First Casualty of the Cold War : THE POLK CONSPIRACY; Murder and Coverup in the Case of CBS Correspondent George Polk <i> By Kati Marton (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $21.95; 323 pp.) </i>

The Cold War is over and many Americans may be tempted to gloat over communism’s demise in Europe. However, our government’s linkage to some of the paranoia and policies of that era, not to speak of the people responding for them, was often embarrassing and hypocritical. In the guise of sustaining democracies, we supported governments that were anything but that, as long as they were unswervingly anti-communist.

The 1948 murder of CBS News correspondent George Polk in Greece, during that country’s tragic civil war, was a parable for the consequences of Cold War politics. In an impressive work of investigative reporting, Kati Marton has culled from personal letters, journals, speeches and a wealth of other material to describe the intrigues of U.S. officials in an engrossing expose of what she rightly entitles “The Polk Conspiracy.”

Washington was committed to the Truman Doctrine, a program of vast military and economic assistance to Greece and Turkey that was designed to curb the onward march of communism to southern Europe and the Mediterranean. The fear was that any connection of Polk’s murder to the right-wing monarchy in Athens would so arouse American public opinion that further aid to Greece would be jeopardized.

It was I. F. Stone, Marton reminds us, who said George Polk was the first casualty of the Cold War: “His brutal murder had more than Polk as its victim, however; America lost much of its innocence in that piercingly beautiful land. The crime of murder was soon to be compounded by other crimes.”

Marton’s portrait of Polk as a man of action, war hero and persevering journalist, as well as his revelation of the cover-up of his murder, make for high drama.

Americans in Greece did not kill Polk, but their brazen support of a discredited regime in Athens created a climate in which his murderers felt they could act with impunity.

A letter written by Col. James Kellis, a former U.S. intelligence agent in Greece and one of the original investigators of Polk’s death, described U.S. officials in Athens as “examples of the worst America can offer to our friends and allies abroad. These people were obsessed by the Cold War and disregarded morality and ethics to attain their ends. . . . Let me say categorically that all Greek, British and American government investigators aimed at one objective: to cover up the facts.”

If Marton makes anything clear, it is what an intellectual fop and lazy journalist Walter Lippman was. The grandee of the press corps in Washington actually believed that as chairman of a journalists’ group organized to investigate Polk’s death, he would obtain a fair and balanced inquiry by appointing as a chief counsel the former head of wartime intelligence, a man who proposed the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency.

It was the classic case of allowing the fox into the chicken coop. Lippman’s choice was retired general William O. Donovan, the master spy, contemptuous of all journalists who were not team players--by which he meant supporters of U.S. government policy. In the climate of the Cold War, skeptical reporters were regarded as Communists.

Marton writes that Donovan “stood like an impenetrable wall between the facts and reporters and, ultimately, the American public. . . . Had more journalists with powerful voices exhibited more skepticism and persistance, Donovan could not have succeeded. In the later 1940s, most reporters, whose stock in trade is supposed to be curiosity, exhibited remarkably little of it.”

Donovan badgered the Greek government to come up with a suspect, preferably a Communist.

To oblige him, security officials singled out a seemingly harmless Greek journalist who once had been a party member. They tortured him, forced him to confess and then, after a staged trial, imprisoned him for years. Gregory Staktopoulos spent nearly seven years in prison. He was not pardoned, nor did he have his name cleared for another 20 years, at which point he recanted his confession after a liberal government came to power in Greece.

(Lippman had sent a copy of Staktopoulos’ confession, provided by Donovan, to a distinguished professor of criminal law at Harvard who dismissed the statement as “practically worthless.” Without further corroboration, Lippman ignored the assessment and said nothing to Donovan.)

Marton brings a journalist’s perspective to the Polk story from her own background as a foreign correspondent, the wife of Peter Jennings and the daughter of two heroic Hungarian journalists who reported the Soviet invasion of Budapest in 1956.

She goes on to say that even though Edward R. Murrow, who considered Polk a protege, and a few of his colleagues at CBS tried to keep the story alive, “neither Murrow nor any other member of the New York- and Washington-based establishment press could accept in 1948 that an adversarial relationship between government and press already existed. . . . Watergate, which would permanently shatter the old trust, was more than two decades away.”

At the conclusion of the inquiry, Lippman invited some of the other “important” Washington journalists who served on his committee to a dinner honoring Donovan. Lippman gave the retired general an inscribed bowl and thanked him for his “work in defense of freedom of the press.”

In a summary given to the press, he said it was “my personal opinion” that Polk’s murder was “planned by the Cominform and carried out by the Communist Party of Greece.”

As Marton points out, however, Lippman’s “personal opinion” was almost a verbatim translation of Staktopoulos’ confession.

Marton may have found the most plausible explanation for the murder in her discovery of a previously undisclosed letter that Polk is alleged to have received from an anonymous employee of the Chase Bank in New York.

Polk allegedly was told that after a trip to Washington to ask for more U.S. assistance to his country, Constantine Tsaldaris, the Greek foreign minister, had deposited $25,000 in a personal account at the bank. In today’s dollars, that would amount to approximately $325,000.

Polk then chose to confront Tsaldaris, who was considered the most powerful politician in the government. When Polk asked about the alleged deposit, the angry foreign minister denied the story, protested the irresponsibility of the accusation and terminated what had been an otherwise cordial interview with the CBS correspondent.

However, in what Marton describes as “an irrepressible and, under the circumstances, dangerous streak of self-righteousness,” Polk is then alleged to have shouted at Tsaldaris: “This will finish you. I’m going to blow this story sky-high when I get home.”

Since the controversial letter was stolen and never recovered, the entire episode amounts to hearsay. As Marton admits, it is wholly dependent on the recollections of Polk’s widow, Rea, based on an interview described to her by her husband.

Conceivably, when Tsaldaris and his associates realized the potential impact a broadcast on the matter would have in the United States, they took steps to silence Polk. The foreign minister was known to have close ties to some of the right-wing extremist organizations in the Greek capital.

Polk was unceasingly critical of the Greek government and army. He was deeply skeptical of assertions in Athens and Washington that the Greek civil war was a struggle of democracy versus communism. He suspected the guerrillas were broader based than that, but he wanted to find out for himself.

A few days after his confrontation with Tsaldaris, Polk flew to northern Greece in pursuit of a contact with the guerrillas. Not long after, he disappeared.

For more than a week, Polk was listed as missing. Then, one month after he had received a telephoned death threat in Athens, his body washed ashore in Salonika Bay. He had been bound hand and foot, shot once in the back of the head and then dumped into the water.

Both the American and Greek governments maintained the fiction that Polk died at the hands of Communist assassins, a fiction Marton categorically rejects. She points the finger at hired guns of right-wing terrorist organizations linked to the ruling oligarchy in Athens.

As Polk’s Greek-born widow told Marton later, “I am surprised he lived for three days after that interview.”