ABSTRACT
Strategic deception is conventionally treated as a success story for Britain, with reason. Cases like FORTITUDE, the campaign which kept German forces from the front during most of the battle of Normandy, in the belief the main invasion was yet to come and would be struck by a mythical ‘First United States Army Group’ (FUSAG); or MINCEMEAT, the planting of a story on Adolf Hitler, through a dead man dressed as an officer and floated on a beach in Spain, that Sicily was not the target of Allied invasion in 1943-these have become the stuff of legends. Those events were real and dramatic and they mattered-ghosts kept Germans from battle. The British appear clever, because they were; doubly so, because these triumphs were linked to ULTRA, the solution of high-grade German cryptographic systems, and to the ‘double cross’ system, by which British security controlled German espionage in the United Kingdom. The intersection of these successes marks a triumph in military history. Still, legend makes for bad history, and problems remain in the study of deception, despite the work of scholars, especially the late Michael Handel.1
