Pete Souza/White House via Getty
Pete Souza served as the official White House photographer under former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, and he recently posted a photo of Reagan’s 1988 trip to Moscow which appears to feature a young Vladimir Putin, who Souza suggests was spying on the visiting US president.
The image received recent attention in 2018, but Souza reposted this week, including a wild story supporting the photo, which was shared on the eve of President Joe Biden’s first summit meeting with the Russian president — a well known and long-serving KGB agent during the former USSR, long a political enemy to the United States during the Cold War.
The photo is embedded below and features Reagan reaching out to shake the hand of a young Soviet child, but it is an adult standing behind the boy, looking like a standard tourist and wearing a camera around his neck, to which Souza brings his Instagram followers’ attention. The story he details as an attached caption gives the background and raises legitimate questions about Putin’
In 1988, I photographed President Reagan during his visit to Moscow. Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the then Soviet Union, gave Reagan a tour of Red Square where groups of “tourists” (KGB agents?) were positioned around the square. Note the man on the left with the camera around his neck.In 1993, I published a book of photographs (“Unguarded Moments”) from my tenure at the White House during the Reagan administration. Some ten years later, I received a random letter in the mail from someone who asked if I knew I had captured a picture of Reagan and Vladimir Putin as shown on page 145 in my book. (Putin had by then become the President of Russia). I was astounded by this letter.I contacted both the Reagan Library and a NSC official in the Bush 43 administration. No one could definitively say whether it was Putin. In 1988, Putin was in fact in the KGB, though he was apparently stationed in East Germany.In January 2009, I was hired as the chief WH photographer for President Obama. A few days before the inauguration, I did an interview with Steve Inskeep of NPR. I was telling this story as an example of how the relevance of presidential photos can change over time. “And as soon as you see the photo you go, oh, my gosh, it really is him (Putin),” were my exact words. A big mistake; I never should have said that, because in fact it had
never been verified.The Kremlin apparently listens to NPR and almost immediately denied it was Putin.About a month after the NPR interview, I received a postcard to my home address. The Red Square photo was on the front of the postcard. The man in the camera was circled with a red marker, and someone had written the word “spy” and drawn an arrow to the man. I turned the postcard over to the Secret Service; nothing ever came of it.In July of 2009, President Obama traveled to Russia and met with Putin at his dacha. No Russian official ever said anything to me, though Robert Gibbs had teased me that I would be detained. And I was able to make the second photo shown here, which I can say is definitely Vladimir Putin on the right.
Take a look at the Instagram post below:
View this post on Instagram
…