According to Obama’s photographer, this is Putin. According to Putin, this is not Putin
Was it a matter of mistaken identity, or is it really Vladimir Putin in that photo?
This post has been updated to include recent comments from the photographer.
In 1988, President Ronald Reagan traveled to Moscow to meet Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan was accompanied by his photographer, Pete Souza, who later became President Obama’s official photographer (and an expert practitioner of the subtle Trump troll). What follows is, at first glance, a standard photo op: Reagan shaking hands with a bunch of regular Moscow folks while Soviet officials stand around in identical gray suits, the Kremlin poking out in the background.
But there’s a twist.
If you look closely, you’ll see a man with a camera hanging from his neck, looking on as Reagan and a young boy stiffly move in to shake hands. According to Souza, that man is none other than future Russian president Vladimir Putin, who in 1988 was just a midlevel KGB agent. In an NPR interview he gave about the photo, Souza said that the tourists Reagan met were asking some oddly pointed questions about his human rights record, until a Secret Service agent told him, “Oh, these are all KGB families,” and went on to confirm that the man with the camera was indeed a KGB agent named Vladimir Putin.
If that were true, it would be a fantastic political meet-cute. But as is the case with anything that’s just a little too perfect, the identity of that man with the camera has been up for debate since the photo surfaced in 2009. Putin’s press spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, flat-out denied that the man in the photo was Russia’s future head of state. “It’s not him,” Peskov said. To further complicate matters, Putin wasn’t even stationed in Russia in 1988 — he was based in East Germany. And sceptics point out that it would be highly unlikely that he was flown back just to pose as a tourist and pester Reagan with questions during a “casual” encounter. Souza has insisted that the man is definitely Putin.
Update: After this article ran, Pete Souza noticed it — as well as the comments from readers chiming in — and questioned his earlier statements:
What do you think?
At Timeline, we reveal the forces that shaped America’s past and present. Our team and the Timeline community are scouring archives for the most visually arresting and socially important stories, and using them to explain how we got to now. To help us tell more stories, please consider becoming a Timeline member.
