.
A

core element of art of deception is to convince the target that he or she came up with the idea themselves. Make them work for the evidence you want to give them.

Ben Macintyre, in his new book Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, describes what today we would call the British disinformation campaign in World War II. In the years leading up to the Normandy invasion, this campaign was vital to fooling the Germans about the location of the invasion. He describes a campaign, using double agents, to feed believable, but false, information to the Germans.

Macintyre quotes Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military expert, on the need for deception:

"The enemy must not know where I intend to give battle. For if he does not know where I intend to give battle he must prepare in a great many places. And when he prepares in a great many places, those I have to fight in any one place will be few. And when he prepares everywhere he will be weak everywhere."

The Western allies knew they could eventually bring overwhelming ground strength against the Germans, but they could not bring this for France immediately. For some days, the initial beachheads would be highly vulnerable to German attack. If the Germans decided to concentrate forces in Normandy, particularly several powerful Panzer divisions, the British and American forces might face disaster. So the goal was to convince the Germans that the invasion was coming elsewhere. The second goal was to make them think, when the Allied troops actually landed in Normandy, that this was not the main attack but only a diversion.

The plan worked, in both phases. Even when the Allies splashed ashore in Normandy, Adolf Hitler, the ultimate decision maker in Germany, refused to believe that “this was it” and refused to release troops from Pas De Calais, including armored divisions.

Hitler had a fanatical belief in his own instinctive judgment, a belief which only grew stronger as his judgment grew worse. But in 1944 his mind still might have been changed by enough evidence; the British made sure he got the wrong evidence. Through five double agents, they sent the Fuhrer enough evidence to confirm his (wrong) ideas.

The Nazi government paid the price for creating a culture in which independent thinking was discouraged, if not downright fatal. German intelligence experts were not inclined to question the party line on the war and the Allied plans. The one place where they were paid, at least for a while, to question Nazi conventional wisdom was the Abwehr, German foreign intelligence. The British did not know it, but they were actually aided by many senior Abwehr officials, including its commander Admiral Wilhelm Canaris; these men were strongly anti-Nazi and involved, to some extent, in plotting to overthrow or murder Hitler. Some of them ignored evidence which would have revealed the Allies’ real plans. Then, Heinrich Himmler and the SS further aided the British by taking over most Abwehr functions in the spring of 1944 and destroying the organization totally not long after that.

The British had two inside views of how their campaign was working. Ultra, which read all German messages aside from phone calls, could trace the passage of their information up the German food chain to the very top. Magic, the American ability to read Japanese communications, enabled reading telegrams from the Japanese ambassador, who had become a rare confidant of Hitler. to Berlin. The ambassador’s detailed and well-written reports to Tokyo were also read in Washington and London – sometimes before the Japanese had eyes on them, due to delays between Berlin and Tokyo. Thanks to Soviet agents Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin also knew what the ambassador was saying.

In this well written book the reader will meet the men, and a few women, who created and ran the project, including: Thomas Argule “Tar” Robertson, John Masterman, Gisela Anthony, Billy Luke, Christopher Harmer, Hugh Astor, and Mary Sherer. Readers will meet the German “spy masters,” duped, perhaps knowingly, into distributing British created information and even helping pay for the spy program. These include Hugo Bleicher, Oscar Reile, and Karl-Erich Kuhlenthal, not to mention Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr. Primarily, readers meet the double agents, the ones who the risks – sometimes travelling to Europe to meet their German bosses. Dusko Popov, Roman Czerniawski (perhaps the most effective agent), Lily Sergeyev (who had a code signal for the Germans, which she never used, that might have blown the whole effort), Juan Pujol Garcia (code named Garbo, in tribute to his ability to convince the Germans he had over twenty people in his personal network, none of who actually existed), and Elvira de la Fuente Chaudoir. Readers will meet Johnny Jebsen, captured by the Gestapo not long before D-Day, who revealed nothing. Jebsen was presumed dead when the war ended; however, in the best dramatic secret agent style, no direct evidence was found. Jebsen might have survived and chosen to vanish.

Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies is a good book, and strongly recommended. It is a work of military history in which no shots are fired. This is a work which constantly maintains its high level of suspense, even though how it ends is known; it is a study in “proactive” psychology, creative head games to get your enemy to ignore facts and reach certain wrong conclusions. It is also a lesson in making sure one has his or her facts right before reaching a conclusion in any matter. The good guys are not the only ones who can play head games.

The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.

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Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

January 16, 2013

A

core element of art of deception is to convince the target that he or she came up with the idea themselves. Make them work for the evidence you want to give them.

Ben Macintyre, in his new book Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, describes what today we would call the British disinformation campaign in World War II. In the years leading up to the Normandy invasion, this campaign was vital to fooling the Germans about the location of the invasion. He describes a campaign, using double agents, to feed believable, but false, information to the Germans.

Macintyre quotes Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military expert, on the need for deception:

"The enemy must not know where I intend to give battle. For if he does not know where I intend to give battle he must prepare in a great many places. And when he prepares in a great many places, those I have to fight in any one place will be few. And when he prepares everywhere he will be weak everywhere."

The Western allies knew they could eventually bring overwhelming ground strength against the Germans, but they could not bring this for France immediately. For some days, the initial beachheads would be highly vulnerable to German attack. If the Germans decided to concentrate forces in Normandy, particularly several powerful Panzer divisions, the British and American forces might face disaster. So the goal was to convince the Germans that the invasion was coming elsewhere. The second goal was to make them think, when the Allied troops actually landed in Normandy, that this was not the main attack but only a diversion.

The plan worked, in both phases. Even when the Allies splashed ashore in Normandy, Adolf Hitler, the ultimate decision maker in Germany, refused to believe that “this was it” and refused to release troops from Pas De Calais, including armored divisions.

Hitler had a fanatical belief in his own instinctive judgment, a belief which only grew stronger as his judgment grew worse. But in 1944 his mind still might have been changed by enough evidence; the British made sure he got the wrong evidence. Through five double agents, they sent the Fuhrer enough evidence to confirm his (wrong) ideas.

The Nazi government paid the price for creating a culture in which independent thinking was discouraged, if not downright fatal. German intelligence experts were not inclined to question the party line on the war and the Allied plans. The one place where they were paid, at least for a while, to question Nazi conventional wisdom was the Abwehr, German foreign intelligence. The British did not know it, but they were actually aided by many senior Abwehr officials, including its commander Admiral Wilhelm Canaris; these men were strongly anti-Nazi and involved, to some extent, in plotting to overthrow or murder Hitler. Some of them ignored evidence which would have revealed the Allies’ real plans. Then, Heinrich Himmler and the SS further aided the British by taking over most Abwehr functions in the spring of 1944 and destroying the organization totally not long after that.

The British had two inside views of how their campaign was working. Ultra, which read all German messages aside from phone calls, could trace the passage of their information up the German food chain to the very top. Magic, the American ability to read Japanese communications, enabled reading telegrams from the Japanese ambassador, who had become a rare confidant of Hitler. to Berlin. The ambassador’s detailed and well-written reports to Tokyo were also read in Washington and London – sometimes before the Japanese had eyes on them, due to delays between Berlin and Tokyo. Thanks to Soviet agents Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin also knew what the ambassador was saying.

In this well written book the reader will meet the men, and a few women, who created and ran the project, including: Thomas Argule “Tar” Robertson, John Masterman, Gisela Anthony, Billy Luke, Christopher Harmer, Hugh Astor, and Mary Sherer. Readers will meet the German “spy masters,” duped, perhaps knowingly, into distributing British created information and even helping pay for the spy program. These include Hugo Bleicher, Oscar Reile, and Karl-Erich Kuhlenthal, not to mention Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr. Primarily, readers meet the double agents, the ones who the risks – sometimes travelling to Europe to meet their German bosses. Dusko Popov, Roman Czerniawski (perhaps the most effective agent), Lily Sergeyev (who had a code signal for the Germans, which she never used, that might have blown the whole effort), Juan Pujol Garcia (code named Garbo, in tribute to his ability to convince the Germans he had over twenty people in his personal network, none of who actually existed), and Elvira de la Fuente Chaudoir. Readers will meet Johnny Jebsen, captured by the Gestapo not long before D-Day, who revealed nothing. Jebsen was presumed dead when the war ended; however, in the best dramatic secret agent style, no direct evidence was found. Jebsen might have survived and chosen to vanish.

Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies is a good book, and strongly recommended. It is a work of military history in which no shots are fired. This is a work which constantly maintains its high level of suspense, even though how it ends is known; it is a study in “proactive” psychology, creative head games to get your enemy to ignore facts and reach certain wrong conclusions. It is also a lesson in making sure one has his or her facts right before reaching a conclusion in any matter. The good guys are not the only ones who can play head games.

The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.