SUBSCRIBER+EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW — In all of U.S. military history, few events have depended more on secrecy and subterfuge than Operation Overlord, which was launched on June 6, 1944 – D-Day, as it came to be known. The information war that preceded D-Day was as important as the military preparations themselves.
It was no secret that an allied assault against German-occupied Europe was coming, and so the nations involved, led by Great Britain, created elaborate deceptions to mislead the Germans about the timing and location. An entire mission – dubbed Operation Double Cross – was set up to convince Hitler and his commanders that the landings were aimed not at Normandy but at Calais, some 150 miles to the east.
This week, as a dwindling number of surviving veterans mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day, and some 25 heads of state including President Joe Biden gather in Normandy for the occasion, The Cipher Brief poses a question: Could such a mission succeed in this day and age? Would the various tricks employed by the allies – dummy landing craft and parachute dolls, to name two – fool anyone today? And could crucial operational secrets hold for months, in this era of sophisticated satellite imagery, social media, and the lightning-fast spread of information?
Cipher Brief expert John McLaughlin is ideally suited to tackle these questions – given his long career at the Central Intelligence Agency, a deep knowledge of U.S. history, and the fact that in his capacity as a professor at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, McLaughlin recently led a group of students on a trip to Europe to study the 1940 Battle of Britain and many of the events that followed, leading ultimately to the 1944 landings that have become synonymous with courage and brilliant military planning. Cipher Brief Managing Editor Tom Nagorski spoke with McLaughlin this week, for his reflections on whether a modern-day Operation Overlord could succeed in this very different time.
THE CONTEXT
- U.S. and Allied forces invaded the beaches at Normandy in northern France on June 6, 1944 as part of efforts to liberate France from occupation by Nazi Germany.
- Around 156,000 Allied troops landed at Normandy by the end of the day, in an operation that ultimately involved 326,000 troops. Around 4,000 Allied troops were killed in the invasion. It was the largest amphibious invasion in military history.
- The Allies conducted a massive deception operation to make Nazi Germany believe the target of an Allied cross-Channel invasion would be Pas-de-Calais instead of Normandy.
THE INTERVIEW
The Cipher Brief: Help us with a little history, for starters: Does anything in U.S. history compare to D-Day, in terms of the use of feints and deception?
McLaughlin: I think you would have to go back to our Revolutionary War to find a pattern of feints and disinformation that even approaches what took place on D-Day. George Washington was a skilled practitioner of deception and intelligence, and he used every trick in the book. He used secret writing – writing that was only revealed when a certain chemical was applied to the letters and communications he sent. He used double agents on a number of occasions, particularly in 1776 in his surprise attack on Trenton. He did the same thing at Yorktown during the siege of the British, just before the formal surrender by Cornwallis – double agents, people working for him that posed on the British side bringing special information about the American forces, but were actually used to lull the British into some lowering of the guard when it came to a potential attack.
At the CIA, we had a letter hanging on the wall, a copy of a letter from Washington to his commanders saying that above all, nothing is more important than intelligence on the enemy.
After Washington, attention to intelligence at a national level declines pretty rapidly. During the Civil War, General Hooker briefly created something called the Bureau of Military Information, but it didn't last very long. Army intelligence was created in 1885, and naval intelligence in the same period. But really you have to go back to the Revolutionary War to find an example of systematic deception that would approximate what we did in World War II for D-Day.
The Cipher Brief: “Systematic deception” is a great term to bring us to June 1944 – and actually, nearly a year prior, when the operational planning began. What were the elements of that systematic deception?
McLaughlin: This was something that (British Prime Minister Winston) Churchill in particular was interested in from the very beginning. And it reflected a long tradition of deception in the British military. At the beginning of World War II, Churchill created a unit called “A Force” under an eccentric and brilliant Colonel Dudley Clark, and charged A Force with creating deception operations in North Africa – for example, disguising from the air the presence of tanks by making them appear to be trucks and even employing little tricks like dragging something behind the supposed truck, erasing the tank treads in the sand. So deception was an important part of the British approach to war right from the beginning, visual tricks backed up by human intelligence – things like inserting letters into diplomatic circles that portrayed something happening that wasn't going to happen, leaking information to diplomats in various capitals that the British knew to be working for the Germans in the certainty that it would be passed back to the Germans. What happened on D-Day was a natural outgrowth of what was a longtime practice.
As for what happened prior to D-Day, you can find online a copy of one of the deception orders called Operation Bodyguard. It's an old typewritten document, with a lot of notations in the margins that basically say, We are setting out to deceive the Germans on what we're about to do. And it includes instructions to those responsible for deception operations to create the idea that somehow British forces were tied up in the Middle East, that we didn't have enough landing craft to carry out an amphibious operation in France. And the goals were very clearly laid out on paper.
And then in the runup to D-Day, a false army was created that was aimed toward an attack in the region of Calais rather than in the region where it occurred. It included things like inflatable tanks that could be lifted by two or three men, but which from the air looked like real tanks. And they even threw false reconnaissance missions over the portion of the French coast that they wanted to suggest was the target.
They used figures dropped from the sky that looked like paratroopers, but were actually large dolls. But if you're looking at them from the ground and you see a parachute coming down with a figure on it that looks like an individual, you can't tell until it's actually on the ground what this actually is.
And they put (General) George Patton in charge – which irritated him greatly – of this fake army that was not going to attack anything, but which gave the impression that there was going to be this landing at Calais. You couldn’t conceal the fact that there was going to be an attack somewhere – as Churchill said, It's damned obvious that we're going to attack – but it's a principle of deception that you are not causing the adversary to think something so much as you are causing the adversary to do something. So in this case, you wanted them to actually orient their forces and orient their attention and a different place. Which they did.
The Cipher Brief: Let's get to the historical “what if” question, imagining this sort of thing today. Dummy landing craft and fake parachute dolls coming out of the sky – I'm assuming, given the sophistication of imagery that we have today, that none of that would work? Could you create the visual deception that the allies were able to create near Calais?
McLaughlin: I don't think you could create that today. That doesn't mean that you couldn't carry out deception operations today, but they would be on different platforms and along different channels. Back then, we didn't have imagery from space. We didn't even have the U-2 aircraft, which was not invented until the 1950’s. So you had only what you could pick up visually from flying reconnaissance missions in fixed-wing aircraft within the atmosphere. Today you have high-resolution imagery that everyone has access to – if you don't as a country, you can buy it from a commercial firm that allows you to identify objects on the face of the earth down to less than one meter in size. And so the kind of thing that we put near the coast, opposite Calais, would be easily identified today.
You would also have signals intelligence that is much more sophisticated than it was at that time. So you would probably have an adversary that would be able to pick up signals and intercepted communication.
Also, I don't know that you could use the kind of cross-channel operation that we did then – there were nothing equivalent to the anti-ship missiles that we have today. So those vessels trying to leave the British Coast and come to the French Coast, just from a military point of view, would face a far more devastating attack. Could you still do deception? Well, yes, but you would probably do it in different ways. Just imagine, for example, the deception that was carried out prior to our 2016 election by the Russians using social media. We're kind of onto that now, and presumably better at detecting it and defending against it, but at that time, we were an open target and people were not aware that upwards of 130 million Americans were reading things on Facebook and Twitter and other platforms and accepting them as true and even retweeting and resending them.
The Cipher Brief: And I suppose today instead of an actual false army, you could create a whole AI-driven disinformation campaign saying, OK, they're going to Calais?
McLaughlin: Yes. Today, you would be using a whole range of things in social media, you would be using artificial intelligence to create deep fakes that would convey something about the military posture or something about intention. You would probably be using techniques to create fake documents that you would leak into different environments to create an impression. So I think deception is possible today, but would be carried out in a very different way.
Now, going along with deception is an important counterpart, which is secrecy. When you look back at some of these operations in World War II, they were very closely held, and when you talk about them today, it's hard to imagine bringing them off. It's hard to imagine maintaining the kind of secrecy that the British did at Bletchley Park, for example, where people were sworn not to talk about what they were doing – including breaking the German code that was sent on the Enigma machine, and that was not publicly known. They kept that secret so well, it was not publicly known until the 1970s when someone finally got permission to write a book about it. So every history of World War II written before 1974 was written without knowledge of the fact that we were actually reading German military traffic, often before Hitler did. Even Churchill in his memoir never breaks that secrecy.
Can you imagine today, an operation where you are actually reading the military traffic of a major adversary and keeping it so secret that no one knows about it for decades? I don't think so. Today, every newspaper and every TV network has someone dedicated to basically finding out secrets about intelligence in particular. Take for example, the hunt for Bin Laden. In 1998, some media outlet – I won't name it – discovered that we were reading Bin Laden’s satellite phone and they published that. And then we no longer read that satellite phone.
Remember – back in World War II, people wouldn't even publish the fact that Franklin Roosevelt was paralyzed and operated out of a wheelchair. People generally knew, but it wasn’t publicized. So we're in a different era when it comes to transparency. And deception becomes much harder in a world where there is a great dedication to transparency, which has its benefits – I'm not saying that's not a good thing. It has its advantages in a democracy in particular, but that's the counterpart to deception.
The Cipher Brief: You mentioned the Bin Laden story, and I'm reminded that the eve of the raid on his compound was the night of the White House Correspondents Dinner, and there were top officials there who knew, but went along, sitting there smiling and laughing at jokes and so forth. In the run up to D-Day, roughly how many people within the Roosevelt administration knew the date and location?
McLaughlin:I don't know exactly, but I'm going to make the assumption that it was a small number of people. And there was a different environment about keeping things secret. During World War II, the idea of keeping a secret was seen as a very positive thing.
The Cipher Brief: And a patriotic thing.
McLaughlin: Yes – a patriotic thing.
The Cipher Brief: As you suggest, the mere act of sharing a secret is today so absurdly easy. In this day and age, all it takes is one person with an iPhone who takes a picture of something and can ruin the day, right?
McLaughlin: Right. Back in 1995 when I was at the CIA, we were working on some papers about what the next 10 years would bring. One of the things we said in 1995 – well before the smartphone – we said then that we are on the verge of universal handheld communication and this will change the world.
You can look at everything from the Arab Spring to our experience in Afghanistan and Iraq and now to Ukraine to see how that smartphone with its capabilities has changed things. The Russians, for a period of time, were talking quite openly on their phones in Ukraine, and that was being picked up and understood very clearly by the Ukrainians and by us, and gave away a lot of their shortcomings and their tactics and so forth.
The Germans were actually not very good in terms of intelligence during World War II. They were fooled by Operation Double Cross. Their intelligence officers were basically toadies. One of the individuals we studied during our recent trip was an intelligence officer who reported directly to Hitler and to Gehring. His name was Beppo Schmid, and he was essentially reporting what they wanted to hear.
He was dramatically wrong in projecting what would happen if the British German Air Force attacked Britain in 1940. He was telling the German high command that the RAF would not be a match, that it would fold quickly, that the Germans would be able to quickly establish air supremacy over Great Britain. And that was all wrong, was dramatically wrong. The Germans were not good at detecting all of this.
The Cipher Brief: I wanted to follow up on Patton’s fake army, well to the east of Normandy. I imagine today if you wanted to do that, you'd really probably have to put a real brigade somewhere, given all the things we've talked about.
McLaughlin: I believe that's right. I don't think you could do as successfully what they did in the case of Patton's fake army. Today, your technique would involve actual military movements and preparations with a real army.
You look at the Gulf War (in 1991), the Desert Storm operation where Norman Schwarzkopf, the American General, carried out deception maneuvers suggesting there was going to be an amphibious landing when in fact there wasn't. But it wasn't a fake army, it was troops moving about in a way that suggested that could happen. And then he did the famous “left hook” operation in which he appeared to be going straight into Iraq, but in fact looped around to the left and surrounded Iraqi forces and decimated them. So yes, deception goes on in military circles, but with different techniques.
And D-Day was uniquely an amphibious operation. There was no other way that this could be carried out. You had to invade across the Channel. And so they had a narrow framework in which to construct their deception, whereas today, conflict unfolds in a wider theater in most cases.
The Cipher Brief: I want to ask about the human element. Apart from dummy land craft and fake messages and armies, you’ve said that while the British were very adept at these things, the state of U.S. intelligence was not particularly strong. What's changed since then?
McLaughlin: What's changed since World War II is that we have proper intelligence services. We have at least four or five national intelligence services and many services that are associated with specific agencies.
We didn't have that in World War II. The CIA was created in 1947. We had the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, primarily what I would call a covert action service, meaning that they were there to disrupt enemy activities, blowing up train lines and assisting resistance groups in Europe, French resistance and so forth. And they did collect some intelligence, but they were not primarily an intelligence collection service in the way that the CIA subsequently became.
One of the reasons we were surprised at Pearl Harbor is that we had literally no human intelligence. We had no agents in Japan. We had no agents in the Pacific area generally that were reporting on Japanese activities, whereas the Japanese had a very successful human agent operating out of their consulate in Hawaii who provided exquisitely detailed information on everything from the depth of the harbors to the configuration of the fleet.
So we were quite innocent in the intelligence world at the time of World War II, and it's one reason why I call that era the era of transformation in American intelligence, because it's there that our eyes were fully opened to the power of human intelligence, the power of signals intelligence – again, by learning from the British the power of deception.
The Cipher Brief: So imagine that here we are, God forbid, late 2024 and there's a big occupying force in Europe, in France, and your commander-in-chief says, OK, John, I need a plan to go in and it's got to be secret. We've got to move 150,000 or so men across the Channel, and can you do it and can you carry out all that subterfuge and deception that was carried out 80 years ago?
McLaughlin: Well, first off, it's a different world. We would not go across the Channel. There is now the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and we are already forward deployed in Europe. NATO has never been stronger, never been more robust, never been more thoroughly committed. So today it would be a different world.
If you're talking about a Europe that has already been occupied, then of course that's a different scenario. If Europe were to be occupied, I don't think we would be invading across the Channel. It would be more of a multi-front attack, coming from many different directions. And as I’ve said, some of the necessary deception could work. Some of it, in this day and age, would be a whole lot more difficult. It’s a different world.
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