A Treasury of Deception

by Michael Farquhar

  Mencken then went on to deliver his “history” of the tub. The first was installed on December 20, 1842, at the home of a Cincinnati merchant named Adam Thompson. It was an immediate sensation, Mencken wrote, that plunged Cincinnati into controversy. Critics condemned it as an elitist contrivance, an “obnoxious toy from England, designed to corrupt the democratic simplicity,” while doctors warned that bathing might be dangerous, a possible cause of “phthisic, rheumatic fevers, inflammation of the lungs, and a whole category of zymotic diseases.” Soon the controversy spread, the columnist continued, with various jurisdictions taxing bathtubs, charging exorbitant water rates for those who installed them, or attempting to ban them altogether. It was not until 1851, when President Millard Fillmore installed a bathtub in the White House, that the new contraption started to gain acceptance and respectability.

  To his astonishment, Mencken’s hoax—intended, he said, to amuse readers during the dreary days of World War I—started to weave its way into the culture as fact. Finally, in 1926, he felt compelled to admit his bathtub story was a fake, “a tissue of absurdities, all of them deliberate and most of them obvious.” In the confession, published in his nationally syndicated column, Mencken wrote: “Pretty soon I began to encounter my preposterous ‘facts’ in the writings of other men. . . . They got into learned journals. They were alluded to on the floor of Congress. They crossed the ocean and were discussed solemnly in England, and on the continent. Finally, I began to find them in standard works of reference. Today, I believe, they are accepted as gospel everywhere on Earth.”

  Perhaps Mencken, never one for modesty, gave himself a bit too much credit. Still, his story was regularly passed on to the unquestioning public he contemptuously called the “booboisie.” Two months after his first confession was published, Mencken wrote another. In it he noted that people are generally far more interested in a good story than the truth. And, once again, his gargantuan ego was abundantly evident. His hoax, he said, was superior to the “string of banalities” that probably constituted the true story of the bathtub. “There were heroes in it, and villains. I revealed a conflict, with virtue winning. So it was embraced by mankind, precisely as the story of George Washington and the cherry tree was embraced.” Well, not quite. This was about bathtubs, after all. Nevertheless, the “facts” were often repeated, even by President Harry Truman, who responded to critics of his plan to add a balcony to the White House by reminding them that President Fillmore had earlier met resistance when he installed the tub. Even in recent years the White House bathtub has been cited in the media as one of the few accomplishments of the Fillmore administration. As The Washington Post predicted in a 1977 story, the attempt to expose the truth of H. L. Mencken’s hoax “will not even slow it up, any more than a single grape placed on the railroad tracks would slow up a freight train.”

  9

  Khmer Ruse

  The NewYork Times had just over a year to gloat over the humiliation suffered by its rival The Washington Post after the Janet Cooke debacle before being shamed itself by an unscrupulous reporter with a tall tale of his own to tell. In December 1981, The New York Times Magazine published “In the Land of the Khmer Rouge,” a dramatic account of a dangerous visit to Khmer Rouge territory in Cambodia by freelance writer Christopher Jones. As it turned out, Jones never left the comfort of a Spanish villa to report the story (though he did file a fake expense report). It was The Washington Post who first exposed the sham, which no doubt compounded the humiliation felt at the Times.

  Two months after the article appeared, the Post reported that Khmer Rouge officials denied Jones had been to Cambodia the previous fall, nor had he interviewed the people quoted in his story. The quotes, in fact, were almost identical to those Jones had used in another dubious dispatch from Cambodia published the year before in the Asian edition of Time magazine. Furthermore, Jones had lifted passages almost verbatim from André Malraux’s 1930 novel about Cambodia, The Royal Way. Then there was this glaring inconsistency caught by the Post: Jones wrote of a firefight that supposedly took place at night. When the fighting ended, “I stood up and peered through my field glasses.” Having apparently forgotten that it was supposed to be dark outside, Jones continued: “Just then, on the summit of a distant hillside, I saw a figure that made me catch my breath: a pudgy Cambodian, with field glasses hanging from his neck. The eyes in his head looked dead and stony. I could not make him out in any detail, but I had seen enough pictures of the supreme leader to convince me, at that precise second, that I was staring at Pol Pot.”

  Asked to comment on the revelations about Jones, Times executive editor A. M. Rosenthal was defiant, at first: “As far as I’m concerned, the man, until somebody proves otherwise, is totally honest.” Nevertheless, a Times editor and two correspondents were immediately dispatched to Spain to confront the twenty-four-year-old writer. For two days Jones stubbornly insisted his story was true before he finally broke down and confessed. “Shaken by the unraveling of his story, Jones fell mute,” the Times reported in its own account of the deception. “Then, urged on by his questioners, he confirmed the hoax. ‘I wanted to do the job, but I couldn’t,’ he said. ‘I had to do my best from what I had, and consequently reconstructed it.’ ” As for plagiarizing Malraux (among several other previously published sources), Jones was succinct: “I needed a piece of color.”

  10

  Times Bomb

  The embarrassment felt at the Times over the Khmer Rouge debacle was but a blush compared to the seismic mortification that shook the venerable newspaper in 2003 when it was revealed—again by the Post—that a twenty-seven-year-old reporter named Jayson Blair had filled its pages with fabrications, distortions, and material stolen from other sources. The journalistic fraud he perpetuated in at least thirty-six articles was acknowledged by the Times as “a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper.” Or as publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. put it, “It’s a huge black eye.”

  For a number of stories Blair was supposed to have filed from various places across the country, he never left New York. Instead, he falsified expense accounts to cover his tracks—or, more accurately, his lack of tracks. In one instance, Blair faked an interview in West Virginia with the father of Jessica Lynch, a POW rescued in April 2003 during the Second Gulf War. The Lynch family was amused to read in the Times that there were tobacco fields and grazing cattle near their home—a pastoral setting completely imagined by Blair. Another story described two wounded Marines lying side by side at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center, even though Blair himself never saw them there.

  While covering the detainment of two snipers who had terrorized the Washington, D.C., region in 2002, Blair made up facts that upset and angered local officials. After one story ran, Fairfax County Commonwealth Attorney Robert Horan called a press conference and called Blair’s account “dead wrong.” Times executive editor Howell Raines, however, seemed pleased with his reporter. He even sent Blair a note praising his “great shoe-leather reporting” on one sniper story. Raines, who later lost his job because of the Blair fiasco, said he had no idea he was dealing with “a pathological pattern of misrepresentation, fabricating and deceiving.” Perhaps not. But there were warning signs.

  Blair could hardly be called an ace reporter. His shoddy reporting during a three-and-a-half-year period resulted in fifty published corrections, an abysmal record. “We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now,” Metropolitan editor Jonathan Land-man wrote in a memo to newsroom executives. No one listened. Blair was given the high-profile sniper case to cover. Little wonder he later called his editors “idiots” in an interview with the New York Observer.

  The disgraced reporter was defiant in that interview, and appeared rather annoyed that his fabrications weren’t better appreciated: “I don’t understand why I am the bumbling affirmative-action hire [Blair is African American] when Stephen Glass6 is this brilliant whiz kid, when from my perspective—and I know I shouldn’t be saying this
—I fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism. . . . They’re all so smart, but I was sitting right under their nose fooling them. If they’re all so brilliant and I’m such an affirmative-action hire, how come they didn’t catch me?”

  Perhaps Blair’s wounded feelings were soothed somewhat by the big, fat book advance he received for writing his side of the stor y.

  The Trojan Horse

  Part III

  THE WARS OF THE RUSES

  “All warfare is based on deception,” the classical Chinese military strategist and philosopher Sun-tzu wrote in The Art of War more than two thousand five hundred years ago. He had a point. Some of history’s most ingenious tricks have been played in battle. Perhaps the best known of these is the Trojan Horse. According to legend, after months of failed attempts to sack Troy, the Greeks constructed a giant wooden horse and left it outside the city’s gates as a peace offering. It was filled with Greek warriors. When the horse was pulled inside the walls of Troy, the soldiers slipped out at night, opened the city’s gates, and commenced a slaughter of Trojans. The story might be apocryphal, but its spirit has been revived in many great conflicts through the ages.

  1

  The Agony of Deceit

  Supreme sacrifices have always been made in times of war, though few quite as drastic as the one a Persian named Zopyrus reportedly made of himself, and seven thousand others, in the sixth century BC. It was part of his devious plan to conquer Babylon, one of the most stubborn of Persia’s rebellious provinces, when Darius the Great came to the throne in 521. The Babylonians mocked the new monarch with the boast that he would rule over them when mules, which are sterile, bore foals. According to the Greek historian Herodotus—the source for this story—one of Zopyrus’s mules actually did reproduce, which he took as a sign that it was time to crush Babylon. His plan to defeat the enemy was to become one of them.

  The method Zopyrus chose to infiltrate their ranks was inventive, if somewhat deranged. He sliced off his own nose and ears, shaved himself bald, and had himself whipped. He then went to Darius and requested that seven thousand soldiers, marked for death, be put at his disposal. The king, stunned by his subject’s extreme loyalty, could hardly refuse. Zopyrus next allowed himself to be captured by the Babylonians. He told them he had been mutilated by his capricious king and wanted to avenge himself by fighting for them. “And now,” he declared, “here I am, men of Babylon; and my coming will be gain to you, but loss—and that the severest—to Darius and his army. He little knows me if he thinks he can get away with the foul things he has done me—moreover, I know all the ins and outs of his plans.” The Babylonians had only to look at their hideously maimed guest to believe he was telling the truth. Zopyrus was given a military command.

  As prearranged with Darius, one thousand of the sacrificial Persian soldiers were placed outside Babylon armed only with daggers. They were quickly slaughtered by the Babylonian forces led by Zopyrus. A week later, two thousand more soldiers were similarly killed. Zopyrus was becoming a valued warrior. His position was clinched three weeks after that when the last four thousand Persian soldiers were massacred. Now trust in Zopyrus was complete. He was given the ultimate reward for his services, which was complete control over Babylon’s defenses. This was what he had planned for all along. And though, now noseless, he could not actually smell victory, it was within his grasp at last. Zopyrus threw open the gates of Babylon and in rushed a Persian horde. A grateful King Darius gave his loyal subject the kingdom he had conquered to rule—tax free—for the rest of his life.

  2

  Sun‘s Burn

  The ancient Chinese tactician Sun Bin, reportedly a direct descendant of Sun-tzu, proved that missing feet were no impediment to kicking ass. He defeated his mortal enemy Pang Juan with a little guile and his ancestor’s famous maxim, “Know enemy, know self; one hundred battles, one hundred victories.”

  Sun Bin, whose name means Sun the Mutilated, lost his feet courtesy of Pang Juan. Both men had studied warfare under a mysterious sage known as the Master of Demon Valley, but the experience hardly bonded them. Pang Juan was bitterly jealous of his more talented classmate and set out to destroy him. He found the perfect opportunity after he became a general in the army of the Chinese state of Wei. Pang Juan lured Sun Bin to Wei, as if to consult with him on a military matter. But when he arrived, Pang had him arrested on bogus charges, the penalty for which was mutilation. Both of Sun Bin’s feet were cut off and his face was branded.

  It was in this pitiful state that Sun Bin encountered the ambassador from the neighboring state of Qi. The diplomat was impressed by Sun’s extensive knowledge of strategy in warfare and sought to utilize it. He smuggled Sun out of Wei and brought him to Qi. There Sun was offered the rank of general in the Qi army, which he turned down because, as a strategist, he knew missing feet could be a rather significant handicap in battle. Instead, Sun Bin became a consultant to the great Qi general Tian Ji. It was the perfect position for this military genius, also known as Sun-tzu II, to exact his revenge on Pang Juan.

  Sun Bin rose to prominence during a period in Chinese history known as the Era of the Warring States, which ran from about 475 BC to 221 BC. “Usurpers set themselves up as lords and kings,” it was recorded in a traditional anthology known as Strategies of the Warring States; “states that were run by pretenders and plotters established armies to make themselves into major powers. . . . Fathers and sons were alienated, brothers were at odds, husbands and wives were estranged. No one could safeguard his or her life. Integrity disappeared. . . . This all happened because the warring states were shamelessly greedy, struggling insatiably to get ahead.”

  It was during these chaotic times that the army of Wei, headed by Sun Bin’s old enemy Pang Juan, joined forces with the state of Zhao to attack the state of Han, which appealed to Sun’s adopted state of Qi for help. As Qi’s resident strategist, Sun Bin observed a characteristic of Pang’s army which would ultimately defeat them. “The aggressor armies are fierce and think little of your army, which they regard as cowardly,” Sun told Qi’s general. “A good warrior would take advantage of this tendency and lead them on with prospects of gain.”

  Sun came up with a brilliantly deceptive battle plan that took full advantage of the enemy’s prejudice. He instructed the army of Qi to light one hundred thousand campfires on the first night of occupation. The next night only fifty thousand fires were to be lit, then half of that on the third night. The illusion thus produced was that of an ever dwindling force. “I knew the soldiers of Qi were cowards,” Pang Juan crowed triumphantly in the belief that the warriors of Qi were defecting—“they’ve only been in our territory for three days now, and more than half their army has run away!”

  Pang Juan was so convinced of Qi’s cowardly retreat that he left his own infantry behind and gave chase with nothing but a small force. It was a fatal error that played right into Sun Bin’s plan. He ordered an ambush set up at a narrow gorge. When Pang and his little group arrived at the spot, they came across a felled tree with a message carved into it. “The general of Wei will die at this tree,” it read. Sure enough, when Pang’s soldiers lit a torch to read the message, a hail of Qi arrows fell on them. Those that weren’t killed scattered, while Pang was left with nothing but the agonizing awareness that he had been tricked. He killed himself on the spot. Sun the Mutilated had been avenged.

  3

  A Bridge Too Far?

  Sure, all’s fair in love and war, but there are still a few deceptions that strike a bit below the belt—like tricking an enemy with the promise of peace. It’s the wartime equivalent of shaking a guy’s hand then sucker punching him in the face. Indecorous as it may be, though, the ploy has worked well in a number of instances, perhaps most notably in 1805, just before the Battle of Austerlitz.

  The large wooden bridge over the Danube River on the road to Vienna was of great strategic importance to Napoleon as his army marched to confront the combined forces of Austria and Russia. Th
e Austrians knew this, of course, and kept the bridge well guarded. They also rigged it with explosives should a French approach make its destruction necessary. Confronted with this obstacle, two of Napoleon’s top marshals, Jean Lannes and Joachim Murat, devised a scheme to take the bridge intact. Dressed in their full ceremonial uniforms and accompanied by a group of German-speaking officers, they approached the bridge.

  “Armistice! Armistice!” they called as they calmly walked across. The Austrians, unsure what to do, called for the local commander, General Auersperg. Murat and Lannes told the elderly, and not too bright, general that the French and Austrian emperors had come to terms. As the leaders of each side conferred, French troops quietly advanced on the bridge and disabled the explosives. No one fired at them for fear of breaking what was believed to be a truce. There’s a scene in Tolstoy’s War and Peace in which an Austrian soldier warns General Auersperg that he is being deceived by the French. Murat responds to the accusation with a challenge to the general: “I don’t recognize the world-famous Austrian discipline if you allow a subordinate to address you like that!”

  Whether or not such an exchange actually occurred is unclear, but General Auersperg did give up the bridge in the belief that an armistice was in effect. The poor old guy was court-martialed for his folly and died in disgrace. Napoleon, meanwhile, went on to defeat the combined Austrian and Russian forces at Austerlitz, a battle he described as the greatest he ever fought. The emperor’s private secretary called Lannes and Murat’s trick preceding it an “act of courage and presence of mind, which had so great an influence on the events of the campaign.” But another French officer, General Baron de Marbot, had a different opinion. “I know that in war one eases one’s conscience,” he wrote in his Memoirs, “and that any means may be employed to ensure victory and reduce loss of life, but in spite of these weighty considerations, I do not think that one can approve of the method used to seize the bridge . . . and for my part I would not care to do the same in similar circumstances.”