[iwar] [fc:Deception.Is.Part.Of.The.Art.Of.War,.But.Shhhhhh!]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-02-28 20:49:14


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Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002 20:49:14 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:Deception.Is.Part.Of.The.Art.Of.War,.But.Shhhhhh!]
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Wall Street Journal
February 28, 2002
Deception Is Part Of The Art Of War, But Shhhhhh!
By Joseph E. Persico
A scene takes place in Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra" in which a
subordinate, Menas, sidles up to the Roman general, Pompey, and says he
could easily cut the throats of Pompey's rivals, including Marc Antony, thus
leaving Pompey in power. Pompey responds that Menas should have just done
it. "And not have spoke on't! In me 'tis villany; in thee't had been good
service."
This situation seems to reflect the fate of the Defense Department's Office
of Strategic Influence. Good idea, chaps, if you'd just kept your mouths
shut. But once it became public knowledge that part of the office's function
was, allegedly, to sow deliberate misinformation to confound our
adversaries, President Bush and his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld,
backed off as if someone had handed them a dead rat. The falsehood is the
weapon of nasty guys. Remember Hitler and his "Big Lie"?
The apparently swift rise and fall of the OSI may have given strategic lying
a bad name. The real test is who is being lied to, about what, and, in
history's timeline, when.
Those now iconographic scenes of Allied troops successfully storming the
Normandy beaches were underpinned by a lie of Paul Bunyanesque proportions.
That American scrapper, Gen. George S. Patton, much to his chagrin was given
command of a phony force which was supposedly preparing to invade occupied
France across the Dover Straits, the narrowest neck of the English Channel
as part of a deception plan labelled "Fortitude." A theatrical set designer
was fabricating thousands of rubber planes, tanks and artillery and
inflating them near the Straits to reinforce the deception for spying eyes
and aerial photographers.
It worked. Just one week before D-Day, Adolf Hitler confided to the Japanese
ambassador to Germany, Hiroshi Oshima, that while the Allies might make
diversionary feints in Norway, Brittany, and Normandy, the Allies actually
"will come with the establishment of an all-out second front in the area of
the straits of Dover."
Oshima thereupon did what diplomats do. He cabled Hitler's words back to the
Japanese foreign office. The United States was cracking the Japanese code;
and thus, the Allies learned that Hitler's major force would not be awaiting
them at Normandy, but, mistakenly, at the Dover Straits.
In the extremis of war, even lying to actual or potential allies has its own
integrity. When, in 1940-41, his country stood alone and vulnerable, Prime
Minister Winston Churchill's keenest objective was to draw the United States
into the war against Germany. Indeed, he charged British intelligence with
advancing that end.
Consequently, British spooks provided President Franklin Roosevelt with a
purloined map showing how the Germans intended to divide South America into
five Nazi vassal states; showed him a stolen document revealing a German
plot to overthrow a pro-American regime in Bolivia; and even provided proof
that the Germans already had 5,000 troops in Brazil poised to threaten the
Panama Canal. FDR cited this intelligence in his speeches and fireside
chats.
It was all a tissue of lies fabricated by the British. But Roosevelt was not
about to scrutinize to death intelligence that would help him lead American
public opinion along the course he wanted, war against Germany.
When Roosevelt was planning to invade North Africa in 1942, key to his
strategy was to minimize French resistance to the seizure of these African
colonies before the Germans could grab them. A key weapon? The baldfaced
lie. Roosevelt had his secret emissary to the French, Robert Murphy, inflate
the number of Americans in the U.S. invasion fleet by 400%, a disincentive
for the French to put up much of a fight.
That's the upside of disinformation employed against friend or foe. The
dread downside is the "blowback" in which deceptions planted among one's
enemies -- and expected to go no further -- come back to haunt the planter.
Unwitting allies may believe the lie and act on it to our detriment.
Newspapers report the falsehood to unintended readers in the wrong
countries. Our own government agencies, not in on the scam, act on erroneous
information. All of this has happened, at one time or another, to U.S.
disinformation efforts.
Even this newspaper was a blowback victim in the 1980s when it innocently
reported a story based on Reagan administration disinformation concocted to
show that Libya's Moammar Gadhafi faced serious internal opposition.
Likewise, the Pentagon's inflated body counts and unfounded optimism during
the Vietnam War, when subsequently exposed, served only to damage the
military's credibility. The blowback is the gas attack in which the wind
wafts the poison back onto the sender.
But let's be frank. Even though the Office of Strategic Influence has been
strangled in its cradle, the function of deceiving our adversaries will live
on in one form or another, practiced in one place or another, just as
deception has gone on ever since the serpent misled Eve and the Greeks left
the Trojans a gift horse. The point is, as Pompey said, "Don't tell me, just
do it."
Mr. Persico is the author, most recently, of "Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR
and World War II Espionage" (Random House, 2001).

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