Recording Alleges Georgian President to Blame for Fake Invasion Panic

MOSCOW, March 17, 2010 -- The president of Georgia was in on the TV hoax that panicked the nation Saturday night with a fake news program that Russia had invaded, according to voices supposedly of station executives on a telephone recording posted on a Web site.

But in another telephone conversation recording posted on the same site, purportedly of President Mikheil Saakashvili himself, the president says the station must include something on-screen during the fake report to indicate to viewers that what they were seeing was not true.

The broadcast, on a pro-government station, has fired up opposition leaders, who accused Saakashvili of recklessly exploiting people's fears to try to hold on to power.

The first recording, which surfaced Monday evening, was purportedly a conversation between the head of the private TV station Imedi, the country's third most popular, which aired the fake news report, and his news director.

On it, the voice of the supposed deputy tells her boss it would be illegal to run the startling segment without a graphic warning that it was a simulation.

"[Misha] told me, 'Oh no, if we do that then the whole essence would be lost,'" the supposed voice of station chief Giorgi Arveladze responds, using a nickname for the Georgian president.

Arveladze, a former politician and Saakashvili supporter, and news manager Eka Tsamalashvili both denied that conversation took place.

The station manager told Georgian TV that it was snippets of different conversations edited together, and he blamed Russia's special services.

In the second recording, posted anonymously to the same site the next day, a voice that sounds like Saakashvili tells his culture minister that even though the fake scenario was something that could very possibly play out in real life, "they should have simply warned people somewhere down the bottom [of the screen] that this was a simulation."

"It really sounds like [Saakashvili's] voice," Ketevan Khachidze, editor-in-chief of The Georgian Times, told ABC News.