A book excerpt published on the website of National Public Radio ought to give pause to those who think the WT Society carefully checks its facts.
The Soviet spy agency KGB was publishing a disinformation campaign against the USA in the mid-1980's. Check out this one that got into a 1989 Awake magazine.
It is, however, possible to identify some causes of widespread anti-American indignation which were clearly of Soviet origin. Among them was the 'baby parts' fabrication which alleged that wealthy Americans were buying up and butchering Latin American children in order to use their bodies for organ transplants. The story was taken up by a Soviet front organization, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), and publicized extensively in the press of over fifty countries. Those taken in by the fabrication included groups as remote from the KGB as the Jehovah's Witnesses, who published the story in 1989 in their magazine Awake, which had a world-wide circulation of 11 million copies printed in fifty-four languages. In 1990 an American correspondent in Mexico noted that the 'baby parts' story was still current even in 'the respectable press':
What is the Awake? In this case, it was a close look-alike to the National Enquirer.
Early in 1988 a not-much-publicized discovery was made at Santa Caterina Pinula, Guatemala. There, according to a resolution of the European Parliament, local authorities found a "casa de engorde," or "fattening center," where newborn babies purchased for as little as $20 (U.S.) were sold to American or Israeli families for $75,000. The purpose? So that the families purchasing them could use the infants’ organs for their own children who were in need of organ transplants, said the resolution. It also states that in 1987 a similar "fattening center" was found in Honduras "near to which the bodies of many children were found, some of them new-born babies, from which one or more organs had been removed." Another was found in Guatemala City "whose register indicated the sale abroad . . . of 170 babies, the major part of which were sent to the United States for the removal of organs." The Parliament’s resolution has been issued to various agencies and governments, calling for appropriate action to be taken against those responsible for this horrible practice.
There is a saying that in any war, the first casualty is truth.
This was true during the Soviet-American Cold War, and it continues to be true in the "spiritual warfare" that the WT Society has against the whole world -- they will use any means necessary to try to increase the so-called urgency of their message. If they were duped by sensational Soviet propaganda, it was their own fault.
