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Forgery: The crime of falsely and with fraudulent intent making or altering a writing or other instrument.

—Webster’s Third

If it were only sexier, it might have rated recognition as the world’s oldest profession. Ever since humankind became literate, civilization has been bedeviled by the forger’s determination to deceive by mimicking the writing of others. When a pharaoh first fashioned a seal to protect the identity of his scribblings, a forger lurked with intent to melt, alter and reseal. Around the 5th century B.C. the Athenian poet Onomakritos was expelled from that ancient city for tampering with the oracles of Musaeus. His crime, unlike those of most forgers, had an unintended benefit. Thereafter, whenever a prophecy failed to materialize, the oracle could angrily proclaim that the prediction had been concocted by that forging scoundrel Onomakritos.

Throughout history, scholars have been forced by the forgers’ wiles to sift the real from the spurious in the written record. Great literature, from Homer to Shakespeare to Frost, has been lifted by forgers, some unmasked, some forever anonymous. Religions have been undermined, the reputations of races besmirched, nation set against nation, scientist against scientist, banker against depositor, even lover against the beloved, all by forgers’ clandestine deceptions. Phony works of art have debased culture. Crass counterfeiting has threatened the stability of currency.

The forgers’ skills, sharpened by greed, malice, political zeal or simply the sheer joy of confounding learned scholars or esteemed institutions, have called into being an opposing set of skills: those of the patient, persistent document sleuths, who squint through magnifying glasses and microscopes at each potential telltale squiggle on yellowed pages or pristine documents in countless offices, from police station houses to great universities and national archives.

Last week, in one of the publishing sensations of the century, the document sleuths clearly won a victory over the forgers who seek to reap wealth while recasting history. The editors of the West German photo-weekly Stern had on April 22 dramatically announced the astounding discovery of 62 volumes of Adolf Hitler’s alleged long-secret diaries. Bound in black imitation-leather covers, the magazine-size books purported to chronicle the Nazi Führer’s years from 1932 to 1945. Hailed by Stern as “the journalistic scoop of the post-World War II period,” the diaries were offered to other publications for serialization at up to $3 million. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., the parent company of London’s Sunday Times, agreed to pay $400,000 for British and Commonwealth rights. Paris Match and Italy’s Panorama, both weeklies, signed on at undisclosed prices. Newsweek, which declined to buy serialization rights after extensive negotiations, devoted a cover story to the diaries and their contents and trumpeted it in a series of national ads.

As an international furor arose over the authenticity of the diaries, Stern’s editors would say only that their trusted correspondent Gerd Heidemann, 51, had acquired the priceless documents and that he would not disclose who gave them to him or who had hidden them for so many years. They had been recovered, Heidemann claimed, from the crash of an airplane near Dresden on April 21, 1945. It was one of ten aircraft carrying Hitler’s staff and priority cargo from the bunker in Berlin where he killed himself nine days later. The diaries, remarkably preserved, had been pulled from the wreckage, reported Heidemann, and concealed in a nearby hayloft.

Historians and Hitler biographers quickly assailed the diaries as unbelievable. Hitler never liked to keep his own notes, they said. He dictated his thoughts to secretaries. The testimony of aides and servants revealed no knowledge that he kept a diary and indicated that his daily schedule left precious little time for private jottings. His right hand trembled from progressively acute palsy and, after a 1944 assassination attempt, his arm was at least temporarily incapacitated by bomb wounds.

Stern stuck stubbornly to its story. The magazine’s claims drew heavily on the reputation of Cambridge Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (The Last Days of Hitler), a director of the Times Newspapers Ltd. He examined some of the books in a Swiss bank and wrote:

“When I turned the pages of those volumes, my doubts gradually dissolved. I am now satisfied they are authentic.” He said he was prepared “to stake my reputation” on their authenticity. Newsweek Consultant Gerhard Weinberg of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill went to the same bank vault and reported that “my preliminary feeling was that they looked genuine.” But he had reservations and said that much more study would be needed to be certain.

The criticism of Stern’s claims rose rather than abated. Trevor-Roper developed second thoughts. “I must have misunderstood,” he said. “The link between the airplane and the archive is not absolutely established.” Finally, he added: “I am now convinced that some documents in that collection were forgeries.”

Alarmed editorial employees of the magazine gathered in Stern’s modern concrete office building in Hamburg. They grilled their top executives about the source of the diaries during a tease two-hour meeeting. “First we publish, then we authenticate!” protested one angry journalist. The magazine’s editorial board relented slightly, ordering that some of the volumes be sent to experts at WestGermany’s Federal Archives in Coblenz.

Stern’s Editor in Chief Peter Koch refused to retreat. He flew to New York, carrying the first and last volumes in the series. He displayed them on national TV, defending them as genuine. Koch airily told American reporters: “I expected the uproar and expected that many incompetent people would denounce the diaries as fakes. This is because every other publishing house will envy our story and every historian will envy us.”

Stern’s presses rolled on with the first installment of the diaries, a segment ostensibly showing that Hitler had approved the celebrated solo flight of his trusted deputy Rudolf Hess to England as war raged in 1941. Next day, Stern’s great coup was blitzed.

West Germany’s Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmermann announced in a terse statement that “the Federal Archive is convinced that documents they were given did not come from Hitler’s hand, but were produced in the postwar period.”

At a press conference immediately afterward in Coblenz, Luis-Ferdinand Werner, who had supervised chemical analysis on the paper, cover, bindings, labels and glue used in three of the seven volumes submitted by Stern, said flatly that the diaries were “obvious fakes.” Beside him, Federal Archives President Hans Booms, who characterized the forgeries as “grotesque” and “superficial,” contended that much of the contents had been plagiarized from a book, Hitler’s Speeches and Proclamations 1932-45, written in 1962 by a former Nazi Federal Archivist, Max Domarus. Booms dated the production of the forgeries as about 1964.

As many specialists in forgery detection had predicted, once competent experts had a full and fair chance to examine the documents, evidence of any but the most crafty forgery would be swiftly found. But this fabrication, the German scientists discovered, was astonishingly inept. Chemical analysis of the binding showed that it contained polyester threads, which were not produced until after World War II. The glue used on the book labels also contained postwar chemicals. The same typewriter had been used on all labels on the volumes. It was a 1925 machine, all right, but close inspection of a label ostensibly typed in 1943 showed no wear on the keys since a label typed in 1934.

Moreover, as in so many manuscript forgeries, a knowledgeable reading of the diaries was damning in itself. The forger or forgers had unknowingly perpetuated minor errors that historians had found in the Domarus book. The crowd at a Hitler rally in Breslau was put at half a million, for instance, whereas more reliable non-Domarus reports had estimated 130,000. Both the diaries and Domarus had General Franz Ritter Von Epp congratulating Hitler in 1937 on his 50th anniversary in army service, when the dictator was only 48 years old; the Führer had actually praised Von Epp for his 50 years in the Army. Said Booms sarcastically about the Hitler portrayed in the diaries: “You get the impression of very limited understanding from a person who had an interest in making entries only when Domarus did.”

Henri Nannen, Stern’s publisher since its founding in 1948, first reacted with scorn, declaring on German television: “The Federal Archives is not God Almighty.” But he soon calmed down and admitted, “We have some reason to be ashamed.” He announced that “there won’t be a single word about these diaries in the next issue.” He promised, however, to “make an attempt to uncover the history of this forgery for our readers,” adding, somewhat needlessly, “We have no reason to protect the swindler.”

Stern’s editorial workers, now even more distressed, met once again to discuss the fiasco. They presented a list of demands to their editors, but would not make them public. One employee reported: “Everyone is panicking. No one can believe that this is happening to us.” Editor Koch’s head was the first to roll. He submitted his resignation, as did another top editor, Felix Schmidt.

Other publications abruptly canceled their plans to print the Hitler diaries. Arthur Brittenden, a spokesman for Times Newspapers, said it had paid only half of its $400,000 to Stern. “We’ll be asking Stern for our money back,” he said. “We won’t be paying any more.” Rupert Murdoch apparently was caught with a twelve-page color excerpt on the diaries already printed for the Star. Seemingly unfazed, Murdoch said, “Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

On Fleet Street, other editors pounced on Stern and the rival Sunday Times with a vengeance that in this instance seemed justified. “It was the day the thunder of the Times turned into a whimper and the Sunday Times was forced to sniff the stench of self-deceit,” crowed the Daily Express. Its story accused “the executives” of Stern and the Sunday Times of having committed “the biggest journalistic blunder for years.”

Still, Stern’s penalty, beyond its ruined reputation, was also financial: rumors in Bonn’s press circles had the magazine paying $4 million for its “discovery.” Other insiders considered that figure too low. The discrediting of the diaries enhanced the reputations of some historians and forgery experts who had quickly concluded that the diaries were fraudulent. New York Autograph Dealer Charles Hamilton had taken one long look at photocopies of a few of the diary excerpts and pronounced them too consistent and too smooth to be credible. “Hitler’s handwriting was full of power and force,” he said. “It was tormented, impetuous, so that when he wanted to make a point, he would dig his pen into the paper and spread the ink, and when he gets to the end of a sentence, it always falls.” Hamilton did not find that falling pattern in the diary.

Also vindicated were Marie Bernard and Hitler Historian Werner Maser, both of whom looked at diary photocopies and dismissed them as not being in Hitler’s hand. Hitler Biographer Joachim Fest and Stuttgart University Historian Eberhard Jäckel both spotted the alleged diaries as probably part of a cache of bogus Hitler materials they had been offered four years ago.

Clearly damaged were the indecisive Trevor-Roper and British Historian David Irving, the only expert to switch from skeptical to an affirmative assessment of the diaries. Irving had earlier interrupted a Stern press conference about the diaries, calling them “pure fabrications” and shouting for tests on the “ink, ink, ink.” But as he read more of the diary notes, he had announced that “I’m becoming more inclined to believe they are authentic.” He said the handwriting in the later diaries “sloped down off the rulings,” as it should in view of Hitler’s illness in those years.

On sound ground but playing an awkward role was Kenneth Rendell, a Newton, Mass., autograph analyst who was paid $8,000 by Newsweek magazine. Also separately advising Stern, he put the two volumes brought to New York by Koch under his microscope, photocopied and enlarged the words, and concluded that the books were forgeries. When he told this to Koch, Rendell says, “he was absolutely devastated.” At week’s end Rendell said that his sole interest was to pursue his theories about how “this mess,” as he called it, had been created. He predicted teasingly and without explanation: “There is potentially a twist to this whole thing that no one can imagine.”

Investigators with similar curiosity wondered about the role of Stern’s secretive reporter Heidemann. Historian Maser told TIME that Heidemann had a reputation as “gullible and morbidly interested in Nazi paraphernalia.” Heidemann, Maser said, had once berated him for claiming in a book review that Hitler had been fully aware of the mass executions of Jews, and had even wanted them speeded up. Heidemann was “furious” and accused him of smearing “the Führer’s” name, contends Maser.

Heidemann, with his wife Gina at his side, was quizzed by Stern executives in one session that ended at 3:15 in the morning. Emerging, she said about the collapse of Stern’s publishing plans, “It’s terrible. But no matter what happens, we will always believe in the diaries.” She charged that the West German officials who had declared the books fraudulent were really trying to “suppress the truth.” She and her husband have friends among former Nazi officers. When they were married, two former Nazi generals served as official witnesses. “It would have been a joy to tell the reality about the Führer,” she said.

The forgery had been detected, but the pursuit of the perpetrators and their motives would certainly continue. The financial profits clearly had to be a powerful incentive for such a reckless project. A desire to create some sympathy for the entire Nazi movement and to humanize Hitler seemed likely aims too. But the sad saga of the truly incredible diaries raised troubling questions about how such an implausible scheme had been taken so seriously, however briefly. The mere appearance of the volumes should have warned even the most gullible observer: all 62 books precisely alike, despite their span of 13 years; all their pages unstained, unworn, although they were claimed to be up to half a century old; their materials cheap, though ostensibly purchased by a ruler who loved richly bound books and could well afford the best.

For all the ignominy and chagrin suffered by Stern and the other participating publications, they could take some solace from the fact that they are not the first to be burned. In this century alone, there have been at least three comparable publishing sensations, each highly hyped and then discredited amid an international uproar.

The first, in 1928, led the staid Atlantic Monthly to produce a series of articles on “Lincoln the Lover,” based on a cache of newly found letters: three ostensibly from Abraham Lincoln to Ann Rutledge, two from her to him and four written by Lincoln about her. The correspondence all too neatly verified the unsubstantiated legend that in their early twenties Lincoln and Rutledge had been sweethearts. Looking back after Rutledge had died in 1835, Lincoln in an 1848 letter to John Calhoun, an Illinois acquaintance, allegedly wrote: “Like a ray of sunshine and as brief—she flooded my life, and at times like today when I traverse past paths I see this picture before me—fever burning the light from her dear eyes, urging me to fight for the right.”

The Atlantic editor who accepted this schmaltz as authentic was Ellery Sedgwick, then 56. One of the most respected men of letters of his day, he was married to a Cabot and had graduated from Groton and Harvard. The conspirator who befuddled his judgment was Wilma Frances Minor, then 42, an attractive former actress and a columnist for the San Diego Union. She claimed that the letters had been handed down through the family of her mother Mrs. Cora DeBoyer, a strong-willed woman who had been married at least five times. Sedgwick employed the Rev. William E. Barton, 67, a Boston minister who had written books about Lincoln, to study the letters.

A scholar of sorts, Barton found the letters too pat to be credible. But when he met Minor in Los Angeles, his doubts were undermined by her charm. Lonely after the death of his wife, Barton, while on his train journey home, wrote a warm letter inviting her to visit him in Foxboro, Mass., and to “come and sleep under my pines and see my Lincoln material and swim in my little lake.” He added: “Tell your mother I made love to you and hope to do it again.”

Experts who had never met the winsome lady read the correspondence and found it compelling. “These new letters,” said Poet Carl Sandburg, perhaps Lincoln’s most famous biographer, “seem entirely authentic— and preciously and wonderfully coordinate and chime with all else known of Lincoln.” Muckraking Journalist Ida M. Tarbell, who had also written a Lincoln biography, wrote to Sedgwick: “You have an amazing set of true Lincoln documents—the most extraordinary that have come to us in many, many years.” After publication of the Atlantic’s first installment, however, a storm of criticism erupted. “You are putting over one of the crudest forgeries I have known,” protested Worthington Chauncey Ford, 72, editor of the Massachusetts Historical Society, in a letter to Sedgwick. Even Barton sadly wrote to Minor, “I have come to the conviction that the letters which you are sending to the Atlantic are not genuine. And, my dear, I am afraid you know it.”

The conspiracy crumbled under the scrutiny of experts. One noted that Lincoln signed his alleged letters to Rutledge “Abe,” when he was known to have abhorred the nickname. Others pointed out that Lincoln, once a land surveyor, had cited “Section 40” in a letter supposedly written at a time when such sections were not numbered higher than 36. Lincoln referred to “Kansas” at a time when the region was commonly called “Indian country.”

Private detectives hired by the magazine helped unmask Mrs. DeBoyer as the mastermind of the forgery and her daughter as the willing purveyor of the deceitful goods. Minor signed a statement that was not quite a confession, but near enough to close the case. Her mother had composed the letters, she admitted, but had received the messages from the spirits of Lincoln and Rutledge while in a trance. Claimed Minor: “The spirits of Ann and Abe were speaking through my mother to me, so that my gifts as a writer combined with her gifts as a medium could hand in something worthwhile to the world.” Neither mother nor daughter was prosecuted.

By coincidence, the century’s second great publishing forgery was concocted by another mother-daughter team. In 1957 Rosa Panvini, then 75, and her daughter Amalia, 43, both of whom lived in Vercelli, in northern Italy, offered diaries they said had been written by Benito Mussolini to the Rome office of LIFE magazine and to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. The daughter contended that one of Mussolini’s ministers had handed her father a package one day with the admonition, “For the love of God, Panvini, hide them in a safe place.” He had done so, she claimed, but she had now decided to sell them to raise some money.

Vittorio Mussolini examined the writing and said it was his father’s. An expert from Switzerland’s Lausanne University conducted chemical tests, compared the diaries with Mussolini’s known handwriting and found the discovery authentic. “Thirty volumes of manuscript cannot be the work of a forger, but of a genius,” he said. “You can falsify a few lines or even pages, but not a series of diaries.”

They would have made good reading. Written in school exercise books, they contained such sensational Mussolini observations as “Hitler is mad! Our ideas are diametrically opposed.” Before anyone bought the diaries, however, Italian police raided the Panvini home, found and seized all except four of them, and charged the two women with forgery and fraud. Rosa admitted that she had spent years perfecting her imitation of Mussolini’s handwriting and used her skill to produce the diaries. Both women were given suspended sentences.

Wholly unaware of this background, editors of the London Sunday Times bought the remaining four volumes from the Panvinis in 1968. After paying about $71,400 for them, the newspaper learned of the hoax and aborted publication.

Rosa Panvini died in 1968. Last week Daughter Amalia, now 69, who lives alone with a score of cats, contended that she had confessed only to avoid going to prison. Neither she nor her mother had forged the diaries, she now insisted. Who had? she was asked. “Who knows?” she replied.

As a forger, Clifford Irving was something else: audacious and foolhardy enough to concoct the “autobiography” of a living person who could readily refute it, point by point, if he wished to do so. When Irving convinced McGraw-Hill in 1971 that Howard Hughes had asked him to help him write his autobiography, the New York City-born freelance writer was clearly counting on the reclusive Hughes to remain silent. Carrying out his elaborate hoax, Irving forged letters from Hughes to himself that persuaded McGraw-Hill to give Irving a $750,000 contract to produce a 230,000-word manuscript. Irving even fabricated a contract in which Hughes agreed that the money should be split between subject and writer.

LIFE bought rights to run excerpts from the impending book, but demanded verification of Hughes’ assent to the project. The esteemed New York City handwriting-analysis firm of Osborn, Osborn & Osborn compared samples of Hughes’ authentic writing with the Irving forgeries and declared, “The evidence that all of the writing submitted was done by the one individual is, in our opinion, irresistible, unanswerable and overwhelming.”

As McGraw-Hill began to pay Irving for his work, the writer insisted that all checks be made out to “H.R. Hughes.” That permitted his wife Edith, posing as “Helga R. Hughes,” to deposit the checks in a Swiss bank account. Irving and a coconspirator, Richard Suskind, carefully researched Hughes’ life. They gained access to a manuscript by James Phalen, who was collaborating with a former Hughes associate, Noah Dietrich. That work in progress included rich anecdotes about the eccentric multimillionaire. Thus Irving’s manuscript had a solid inside-Hughes ring to it.

Too much so. Phalen later learned about one incident in Irving’s text that only Dietrich could have provided, and Dietrich had not talked to Irving. Phalen protested. Meanwhile, Hughes had broken years of silence, using a speaker-telephone to address a group of reporters who knew his voice, and had denounced Irving’s work as a hoax. Squads of detectives joined in the hunt. Irving’s deception collapsed. He and his wife confessed to conspiracy and grand larceny and served prison terms of about 18 months.

Why were respected experts in the art of forgery detection initially taken in by the fabrications of such prolific deceivers as Irving and the two mother-daughter teams? Irving contends that hired experts tend to render the favorable judgments that publishers seeking their guidance wish to hear. Once a forger masters his subject’s handwriting idiosyncrasies and ways of thinking, Irving claims, sheer quantity is no problem. “Once you do one page,” he says, “you can do 20. Once you do 20, you can do a book.”

Most forgery detectives disagree. They believe they have too many weapons to let any manuscript, long or short, escape detection—once they have a fair chance to compare fully the real and the suspect writing. Many are convinced that their trained eyes, aided perhaps only by the magnification of microscopes or enlarged copies projected onto white screens, can spot even the most skilled forgery.

What do they look for? First, for the flow of the handwriting. Writing in which each letter of the alphabet is too carefully consistent over too many lines or over different periods of time is a telltale sign of forgery. In writing naturally and quickly, people tend to vary the formation of most characters ever so slightly, often subconsciously. Even their writing posture or how they feel about what they are writing can create minute variations. “Your signature on a $50,000 mortgage, is a little more careful than on a $10 check,” notes FBI Special Agent James Lile, an expert in the documents section of the bureau’s crime laboratory.

Lile says revealing information can be found even in the letter of the alphabet that is simplest to reproduce: e. “You look at the size of the loop, the length of the elongation. Is it broad or narrow? Is the pressure greatest going up or down?” New York Autograph Dealer Mary Benjamin watches for ampersands, which, she says, she has never seen vary when made by the same hand.

There is a usually unspoken professional admiration between the masters of such analysis and the masters of the fabrications. In his revealing account, Great Forgers and Famous Fakes, Autograph Dealer Hamilton quotes a letter from Forger Arthur Sutton, whom Hamilton had helped to expose, causing Sutton to plead guilty to fraud. “I have always had the greatest respect for you,” wrote Sutton, who crafted the signatures of famous figures from Sitting Bull to Richard Nixon and Marilyn Monroe. “I am glad I have been caught and can promise I will never forge any autographs ever again.” Admitted Hamilton, in a public aside to Sutton: “It is the forgeries and fakes that give piquancy and excitement to the chase. Without them, philography would be a pretty dull pursuit.”

The slippage of handwriting standards, particularly in the U.S., has made the modern forgery detective’s task easier. Unlike the careful and uniform script once taught in the schools, like the one based on the hallowed Palmer method, handwriting today is sloppy and therefore more individualistic. That makes it more difficult for forgers to emulate and easier for document analysts to spot variations from the genuine article.

If handwriting analysis should fail, the experts turn to tests of paper, ink and pens, such as those carried out by the West German Federal Archives last week. Here, too, experience and a keen eye for detail may prove sufficient to detect deceit. Benjamin notes that in the West parchment was used exclusively until about the year 1150. Next came two types of rag paper. One was laid paper, formed by being stretched across wires that left visible lines spaced about an inch apart. It was in common use until about 1800. The other was wove paper, in which the fibers can be seen by the trained eye. It was used consistently after 1800. Benjamin has seen only two authentic autographs by George Washington written on wove paper. By 1860 wood-pulp paper, easily distinguishable from rag paper, became commonplace. Many a period piece forger has given himself away by using the wrong paper.

The experts’ suspicions can be aroused even by the size of writing paper, since fashions here have also changed through the years. There have been customs too in how letters are folded. Watermarks placed in paper by manufacturers are carefully catalogued and thus can be traced to their origins. The wrong watermark can disclose a forgery. Benjamin and other analysts check the ink used on antique documents. Sometimes its very color is all they need to see. Ink made of ground carbon was used until 1020; it does not affect the color of the paper as it ages. But iron-gall ink, widely used until about 1860, is acidic and with time tends to tint and wear through the paper. Aniline ink followed; it disappears when the paper on which it is used is dunked in water. That is not a test many analysts try, since their document, real or fake, might vanish.

Benjamin recalls one collector of rare autographs who verified, wholly by accident, that his priceless document containing the signatures of all 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence was genuine. A hurricane had caused the paper to be submerged in water for five days. When he retrieved it, the owner found to his relief that all the signatures remained clear and bright. They had been written with iron-gall ink on rag paper.

The type of pen wielded by a forger can be a giveaway. The quaint quill was used exclusively until 1780, when its successor, the steel pen, came into existence. The difference in writing between the two can be seen under a microscope. Fiber-tipped pens were not used extensively in the U.S. until 1964. Any forger using a pen not common in the period his document purports to derive from risks quick discovery. The modern proliferation of pens, particularly ballpoints, complicates the task of current document analysts, but can provide fresh clues. A ballpoint requires the writer to exert more pressure; the force with which individuals habitually attack their writing is often distinctive.

Researchers at West Germany’s Mannheim University have applied modern technology to detect minute variations in pressure applied to paper by writers. They are developing an electric grid microscope to measure precisely the indentations made by a pen. A more sophisticated device called a Verisign was developed by the same team. A pen attached to a computer retraces a writing sample; the computer analyzes 16 separate writing tendencies, such as the pace, spacing and crossbars in key letters. In one recent test, 5,000 forged signatures were fed to the machine, which compared them with authentic ones. In only a single instance did a fake go undetected.

The prevalence of typewriters has complicated the forgery detective’s task. “When I first started out in this business, I had most of the information about typewriters in my head,” recalls James Conway, a retired U.S. Postal Service examiner in private practice in Alameda, Calif. “There were only five or six major typewriter manufacturers.” Now there are more than a dozen. The widespread use of photocopiers gives the forger easy access to the handwriting of individuals or to documents he wishes to imitate.

Another new headache for the experts: government officials, executives and various celebrities who permit their names to be signed to routine papers by secretaries. In older times, secretaries usually attached their initials to such signatures. They rarely do that now, and often can imitate their employers’ writing so well that even the bosses cannot tell except by remembering whether they signed a document. John Kennedy was the first President to let a secretary sign his routine papers. He also introduced the Autopen, a writing robot that can reproduce a signature several thousand times a day. Autograph Analyst Benjamin had to disillusion an ex-serviceman whose letter from J.F.K. to his parents would have been worth $1,000 if signed by the President. She found that a secretary had provided the signature, rendering the paper worthless.

Who is gaining in the ceaseless war between forger and detective? Most document analysts contend that modern techniques, plus the accumulated expertise of so many specialists, make the forgery of an extensive literary work or a historical document Like the Stern diaries much more difficult to carry out successfully. They doubt that any such hoax has gone undiscovered—although if it has, of course, they would not be aware of it.

It is in the more mundane, but often lucrative, field of forged checks, false signatures on credit cards and the fabrication of bogus passports, driver’s licenses and other identification documents that the contemporary forger may be outrunning his pursuers. Los Angeles Graphologist Andrea McNichol blames the carelessness of banks and other institutions for making the forger’s life easier. “Banks take no steps to protect themselves,” she contends. “You could sign your name ‘Jesus Christ,’ and they would pass it.” Sergeant Russell Meltzer of the Los Angeles police forgery division agrees. Says he: “Sometimes the victims should be prosecuted for stupidity, instead of the crooks for the crime.”

One thing seems certain. In an age in which record-keeping and the resulting blizzard of paper keeps growing, the forger’s furtive art is bound to flourish. “You can’t be born or die or do much in between without a lot of paper,” says Conway. Indeed, each bureaucrat seems unable to resist converting his musings to writing, each official transaction produces a document, each personal milestone is recorded—and all are grist for the forger.

Those who plot forgery on an epic scale, however, may well be inhibited by last week’s dramatic demonstration of how the canny sleuths who peer at the loops produced by a pen and assess the chemicals found in a binding can so readily expose a Hitler diary hoax. At least equally forewarned should be any editor foolish enough to emulate those at Stem, who so recklessly placed journalistic expediency above society’s overriding need for accurate history. There is never a need, nor a justification, for “publishing first and authenticating later.” —ByEdMagnuson. Reported by Gary Lee/Bonn and Melissa Ludtke/ New York

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