Deadly Fun

For Your Ears Only, Mein Fuehrer 

Disinformation has been a deep art of warfare for time immemorial.  The old aphorism, "the first thing to die in war is the truth" has a general application, but using fiction as a weapon against the enemy is in a different class entirely. 

It is difficult to overestimate the crucial contribution misinformation made to the defeat of Hitler and the Axis Powers.  It turns out that the British contribution was influenced by a novelist who wrote spy stories.  It was a case of life imitating art.  Dennis Wheatley was a spy thriller writer whose main character, Gregory Sallust was in deadly action against the Nazis.  Wheatley was quick to market, writing stories set in events just four months prior to publication, in some cases.

Then Churchill hired him as part of the Deception Team.
  The plot he was charged with writing was a fictional account of a false invasion into Europe.  It was intended ultimately for just one reader, Adolf Hitler.  Tina Rosenberg, interviewed in Harpers documents a story where the truth was much more incredible than fiction. 

Wheatley carried out deceptions on two levels: in his books, and in real life.  His real-life deception work was unprecedented.  Tactical deception is as old as battle, of course. What was new was the idea of investing in lies for the long term.

For example, Operation Bodyguard . . .  aimed to make Hitler believe that the invasion of Normandy was itself only a feint — that the real invasion, with a million men, would come later at Pas de Calais. That’s how Britain kept Hitler from moving his troops away from Pas de Calais to Normandy. Even after the Allied expedition landed in Normandy and began fighting its way south, it took Hitler over seven weeks to start moving his forces from Pas de Calais, because he was still waiting for the “real” invasion.

Why did Hitler fall for this deception?  Because the deceivers had spent years inducing him to wildly overestimate Allied troop strength. The week before D-Day, Hitler thought the Allies could command more than eighty divisions in Britain. In truth, there were only fifty-two.

Deception worked like this: First, Wheatley and his colleagues drew up a cover story (“story” is actually the term of art) for each operation — what they wanted Hitler to believe. Then they began to scatter crumbs for the Nazis to find. Wheatley created enormous charts detailing what lies to tell on what date, and through what channel.  Diplomatic gossip? False reports by double agents?  Physical means such as “losing” a rucksack or a dead body? Nothing too direct or it wouldn’t be believable — the Germans had to gradually construct the story themselves.

That is how to write a deception plan. It’s also how to write a novel.  The biggest difference was that instead of writing for millions of readers, Wheatley was writing for just one.

There were three key elements that made this particular deception work.   The first was possession of the Enigma codes which enabled the Deception Team to keep their story realistic.

But in real life, Wheatley relied heavily on signals intelligence. Since Britain had cracked the German Enigma ciphers, they could listen to the Nazis’ radio communications. Wheatley could thereby tailor his deception plans to what Hitler already knew and believed.

Secondly, British Intelligence had done a remarkable job in turning Nazi spies in Britain so they became facile tools in spreading Wheatley's disinformation data and stories.

One could argue, however, that the Germans lost the war because they lacked human intelligence. The deceivers’ most important channels to Germany were Nazi agents in Britain who had been doubled.  In June 1942, the British came to the astonishing realization that every single German agent in Britain was a double.  They would control them for the rest of the war. This meant they could feed the Germans outrageous deceptions with no fear of being contradicted by real agents. Wheatley had started his deception work thinking he had to do everything short of invasion in order to simulate an imminent invasion.  But once the deceivers realized there were no real German agents inside Britain, all they had to do was write radio plays. 

Thirdly, the megalomania and paranoia of Hitler combined to make him far more easily subject to deception.  Racked with the distortion of fictional conspiracy theories, he was relatively easy to manipulate.

But the Nazis’ most important vulnerability was that their leader was a megalomaniac who made decisions on whim and instinct. There was no coordinated system for filtering intelligence up to Nazi decision-makers, and when it did reach the top, it was often ignored. What crossed Hitler’s desk was determined by which officers he had seen that day. And he would pay attention only to information that supported views he already held — so of course that’s what his subordinates tended to show him.

And so it came to pass.  We have no doubt that Wheatley's story writing and its effective publication to one set of ears in Germany facilitated the turning of the tide at a critical juncture of World War II.