Can reporters be trusted with war information? Can the government be trusted? We’re still finding out — or maybe we’re not finding out.
One of the great successes of World War II was Operation Fortitude, aimed at cloaking the D-Day invasion in a “bodyguard of lies.’’ The Allies wished to convince the Germans that the assault across the English Channel would land near the town of Pas de Calais, at the Channel’s narrowest point.
So the Allies created a phantom army, with inflatable rubber tanks and papier-mache airplanes. To further the illusion, they created a fake navy, too, and put out faux radio transmissions.
Meanwhile, the real assault armies were assembling farther south. And on the morning of June 6, 1944, the Allies landed at Normandy, 200 miles from Calais. Not only was the Normandy coast lightly defended, but the Germans were still convinced that the “real’’ attack was still coming at Calais. By the time they figured out the deception, it was too late.
Operation Fortitude was, in the words of Air Force historian Ernest Tavares Jr., a “near perfect plan,’’ leaving the Germans “essentially blind.’’ And that’s the way to win a war.
So to the obvious question: Could anything so sneaky as Operation Fortitude be pulled off today? Could thousands of people be kept quiet in a world full of cell phones, e-mail and text-messaging, all interfacing with an ever-proliferating number of cable news channels, bloggers and list-servers?
Which is to say, in other words, that “the media’’ today isn’t just a few reporters who might be pep-talked or intimidated into keeping a secret.
Instead, the media includes millions of people representing different traditions, different countries, different loyalties. Could such a buzzing collectivity even begin to keep a secret?
The United States is hardly helpless. American forces deposed Saddam Hussein in just three weeks of fighting last year.
Yet on the other hand, the larger objectives in the “Global War on Terror’’ — defeating the insurgents, democratizing Iraq, winning hearts and minds across the Middle East — remain to be achieved. And it’s apparent that reports and images from Iraq, most notably the Abu Ghraib prison photos and the video of the Marine shooting a wounded man in Fallujah, aren’t helping the American cause.
It’s not so much that the media is untrustworthy — although many in the military might argue that it is — it’s that the “press,’’ from Al-Jazeera reporters to the humblest freelancer, is simply uncontrollable. And absent an enormous paradigm shift, that’s not going to change.
But now, the military is preparing just such a paradigm shift. On Dec. 1, the Los Angeles Times revealed that in September the Pentagon had established a “strategic communications office’’ to wage information — or disinformation — warfare in Iraq. The Times reported that an Oct. 14 announcement by the Marines of a seeming attack on Fallujah, carried on CNN, was, in fact, a fake-out of the enemy.
It’s hard to argue against deceiving the enemy in wartime, but it must also be noted that such deceptions are soon covered by the media, which is to say, uncovered.
Of course, it’s possible that the military has launched a hundred other Fortitude-like fakes that have gone unreported. But now we know — or we think we know — that the Pentagon plans to create a “director of central information’’ to control “strategic information.’’
That new Pentagon post is not to be confused with the “National Intelligence Director,’’ the new slot created to oversee the CIA and other spy outfits — one thinks.
But now that the directorate of information has been revealed, what does that revelation do to the American government’s credibility? Is it really a good idea to have, in effect, a Ministry of Deception if its existence is known to the world?
In the future, it might be harder for the enemy to know what’s going on, and that’s good. But it will surely be harder for Americans to know what’s going on, and that’s not so good.
