Eisenhower, Dwight

Eisenhower and World War II

Eisenhower was introduced to military deception by Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Meeting for the first time in 1942, the British leader briefed Eisenhower on many things, including the British network of “turned” German spies, the Manhattan Project, and Ultra. Keeping the secret of Ultra—that the Allies could read the Germans' secret code encryptions—was pivotal to the Allied victory.

Eisenhower was quick to recognize the usefulness of military deception, despite the U.S. Army's limited experience with codes and intelligence. His insistence on managing the nominally civilian Operation of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner to the CIA, as long as it was operating in his theater of war quickly taught him the riskier side of deception when the OSS tried to encourage, in vain, a French resistance in North Africa. Embarrassments caused by the OSS's lackluster work in finding a French leader and the agency's possible participation in an assassination nearly caused the end of Eisenhower's career early in the North African campaign.

Surviving the embarrassments caused by the OSS, Eisenhower continued to learn the art of deception. After the nearly successful German counterattack at Kasserine Pass, he realized that the best intelligence could not come from only one source. He left Africa sensitive to the weaknesses of both spying and signals intelligence, such as Ultra.

When prisoners revealed that the Nazis were able to read low-level Allied codes, Eisenhower recognized the counterintelligence value, telling General George S. Patton that it was better not to change the codes as long as information [Page 326]transmitted was not too sensitive. Such deception encouraged German confidence in the accuracy of the decoded signals, a useful trust if Eisenhower ever needed to provide misdirection as to where an attack would come.

Operation Fortitude

Nowhere was such misdirection more successful than in Operation Fortitude, which convinced the Germans that Eisenhower was in charge of a much larger landing force than he actually was, and that the force was aimed somewhere other than Normandy. Fortitude was possibly the greatest success of the war, and was certainly Eisenhower's greatest success with deception. As the supreme commander, he was in charge of veterans employed to create the radio chatter expected from a fake army, stagehands building fake landing equipment and bases, overseeing the information relayed through double agents, and multiple layers of security.

After his experiences in north Africa, Eisenhower was well aware that the Germans expected Patton to be in charge of the landings, and Fortitude provided confirmation of this through the German spies that the British had turned. Remaining personally involved in the multilayered deceptions that made up Fortitude, Eisenhower went so far as to reuse a strategy that he had learned earlier in the war of making the press feel like a part of each unit; he believed this sense of participation in the war effort made the press less likely to leak important secrets. He was more suspicious of civilians, though, and after a difficult fight, he managed to convince Churchill to have civilians moved away from staging areas.

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