A Treasury of Deception

by Michael Farquhar

  4

  Stretching the Troops

  A few years before he became one of the Ku Klux Klan’s charter members, Nathan Bedford Forrest was among the Confederacy’s craftiest generals. On a number of occasions during the Civil War, Forrest successfully demanded the surrender of much larger Union forces by use of a ploy as old as scripture.

  The Book of Judges records Gideon’s defeat of a vast army of Midianites with only trumpets and torches, the latter hidden in clay jars. After he had surrounded the Midianite camp at dark with his tiny force of three hundred men, Gideon ordered his soldiers to blare their trumpets and smash open the clay pots with the torches inside at his signal. When they did, the resulting flash and din convinced the Midianites that they were surrounded by a massive force. They scattered and fled in a blind panic.

  Forrest adopted a similar tactic in 1863. He called for the surrender of the Union troops of Colonel Abel Streight near Rome, Georgia, after a long march that had exhausted both sides. Though he was significantly outnumbered, Forrest created an illusion of strength. He had only two artillery pieces, for example, but he ordered them passed back and forth across Streight’s line of vision as the two parlayed. “Name of God!” Streight exclaimed after watching this demonstration for a while. “How many guns have you got? There’s fifteen I’ve counted already!” Forrest glanced in the direction the Union commander was looking and replied nonchalantly, “I reckon that’s all that has kept up.”

  As the discussion with Streight continued, Forrest periodically issued fake orders for the movement of troops that did not in fact exist. The few Confederates that were there marched back and forth across Streight’s line of sight, just as the artillery men had done with the two guns. It was a simple ploy, but it was enough to fool the Union commander. Streight ordered the surrender of fifteen hundred Federals to a rebel force half that size. It was, declared George W. Adair, editor of the Southern Confederacy, “the boldest game of bluff on record. . . . For cool audacity, it excels all history or imagination.” Adair exaggerated slightly, but less than two years later his old friend Forrest pulled a similar stunt with even more remarkable results.

  Union forces held a fort in Athens, Alabama, that defended the Central Alabama Railroad. The structure was “one of the best works of the kind I ever saw,” noted a federal inspector of such defenses. Forrest wanted it surrendered. “Knowing it would cost heavily to storm and capture the enemy’s works, and wishing to prevent the effusion of blood I knew would follow a successful assault, I determined to see if anything could be accomplished by negotiations,” Forrest later reported. “Accordingly, I sent Major Strange, of my staff, with a flag of truce, demanding the surrender of the fort and garrison.”

  Union colonel Wallace Campbell, who had already been fed misleading information about the enemy’s strength by two Confederate prisoners, agreed to a personal interview with Forrest. “[I] immediately met General Forrest,” reported Campbell, “[who] told me he was determined to take the place; that his force was sufficiently large, and have it he would, and if he was compelled to storm the works it would result in the massacre of the entire garrison. He told me what his force was, and said myself and one officer could have the privilege of reviewing [it].”

  Forrest gave Campbell a guided tour of his troops, the relatively small size of which was cleverly concealed. Dismounted cavalry were identified as infantry; horse-holders as cavalry. The same elements were then dispersed to other parts of the field to play different roles until, wrote one Confederate, “the whole place seemed to be swarming with enthusiastic troops and bristling with guns.” Campbell, convinced, as he later wrote, “that there were at least 10,000 men and nine pieces of artillery,” duly surrendered the fort.

  The audacious trick only added to the luster of Forrest, respectfully known in the South as “the Wizard of the Saddle.” Of course in the North, the epithets were somewhat less laudatory. General William Tecumseh Sherman called him “the very devil,” but later acknowledged, “He had a genius which was to me incomprehensible.”

  5

  Warning: Smoking May Be Hazardous to Your Success

  Captain Richard Meinertzhagen discovered one sure way to end a stalemate during World War I. He tricked the enemy into getting stoned. That and a few other deceptions allowed British forces under General Edmund Allenby to break through a line in the Gaza desert that had been stubbornly defended by Turkish and German troops and take the Holy Land.

  The first step was to convince the enemy that the British planned an attack on heavily fortified Gaza, and that troop movement around the true target of Beersheba, some thirty miles east of Gaza and significantly less defended, was only a feint. Captain Meinertzhagen helped to give this impression by planting on the Turks a staff officer’s notebook filled, as he later wrote, with “all sorts of nonsense about our plans and difficulties.” The dummy notebook was stuffed into a canvas sack, along with an amount of cash large enough to indicate that the bag had not been lost intentionally. Other authenticating items were added as well, like a letter supposedly written by the wife of the nonexistent officer, and a valuable cipher of British secret codes.

  Meinertzhagen then rode into the no-man’s-land between the British and Turco-German lines in search of a patrol. When one fired on him, he dropped the sack—previously stained with horse’s blood—and, pretending to be wounded, retreated back to his own line. The Turks retrieved the sack, which was then sent to German headquarters for analysis, while the British made a show of searching for it. Under the assumption that the enemy would use the cipher discovered in the bag, along with the dummy notebook, Meinertzhagen began to feed them false information from the British radio station in Egypt. One of the most significant bits of false data was that the supposed attack on Gaza would not occur before November 14 because British commander Edmund Allenby would be on leave until November 7. Meanwhile, the real assault on Beersheba was set for October 30.

  British intelligence indicated that the enemy believed the ruse and had planned accordingly. It was then that Meinertzhagen launched the last phase of his plan. As British forces moved quietly from Gaza to Beersheba, leaving behind a “cavalry” of straw horses, he had one hundred and twenty thousand packs of cigarettes dropped over enemy lines. Whereas before the cigarette packages always contained propaganda messages, these smokes were laced with opium. What seemed like manna from heaven to the tobacco-starved Turks turned out to be a plague that paralyzed them. On October 30, 1917, the attack on Beersheba began. The city’s defenders were sound asleep, too stoned to repel the invasion. From Beersheba, the British moved on to Gaza and then the rest of Pales-tine, leaving the Ottoman Empire crushed like a cigarette butt. “Meinertzhagen’s device won the battle,” Prime Minister David Lloyd George later wrote. He was “one of the ablest and most successful brains I had met in any army. . . . Needless to say he never rose in the war above the rank of Colonel.”

  6

  Drowned and Dirty: The Man Who Never Was

  Doped cigarettes and bloodied knapsacks seem almost primitive next to the masterly deceptions executed during World War II. One of the most successful came on the eve of the Allied invasion of southern Europe in 1943. It’s the story of the man who never was.

  The Allies wanted Hitler to believe that they were going to invade by descending on the islands of Sardinia and Pelopónnisos, not Sicily as was actually planned. Any ruse capable of making the Germans believe there would be two invasions, eight hundred miles apart, had to be breathtaking. The British decided a dead man would carry the false message, and dubbed the plan Operation Mincemeat. The corpse, carrying phony invasion strategies in a briefcase chained to its wrist, would be floated off the coast of Spain, which teemed with German spies and operatives. If all went well, the body would be recovered and its false secrets revealed.

  To help ensure the plan’s success, scrupulous attention was devoted to detail. The perfect body had to look as though it had been in an air crash and then drow
ned. After an exhaustive search, the corpse of a man who had died from exposure and pneumonia was discovered and recruited. The lungs were already filled with fluid. With the body in cold storage, operatives devised a name, service, and rank for it. He was to be called Major William Martin. They were, however, unable to use a photograph of the corpse for a fake identity card. “It is impossible to describe how utterly and hopelessly dead any photograph of the body looked,” one operative wrote. The situation was saved when an officer who resembled the dead man posed for the picture.

  The corpse’s clothes were stuffed with everyday props—theater ticket stubs, an invitation to a London nightclub, notice of an overdrawn bank account, a picture of his fiancée, love letters, and a cranky letter from his father complaining about fuel rationing. Lord Louis Mountbatten added a touch of his own to explain why a relatively junior officer would have in his possession such important invasion documents. He wrote a personal letter to the British commander in the Mediterranean that said Major Martin was an expert in the employment of landing craft. “He is quite shy at first,” Mountbatten wrote in the phony missive, “but he really knows his stuff. . . . Let me have him back, please, as soon as the assault is over.”

  All was now ready. After the conspirators selected the ideal spot in terms of winds and tides, “Major Martin” was launched. The plan was an evident success. After the major’s body had been recovered, his effects were shipped back to London and scientific analysis indicated that the secret letters had been opened and carefully resealed. While conferring with President Roosevelt in Washington, British prime minister Winston Churchill received a succinct message : “Mincemeat swallowed whole.” The success of the venture became evident several weeks later when Allied forces met little resistance at Sicily. The enemy had moved. To this day, the true identity of the operation’s dead hero has never been revealed.

  7

  Phantom Force

  As much as Churchill savored the success of Mincemeat, it was merely an appetizer for the smorgasbord of deception that surrounded the Allied invasion of France in 1944. Never in the history of warfare had there been such a staggering challenge—to smash through the Nazi fortress of Europe from the sea. And never had secrecy and surprise been more imperative. If Hitler learned that the Allied assault was to be centered in Normandy, he would mass his forces there and shred the invaders as they landed. The expedition would be doomed, hundreds of thousands of lives lost, and the war effort gravely compromised. It was critical, therefore, that Allied intentions be carefully hidden from Hitler and his Wehrmacht—a task for which the British had proven themselves fully qualified. (See previous two chapters.)

  “In warfare,” Churchill once remarked, “truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” The great prime minister certainly appreciated the value of this most subversive form of fighting, and from his comment emerged the code name for all cover and deception operations surrounding the invasion of Europe: Plan Bodyguard. Some of the kingdom’s craftiest minds devised brilliant schemes to trick the Nazis. The goal was to make them believe the invasion of Europe could come anywhere—as far north as Norway, all the way down to the Mediterranean— and thus cause them to stretch their forces thin in defense of the entire continent. There were misleading radio reports that were designed to be intercepted by the enemy. Captured German spies were compelled to feed their masters false information, while bogus reconnaissance missions were sent to potential landing sites. And of invaluable help in all the deceptive operations was the intelligence derived from the Nazis’ secret Enigma codes that had been cracked at the beginning of the war—a fact the Allies took drastic measures to keep concealed from the enemy.7

  Perhaps the most elaborate in the Allied bodyguard of lies was the First United States Army Group (FUSAG), an almost entirely fictitious fighting force. What appeared to be a massive buildup of fifty divisions and a million men in southeastern England was in reality a masterful illusion. The object of Quicksilver, the code name of this particular element of Plan Bodyguard, was to make Hitler think the Allies intended to invade France at the Pas-de-Calais, and that Normandy was only a diversion to lure German forces away from the prime landing sight. Hitler was already inclined to believe that the Pas-de-Calais would be the center of attack, and kept one of his strongest divisions there to defend it. The Allies intended to keep it that way while they stormed Normandy.

  The creation of the imaginary FUSAG turned a swath of southeastern England into something like a giant film set that dwarfed any spectacle Cecil B. DeMille ever produced. From the air it was to appear that a mighty force was gathering. Rivers and lakes around the region were filled with fake landing ships made of tubular scaffolding and canvas and floated on oil drums. Smoke that coiled from the “ship” funnels added to the illusion, as did oil patches in the water around them. Other elements of FUSAG were also fabricated, in-cludingammunition dumps, field kitchens, hospitals, troop encampments, and fuel lines. One morning a local farmer awoke to find a mass of tanks assembled in his fields. A bull charged one of them, and, rather than being knocked unconscious, walked away as the “tank” hissed and slowly deflated. It was, like all the others, inflatable.

  Sporadic radio noises, meant to simulate a large army group, were periodically sent out into the ether, while planted newspaper reports described life around the ever expanding military base. One story described a local vicar who was livid over the moral collapse that accompanied the vast number of foreign troops assembling in the region, and another concerned “the immense numbers of rubber contraceptives” found around American paratroop bases.

  One of the more clever illusions was a fake oil dock from which a pipeline under the English Channel would supposedly supply the invading armies at the Pas-de-Calais. The dock, made almost entirely of camouflaged scaffolding, fiberboard, and old sewage pipes, occupied nearly three miles of the English shoreline. Wind machines blew up dust to make it appear that construction was moving apace and to disguise the fact that there were only a few people working on the project. King George VI came to “inspect” the dock, while the Royal Air Force flew fighter patrols as if to protect the vital installation. German reconnaissance aircraft were allowed to fly overhead, but only after the fighter patrols made a show of engaging them. And when the Germans shelled the artificial dock with long-range missiles, massive sodium flares were lit to mimic the raging fires that accompanied direct hits.

  To give FUSAG even more credibility, General George C. Patton was sent to Britain to head the phantom force. Though the famed American general was less than thrilled with the prospect of leading an army that didn’t exist, he was an inspired choice. The Germans knew him and respected him, and his assignment to FUSAG could only underscore for them how important this force was to the Allies.

  No matter how cleverly the elements of Quicksilver were executed, the Allies knew it would take more than rubber tanks and cardboard docks to trick the Germans into believing FUSAG existed as a true fighting force. Even Patton wasn’t enough. The enemy needed details surreptitiously fed to them, like the location and identity of various formations. That’s where German spies under Allied control were utilized. False information about FUSAG was relayed by a group of double agents believed by the Nazis to be reliable. And though there were some perilous episodes in which Quicksilver was almost exposed, this part of the ruse was most successful. After one particularly newsy dispatch, for example, a German intelligence officer informed the führer that valuable information about Allied plans for the invasion of France at Calais had been obtained. “The authenticity of the report was checked and proved,” the officer stated. “It contains information about three armies, three army corps, and twenty-three [divisions] among which the location of only one need be regarded as questionable. The report confirms our operational picture.”

  One highly decorated German officer was the unwitting source of further misinformation. General Hans Cramer, who had been captured by the Allie
s in Tunisia, was in failing health and was to be sent back to Germany as part of a repatriation program run by the Swedish Red Cross. Before he left, however, he was to be given a glimpse of FUSAG to take home with him. On the journey from his prison camp in Wales to London, Cramer was driven through an area where an immense buildup of armor, shipping, and aircraft was taking place. He was told it was FUSAG in southeastern England, although what Cramer really saw were the actual preparations being made elsewhere in England for the invasion of Normandy. Cramer had no way of knowing where he was because all signposts and other identifying markers throughout Britain had been removed earlier in the war. So, like a good Nazi, Cramer dutifully informed his superiors of what he had seen and heard. Thus, FUSAG was officially verified by one of Germany’s top generals.

  On June 6, 1944—D-Day—the largest invasion force ever assembled hit Normandy. Though fighting was fierce, and many lives were lost, the Allies were able to gain a foothold on the continent. To maintain it, however, the fiction of FUSAG had to be maintained. Hitler had to remain convinced that this imaginary force was still poised to strike at Calais. Otherwise, he would send the defenders there to Normandy, which would have devastating consequences. Here Churchill played a part in the grand deception. He announced in the House of Commons that the D-Day assault at Normandy had commenced, but he broadly suggested that another assault on France was to follow. Other Allied leaders did the same. “The Germans appear to expect landings elsewhere,” President Franklin Roosevelt said in an address to the nation. “Let them speculate. We are content to wait on events.”