A wartime friend, now with the Office of the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, wrote me to ask TIME'S aid in exposing one of Russia's elaborate propaganda weapons. He enclosed photostats of TIME pictures and stories stolen and perverted by a Russian-sponsored magazine called USA in Wort und Bild (USA in Word and Picture).

Following up his lead, our Berlin bureau and New York research staff looked into the work of this Communist news-warping machine. Here are some samples:

1) When Harry Truman opened the

Washington Senators' first baseball game last spring, TIME published a picture of him tossing in the first ball (see picture). USA in Wort und Bild stole the picture 'to republish over another caption: "President Truman practices the official form of greeting in the new police state, America."

2) In September, after North Korean armor had been slashing into outnumbered United Nations forces, many U.S. papers carried a picture of General MacArthur looking at a captured Russian-made tank. To newsmen he said, "This is a pleasing sight for my old eyes." The Red journalists printed MacArthur's picture and quoted him correctly. But their version showed a great change. MacArthur was gazing, not at a Russian tank, but on a pile of dead North Koreans.

3) You may remember our EDUCATION section's story on the New York City school strike last year. Several thousand students marched to City Hall to protest denial of a $600-a-year pay raise for teachers. With our story ran a picture of a mounted cop trying to hold back the laughing, waving crowd of high-school kids. USA printed the picture months later, captioned along a now-familiar Communist line: "In New York's Union Square a monster rally for peace was staged, which, in spite of all attempts by police to break it up, turned into a powerful demonstration against U.S. policy of aggression."

According to USA issues to date, the U.S. is populated by two kinds of people: a wasteful, sex-mad, rich minority and poor, starving millions. When, as often, the Red editors are not able to find enough twistable news, they print as current events ancient stories and pictures about the rollicking 1890s and the depression-ridden 1930s. Old Charlie Chaplin movies are reported, not as achievements in comic art, but as true stories about U.S. treatment of tramps. From some cute remarks to a paper's inquiring photographer, the humorless Reds built their definition of the typical U.S. male's ideal pleasure: beating Mae West.

About once a month a similar bundle of half-truths, lies and simple absurdities slithers out of USA's offices on Pushkin Street in Red-run East Berlin. Free and unrequested, these magazines go by mail to editors, union leaders and other influential men in Western Germany. The Iron Curtain protects the Red editors from libel and copyright suits.

Such piracies and distortions deepen the responsibility of TIME and other U.S. publications. That responsibility was summed up by President Truman's words reported in the same TIME story from which USA stole the "police-state-greeting" picture: "Our task," said the President later that week, "is to present the truth to the millions of people who are uninformed or misinformed or unconvinced . . . We must make ourselves known as we really are -- not as Communist propaganda pictures us."

Along with other U.S. publications distributed overseas, TIME'S four international editions try to do just that --by fully reporting the week's news, good and bad,

Cordially yours,

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