The United States in particular has always been a haven for those seeking to leave tyranny and espouse freedom. It will always have a welcome for those who do not wish to continue to work for the Kremlin.
10
Confusing the Adversary
In intelligence, the term “deception” covers a wide variety of maneuvers by which a state attempts to mislead another state, generally a potential or actual enemy, as to its own capabilities and intentions. Its best-known use is in wartime or just prior to the outbreak of war, when its main purpose is to draw enemy defenses away from a planned point of attack, or to give the impression that there will be no attack at all or simply to confuse the opponent about one’s plans and purposes.
As a technique, deception is as old as history. Notable instances come down to us from Homer and Thucydides: the Trojan horse that led to the fall of Troy and the strategy of the Greeks attacking Syracuse in 415 B.C. In the latter case the Greeks infiltrated a plausible agent into the ranks of the Syracusans, lured them to attack the Greek camp at some distance from the city and meanwhile put their whole army on board ship and sailed for Syracuse, which was left practically undefended.
During the kind of peace we now call Cold War, various other forms of deception, including political deception, are being practiced against us by the Soviets, often involving the use of forgeries. Deception took an even less subtle form in Cuba when the Soviets, while vigorously denying any complicity in installing their intermediate-range or offensive-type missiles, were caught in the act.
As a strategic maneuver, deception generally requires lengthy and careful preparation. Intelligence must first ascertain what the enemy thinks and what he expects, because the misleading information which is going to be put into his hands must be plausible and not outside the practical range of plans that the enemy knows are capable of being put into operation. Intelligence must then devise a way of getting the deception to the enemy. Success depends on close coordination between the military command and the intelligence service.
After the Allies had driven the Germans out of North Africa in 1943, it was clear to all that their next move would be into southern Europe. The question was where. Since Sicily was an obvious steppingstone and was in fact the Allied objective, it was felt that every effort should be made to give the Germans and Italians the impression that the Allies were going to by-pass it. To have tried to persuade the Germans that there was to be no attack at all or that it was going to move across Spain was out of the question, for these maneuvers would not have been credible. The deception had to point to something within the expected range.
For quick and effective placement of plausible deception directly into the hands of the enemy’s high command, few methods beat the “accident,” so long as it seems logical and has all the appearances of being a wonderfully lucky break for the enemy. Such an accident was cleverly staged by the British in 1943 before the invasion of Sicily, and it was accepted by the Germans at the time as completely genuine. Early in May of that year the corpse of a British major was found washed up on the southwest coast of Spain near the town of Huelva, between the Portuguese border and Gibraltar. A courier briefcase was still strapped to his wrist containing copies of correspondence to General Alexander in Tunisia from the Imperial General Staff. These papers clearly hinted at an Allied plan to invade southern Europe via Sardinia and Greece. As we learned after the war, the Germans fully believed these hints. Hitler sent an armored division to Greece, and the Italian garrison on Sicily was not reinforced.
This was perhaps one of the best cases of deception utilizing a single move in recent intelligence history. It was called “Operation Mincemeat,” and the story of its execution has been fully told by one of the main planners of the affair, Ewen Montagu.1 It was a highly sophisticated feat, made possible by the circumstances of modern warfare and the techniques if modern science. There was nothing illogical about the possibility that a plane on which an officer carrying important documents was a passenger could have come down, or that a body from the crash could have been washed up on the Spanish shore.
1 The Man Who Never Was (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1954).
Actually, the body of a recently dead civilian was used for this operation. He was dressed in the uniform of a British major; in his pockets were all the identification papers, calling cards and odds and ends necessary to authenticate him as Major Martin. He was floated into Spain from a British submarine, which surfaced close enough to the Spanish coast to make sure that he would reach his target without fail. And he did.
“Overlord,” the combined Allied invasion of Normandy, in June, 1944, also made effective use of deception—in this case not an isolated ruse but a variety of misleading maneuvers closely coordinated with each other. They succeeded, as is well known, in keeping the Germans guessing as to the exact area of the intended Allied landing. False rumors were circulated among our own troops on the theory that German agents in England would pick them up and report them. Radio channels to agents in the French underground were utilized to pass deceptive orders and requests for action to back up the coming Allied landings; it was known that certain of these agents were under the control of the Germans and would pass on to them messages received from the Allies. Such agents therefore constituted a direct channel to the German intelligence service. In order to make the Germans think that the landings would take place in the Le Havre area, agents in the vicinity were asked to make certain observations, thereby indicating to the Germans a heightened Allied interest in fortifications, rail traffic, etc. Lastly, military reconnaissance itself was organized in such a way as to emphasize an urgent interest in places where the attack would not come. Fewer aerial reconnaissance sorties were flown over the Normandy beaches than over Le Havre and other likely areas. Rumors were spread of a diversionary attack on Norway to prevent a concentration of forces in the North of France.
There are essentially two ways of planting deceptive information with the enemy. One can stage the kind of accident the British did in Spain. Such accidents are plausible because they do, after all, frequently occur solely as a result of the misfortunes of war. History is full of instances where couriers loaded with important dispatches fell into enemy hands. The other way is to plant an agent with the enemy who is ostensibly reporting to him about your plans as the Athenians did at Syracuse. He can be a “deserter” or some kind of “neutral.” The problem, as in all counterespionage penetrations, is to get the enemy to trust the agent. He cannot simply turn up with dramatic military information and expect to be believed unless he can explain his motives and how he got his information.
A wholly modern deception channel came into being with the use of radio. For example, a parachutist lands in enemy territory equipped with a portable transmitter and is captured. He confesses he has been sent on a mission to spy on enemy troop movements and to communicate with his intelligence headquarters by radio. Such an agent stands a good chance of being shot after making this confession; he may be shot before he has a chance to make it. The probability is high, however, that his captors will decide he is more useful alive than dead because his radio provides a direct channel for feeding deception to the opponent’s intelligence service. If the intelligence service which sent the agent knows, however, that he has been captured and is under enemy control, it can continue to send him questions with the intent of deceiving the other side. If it asks for a report on troop concentrations in sector A, it gives the impression that some military action is planned there. This was one tactic used by the Allies in preparation for the Normandy landings.
A lesser and essentially defensive kind of deception involves the camouflaging of important targets. To deceive Nazi bombers during World War II, airfields in Britain were made to look like farms from the air. Sod was placed over the hangars and maintenance shacks were given the appearance of barns, sheds and outbuildings. Even more important, mock-ups
were set up in other areas to look like real airfields with planes on them. Elsewhere mocked-up naval vessels were stationed where the real might well have been.
The mounting of strategic deception calls for the close cooperation and high security of all parts of government engaged in the effort. For a democratic government this is difficult except under wartime controls.
For the Soviets, of course, the situation is somewhat easier. With their centralized organization and complete control of the press and of dissemination of information within their country or to foreign countries from the U.S.S.R., they can support a deception operation far more efficiently than we can. Often the Soviets put armaments on display with a certain amount of fanfare in order to draw attention away from other armaments they may have in their arsenal or may plan to have. Sometimes they exhibit mock-ups of planes and other equipment, which may never see the light of day as operational types.
For example, on Aviation Day in July, 1955, in the presence of diplomatic and military representatives in Moscow there was a “fly-by” of a new type of Soviet heavy bomber. The number far exceeded what was thought to be available. The impression was thus given that many more had lately come off the assembly line and that the Soviets were therefore committed to an increasing force of heavy bombers. Later it was surmised that the same squadron had been flying around in circles, reappearing every few minutes. The purpose was to emphasize Soviet bomber production. In fact, they were soon to shift the emphasis to missiles.
Deception can also use social channels. A Soviet diplomat drops a remark in deepest confidence to a colleague from a neutral country at a dinner party, knowing that the neutral colleague also goes to British and American dinner parties. This “casual remark” was contained in a directive from the Soviet Foreign Office. When it is studied in intelligence headquarters somewhere in the West, it is found to agree in substance with something said by a Soviet official at a cocktail party ten thousand miles away. Thus, the two remarks seem to confirm each other. In reality both men were speaking as mouthpieces in a program of political deception which the Soviets coordinate with their ever-shifting plots in Berlin, Laos, the Congo, Cuba and whatever is next on the program.
One of the most successful long-range political deceptions of the Communists convinced gullible people in the West before and during World War II that the Chinese people’s movement was not Communistic, but a social and “agrarian” reform movement. This fiction was planted through Communist-influenced journalists in the Far East and penetrated organizations in the West.
The Soviets have centralized the responsibility for planning and launching deception operations in a special department of the State Security Service (KGB) known as the “Disinformation Bureau.” In recent years this office has been particularly busy formulating and distributing what purport to be official documents of the United States, Britain and other countries of the Free World. Its intention is to misstate and misrepresent the policies and purposes of these countries. In June of 1961, Mr. Richard Helms, a high official of the Central Intelligence Agency, presented the evidence of this activity to a Congressional committee. Out of the mass of forgeries available, he selected thirty-two particularly succulent ones, which were fabricated in the period 1957–60.
He pointed out that the Russian secret service has a long history of forging documents, having concocted the Protocols of Zion over sixty years ago to promote anti-Semitism. The Soviets have been adept pupils of their czarist predecessors. Their forgeries nowadays, he pointed out, are intended to discredit the West, and the United States in particular, in the eyes of the rest of the world; to sow suspicion and discord among the Western allies; and to drive a wedge between the peoples of non-Communist countries and their governments by promoting the notion that these governments are the puppets of the United States.
The falsified documents include various communications purporting to be from high officials to the President of the United States, letters to and from the Secretary of State or high State Department, Defense Department and USIA officials. To the initiated, these documents are patent fabrications; while some of the texts are cleverly conceived, there are always a great number of technical errors and inconsistencies. Unfortunately, these are not apparent to the audiences for which the letters are intended, generally the peoples of the newly independent nations. The documents are prepared for mass consumption rather than the elite. One of the most subtle, supposedly part of a British Cabinet paper, wholly misrepresented the U.S. and British attitude with respect to trade-union policies in Africa.
A typical Soviet forgery which appeared in an English-language newspaper in India consisted of two spurious telegrams allegedly sent by the American Ambassador in Taipeh to the Secretary of State in Washington commenting on various wholly fictitious proposals for doing away with Chiang Kai-shek. In order to explain how the “telegrams” had fallen into their hands, the Soviets cleverly exploited the fact that a mob had shortly before raided our embassy in Taipeh.
The forgery technique is particularly useful to the Communists because they possess the means for wide and fast distribution. Newspapers and news outlets are available to them on a world-wide basis. While many of these outlets are tarnished and suspect because of Communist affiliations, they are nevertheless capable of placing a fabrication before millions of people in a short time. The denials and the pinpointing of the evidence of fabrication ride so far behind the initial publication that the forgeries have already made their impact in spreading deception. On the other hand, the technique of forgery is not so readily available to Western intelligence in peacetime, for, quite apart from ethical considerations, there is too much danger of deceiving and misleading our own people and our free press.
When one deliberately misleads, sometimes friend as well as foe is misled. And later the deceiver may not be believed when he wishes to be. This is the situation of the Soviets today after Cuba.
Often the very fear of deception has blinded an opponent to the real value of the information which accidents or intelligence operations have placed in his hands.
As Sir Walter Scott wrote:
Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive!
If you suspect an enemy of constant trickery, then almost anything that happens can be taken as one of his tricks. A collateral effect of deception, once a single piece of deception has succeeded in its purpose, is to upset and confuse the opponent’s judgment and evaluation of other intelligence he may receive. He will be suspicious and distrustful. He will not want to be caught off guard.
On January 10, 1940, during the first year of World War II, a German courier plane flying between two points in Germany lost its way in the clouds, ran out of fuel and made a forced landing in what turned out to be Belgium. On board were the complete plans of the German invasion of France through Belgium, for which Hitler had already given marching orders. When the Luftwaffe major who had been piloting the plane realized where he had landed, he quickly built a fire out of brush and tried to burn all the papers he had on board, but Belgian authorities reached him before he could finish the job and retrieved half-burned and unburned documents to be able to piece together the German plan.
Some of the high British and French officials who studied the material felt that the whole thing was a German deception operation. How could the Germans be so sloppy as to allow a small plane to go aloft so close to the Belgian border in bad weather with a completely detailed invasion plan on board? This reasoning focused on the circumstances, not on the contents of the papers. Churchill writes that he opposed this interpretation. Putting himself in the place of the German leaders, he asked himself what possible advantage there was at that moment in perpetrating a deception of this sort, i.e., alerting Belgium and Holland by faking invasion plans. Obviously, none. As we learned after the war, the invasion of Belgium, which had been set for the sixteenth of January—six days af
ter the plane came down—was postponed by Hitler primarily because the plans had fallen into the Allies’ hands.
Accidents like this are not the only events that raise the specter of deception. It has already been pointed out that if you send a deception agent to the enemy, you have to make him credible. Bona fide windfalls have sometimes been doubted and neglected because they were suspected of being deception. This happened to the Nazis late in World War II in the case of “Cicero,” the Albanian valet of the British Ambassador to Turkey. He had succeeded in cracking the ambassador’s private safe and had access to top-secret British documents on the conduct of the war. One day he offered to sell them to the Germans as well as to continue supplying similar documents.
His offer was accepted, but some of Hitler’s experts in Berlin could never quite believe that this wasn’t a British trick. Their reasons, however, were more complex than in the cases where deception alone is feared. The incident is also an excellent example of how prejudice and preconception can cause failure properly to evaluate valid intelligence. For one thing, the Cicero documents gave evidence of the massive Allied offensives to come and the growing power of the Allies—information which collided head on with illusions cherished in the highest Nazi circles. Second, competition and discord among different organs of the German government prevented it from making a sober analysis of this source. The intelligence service under Himmler and Kaltenbrunner and the diplomatic service under Ribbentrop were at odds and, as a result, if Kaltenbrunner thought information was good, Ribbentrop automatically tended to think it was bad. An objective analysis of the operational data was out of the question in a situation where rival cutthroats were vying for position and prestige. In the Cicero case, Ribbentrop and the diplomatic service suspected deception. The net effect was that, as far as can be ascertained, the Cicero material never had any appreciable influence on Nazi strategy. Contrary to the general impression, there is also no evidence that the Nazis gained from Cicero any information about the planned invasion of Europe except possibly the code work for the operation—“Overlord.”
The Craft of Intelligence Page 19
