The Secret Agent and Propaganda

When talking about the revolution, I must mention the magazine Myet Khen Thit. It was not just a magazine; it was The magazine, and it played a significant role in the conflict between the Burmese military and its opponents for more than a decade.

With its bizarre title, which meant The New Grassland, Myet Khen Thit was the brainchild of Burma's military intelligence service (MIS). It first appeared in 1991, three years after the 1988 uprising, and it vanished in 2001—after serving as one of the main propaganda tools for the Burmese junta.

Aung Naing Oo

Myet Khen Thit was designed to discredit opposition groups both inside and outside Burma. Its stories were based on half-truths, disinformation and fabrication, couched in a genuinely old fashioned, blazing propaganda rhetoric.

The ABSDF was one of the magazine’s main targets, and many stories—often with pictures—were printed about the organization. Since many students lived in Mae Sot, Bangkok and Three Pagoda Pass, it was relatively easy for spies to winnow out information: their personal problems, food shortages, infighting and other real or imagined secrets. No wonder the ABSDF and its leadership received so much attention in the magazine’s pages.

When someone told us we were in Myet Khen Thit, we rushed to find a copy—not because we were thrilled to be mentioned in the junta's mouthpiece but rather to see how true the information might be.

I was mentioned in the magazine several times, once in a really personal way which upset me. The story, accompanied with an unflattering photograph, referred to me as 38 years old. The photo must have been taken when I was sick with malaria. I appeared gaunt and haggard, and I was only 26 at the time. 

More seriously, I was truly amazed and distressed, when I realized how lax the security was in Manerplaw, the KNU headquarters, and in the offices of many ethnic and opposition groups. The junta’s military intelligence operation proved itself effective.

Once, Ko Ko Oo, the then general-secretary of ABSDF, the Moe Thee Zun faction, and I sent a letter in English to Gen Bo Mya, who was then the head of the Democratic Alliance of Burma. The letter was about with the disappearance of four ABSDF students when they were on their way from Manerplaw to Mae Sot.

Given the sensitivity of the issue, we made sure not to give the letter to anyone other than Gen. Bo Mya. About a month later, a resistance leader informed me that the letter was in Myet Khen Thit. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I opened the magazine. In hindsight, perhaps the letter was copied or stolen from my office in Bangkok or headquarters in the jungle.

Despite such genuine intelligence coups, many stories were provocative lies, dreamed up by creative writers. Once, the magazine described a torrid love affair between a beautiful 21-year-old girl whose image often appeared on ABSDF postcards and calendars, and an exiled NLD politician who was nearing 60. It read like a true tabloid scandal, and every word was a lie. The girl had never even met the politician.

Sometimes the magazine made howling factual errors, once describing the Thaung Yin River (Moei in Thai) that separates Burma and Thailand as flowing from north to south. But the Thaung Yin is one of the few rivers in the world that flows from south to north.

But most often, if we read the magazine, or listened to the tirades against the opposition groups by Burma's Information Minister Kyaw Hsan, we recognized a consistency, a mixture of accurate information, outright lies, and half-lies, in other words pure propaganda, a standard which still prevails in the state-run media today.

Propaganda specialist say that a blend of truth and lies is what makes propaganda work effectively in the long run, often changing the views of the less well-informed who reason that if they recognize some things as true, well, some of the other things could be true also.

A glaring example of truth and lies was a report in the New Light of Myanmar in 2008 on an opposition meeting in Mae Sot. The state-run newspapers reported that the late Maj-Gen Shwe Sai (whom we called Mr. Big Pipe because of his smoking habit), the head of KNU sixth brigade, had participated in the meeting.