A murder inquiry as wall news: Iran News poster 52d, Tehran 1956

A Farsi "Latest News" sheet in the U.S. Information Agency file, catalog date 22 August 1956. Five photographs follow the recovery of Hesam Lankarani's remains under Tehran's military governor, name one man as a Tudeh party terrorist and the killer, and speak of the party's "dastardly terrorist acts" (NAID 6948844).

Five photographs

Content note: the photographs show human remains, a skull and bones, as the archive describes them.

The sheet is printed in red and yellow under the heading "Latest news" and closes with the name "Iran News." Its five captioned photographs move like a police report: a forensic doctor with the skull, the military governor and an officer at a house where the body was dug up, a colonel briefing reporters, a man identified as the killer, and the victim's brother with a prosecutor's representative examining the bones.

آخرین اخبار

[...]

سرکار سرهنگ مبصر رئیس ستاد فرماندار نظامی اطلاعاتی درباره ترورهای ناجوانمردانه حزب توده در اختیار مخبرین جراید می‌گذارند.

آرسن اوانسیان یکی از تروریستهای حزب توده و قاتل حسام لنکرانی

[...]

اخبار ایران

[English, as given by the archive:] Latest news [...] Colonel Mobaser, chief of staff of the military governor, gives information about the dastardly terrorist acts of the Tudeh party to the press correspondents. Arsen Avanesian, one of the Tudeh party terrorists and the killer of Hesam Lankarani [...] Iran News

An American file, an Iranian face

Everything printed on the sheet points to Iranian authorities: the military governor of Tehran, his chief of staff, a prosecutor's representative, and a masthead called Iran News. The National Archives holds it in Record Group 306 among the U.S. Information Agency's posters distributed in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, catalog date 22 August 1956. FRAME credits the agency and classes the source as blurred. The archive's purpose field reads "Demonize."

Guilt by caption

The archive tags one technique, name-calling, for the labels the captions attach to the Tudeh party: "terrorists," and killings called "dastardly." A murder is a crime and investigating one is a government's plain duty. What the poster does with the investigation is another matter.

One caption names a man as "the killer." The record does not say whether any court had heard his case when the sheet went up, and the poster does not say either. The proceedings it shows are run by a military governor, and the press appears mostly as an audience for officials. A reader is handed a verdict on a person and on a whole party in the same breath. That is the habit due process exists to restrain, whoever's government prints it.

A later sheet in the same series and under the same heading, catalog date 27 December 1956, is Iran News 52n, on Hungary, the UN and Eisenhower's re-election. For the covert side of American messaging in Iran three years earlier, see Mossadeq's Spy Service, a CIA typescript written for placement in Iranian media. The U.S. Information Agency hub explains why the site keeps the two kinds apart.