Propaganda and Information Warfare in the Twenty-First Century

Scot Macdonald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135983512
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia militar y marítima

This is the first book to analyze how the technology to alter images and rapidly distribute them can be used for propaganda and to support deception operations.

In the past, propagandists and those seeking to conduct deception operations used crude methods to alter images of real people, events and objects, which could usually be detected relatively easily. Today, however, computers allow propagandists to create any imaginable image, still or moving, with appropriate accompanying audio. Furthermore, it is becoming extremely difficult to detect that an image has been manipulated, and the Internet, television and global media make it possible to disseminate altered images around the world almost instantaneously. Given that the United States is the sole superpower, few, if any, adversaries will attempt to fight the US military conventionally on the battlefield. Therefore, adversaries will use propaganda and deception, especially altered images, in an attempt to level the battlefield or to win a war against the United States without even having to fight militarily.

Propaganda and Information Warfare in the 21st Century will be of great interest to students of information war, propaganda, public diplomacy and security studies in general.

1

THE LYING EYE

Photography, propaganda and deception

In 1827, the French scientist Nicephore Niepce produced the first photograph. In 1839, William Henry Fox Talbot and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre announced that they had independently discovered two different methods to capture and fix an image. After further development, the French government bought the rights to Daguerre's process, called the Daguerreotype. Photographers started “faking” photographs from the earliest days of photography. People could not keep their eyes open for the long exposure required by a Daguerreotype, so photographers scratched out the pupils of eyes on the plate or emulsion to make the subject's eyes appear to be open. Further deceptions soon followed. While Daguerre became a celebrity, Hippolyte Barnard, who had helped develop the photographic process, did not. In 1840, Barnard decided that since he was not getting the public attention he felt he deserved for helping to develop photography, he would get attention by other means. He posed himself in a photograph as a drowned corpse and wrote a “suicide” note that said, “The government, which gave M. Daguerre so much, said it could do nothing for M. Bayard [MC] at all, and the wretch drowned himself.” Although the photograph brought Barnard much more attention, Daguerre still overshadowed him as the inventor of photography (Brugioni 1999: 26).

During the 1840s, rapidly improving methods caused photography to explode in popularity and by 1850, for example, there were 77 photographic galleries in New York City alone. Even so, during the US Civil War newspapers lacked the equipment to transform photographs into half-tone blocks to use in presses to mass-produce the images. Therefore, artists, not photographers, provided illustrations of the war.

It was not until 1900 that the use of photographs in the mass media dramatically increased as American newspapers sought increased readership. In cities with large segments of uneducated natives and non-English speaking immigrants, images, not text, were critical to increased circulation. Each newspaper employed retouchers who altered images for the greatest dramatic effect. Many journalists believed that photo manipulation was normal in part because just developing and printing a photograph involved manipulating contrast, brightness and size. If there was no photograph of an event, one was often faked. By 1900 faking news events already had a long history. Photographers Henry Negretti and Joseph Zambra, for example, lacked a photograph of British balloonists James Glaisher and Henry T. Coxwell's 5 September 1862 record-setting ascent in a hot air balloon to 37,000 feet. The photographers solved their problem by superimposing the image of the balloonists in their basket against an appropriate background. They then painted in the superstructure of the balloon (Brugioni 1999: 30).

Still photography soon led to the development of motion pictures. The two Lumière brothers, industrialists and inventors from Lyon, developed a system for projecting photographic film onto a screen. On 28 December 1895, the first public showing of a film to a paying audience took place at the Grand Café in Paris. It consisted of 10 short films of about 50 seconds each, including offerings such as “Coming out of the Lumière factories.” Within a few years, even battles were being filmed. During the Second Boer War (1899–1902), the British government authorized the first motion picture coverage of a war and just over a decade later the First World War saw the extensive use of photography and newsreels, especially by propagandists.

The inter-war years witnessed a boom in what Frank Luther Mott, later dean of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, in 1924 would call photojournalism. Photojournalism flourished in such magazines as Life, Look and Colliers. By the Second World War, photographs and films were crucial propaganda weapons, with photographers and cameramen present on every front and in every theater. By late 1944, Allied censors in Paris reviewed 35,000 photographs and 100,000 feet of newsreel every week (Knightley 1975: 315).

Television was developed in the 1920s, but did not spread widely until after the Second World War. Contrary to the common belief in the United States, Vietnam was not the first war to be extensively televised. The French-Algerian War (1955–62) was the first covered by television. Since then, television cameramen have become instrumental in reporting politics, foreign affairs and military conflicts around the world.

The images that have become instrumental to reporting on events around the world are powerful. They can frame events or issues, creating reference points for the public. For example, the constant replay of newsreel images of German tanks rumbling across farm fields and Stuka dive bombers hurtling out of the sky have reinforced the commonly held belief that the German military was highly mechanized during the Second World War. This belief, however, is a myth. During the 1939 invasion of Poland, 90 percent of the German army was composed of foot soldiers who relied on horse transport (Deighton 1980: 99). Four years later in 1943, at the height of German mechanization, the typical Wehrmacht infantry division had 5,375 horses and 1,133 horse-drawn vehicles, but only 942 motor vehicles (Deighton 1980: 175). Images still frame events today. The Northern Ireland peace process hit an obstacle in December 2004 when the Irish Republican Army (IRA) refused to be photographed turning in their weapons. The IRA said they had agreed to a “decommissioning” that would put their weapons “beyond use.” Photographing the process, the IRA argued, would make it appear that they were surrendering (Daniszewski 2004: A20).

By their ability to frame events, images can help win or lose wars. In a case similar to President George W. Bush's ban on images of military coffins arriving back in the United States from the 2003 intervention in Iraq, Franklin D. Roosevelt felt that images of dead Americans during the Second World War would be so disturbing to the public that he banned their publication until 1943, when he changed his mind and concluded that the public should be shown the sacrifices being made to achieve victory. More than 20 years later images on television, many feel, hammered home to the American public the conclusion that they were losing the Vietnam War. This perception contributed significantly to US withdrawal from the conflict.

The Vietnam War was far from the only conflict in which images have played a crucial role. The Nigerian-Biafran War (1967–70), like Vietnam, was a war of images fought in the court of public opinion, but Nigerian officials never fully grasped the importance of this coverage. “When (to demonstrate their quick justice) they executed before the cameras a Nigerian officer who had a short time earlier (to show his serious intent) executed before the camera a captured Biafran, all they accomplished for most viewers was the piling of one revulsion upon another” (Davis 1976: 698). Biafra, by contrast, quickly learned to get maximum value from photographers and cameramen, who were allowed to roam freely in the territory Biafra controlled. Pictures of starving Biafran children were credible, eliciting global support. A British ITN broadcast, for example, sparked a large Oxfam relief campaign for Biafra. The Nigerian government was far less effective at using television. Images of smiling Nigerian soldiers feeding and playing with children in recaptured areas looked staged, no matter how genuine they sometimes were in fact. In the image war, Biafra soundly defeated their Nigerian adversaries.

More recently, the 1992–3 Somalia operation “lived and died by the television camera” (Adams 1998: 60). Although some in the US government counseled withdrawal even before the bloody fighting of 3 October 1993, the horrifying images of the aftermath of that day dramatically changed US policy. The 3 October mission was a tactical success: many of warlord Mohammed Aidid's senior leadership were captured. Furthermore, 312 Somalis were killed and 814 wounded at the cost of 18 US dead and 84 wounded. A further seven Malaysians were wounded and one killed in a UN force that attempted to rescue the besieged Rangers. By any military calculation, the kill-ratio of 75 to 1 was a massacre.

In the world of images, however, the mission was a US disaster. The global media repeatedly replayed images of Michael Durant, a captured helicopter pilot, who was wounded and had been beaten. The Somalis also mutilated the bodies of five dead US soldiers, dragging one of the corpses through the streets in front of a CNN camera. President William J. Clinton is said to have wept as he watched the images. “By Saturday and Sunday we had won the war,” one US military officer recalled, “but on Monday Aidid mounted a strategic attack in the information domain …when bodies started appearing on TV screens, Americans said, 'Wait a minute, nobody told us this was going to happen' – Aidid won” (Adams 1998: 72). Within days, Clinton ordered US troops out of Somalia and cancelled the hunt for Aidid. As in Vietnam, the United States won on the battlefield, but lost the image war.

Besides helping to win or lose wars, photographs can also discredit governments. In April 1984, Alex Libak, a photographer for the Israeli newspaper, Hadashot, took pictures of Shin Bet (internal security) officers taking a live Arab hijacker into custody after security officers stormed a hijacked bus. The government later claimed that all of the hijackers had been killed during the fighting. Libak's photographs of the hijacker, who later turned up dead, alive and in the hands of Shin Bet led to a major government scandal (Raviv and Melman 1990: 281–2).

In 1986 images made a crucial difference in proving the validity of a story. Britain's Sunday Times only believed and published Israeli nuclear power plant worker Mordecai Vanunu's allegations about Israel's nuclear program when he produced 60 photographs to support his story (Raviv and Melman 1990: 360–78). Images also help credibility in the realm of espionage. Israeli agents often require photographs to support reports from Arab agents working for them, since the Israelis believe that Arabs “tend to exaggerate and often fail to report accurate details” (Raviv and Melman 1990: 427).

More recently, the deaths of two Afghans held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that were ruled homicides, failed to spark much public interest about possible abuses by US troops guarding detainees in the war on terrorism. For two years rumors about ill-treated prisoners circulated, but did not gain national prominence until 2004 when images from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq exploded into the public's consciousness. As one editorial asked, “Why was [the] pattern of abuse ignored for so long?” (USA Today 2004: 11A). Because there were no pictures: images made the story real.

In the modern way of knowing, there have to be images for something to become “real.” …For a war, an atrocity, a pandemic…to become a subject of large concern, it has to reach people through the various systems (from television and the Internet to newspapers and magazines) that diffuse photographic images to millions.

(Sontag 2003: R16)

Cases ranging from Vietnam and Somalia to the Iraqi prison abuse scandal strongly support Sontag's argument. As an Israeli Minister of Information wrote, “Without television, you cannot have a war” (Hiebert 1995: 335).

A picture is worth a thousand lies: photographic deceptions

It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Oglivy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence Comrade Oglivy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.

Orwell, 1984

The word “photography” is derived from Greek words for light and writing, and the “writing” in a photograph is as easy to alter or forge as the written word. There are five main types of photographic deception. Photographers can focus on certain things and not others or they can stage a photograph. They also can alter a photograph after it is taken or change the caption, so that the reader will misinterpret the image. Artists can also create photomontages by combining multiple photographs to create one image.

Focusing on certain things and not others

The media is a searchlight. It focuses its beam on a single subject, then quickly swings around to illuminate something new. Unfortunately, for as much as the media illuminates, even more is lost in the vast region of darkness around the circle of light. Just like the media in general, photographers can use their cameras to capture certain events, while ignoring others and, by doing so, present a distorted picture of reality. Even if “the camera does not lie directly, it can lie brilliantly by omission” (Knightley 1975: 15).

In 1885, the British government sent Roger Fenton, a founder of the Royal Photographic Society and photographer of the royal family, to the Crimean War to attempt to counter negative press coverage. Fenton arrived in Balaclava on 8 March 1855 and started taking photographs. His pictures portray a clean, ship-shape war, bordering on a picnic. There are no wounded, let alone any corpses. The photographs show only happy troops and elegant officers. The pictures were accurate in the sense of showing people and events as they were without for the most part being staged. They were, however, clearly a deception for propaganda purposes that was achieved by focusing on certain things while ignoring others. Such selective depiction of the war was not entirely due to British government pressure. Other photographers not employed by the British government, including James Robertson and the Frenchman Charles Langlois, also failed to portray the horror and carnage of the war. Whatever the reason, their photographs led to a distortedly rosy view of the costly conflict (Knightley 1975: 15).

Besides distorting public perceptions regarding a war, photographs can be used to deceive an adversary about a tactical situation by focusing on certain things and not on others. During the Cold War, the Soviets published photographs of army pontoon bridges stretched across broad rivers as trains and trucks poured across them. No close-up photographs of the trucks or trains were published because someone might have noticed that they were all empty. If they had been loaded, the bridges would have collapsed (Suvorov 1984: 224–5).

The United States has also used the media spotlight to deceive enemies in wartime by showing certain things and omitting others. During Operation Desert Shield, the US military wanted the Iraqis to believe that the Coalition's ground assault would consist largely of an amphibious landing in Kuwait. Great emphasis was accordingly and very publicly placed on the Fourth Marine Expeditionary Brigade. In November 1990, Vice Admiral Henry Mauz, the Chief of Naval Operations for Central Command, took personal command of an amphibious landing exercise off Oman, code-named Camel Sand. Later the same month, another such exercise, code-named Imminent Thunder, took place. Public affairs officers at the Pentagon and in the Gulf carefully drew the media's attention to the exercises and the Marine brigade aboard ships off the Kuwaiti coast. Journalists were told about how the Marines operated, given access to the ships, and encouraged to write about the vital role amphibious landings could play in a land campaign. The Americans knew the Iraqis were relying on the media for information and wanted to convince them that the attacking forces would come from the east through Kuwait, not from the west across the desert as actually happened. Using the media “was considered entirely legitimate.” A Pentagon official said, “We told no lies The reporters wanted to believe what they saw and simply did not ask the right questions. More fool them” (Adams 1998: 46).

Television coverage of the 2003 war in Iraq also focused on certain things while ignoring others. In a scene flashed across US television screens, what appeared to be an Iraqi multitude cheered as they pulled down a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. The Iraqi-filled screen suggested a huge crowd but, during the few seconds when the camera pulled back, it showed that the crowd consisted of about 300 people. Furthermore, many in the crowd were foreign journalists. For a city of nearly five million, it was a tiny demonstration. Perhaps most Iraqis were still too frightened to parade in the streets against their former dictator, but if they were, television did not accurately convey that information (Rosenberg 2003: A16).

Many leaders closely manage their own photo opportunities to focus attention on certain things, while downplaying others. Of 35,000 photographs of Franklin D. Roosevelt published when he was alive, for example, none show him in his wheelchair (Smith 2005: A25). The media cooperated with this omission through a gentlemen's agreement not to show the president's disability.

Staging a photograph or film

Instead of focusing on certain things and omitting others, some photographers deceive by actively staging scenes to photograph. Such staging has a long history. Before cameras could be used outdoors, early photographers often used painted backgrounds to create the illusion of an exterior setting. Since then, scenes have been staged to illustrate political and military events, to serve as propaganda and to deceive intelligence services.

Photographers during the US Civil War produced some of the most striking images of war in history. Many, however, were staged. Timothy O'Sullivan and Alexander Gardner, who worked for Mathew Brady, moved corpses and weapons to create more dramatic scenes to photograph. Possibly the most famous of the staged photographs is a Gardner image of a rebel sharpshooter taken at the Devil's Den two days after the battle of Gettysburg, called A Sharpshooter's Last Sleep or Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter. Before taking the photograph, Gardner dragged the body of a Confederate soldier about 30 yards to where he lies in the picture, and turned his head toward the camera, resting it on a knapsack to achieve a photogenic angle. The soldier's rifle is still against a stone wall, but since souvenir hunters routinely removed such equipment soon after a major battle, it was almost certainly Gardner's prop. In addition, the weapon in the photograph was a type rarely used by sharpshooters (Brack 1996: 48; Brugioni 1999: 31–2; Nickell 1994: 60–2).

The staging of scenes continued in other war zones. At the start of the 1898 Spanish-American War, photographs of the result of the event that triggered the war, the USS Maine at the bottom of Havana harbor after she blew up, were shot in a fish tank in New Jersey (Rosenberg 1997: F1). During the Italian campaign in Abyssinia in 1935–6, photographers were not allowed at the front. Responding to their editors' demands, many photographers staged photographs. Herbert Matthews, a New York Times reporter, later said that 99 percent of the photographs published about Abyssinia were faked. Joe Caneva of the Associated Press showed more initiative than most when he convinced the Italians to maneuver about 50 tanks and several companies of soldiers before his camera. Later his pictures of the Italian maneuvers appeared in newspapers around the world as a tank charge against the Abyssinians (Knightley 1975: 186). After the Six Day War, the Israelis photographed Egyptian soldiers in their underwear next to undamaged Soviet tanks and in other unheroic poses to convey the message that the Egyptians were cowards (Andrew and Gordievsky 1990: 498).

Staging events for the camera did not stop at still photographs. During the 1898 Spanish-American War, newsreel films showed the decisive Battle of Manila Bay. Audiences, however, were not told that the exciting battle scenes had been shot with models in a fish tank. During the Second Boer War, the Edison Company, the first motion picture company, lacked actual footage of the war, so they staged battles to film (Rosenberg 1997: F1). Edison was not the only company that made do with staged reenactments. A British newsreel showed Boers attacking a Red Cross tent full of wounded as British doctors and nurses valiantly defended their helpless patients. If the film had been real, the British would have had reason to worry, since the “Boers” in the film were actually “attacking” across Hampstead Heath, which is in a London suburb (Knightley 1975: 75).

Even rebels staged scenes for motion picture companies. In 1913, Francisco “Pancho” Villa was short on cash and seeking US support for his revolution in Mexico. Realizing the propaganda value of motion pictures, Villa sold the film rights to his battles for $25,000 to the Mutual Corporation. Villa then scheduled executions for the camera and re-staged battles after the fighting had ended, using the actual dead who were still lying on the ground to make the staged battles appear more authentic (Rosenberg 1997: F1). The Mutual Corporation also made Vill...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Propaganda and Information Warfare in the Twenty-First Century
• CONTEMPORARY SECURITY STUDIES
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Lying Eye: Photography, Propaganda and Deception
• 2 Altered Images: Here, There and Everywhere
• 3 Psychological Operations: Hearts and Minds and Eyes
• 4 Psychological Operations: The Un-American Weapon?
• 5 Deception is a Many and Varied Thing
• 6 How to Deceive: Principles
• 7 How to Deceive: Stratagems
• 8 The Best Deceivers: The British in the Second World War
• 9 The Easiest Mark: The United States
• 10 The Threat: Striking the Media Culture
• 11 Defense: The Media Culture Strikes Back
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index