MINORITY REPORT

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01350R000200230035-1
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 26, 2004
• Sequence Number: 35
• Publication Date: February 16, 1985
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

Approved For Release 2005/01/13 : CIA-RDP88-01350R0002002 - 6r --
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CHRISTOPHER HITCHERS
NOBT[TY REP QRT.
hen 'American citizens are murdered in
foreign countries, there is a Richter scale of
indignation which monitors varying levels of
e and protest. Should the killers be
a
g
outr
v "terrorists" or some other kind of properly constituted
enemy, the needle goes offthe graph. 'Should our fellow
or with
ide
""
,
by
countrymen or -women be slainour s
American weapons provided to "our friends," there is con-
A. station loathes the press because the
I
C
Eve
.
n
fusion.
. last thi_T it" wants is a re orter whacked out by a TO-
Somoza's regime never. recovered
d
Western goon squa
. from the shooting of a cameraman on prime time., And
when four churchwomen were raped and butchered by the
American-trained army of El Salvador, the Reagan Admin-
istration managed to suggest that they were terrorists, that
.they had been killed by the left and that they were victims of
a misunder;u:ading, all at the same time. For decades, one of .the:-most sought-after newspaper
prizes has been the'George PolkAward. George.-Polk'was
the CBS correspondent in Greece during the civil war there,
and in May 1948 he was found dead in Salonika harbor.-He
had been on his way to interview _Gen. .Markos Vafiades, the
commander of the Communist -forces;-:the- American ad-
visers then implementing tine:Truman doctrine were at pains
to suggest that he had been murdered by the left. At home, a
committee of leading American writers was :formed under
the chairmanship of Walter Lippmann.-its members included
lames Reston, Marquis Childs, and Eugene Meyer, chair-
man of the board of The Washington Post and father of"its
present proprietor. ,The-committee nominated Gen:; "Wild
::Bill". Donovan, the former -director of-the Office of Stra-
tegic Services, to conduct-its investigation. By the time he ar-
the Security Police were already:flourishing
G
rived in
reece, a confession from a left-wing Salonika journalist. Donovan
decided to accept the authorities' version of 'the incident,
despite misgivings expressed, by Polk's .family,' who. re-
called that he had received threats from Tight-wing
death squads.
Sound familiar? So does the sequel. Last month in
Athens,. a book was published titled The Polk Affair.- My
Personal Testimony. The author, Grigoris Staktopoulos, is
the man who spent twelve years in prison for Polk's murder.
He relates in hideous detail how he was tortured into con-
fessing. He presents a mass of documents and testimony to
show how'the trial and the investigation were rigged. The
foreword to his'book, written by former conservative Prime
Minister Panayotis -Kanellopoulos, compares Staktopoulos
to Dreyfus. It is only a matter of time until, like Dreyfus, he
is given a full judicial pardon.
Where will this leave the George Polk Awards and all the
members of the American journalistic establishment who
commissioned 'General Donovan to find that Polk was a
cold war martyr to the Communists? Even at the time, the
eagerness of American officials to accept the word of the I
Greek right .was distinctly suspicious and self-serving. Col.
James Kellis of the U.S. Air Force, Donovan's chief in-
vestigator, wrote, "I collected other information that con-
tradicted the official investigation and reported to General
Donovan that I believed there was an attempted right-wing
cover up.... many of our officials here were concerned
that if the extreme right committed this murder and were
discovered .... it would upset our aid program to Greece."
Colonel Kellis was "caught," like so many in his position
before him, "between what I thought was the truth and our
national and personal interest."
lie was also caught between the truth and an outraged
U.S..Embassy. The charge d'affaires, Karl. Rankin told
Kepis to keep his mouth shut and to understand "the need
to pin this murder. on the Communists.". C.I.A. agents
.,-Christopher Freer and Robert Driscoll did thesarrie Finally
. ~. w
ere
Kellis was recalled to Washington and Ins msgi~mgs
shelved Not until 1978 did'he make a sworn statement, at
the Greek Consulate in.New York City.
Bat even before -that, material was available_ that in-
dicated the U.S. government knew more than it cared to ad-
mit: Papers discovered in the National Archives in Washing-
ton and released by the Greek journalist Elias P. Demetra-
copoulos in .1976 include a letter from Smith Simpson, labor
attache at the embassy in Athens, to Loy Henderson, then
director of Near Eastern Affairs at the State Department.
Approved For Release 2005/01/13 : CIA-RDP88-0135OR000200230035-1
Continued