Return-Path: <sentto-279987-4544-1014958133-fc=all.net@returns.groups.yahoo.com> Delivered-To: fc@all.net Received: from 204.181.12.215 [204.181.12.215] by localhost with POP3 (fetchmail-5.7.4) for fc@localhost (single-drop); Thu, 28 Feb 2002 20:51:08 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 15644 invoked by uid 510); 1 Mar 2002 04:48:45 -0000 Received: from n30.groups.yahoo.com (216.115.96.80) by all.net with SMTP; 1 Mar 2002 04:48:45 -0000 X-eGroups-Return: sentto-279987-4544-1014958133-fc=all.net@returns.groups.yahoo.com Received: from [216.115.97.191] by n30.groups.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 01 Mar 2002 04:48:54 -0000 X-Sender: fc@red.all.net X-Apparently-To: iwar@onelist.com Received: (EGP: unknown); 1 Mar 2002 04:48:53 -0000 Received: (qmail 4634 invoked from network); 1 Mar 2002 04:48:53 -0000 Received: from unknown (216.115.97.172) by m5.grp.snv.yahoo.com with QMQP; 1 Mar 2002 04:48:53 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO red.all.net) (12.232.72.152) by mta2.grp.snv.yahoo.com with SMTP; 1 Mar 2002 04:48:53 -0000 Received: (from fc@localhost) by red.all.net (8.11.2/8.11.2) id g214nEL31548 for iwar@onelist.com; Thu, 28 Feb 2002 20:49:14 -0800 Message-Id: <200203010449.g214nEL31548@red.all.net> To: iwar@onelist.com (Information Warfare Mailing List) Organization: I'm not allowed to say X-Mailer: don't even ask X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL3] From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net> X-Yahoo-Profile: fcallnet Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list iwar@yahoogroups.com Precedence: bulk List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:iwar-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com> Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002 20:49:14 -0800 (PST) Subject: [iwar] [fc:Deception.Is.Part.Of.The.Art.Of.War,.But.Shhhhhh!] Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit 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). ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Tiny Wireless Camera under $80! Order Now! FREE VCR Commander! Click Here - Only 1 Day Left! http://us.click.yahoo.com/nuyOHD/7.PDAA/yigFAA/kgFolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> ------------------ http://all.net/ Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 2002-12-31 02:15:04 PST