The
"Three Amigos"
Photo
Summary. In the summer of 1991, three photos, alleging to be of Americans being held prisoner in SEAsia, surfaced in the public media. If you have not read the stories of these three photos, follow this link to the "Phony Photo" article. You also need to read this article about the events of summer 1991.
The phony photo
This is the photo that was alleged to be of three American prisoners. Eight families claimed that the men in this photo are their missing family member. Most prominent among these were the Robertson, Lundy, and Stevens families.
The real photo
This is the photo that appeared in a 1989 Khmer-language edition of the magazine Soviet Life. It is a photo of three Soviet farmers during the Stalin era celebrating a record harvest. The original photo was doctored from this photo. Imagery analysts analyzed the phony and the original. Their conclusion was that someone made a photocopy of the original and doctored it, then reproduced the doctored version.
This phony photo was in fairly wide circulation.
- It was initially provided to the Defense Intelligence Agency in August 1990. at that time, the source also provided four other photos, each of which was quickly determined to be a forgery, traced to similar Soviet publications available in Cambodia.
- In November 1990 another source provided a cropped version of this photo, showing only the individual on the left and the individual in the center.
Back to "Phony Photos" article.