NYC Photo Agencies and U.S. Counterinsurgency

BY BILL GIFFORD & RICK HORNUNG

           Several Salvadorans had asked Bigwood if his photos – of refugee camps, guerrilla soldiers, campesinos, and street demonstrations – were being used by the U.S. government. The information they contained might have been damaging, even deadly, to both the photographer and his subjects. He immediately instructed Gamma to make his files off-limits for government use.

           Both Gamma and McDonald say they have honored Bigwood’s request. But McDonald and other employees of the State Department's Graphics Service (which has an unlisted number) continue to visit a number of New York photo agencies, including Sygma, Wide World, Gamma, JB Pictures and Bettman Newsphotos, from which they send dozens of photographs to Washington each week. (Magnum, SlPA, Black Starr, Picture Group, and Impact Visuals say they don't do business with State.)

           "The agencies are very cooperative," McDonald says. "They just let me go in and look at their files. I take what I think is interesting and send it down to Washington." She says that the State Department needs photographs of major figures and events for their publications, such as State magazine, and for various informational pamphlets, books, and reports. The department pays research and printing fees (McDonald would not disclose the annual cost) to each agency, and photographers are paid for pictures that are published In this respect; the State Department is like any other photo agency client.

           But an official at the State Department's Central American desk, who asked to remain anonymous, said that large numbers of the pictures are sent down to the embassies where they are used for intelligence purposes. "There are people in the State Department who think that pictures can help them identify combatants," the official said, "or more important, partisans on the right , or the left."

           "I am sure it's going to intelligence," says an official in the U.S. embassy in El Salvador.

           "Some of the pictures are circulated to security people who make it their business to follow people who could be involved in an attack on a United States embassy," the official said. "Copies of these pictures could easily get into the hands of the local police or the army, or a private militia, and these organizations have their own agenda. Officially, it's our policy to be very careful about the sharing of information, but it is very easy for things to be done outside of official channels."

           Amnesty International concluded in 1984 that the Salvadoran "death squads" were in fact made up of members of the intelligence divisions of the security forces working in plain clothes but on orders from superior officers. The CIA played a key role in modernizing Central American security and intelligence forces, including improving communications and records systems, in the 1960s and 1970s. There is evidence of links between the death squads and American intelligence and military advisors as part of the American counter-insurgency strategy.

           Security forces in other Central American countries, notably Guatemala, are known to systematically scrutinize and file thousands ot photographs in order to identify and monitor possible "subversives."

           Photographer’s complaints triggered an investigation by the Committee to Protect Journalists. But because the pictures are obtained through normal business channels, and are made available to paying customers, the investigation was dropped, committee member Joel Solomon said.

           Not all photographers and agencies think of the government as just another client, however. "In El Salvador and Lebanon and other hot spots, the people being photographed could be killed if they were identified," said Donna Binder of Impact Visuals, a photo agency which does not deal with the State Department. "It is totally amazing to me that agencies would be so ignorant of the world situation that they would endanger people in this way."