The images have come thick and fast over the last five months, each sending out a different message. A shirtless Elian in Tommy Hilfigger slacks waving the Stars and Stripes. A defiant Elian giving the victory sign to the "well-wishers" camped outside his house. A vulnerable Elian peering through the chainmail fence like a prisoner of war.

Then, early on Saturday morning, came the image that may win the Pulitzer Prize. Elian, cowering in a cupboard, screaming in terror at a US federal agent whose combat gear and sub-machinegun shocked America.

But is the picture worth a thousand words, or does it need two thousand to put it in context? At first glance it appears to offer powerful evidence that the US authorities used excessive force.

In the picture, a burly Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) agent dressed in goggles and a flak jacket points a Heckler and Koch MP5 at a six-year-old boy. Elian clings to Donato Dalrymple, the Italian-American who saved his life after his mother died attempting to reach the US from Cuba five months earlier.

But on closer inspection, the photo tells a more complex story. The gun is pointed away from the child and the safety catch is switched to "S". The agent's finger is not on the trigger. Dalrymple looks like he has no intention of handing the child over without a struggle.

Then there are the circumstances in which the photographer got the picture to consider. Alan Diaz (43), a US citizen of Cuban descent, had been taking photographs of Elian in the Little Havana house and its backyard for months. He admits he formed an "unusual relationship" with Elian's Miami relatives. He even had dinner in their house on Christmas Eve.

He agreed with Elian's granduncle and cousin the night before the seizure that he would be there to record the raid whenever it happened. When the federal agents knocked down the front door, Dalrymple tried to escape with Elian in his arms. Diaz shouted, "Sit tight, Donato, there's nowhere to go," Dalrymple told the Washington Post.

The US Attorney General, Janet Reno, guessed Diaz would be there. Some of her officials advised her to order the federal marshals to throw photographers out of the house before Elian was seized.

Also, Reno had information that some of the crowd gathered outside Lazaro Gonzalez's home were carrying guns. Elian's relatives had hinted to reporters that there might be guns inside the house, too.

She rejected her officials' advice, reasoning that the best way to avoid allegations of a Waco-style cover-up was to allow the photographer to stay.

So Diaz was allowed to capture the image that made disturbing viewing for Americans. The power of the photograph became clear immediately.

The Republican presidential candidate, George W. Bush, said the picture was "chilling". In Miami, protesters downloaded the photo from the Internet, photocopied it and turned it into placards. Some protesters replaced the faces of the armed immigration officers with those of Janet Reno and Fidel Castro. A poll that day found that two-thirds of those who had seen the picture disapproved of the operation.

Within hours another image hit the screens, this time one more in keeping with family values. In contrast to the look of terror on Elian's face in the siege photo, the boy was smiling serenely as he hugged the father he hadn't seen since November.

But this time the photo was taken by an INS agent, not a journalist. It was issued to the media by a lawyer for the Gonzalez family in Washington who is also a friend of Bill Clinton. Consequently, it didn't take long for the conspiracy theorists to get into their stride.

A Cuban-American congressman, Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Florida Republican, said he believed the government was "brainwashing" the child. "I saw a little Band-Aid. I think the drugging has already begun," he told reporters in Miami.

Ms Marisleysis Gonzalez (21), Elian's cousin, said the photo was a fake. "That is not Elian. Look how short the hair looks when he was taken out of the house and look how long the hair is in the [other] picture." Others said the photo had been taken six months previously in Cuba.

Even the Washington Post gave space to the conspiracy theories. Columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote: "I'm a psychiatrist. Give me a six-year-old and a few hours alone and I'll have him smiling for the cameras, too, with or without pharmacology."

The battle of the photos was played out on the front pages. The Miami Herald, where journalists had to walk a tightrope throughout the custody battle, featured both photos on its front page under the headline, "Seized". The New York Times ran the "siege" photo on its front page in its early editions, but splashed the photo of the reunion in later editions, relegating Diaz's photo to page 14.

Despite the doubts, the second photo of a happy Elian had the desired effect. A Gallup survey for CNN the day after the raid found that public opinion had swung and that 57 per cent of respondents now agreed that federal agents had little choice but to physically remove Elian from the Gonzalez home in Miami. Only 37 per cent disagreed.

"Clearly the image of Elian with his father helped comfort a lot of people who were very uncomfortable with the first image," a US photojournalism lecturer, Ken Light, told The Irish Times. "It was a very astute move politically to get the second image out." Light says the way Alan Diaz's image was used for propaganda purposes highlights the powerlessness of photographers when their work is being abused. "It was a very powerful photograph but people have the ability to twist and turn an image as they like without any accountability to the photographer who created it," he said.

Diaz himself went to ground, refusing to speak to journalists. When NBC's Today programme asked him to talk about the photo, he told them to judge it for themselves.

rosullivan@irish-times.ie