsequent incarceration, and final
release. The result is a scathing criticism of the entire process, particularly of
the judicial system, whose organs Kafiris accuses of being “dragged inevitably
and irresolutely by certain paramount considerations or consciously betraying
their sacred mission and the oath they had taken.”130 He considers Staktopou-
los innocent of all charges, calls his imprisonment in the cells of the General
Security illegal, finds the panel of judges and defense attorneys incompetent,
and characterizes Mouskoundis as the mastermind of the entire travesty of jus-
tice. More obliquely he hints at sinister foreign influences—almost certainly
he has the United States in mind—that demanded a prompt conviction and
may have provided unnamed methods of interrogation under torture. What
makes Kafiris’s book truly authoritative is that he, as the deputy prosecutor of
the Areios Pagos, personally presented to that court the third appeal, submit-
ted in December 2002 by Staktopoulos’s widow, and formally recommended
that it be granted. After the court’s denial of the appeal, Kafiris resigned “for
personal reasons.” In his book he quotes one of the two dissenting judges as
charging that the trial had been subjected to unlawful political influence.
The brief review of the four appeals that follows is based largely on
Kafiris’s book (which frequently cites and concurs with Vourvahis’s account)
and on court documents obtained independently.
129. Ibid., p. 411. The volume contains a nine-page bibliography on the Polk/Staktopoulos case.
130. Kafiris, E Ypothesi Polk-Staktopoulou, p. 16.
119
Iatrides
The Battles to Reverse the Conviction
The first petition to the Areios Pagos, submitted on 29 August 1977, was
prepared by Staktopoulos with the assistance of the prominent Thessaloniki
attorney and politician Stelios Papathemelis. Its central argument was that
Staktopoulos’s conviction should be thrown out because it had been based
solely on a confession of the accused obtained through physical and psycho-
logical torture.131 According to the appeal, the confession consisted of facts
and fabrications cleverly woven together by the interrogators who, through in-
timidation and torture, forced him to repeat them in court. Kafiris in his book
characterizes the long and rambling confession as a “mixture of loquacity, gos-
sip, incoherence, nonsense, and contradiction” that should not have been al-
lowed or taken seriously. As required by law, the petition also introduced in
writing new evidence, compiled by Papathemelis, stating that Polk’s press card
received by the police had actually been found by an illiterate dockworker,
Efthimios Bamias, and that the envelope had been addressed and mailed by
a local store owner and Bamias’s friend, Savvas Karamihalis. Karamihalis had
related the incident to his children shortly before his death, and they had veri-
fied that the handwriting on the envelope was their father’s. Additional written
testimony was provided by Kellis and several journalists, each supplying new
information intended to show that Staktopoulos was not involved in Polk’s
murder.
In the denial of the petition, announced on 20 June 1979, the Areios Pa-
gos dismissed as “incomprehensible” the claim of torture, pointing out that
Staktopoulos’s confession had been voluntary and given in open court. (Ridi-
culing the court’s refusal to consider police torture, Kafiris offers examples of
cases where brutal interrogation methods had in fact been used.) The court
also rejected as vague and unsubstantiated the testimony concerning the find-
ing and mailing of Polk’s press card to the police. Thus, references to the
location where the card had been found appeared to the court to be imprecise
and contradictory, Karamihalis’s account was deemed unreliable because the
man was dead and his children, who had submitted the relevant written testi-
mony, were in no position to verify its authenticity. Similarly, the court found
the statements by journalists to be based on newspaper reports and there-
fore unacceptable hearsay evidence. Kellis’s testimony claiming he had been
advised by U.S. officials not to become involved in the Polk case (presum-
ably because his investigation was pointing to right-wing groups and might
131. Ibid., pp. 27–46; and Vourvahis, Poios Skotose ton, pp. 326–368.
120
exonerate Staktopoulos) was rejected because the CIA cover document that
accompanied Kellis’s signed testimony did not carry the name and signature
of its CIA author.
Following Staktopoulos’s death in 1998, his widow filed with the Areios
Pagos a new petition (on 12 March 1999) requesting that the 1949 conviction
by the Thessaloniki criminal court be set aside because it had been based on
faulty evidence. The appeal argued that Mouzenidis, one of the two convicted
killers, had died in battle before Polk’s death and that the three alleged conspir-
ators, Mouzenidis, Vasvanas, and Staktopoulos, had not met or eaten together
at the seaside restaurant Luxembourg, as claimed by the prosecution. The ap-
peal also presented once more evidence that the envelope containing Polk’s
press card had not been addressed by Staktopoulos’s mother but by Karami-
halis. Much of the new evidence presented in the second appeal was taken
from foreign publications on the Polk case, portions of which had recently
been translated into Greek.132 Especially useful was Keeley’s book, which was
repeatedly cited as the source of vital information discrediting the prosecu-
tion’s case and supporting Staktopoulos’s claim of innocence.
In a decision to deny the appeal, announced on 4 July 2001, the Areios
Pagos closely followed the language of the previous decision, suggesting that
the new evidence was incomplete, inconclusive, or not sufficiently specific.
The court rejected the claim that Mouzenidis had died before Polk’s mur-
der because the appeal had failed to establish with certainty the exact date
of Mouzenidis’s death. Kafiris’s book reviews at some length evidence that
Mouzenidis was killed in April 1948 during the civil war and chides the court
for refusing to question the criminal court’s stand on that point.
Staktopoulos’s widow petitioned the Areios Pagos again, on 9 December
2002, to overturn her late husband’s conviction because of errors committed
by the criminal court in Thessaloniki.133 The third appeal is especially im-
portant because Kafiris, in his long and detailed presentation to the court as
prosecutor, argued strongly that the evidence submitted was credible, suffi-
cient, and compelling, and he recommended that it be accepted. The new
evidence, based largely on the Vlanton/Mettger book, concerned the testi-
mony of a woman from Thessaloniki, Soula Karanthou, who in December
1952 gave the CIA station in Athens sworn testimony about her neighbor,
Zisis Nixas, a known right-wing thug who, she believed, had been involved in
Polk’s murder. In addition to Karanthou’s testimony, Kafiris presented to the
132. Kafiris, E Ypothesi Polk-Staktopoulou, pp. 47–50; and Vourvahis, Poios Skotose ton, pp. 368–411.
133. Kafiris, E Ypothesi Polk-Staktopoulou, pp. 213–242.
121
Iatrides
Areios Pagos a detailed review of the key points of the evidence used by the
Thessaloniki criminal court to convict Staktopoulos. Relying heavily on Kee-
ley’s book, he argued that much of that evidence was false, unsubstantiated,
or inadmissible and that the handling of Staktopoulos by the Thessaloniki au-
thorities from the moment of his arrest to his conviction and imprisonment
had been cruel, inappropriate, and possibly unlawful.
The court’s decision to deny the petition, announced on 19 January 2004,
for the most part simply referred to the arguments of previous decisions of the
Areios Pagos, again claiming that the new evidence was insufficient, unsub-
stantiated, or inadmissible. The Karanthou testimony was rejected because
the CIA memorandum containing it was unsigned. (As Kafiris points out
in his book, routine CIA memoranda are unsigned.) The court chose to ig-
nore its own prosecutor’s arguments regarding the cruel treatment of Stak-
topoulos and the claim that his confession was extracted under pressure.
Kafiris’s book cites a U.S. diplomatic telegram alleging that Mouskoundis
was asked whether he could guarantee that Staktopoulos could be “broken”
in five days. Mouskoundis’s cautious reply was that the process could take
from one to fifteen days. Kafiris also returns to a key point the Areios Pagos
had chosen to ignore: that the Thessaloniki criminal court had dismissed the
self-incriminating statement of Staktopoulos’s mother, acquitting her unan-
imously yet also relying on the mother’s invalidated testimony to substanti-
ate Staktopoulos’s confession regarding the mailing of Polk’s press card to the
police.
The final appeal to the Areios Pagos was filed by Staktopoulos’s widow
on 16 March 2006 and was based on three items of new evidence.134 The first
was a letter by Elias Vafeiadis, son of Iordanis Vafeiadis, one of Staktopoulos’s
defense attorneys at his trial and a relative of the accused. In the letter Elias
Vafeiadis recalled learning from his father that three autopsy reports had been
prepared on Polk’s murder; that they contained errors, omissions, and inaccu-
racies; and that Mouskoundis had suppressed that information. Elias Vafeiadis
also recalled that when his father had visited Staktopoulos in his detention cell
he had found him to be severely traumatized, physically and psychologically:
the prisoner claimed he had been tortured and given intravenous injections
of unknown drugs, leaving him begging for a quick trial to end his ordeal.
Elias Vafeiadis further reported that the Thessaloniki prosecutor in charge
of the case, Constantinidis, had visited his father one night at home. After-
ward, the elder Vafeiadis confided to his son that, in his conversation with the
134. Ibid., pp. 243–256.
122
prosecutor, he had threatened to commit suicide if Staktopoulos was executed.

In response, Constantinidis allegedly promised there would be no execution.
The second item of evidence was a book by a certain George Parisis, published
in 2004 under the title E Nea Argonaftiki Ekstrateia. The author, a Commu-
nist guerrilla during the civil war, wrote that in April 1948 he had been in
the mountains with Vasvanas, the convicted killer, for fifteen to twenty days,
approximately the time of Polk’s death in Thessaloniki. The final item in the
appeal was Vourvahis’s book, Poios skotose ton Polk. Once again the Areios
Pagos rejected the new appeal. In its decision of 27 March 2007, the court
argued that the items submitted were unsubstantiated or did not constitute
significant new evidence in the case.
Reviewing the record of the Areios Pagos decisions to reject petitions to
reverse the Staktopoulos conviction, Kafiris avers that the judges were moti-
vated by a “guild mentality” and a “collegial solidarity” that prevented suc-
cessive panels of the court—from 1977 to 2007—from subjecting to serious
legal scrutiny the decisions of its predecessors. The logic of this argument
places much of the blame on the panel of judges that denied Staktopoulos’s
original appeal, submitted in August 1977. According to Kafiris, that panel
consisted mostly of former military judges who had been appointed to the
Areios Pagos during the years of military dictatorship (1967–1974) and who
could hardly be expected to sympathize with Staktopoulos’s claim that his
confession was the result of torture. Kafiris is openly critical of the four Areios
Pagos panels, and of the country’s legal system in general, but he places in a
broader context the miscarriage of justice he dissects: “in the end, . . . in this
case an underhanded and destructive role was played by various authorities,
services and official functionaries of Greece, America, and England.” The re-
sult of these pressures and sinister influences was “the final cover-up of the
case, and the inhuman torture and wrongful conviction of the Greek journal-
ist Gregoris Staktopoulos.”135
Summing Up
We may never know who killed George Polk or the motives behind the crime.
But there can be little doubt that the assassination of the U.S. journalist and
the ruin of the life of Gregoris Staktopoulos were caused by sharp ideological
135. Ibid., pp. 257–258.
123
Iatrides
divisions, power struggles, and the inflamed fears that had brought on the
Greek civil war and dominated its broader arena, the East-West confrontation.
The hard facts surrounding Polk’s murder are few and relate almost en-
tirely to his own movements and actions. They are frustratingly inadequate
for any credible conclusions regarding the identity of his killers, their motives,
and the commission of the crime. Polk’s reporting on developments in Greece
was highly critical of the Greek authorities, whom he regarded as incompetent
and corrupt, and of the U.S. government for supporting a repressive regime.
However, many other foreign correspondents were equally outspoken in their
criticism of the Greek regime yet suffered no physical harm as a result. To ob-
tain the Communist insurgents’ side of the story, Polk openly solicited infor-
mation from various individuals, Greek, U.S., and British, on how he might
travel to the mountains to interview the Communist military leader Markos.
However, other Western journalists had expressed a similar interest, and one,
Bigart, was successful. Polk’s arrival in Thessaloniki was unplanned, insofar
as his original flight to Kavala was rerouted due to bad weather. Eight days
after his disappearance, his body was found floating a few hundred yards from
Thessaloniki’s main pier. He had been shot once behind the ears. There was
no evidence of robbery, but his press card had already been delivered by mail
to a nearby police station. The autopsy revealed that his last meal had included
lobster, peas, and meat. Everything else that is known about his violent death
is based on uncorroborated claims and speculation.
Of the scores of individuals, prominent or not, Greek, U.S., and British,
whose names were linked to Polk’s murder, one stands out to this day as a
possible key to solving the mystery that surrounds the crime: Randoll Coate.
British diplomatic documents confirm that he had invited at least two for-
eign journalists (Bigio and Thrapp) to travel to the insurgents’ command post
to interview their military leader. Whether he was acting in his capacity as
the consulate’s press and information officer, as an SIS operative, or on his
own initiative as a political maverick driven by unknown motives, is impos-
sible to determine with any degree of certainty. That he was in a position
to extend such invitations to Western journalists is, however, consistent with
the widely held belief that he was in contact with Communist circles, pos-
sibly having cultivated ties established during his wartime days with SOE in
ELAS-held territory. There is little reason to suppose that he had intended to
have foreign journalists killed, which would almost certainly have had danger-
ous consequences for himself. Rather, it appears more logical to assume he in
fact wished to have Western journalists hear and make public a Communist
commander’s views on the insurgency and its objectives, even though facil-
itating the airing of Communist propaganda—the kind Markos gave Bigart
124
only weeks after Polk’s murder—was bound to displease his superiors in the
Foreign Office, anger U.S. officials, and infuriate the Greek authorities.
During months of service in a Communist-controlled rural area, Coate
seems to have developed a genuine affection for the Greek far-left, stemming
not from Marxist ideology but from a heartfelt sympathy for the country’s
poor peasants and the oppressed. For the same reason he evidently disap-
proved of the Greek government’s policies and of British support of them: “I
despised our Greek policy, and I loved the Greek people,” he told Marton
in 1987, adding that, “in the eyes of Greek (and perhaps some British and
American) officials, he had been permanently contaminated by his time with
the left-wing guerrillas during the occupation.”136
Beyond his apparent desire to have Western journalists interview Markos,
hints of hidden leftist sentiments may be detected in the comments quoted
by Marton and in postwar recollections he shared with his family.137 Much
more obvious, if problematic, is Durkheim’s letter in which Coate is pre-
sented as a veteran of ELAS who wished to reestablish contact with the Com-
munist camp. Durkheim’s letter remains puzzling, however, and its purpose
and significance are anything but clear. But the fact that Coate accepted from
Durkheim such a potentially compromising letter and kept it for the rest of his
life suggests that in their worldview and political convictions the two men may
have indeed been “comrades” of sorts. In this connection, writing for a promi-
nent British newspaper in March 1947, Durkheim characterized the insur-
gents’ “Democratic Army” as being made up of volunteer peasants who were
seeking to escape monarchist terrorism and right-wing repression.138 Strange
as it may appear, Coate may have come to share such a revisionist view of the
Greek civil war.
Polk visited Coate to solicit information that the British official was
known to possess and had been willing to share with others: how to reach the
insurgents’ command post to interview Markos. Although we do not know
Coate’s response, his subsequent statement to his superiors that he had re-
fused to accommodate Polk is not entirely credible. An admission that he
had helped the murdered journalist could have brought him under suspicion
and probably would have damaged his career. An admission almost certainly
would have compelled him to identify those to whom he had entrusted Polk
and whom the Greek authorities would have immediately viewed as the prime
136. Marton, The Polk Conspiracy, pp. 255–256.

137. I am grateful to Pamela Moore Coate for making available to me a portion of her book manuscript
on her late husband’s tenure in Greece.
138. New Statesman and Nation, 14 March 1947.
125
Iatrides
suspects in the crime. To concede that he had helped Polk with the sought-
after information but claim that he had done so innocently, with no intent to
put him in harm’s way—which is the likely truth—would have exposed him
to severe criticism from Greek and U.S. officials and possible punishment by
his government. The most expedient solution was for him to get out of Greece
as soon as possible and save his career. Thus, Coate’s responsibility in connec-
tion with the Polk murder was most plausibly limited to bringing the U.S.
journalist in contact with unknown individuals who were supposed to take
him to Markos. If this was so, and if these individuals arranged to have him
killed instead, their identity and motives remain unknown. By the same to-
ken, the available evidence permits no more than speculation about whether
Coate had intended to prevent or to assist Polk in interviewing the Communist
leader.
In contrast, we do know enough to reach a definite conclusion about
Staktopoulos: He was innocent of the charges on which he was convicted
and the victim of an elaborate frame-up. The fact that pressure and persis-
tent meddling by U.S. officials and journalists contributed to the need for
such injustice in no way diminishes the burden of responsibility that falls on
Greek shoulders: government officials, security officers, prosecutors, judges,
the press. In the ensuing years, repeated refusals of the supreme judicial au-
thority to reexamine the conviction and correct the injustice committed by the
security agencies and the criminal court have amounted to a national scandal
of historic significance. The scandal and stigma can no longer be attributed
to foreign intervention or to the need to protect the country against Commu-
nism or other enemies, foreign or domestic, real or imagined.
126
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Assassination and Judicial Misconduct

in Cold War Greece

The Setting: From Liberation to Civil War

Journal of Cold War Studies

By February 1947 the Truman administration’s sense of urgency was un-

On 12 March 1947, President Harry Truman presented to a joint session

reconstruction and economic development was to be undertaken across the

9. Iatrides, “George F. Kennan and the Birth of Containment,” p. 133.

Political Murder, Cruel Injustice

Polk’s criticism extended to the Truman administration, which he accused

in the U.S. embassy.16 Greek right-wing elements accused him of being a

Zachariadis.”25 Markos promised to give a more substantial answer about the

in which he flew as a volunteer observer was shot down by Communist-led

If by all indications Polk’s murder was politically motivated, what followed

Georgios Stefanakis, who subsequently protested to his superiors that he had

43. Antoniou, Istoria Ellinikis, Vol. 4, p. 2361.

anxious to have Thrapp, the UP correspondent, identify the person who he

In mid-November, Gibson added:

Building the Case against Staktopoulos

known facts of the case to be a fabrication. Moreover, none of those he named

65. Vourvahis, Poios Skotose ton Polk, p. 229.

67. Rankin to State, telegram 1281.

Randoll Coate: A “British Connection”?

Sometime after his exchange with Donovan, Thrapp confided to colleagues

74. A. G. R. Rouse memorandum, 23 May 1949, in TNAUK, FO, 371/78404 77610, R

the region. In March 1947, Coate accompanied the UN Balkan Commis-

77. Bigio letter to author, 11 August 1992.

80. Peck to Coate, 22 August 1949, in TNAUK, FO, 371/78404 R 7867/10139/19 G.

changed his mind and demanded to be turned over to Soviet authorities in

According to Xydis, Hadziargyris

85. West, A Matter of Trust, p. 41.

93. C. M. Woodhouse to author, sent from Oxford, UK, 30 April 1992.

The Search for Answers and for Justice Continues:

Nothing underscores more dramatically the failure of the Staktopoulos trial

Marton, The Polk Conspiracy

foreign bank account of $25,000. (The existence of such an account, report-

100. Marton, The Polk Conspiracy, p. 343.

Sometime after working as Donovan’s investigator, Kellis joined the CIA,

Hadziargyris, “[who] I believe is a leftist, he certainly has some contacts with

Rather than producing a “smoking gun,” Kellis’s reports to Donovan, and

Kellis recommended a new approach, consisting of “independent investiga-

In a letter dated 14 September 1948 Lambron informed Donovan that

115. Kellis to Donovan, 29 August 1948, in Marton Papers.

Although he came to regard right-wing elements as the probable culprits, Kel-

123. Kellis to author, 17 May 1978.

Vlanton and Mettger, Who Killed George Polk?

Vourvahis, Poios skotose ton Polk?

127. Vourvahis, Poios Skotose ton Polk, p. 311.

Kafiris, Mia anthropini kai dikastiki tragodia

The Battles to Reverse the Conviction

134. Ibid., pp. 243–256.

prosecutor, he had threatened to commit suicide if Staktopoulos was executed.

135. Ibid., pp. 257–258.

136. Marton, The Polk Conspiracy, pp. 255–256.

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