The man who framed history

The Loch Ness monster is said to be the most successful photographic fake

CIA photo analyst spotted Nazi death camps, Cuban missiles, exposed Chairman Mao, Loch Ness monster fakes

In this story: Death camp images Film shows four killing complexes When is an assassination not an assassination? Chairman Mao's erratic ears Spotting missiles in Cuba RELATED STORIES, SITES

(CNN) -- Dino A. Brugioni has spent his life looking at photographs. He has also made history.

Brugioni didn't have a photo gallery, nor was he a paparazzo chasing celebrities. He spent more than 40 years with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, studying photographs for hidden missiles, supposed POWs, and purported assassinations.

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He found aerial photos that document the horrors of the Nazi death camps during World War II.

Death camp images

After seeing a television show about the Holocaust in 1978, Brugioni suspected that film archives from thousands of bombing missions might also contain aerial photographs of Nazi concentration camps.

Brugioni had flown 66 missions over Europe in World War II, and he knew that cameras designed to capture images of the Allied bombings also sometimes ran on for many minutes after the raid.

"I knew that the IG Farbing plant near Auschwitz was a target, and I wondered if, by chance, while they were photographing and bombing the plant, did they see anything of the death camps?" Brugioni told CNN.

An Egyptian government photo designed to fool Libya's Col. Gadhafi but later proven to be a fake

"I noticed that they were in perfect alignment" to be photographed by the bombers, he said. "The IG plant was in perfect alignment with the death camp."

So he dug through the archives, and pulled out a can of film from a 1944 bombing raid. Within moments, eerie scenes were staring back at him.

"I could see the boxcars and people being marched to their deaths," he recalls. "I could see the undressing rooms, the gas chambers, and I could see the crematoriums."

Brugioni, one of the founders of the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center, rushed the images to the CIA director, Adm. Stansfield Turner, who said, "We have to get these to the White House."

President Jimmy Carter quickly publicized the images.

Film shows four killing complexes

Brugioni, who is retired now and living in rural Virginia, recently had the chance to view the photographs again.

"Most of these buildings now are all gone and the various killing complexes, before the Germans evacuated this plant, they blew them all up, so these photographs show what the place was like during that period of 1944 and 45," he said.

This picture, top, was said to be a group of American POWs that survived the Vietnam War; later the real photo,bottom, taken in the 1920's was found

As he poured over the images, he explained what he saw:

"... You can clearly see the boxcars there, and then these are people (are in what) we would call 'gaggle' formation-- people that are not used to marching, just groups.

"And they would go and make this turn ... notice the gate is open; this is a secured area. There is a flower bed here, of all things, so people actually thought that were going to be allowed to shower and clean up. And they went into this building, and that is the undressing room. They took all their clothes, burn them up, and then they went into this building, and here you can see the vents on the roof. That's the gas chamber. And then this large building is the crematorium," he explains.

"That's one killing complex. Here is another. There were four at Auschwitz, and capable of killing up to 10,000 people a day."

Brugioni understands the value of such images. "These photographs ... prove not only that the Holocaust existed, but that it was of such massive scale at Auschwitz... Those photographs are now are in the Holocaust Museum" in Washington, D.C. "They are enlarged so you can see what this death camp looked like."

When is an assassination not an assassination?

Along with uncovering hidden history, Brugioni has an eye for divining photographic fakery.

Mao, foreground, supposedly swimming in the Yangtze River after a mysterious disappearance and rumors of a stroke

"Take this Egyptian government photo, designed to make Libya's Col. Gadhafi believe an opposition figure was dead. It fooled the Libyan leader for a time," he says, but it didn't fool the CIA. "Look at the way the blood marks flow and you know it is a fake."

Or consider a photograph that emerged in Southeast Asia in 1991. It was said to be a group of American prisoners who had survived the Vietnam War, still living somewhere in Asia.

"Anytime a photograph of supposed American POWs appears, then there is a massive effort in the intelligence community to try to find the truth," Brugioni said.

Analysis turned up questions about the photograph. "An analysis was done that looked like the mustaches were false," he said. And "if these were American POWs, they were in good shape -- some 15 years had elapsed ... they should have shown some sign of aging."

Finally, the analysts hit paydirt when they found the same photograph in a Cambodian magazine, "Taken in the 1920s in the Soviet Union," he said. "When that was done the Department of Defense had to go and tell the people that, 'No, that's not your brother, that's not your father' and so forth."

Chairman Mao's erratic ear

Analysis of faces and shapes often help examiners determine whether a photograph is truly of the person it is said to be. Such was the case with Chairman Mao.

In 1964, Mao Zedong, the first leader of the Communist Party of China, disappeared, Brugioni said, "and the health of foreign leaders is of great interest to the president."

"Mao disappeared and there were some rumors that he had a stroke. And all of a sudden, Mao is supposedly swimming in the Yangtze River," captured by camera and distributed around the world.

The director of the CIA asked its analysts if it was Mao in that photograph.

"Well, next to fingerprints, the ear is the best identifier. Each ear is different and there is only one person in 200,000 that has the same ear configuration," Brugioni said.

"So we began examining photographs of this bouncy Mao and determined that he was a double, that Mao had one and possibly two doubles," he said.

"So this information was brought to the attention of the director of the CIA, and he in turn informed the president," he said.

"Now, you always want a double to talk, and one of the things I have noticed is that Saddam (Hussein) has one, possibly two, doubles, and when his double appears, you watch it, he will never talk. He'll motion to people but you don't hear him talking because if he does talk, then you can use voice emphasation to determine whether it's the real one or not," he said.

The use of doubles isn't unusual, Brugioni said. "Roosevelt had a double, Churchill had a double, Stalin had a double, even Washington had a double."

Spotting missiles in Cuba'

Perhaps the most satisfying work for Brugioni was helping discover the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba -- the Cuban Missile crisis.

"We had an agent in Cuba and he said that Cubans were being moved out of an area and Russians were being moved in," Brugioni said.

So the U.S. sent a U2 spy plane over Cuba, and when the film was developed, "we found objects 65 feet long, and then we found tents 100 feet long, and then we found erectors," he said.

"The men weren't quite sure what type of missile this was and so they called me. I was a senior supervisor and I had this book of highly classified information, including photographs taken of the parades in Moscow. And so I went to the photo interpreter and I opened the book to the photo of the SS4 and he looked at it and said, 'That's it.'"

Looking back at that key time in American history, Brugioni says, "A lot of people said this was a gutsy call on the part of the photo interpreters to say that that's a missile site.

"Well, these things are all alien to the environment. This is ranch country. This is not a Boy Scout jamboree. It just doesn't fit. And not only that, but when you measure these things, these are large. These are 65 feet long. And that's not associated with agricultural machinery. And 100-foot tents? You don't see 100-foot tents very often in Cuba."

'The most satisfaction was the missiles in Cuba," he said. "Because we potentially avoided a nuclear conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union."

And what does he think was the most successful photographic fake?

"The Lochness monster. It went from 1934 until early in the 1990s ... one of the men involved admitted to his son on his death bed" that the monster was actually a 14-inch toy submarine fitted with a serpent head.

CNN Correspondent David Ensor contributed to this report, written by CNN.com Writer Jonathan D. Austin.

Dino Brugioni
The American Experience/Spy in the Sky/Transcript (Dino Brugioni)

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