Anatomy of a murder investigation – the Lasantha Wickrematunge case
January 31, 2025
Paris Charter on AI and Journalism
February 12, 2025
January 31, 2025 – Source: JSTOR –
The George Polk Awards are given annually to honor special achievements in journalism. They’re named after a CBS reporter who was murdered while covering the Greek Civil War in May 1948.
Polk’s body was found floating in Salonica Bay; he had been tied up and shot in the back of the head. In the violent ambiguity of a civil war between leftists and rightists supported by the Soviets and the United States, respectively, Polk became what investigative journalist I. F. Stone called “the first casualty of the Cold War”—a casualty whose death has never been satisfactorily explained, for truth itself was a casualty of the shadowy espionage/proxy war that made up the post-World War II era. Scholar John O. Iatrides writes that the “case raised questions about nearly everyone involved, some of which linger to this day.”
Polk’s death was big news at the time. Ernest Hemingway led a “Newsman’s Commission” to investigate the murder. The prominent journalist and commentator Walter Lippman headed another investigation that sent General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the wartime head of the Office of Special Services, to monitor the case in Greece itself. The British, whose influence in the region was waning but who still trained police and military units, looked into it. And at least seven Greek state entities were involved in investigations of the matter as well.
“Greece emerged from the Second World War devastated and demoralized,” contextualized Iatrides. The Axis’s “triple occupation (German, Italian, Bulgarian)” resulted in “a highly politicized resistance movement [that] accentuated prewar political divisions and sparked widespread violence.” That violence spread beyond the end of the war, with deeply entrenched leftist partisans, some of them Moscow-and-later-Belgrade-allied Communists, and monarchial-Rightists, some of them avowedly fascist.
From late 1946, the US began to assist the Greek Right: Greece was seen as bulwark against Moscow and its client states in southeastern Europe. The troubled Greek state thus became a key point of “containment,” the policy of boxing in the Soviet Union and its allies, formally announced as the Truman Doctrine in early 1947.
A WWII fighter pilot turned respected reporter, George Polk became a harsh critic of the anti-democratic character of the Greek state. He was no outlier in this: the corruption and oppression of the state was blatant. At the same time, he had “no sympathy for the Communist insurgents,” calling their supporters in the Soviet Union “barbarians from the north” dedicated to taking the country over.
Unsurprisingly, the government pointed to leftists as the assassins. A Pontic Greek refugee—Greeks had been expelled from Anatolia during the long conflict with Turkey—and journalist named Gregory Staktopoulos was convicted for complicity in the murder in April 1949. He received a life sentence. Two others, never apprehended, were found guilty of the murder and sentenced to death in absentia. So many questions were raised by the evidence and Staktopoulos’s continuously revised “confessions” that many, including Polk’s brother, doubted he was guilty.
Staktopoulos nevertheless spent four years in solitary confinement in a basement of the General Security headquarters. When his appalling, “probably unlawful” condition was revealed, he was put into a regular prison. His sentence was reduced in 1956, and then again in 1960. He was released soon afterwards, although four appeals, the last in 2006 by his widow, to overturn his conviction were rejected by Greek’s highest court. In a 1984 book, Staktopoulos detailed the torture he’d undergone before “confessing.” Iatrides calls the failures of the appeals a “national scandal of historic significance. The scandal and stigma can no longer be attributed to foreign intervention or to need to protect the country against Communism or other enemies, foreign or domestic, real or imagined.”
Most now say Polk was killed by the extreme Right. As Iatrides explains, there are many suggestive, but not definitive, pieces of the puzzle: the “British connection”; the presence of “Wild Bill” Donovan, “founding father” of the CIA; the CIA’s 2007 announcement that it had lost its records on the Polk case; repeated charges that the US government and media colluded in the frame-up of Staktopoulos and the cover-up of the murder.
Yet the murk of Cold War history means that it remains difficult to “distinguish between hard facts, plausible theories, and sheer fantasy.” Iatrides calls the best English-language book on the subject Edmund Keeley’s The Salonika Bay Murder: Cold War Politics and the Polk Affair (1989) precisely because it doesn’t offer a concrete solution.