in this issue (July 2001) of American Journalism Review (AJR):

THE ACCIDENTAL SPY

by Jeremy Bigwood

A photojournalist, distressed that a "State Department" official has been examining his unpublished photographs, files a flurry of FOIAs in an effort to find out what's up.

In the film "Under Fire," the lead character is a photojournalist who goes

behind the lines in Nicaragua with the Sandinistas, guerrillas fighting the

U.S.-backed regime in power. To gain that access, the journalist first had

to convince the Sandinistas that the images he was taking in their secret

base camps would be used only to tell their story. He was horrified to later

learn that the CIA had gained access to his images and that Nicaraguan

security forces were using them to identify and kill the same people whose

trust he had engendered.

Life imitated art for me in the late 1980s when I was a freelance

photojournalist based in San Salvador. I air-freighted hundreds of

undeveloped rolls of film to the New York office of Gamma Liaison, one of

the world's top photo agencies. This was the most exciting and stimulating

work I have ever done. The agency sold my color slide pictures to magazines

including Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, Der Spiegel and Der

Stern. (I also shot black-and-white and color print images for newspapers

including San Francisco s Chronicle and Examiner, the Los Angeles Times,

Washington Post and Boston Globe.) From 1984 to 1994, I regularly covered El

Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and southern Mexico.

I kept a post office box in the United States and picked up my mail there

about every three to six months. In October 1988, I was surprised to see

"US. dept. of" listed under publication name on my check stub for my only