From the Managing Editor

By JAMES R. GAINES

Magazines make mistakes, you will not be shocked to learn. When we do, of course, it's important to set the record straight. But sometimes we feel the need to alert our readers when there is only the possibility that a mistake has been made. This is one of those times.

In our issue of June 21, we published a cover story on the rise of prostitution around the world, particularly in Russia and Eastern Europe. As a following piece, we focused on a particularly terrible aspect of the problem, child prostitution. Our primary exhibit: a set of photographs taken in Moscow by freelance Russian photographer Alexey Ostrovskiy. Distributed first by Agence France-Presse, they purport to show a pimp named Sasha and two 11-year- old boys soliciting tricks near the Bolshoi Theater, an infamous pick-up spot. Some of the pictures, which showed the boys made up as girls, were too explicit to publish. The ones we did publish were awful enough, haunting and unforgettable.

The question is: Were they true?

Not long after our cover story was published we began hearing ominous charges that they were not, charges emanating in particular from the photo editor of the Reuters bureau there, Richard Ellis. Soon the doubts were published as facts: that the boys were not prostitutes; that Ostrovskiy had paid the pimp and the boys to pose; that TIME had been duped.

Naturally, we had reported on the pictures' background before we published them: five independent sources had confirmed to our Moscow correspondents that Sasha is a pimp, that young boys are part of his "ring," that they work in the Bolshoi Theater area and other places. We could not then speak to the boys, who were said to be out of Moscow. But later the boy Marik (at left in both pictures) confirmed to our Moscow bureau that, yes, he did work with Sasha as a prostitute and, yes, some of his customers liked him to dress up as a girl. Yes, those were the pictures; no, he was not paid to be in them.

But Marik by then had said the opposite to other journalists. Why? we asked him. Because, he said, he had been told by Sasha not to admit to their illegal $ behavior. Reasonable enough. Of course, it is also reasonable to be skeptical of a source who shapes his story to his audience.

Meanwhile, Ellis of Reuters and two colleagues had arranged to meet Sasha at the Bolshoi Theater garden to persuade him to say the story was false. Suspicious of Ellis' motives, Sasha brought a tape recorder in his pocket. On the tape, which Ostrovskiy obtained from Sasha and gave to TIME, Ellis and associates are plainly heard beseeching Sasha to say the pictures were staged, holding out the prospect that if he did so TIME would have to pay him "very good money. $20,000." They tell Sasha, "There is big money here. You and the kids can get real decent money and live in clover the rest of your lives. . . . Alexey ((the photographer)) made his money and in a way set you up." (In fact, Ostrovskiy had not been paid for the pictures, pending the outcome of our investigation.)

At every turn of the conversation, despite Ellis' attempts alternately to frighten and entice him into recanting, Sasha insisted that the pictures and the people in them were what they appeared to be -- as he insists to this day. Of course, it is also reasonable to be skeptical of anyone with a tape recorder in his pocket.

Winston Churchill called Russia "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Certainly it seems so in this case. Why would someone find it in his interest to insist he is a pimp for young boys? Why would Reuters' Ellis -- who claimed to be acting in the interest of journalism -- attempt to induce someone to change his story for money? We may never get to the whole truth of the matter, but we will continue to try.