When Your Eyes Tell You Lies

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 16, 2000 | by Timothy W. Maier

In his uncensored book, Brugioni exposes some of the most dubious propaganda schemes of the Cold War. Remember Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who was launched into space in April 19617 The Soviets made efforts to conceal the details of his spacecraft and equipment from Western eyes by changing the background of the picture. It appears that he is in space but he's not. They even shot a "space walk" in a water tank.

Or how about Mao Tse-tung, who disappeared from public view in late 1965. To calm concerns about his health, Beijing's Chinese News Agency released a picture of Mao swimming in the rough Yangtze River. The Chinese News Agency claimed Chairman Mao, then 72, swam nine miles in 65 minutes. But Brugioni's analysis shows this was no river but, more likely, a lake. Other shots showed a robust Mao entertaining foreign guests, but careful analysis of the ears showed Mao had employed a double -- a technique used by U.S. presidents including George Washington and Franklin Roosevelt. During World War II, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin all employed doubles who often were photographed far away. Recent evidence from Iraqi defectors indicates that Saddam Hussein does the same.

The health of foreign political leaders became a priority for the CIA, says Brugioni, when it became evident that countries were trying to conceal the age or health of their leaders. "If a president was going to make a deal we wanted to know how long the individual we were dealing with would last" says Brugioni.

In the 1950s the CIA began to take a hard look at the growing number of manipulated photographs and propaganda being circulated by the Soviet Union in the Third World. The objective of such forgeries apparently was to isolate the United States and its allies by convincing emerging countries that the United States was aggressively imperialist and racist. The disinformation program was aimed chiefly at journalists and officials who were sent doctored pictures by mail.

Allen Dulles asked Richard Helms, then assistant director of the CIA, to testify before Congress about the widespread Soviet deception. In 1961 Helms showed Congress dozens of such forgeries, explaining that the "Soviet propaganda campaign against the West grows daily more intense. It's focused on the United States, our government and our diplomatic, military and intelligence services." In 1978 Adm. Stansfield Turner, then director of the CIA, provided similar evidence of KGB forgeries before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

"We were on the watch" Brugioni says. "There were thousands of photographs. They were brushing out details of their weapon systems and making their leaders look younger and healthier." Some of this manipulation was obvious, such as during the Vietnam War when the North Vietnamese created a bogus photo of Gen. William Westmoreland at an alleged massacre site. The propaganda photo was supposed to show that the killing of innocent civilians was a policy decision made by the U.S. commander himself. To do this hatchet job, the North Vietnamese took a Newsweek cover shot of Westmoreland and superimposed it over the massacre scene.