The interest in the Polk case, forty years after the murder of the American journalist in the civil war-torn Greece of 1948, is not solely due to the fact that the murder remains unsolved and that the exonerating decision of the Greek justice system for the scapegoat is still pending. It is also due to the fact that the Polk case serves as an exemplary site for highlighting phenomena that marked both the American and Greek political scenes during the specific historical juncture of the Cold War, the Greek Civil War, and the replacement of the British by the Americans in Greece. As Professor E. Keeley demonstrates in this first thorough and documented study of the case, based on the until recently classified State Department archives, the conspiracy set up for the "official solution" and the subsequent cover-up of this conspiracy required the collaboration-collusion of a wide spectrum of official and less official actors representing three states - the USA, Great Britain, and Greece - and many levels of authority. At the center of the author's analysis is the role of the American press, a role shaped by the influence of two parallel phenomena: on the one hand, the apparent effort to manipulate the fourth estate by the executive branch, and on the other hand, the equally apparent collaboration of a segment of the press with the executive branch and its political choices.