Air-Marker Fraud

Last week TIME published a picture and story describing what the U.S. Army said was a plot by a rural fifth column to point out military objectives to enemy bombers by means of cunningly contrived ground markers. TIME erred. So did some 1,900 U.S. newspapers which accepted the story in good faith from Army press-relations officers. The story, though not a deliberate fake, revealed a fantastic miscarriage of information among Army airmen, brass hats and FBI. The facts:

The markers, which pointed suspiciously at airfields and factories along the eastern seaboard, were photographed early last spring by an observation squadron of the Army's First Air Force. The squadron and

FBI investigated, found that the marks appeared to have been innocently made, had them erased. But meanwhile the pictures, without the results of the investigation, had been forwarded to First Air Force headquarters at Mitchel Field, L.I., where intelligence officers jumped to the conclusion that the markers were the work of fifth columnists.

They gave the pictures to a public-relations officer. Major Lynn Farnol, onetime Hollywood and Broadway press agent. Major Farnol, no man to look a good story in the mouth, got the pictures released last fortnight by the War Department bureau of public relations, which knew only that "the case was closed."

Issued to the whole U.S. press, the pictures were a 24-hour sensation. Only U.S. newsman not caught napping was the Washington Star's tall, rawboned chief editorial writer, John Cline. Mr. Cline sat down to write an editorial about the Army's discovery. "The more I thought," he said, "the more the whole thing smelled." Upshot: the Star assigned veteran Reporter Joseph Fox, who covers the Justice Department, to investigate. Reporter Fox's probe led him to the Virginia farm of one C. Russell Bull, whose wife readily explained one of the markers: a figure 9, formed by gunny sacks in a field, which pointed at a factory. Mrs. Bull said they were fertilizer sacks dropped from a truck to dry; when Army men visited the farm last March the sacks were rearranged.

The Star's story (ENEMY AIR-RAID MARKER STORY JUST A HOAX) caught the War Department flatfooted. It admitted that the story was indeed a fraud, launched an inquiry by Lieut. General Hugh A. Drum, commander of the First Army, to fix responsibility. While the press howled for ex-Hollywood Press Agent Lynn Farnol's scalp, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson announced a reorganization of Army press-agentry, which had been in the works before the air-marker story. The new system, intended to prevent just such blunders and to end rivalry among Army units for headlines, centers responsibility for all Army publicity in the War Department's public-relations chief, Major General Alexander Surles.

Said Statesman Stimson: "The Army has no place in its organization for promoters of news. My own concept is based on an old Bible text from I Kings 20, 11: 'Let not him that girdeth on his harness boast himself as he that putteth it off.' "

To newsmen, the Army's handling of the whole bungled affair suggested a more appropriate text from Matthew 6, 3: "Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth."

Another piece of last week's anti-sabotage fancywork turned out to be only embroidery: the alleged capture by twelve-year-old Neddie Collins, of Rye, N.Y. of a Nazi radio spy on Cape Cod. Little Ned wrote his father a letter describing such an incident, Mr. Charles Collins showed it to a local OCD official, who gave it to the press. (TIME, unhappily, fell for it, too.) The Navy traced little Ned, found he had dreamed it all up.

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