Tanks Made Of Cloth, Ghost Army Duped Iraqis -- Campaign Of Deception Helped Set Up Victory In Persian Gulf War

On a February night filled with a foul rain, the remnants of the Iraqi army struggled to see.

Thirty-six days of bombing had left them nearly blind and deaf to the war around them. Their communications barely functioned. What was left - a radio patchwork between Baghdad and the front lines, ground radar and infrared sensors to detect American armor, signals geared to intercept communications - was just enough to let them peer south into Saudi Arabia.

And there, along a dry riverbed near where Iraq and Kuwait meet the Saudi sands, they saw a behemoth: the U.S. Army's 7th Corps and its 1,200 M-1 tanks.

The Iraqis picked up telltale heat signatures from the tanks' rumbling engines. They saw trucks and missile batteries. They heard radio traffic from the U.S. camp. The Americans seemed to be preparing for an assault straight into the teeth of the Iraqis' defense. This was it, the Iraqis figured: The ground war would be won or lost right here. They tensed to meet the juggernaut before their eyes.

It was a mirage.

Almost every one of the M-1s was a phantom - a printed fabric image stretched over a metal frame. Each concealed a heating element and a gas generator throwing off infrared energy, duping the Iraqis' sensors into seeing idling tanks. The trucks and missiles were decoys, too. The radio traffic was a ruse. The sights, the sounds, even the smells of a great army were there. But no army.

On the night of Feb. 22, U.S. military intelligence listened to the Iraqis bite the lure.

Then, as much as 200 miles west of the illusion they'd created, the 60,000 soldiers of the 7th Corps drove deep into Iraq in the final crushing blow of the war.

It was all part of "our deception plan," said allied commander, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf.

It demanded more than ghost troops and cloth dummies. The Pentagon staged a mock landing of thousands of Marines off Kuwait's coast. It ordered soldiers to infiltrate Iraq disguised as wandering shepherds and traveling salesmen. It manipulated the media.

This was the invisible war, a war of decoys and disinformation, far more real than the one seen on television. Conceived and executed in secret, it worked like a sandstorm in the desert, blinding Saddam Hussein's army. The deception plan was the devious mind behind the military's muscle. Every day of the war depended on it.

And if Americans were misled by their leaders, if a cloud of falsehoods drifted back home from the desert, that was part of the price of victory.

The guiding spirit of the war against Iraq was a long-dead Chinese general. Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" is the Genesis of current military strategic literature.

His doctrine of deception is 2,500 years old, yet it became part of modern American military dogma only a few years ago. Today it is taught at every major war school in America. Sun Tzu's words are engraved in the minds of the best and brightest graduates of the Army's elite academies, a cadre of uniformed intellectuals who call themselves the Jedi Knights.

The Iraqi forces also were skilled at subterfuge, having learned from the past masters of the art, the Soviets, who have an entire intelligence branch devoted to maskirovka, deception techniques.

Iraqis painted craters on their airfields and veiled Kuwait in smoke from sabotaged oil wells to foil U.S. spy satellites. They staged tank surrenders that became sneak attacks. They broadcast a barrage of lies. But they lost as brutally as they did because allied air attacks beat them half-senseless, then falsehoods were fed into what was left of their eyes and ears.

It will be at least 30 years before all the classified records of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm are unsealed. For now, military officers are forbidden to reveal the stratagems used against Iraq. This account is based largely on background interviews with U.S. military and intelligence personnel.

On Aug. 8, 1990, six days after Saddam invaded Kuwait, President Bush told the nation that he was sending armed forces to Saudi Arabia. "The mission of our troops is wholly defensive," he said. "They will not initiate hostilities."

The word from the White House was deceptive. That same day, the president's chief of staff, John Sununu, leaked a false report on the number of troops in the initial deployment: 50,000. In fact, 250,000 soldiers were headed to the front from Day One. About 250,000 more would join them - a decision Bush made in secret, long before announcing it after November's elections.

In mid-August, Bush ordered the CIA to overthrow Saddam with secret acts of war: infiltrating spies, broadcasting propaganda aimed at inciting uprisings, trying to sabotage Iraq's political architecture. This was not a simple undertaking in one of the world's worst police states.

By the end of August, the Pentagon had picked thousands of targets for a bombing campaign that would kill, by U.S. estimates, close to 100,000 Iraqis. Those who spoke the truth about the plans did so at their peril. In early September, the Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Michael Dugan, told reporters the war would start with massive air attacks on Baghdad. Saddam himself would be in the electronic crosshairs. For his candor, Dugan was fired by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.

"You don't discuss war plans," said an Army intelligence officer. "And you particularly don't discuss them when your commander-in-chief is saying this mission is `wholly defensive' while you're planning the biggest damned offensive since World War II."

In early September, Schwarzkopf had the barest semblance of a fighting force in place. He needed time.

It would be November, three months after the initial deployment, before the first 250,000 troops had arrived. It would be three more months before they were ready to go. So reporters in Saudi Arabia were told off the record that battle-ready U.S. forces in the field were far greater in number than was the truth.

The Pentagon's Special Forces and their British counterparts, the Special Air Service, were the point men of the deception plan, infiltrating Iraq by land and by air.

Army officers carrying phony passports plied the streets of Baghdad and Kuwait City, posing as embargo-breaking salesmen of armaments, ammunition, radios and rice. Then came the British, who roamed the desert disguised as Bedouin shepherds, wandering into Iraqi camps and radioing their positions back to Riyadh at night. Next were a team of Green Berets who burrowed into the sand behind enemy lines. They used periscopes and miniature eavesdropping devices to spy on Iraqi ground units.

Finally, soldiers with hang gliders and night-vision goggles floated over Iraqi formations, reporting what they saw over tiny walkie-talkies, whose encoded signals bounced off satellites back to Central Command. Stealthy helicopters with blades barely louder than a blender also infiltrated.

In late January, the biggest deception operation since D-Day took shape in eastern Saudi Arabia. The goal, Schwarzkopf said, was "to make the enemy think we were doing exactly what he wanted us to do, and that's make a headlong assault" into the Iraqis' thickest defenses.

The Army's 7th Corps, working with the 18th Airborne Corps and Army psychological-operations units, created what looked like a massive headquarters along the Wadi al-Batin, the dry riverbed that runs south along the Iraq-Kuwait border into Saudi Arabia.

There were phony missiles, phony fuel dumps, phony radio traffic, phony trucks. There were hundreds of phony tanks: every one a Multispectral Close Combat Decoy, or MCCD, the military version of a hunter's carved duck. Broken down, it weighs 50 pounds and fits nicely into a duffel bag. It takes five minutes to assemble and lists for $3,500 - one-thousandth of the cost of the M-1 tank.

In the first week of February, the real tanks and trucks, along with nearly 100,000 troops, secretly traveled up to 200 miles westward through the barren wastes of Saudi Arabia.

The Iraqis, fixated on the military mirage, left their western flank all but undefended.

On Feb. 24, the day the ground war began, the backs of 80,000 Iraqi troops were turned to the desert, their eyes riveted on the Persian Gulf, waiting for waves of Marines. While they stared into the emptiness, they lost half of Kuwait.

"It became very apparent to us early on that the Iraqis were quite concerned about an amphibious operation across the shores to liberate Kuwait," Schwarzkopf said. "We wanted the Iraqis to continue to believe that."

So Operation Imminent Thunder was born. The Pentagon flew television crews into the Persian Gulf to watch thousands of Marines practicing a landing on Kuwait's shore. The TV crews did not know they were part of a deception. Starved for footage, the networks broadcast and rebroadcast the images.

The Iraqis got the message. They stationed six full divisions out on Kuwait's coastline, waiting for an invasion that never came.

U.S. military spokesmen told Saudi and Kuwaiti news agencies that Air Force planes were landing in Kuwait to shore up the amphibious assault. They told the British Broadcasting Corp. that the Marines had landed on Faylakah Island, 20 miles off Kuwait City. The false reports shot around the world and landed in Baghdad - a textbook case of disinformation.

Looking back on Imminent Thunder, an Army colonel practiced in the art of deception laughed and told a reporter: "You guys did a great job."

Throughout the war, the CIA and Army intelligence units sowed subversive messages in Iraq. They reaped some benefits, and - in the case of Kurdish and Shiite rebels against Saddam - some bitter fruit.

Bombarded by leaflets and loudspeaker messages, tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers who had survived six weeks of devastation gladly gave themselves up, even to reporters armed with only with pens.

In a sense, the American people were part of the deception plan.

The information and images of the war they received from the president and the military were tightly controlled, sometimes misleading and manipulative. On television, U.S. bombs and missiles never missed; in reality, they often did. The Pentagon and the White House used the media to shape public opinion - a time-honored practice - and to disarm potential opponents on the home front.

Iraq's much-touted chemical and biological weapons never materialized. Though the Pentagon raised the specter that Saddam would arm his missiles with chemical warheads, there is no evidence that he was capable of that technically difficult feat.

Perhaps these were innocent misjudgments. But it's certain that if Iraqis had to be deceived about the United States' military strategy and political aims, then Americans could not be told the whole truth.

And if opinion polls are to be believed, most Americans didn't mind a bit.