Denial and deception (D&D) is a Western theoretical framework [1] for conceiving and analyzing military intelligence techniques pertaining to secrecy and deception. [2] Originating in the 1980s, it is roughly based on the more pragmatic Soviet practices of maskirovka (which preceded the D&D conceptualization by decades) but it has a more theoretical approach compared to the latter. [1]
In the D&D framework, denial and deception are seen as distinct but complementary endeavors. [2] Denial most often involves security and concealment to prevent foreign agents, photographic surveillance, electronic monitoring, or even the media from revealing secretive diplomatic or military matters. Deception is the construction of a false reality for the adversary through intentionally "leaked" false information, false stories implanted in the media, dummy or decoy structures or military formations, or numerous other measures. [3] For example, in the Japanese information warfare campaign that preceded the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the D&D approach identifies as a denial measure the twice-repeated change in naval call signs effected by the Imperial Navy between 1 November and 1 December, but identifies as a deception measure the Japanese Foreign Office announcement that a large Japanese liner would sail to California on 2 December to evacuate Japanese citizens. [4]
A denial and deception campaign is most effective when numerous denial and deceptive efforts are coherently coordinated to advance a specific plan; however, the most effective such operations are very complex, involving numerous persons or organizations, and this can prove exceedingly difficult. A single failed denial measure or deception can easily jeopardize an entire operation. [3]
According to political scientist John J. Mearsheimer ( Why Leaders Lie ), during peaceful times, inter-state deceptions have little traction as the level of trust between states is usually already very low and therefore being caught in a lie would be ruinous. On the other hand, leaders in democracies move up the ranks largely by employing political deception and thus are not only familiar with deceiving the public for personal gain but also have considerable political capital and public trust following their election. With this comparatively high level of trust, democratic leaders are the most likely to successfully target the public with deceptions, particularly with fearmongering. Following this successful deception, the two democratic leaders were effective in launching the Iraq War with little opposition. [5]
According to Abram Shulsky, democracies, like the United States, had difficulty employing denial and deception campaigns. This is largely due to the open media of most such societies which frequently expose any major operations undertaken militarily or diplomatically. Also, legal restrictions tend to hamper governments and particularly intelligence services in democratic societies. The exception to these restrictions occurs in wartime, when some measure of martial law is imposed and legal impediments are relaxed. Authoritarian systems of government, however, frequently employ denial and deception campaigns both domestically and abroad to manipulate domestic opposition and foreign governments. These operations are unhampered by legal restrictions or an open media. Non-state actors, such as terrorist organizations, frequently use denial and deception to influence governments and the public opinion of target societies. [6] Other authors illustrate the D&D topic with Operation Fortitude and consider it one of the most successful such examples in history. [7] [8] [9] According to Donald C.F. Daniel, democratic societies have more qualms with deception than they have with denial (in the technical sense used in this article); Daniel contrasts the little public controversy that surrounded the secretive way in which Nixon's rapprochement with China was negotiated (as example of secrecy/denial that did not cause a public outrage) with the uproar caused by the 2001 announcement of the Office of Strategic Influence (an institution that had among its stated goals the planting of false stories in the foreign press). [2]
According to United States Department of Defense definitions, military deception includes both denial and deception (as defined in the D&D framework). [10] Canadian OPSEC officer John M. Roach notes that "Deception used as a broad, general term includes the elements of both denial and deception, each having distinct actions that are either active or passive." [11] D&D is not the only terminology used to make this distinction; according to Roach "passive deception" is another technical term for denial. [11] Western writers see the Soviet (and post-Soviet) maskirovka practices as not drawing a sharp or significant distinction between the two components of denial and deception. [1] [11] The Islamic concepts of kitman and taqiyya, or at least the jihadist interpretations thereof, have been seen by Westerners as the equivalents of the two components of denial and (respectively) deception. [11] [12] Since taqiyya is a word with Shiite connotations, Sunni militants sometimes prefer to use the word iham instead, roughly with the meaning "deception of unbelievers". [13] Although the Chinese deception theory literature is vast and uses rather different terminology (relative to Western works), some recent surveys have identified that "seduction"—understood as convincing the enemy to make fatal mistakes—is considered the highest form of deception while confusing or denying information to the enemy are considered lesser forms. [14]
Disinformation is false information deliberately spread to deceive people. It should not be confused with misinformation, which is false information but is not deliberate. "Fake news" has sometimes been categorized as a type of disinformation, but scholars have advised not using these two terms interchangeably or using "fake news" altogether in academic writing since politicians have weaponized it to describe any unfavorable news coverage or information.
Black propaganda is a form of propaganda intended to create the impression that it was created by those it is supposed to discredit. Black propaganda contrasts with gray propaganda, which does not identify its source, as well as white propaganda, which does not disguise its origins at all. It is typically used to vilify or embarrass the enemy through misrepresentation.
Counterintelligence (counter-intelligence) or counterespionage (counter-espionage) is any activity aimed at protecting an agency's intelligence program from an opposition's intelligence service. It includes gathering information and conducting activities to prevent espionage, sabotage, assassinations or other intelligence activities conducted by, for, or on behalf of foreign powers, organizations or persons.
Plausible deniability is the ability of people, typically senior officials in a formal or informal chain of command, to deny knowledge of or responsibility for actions committed by or on behalf of members of their organizational hierarchy. They may do so because of a lack or absence of evidence that can confirm their participation, even if they were personally involved in or at least willfully ignorant of the actions. If illegal or otherwise disreputable and unpopular activities become public, high-ranking officials may deny any awareness of such acts to insulate themselves and shift the blame onto the agents who carried out the acts, as they are confident that their doubters will be unable to prove otherwise. The lack of evidence to the contrary ostensibly makes the denial plausible (credible), but sometimes, it makes any accusations only unactionable.
John Joseph Mearsheimer is an American political scientist and international relations scholar, who belongs to the realist school of thought. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He has been described as the most influential realist of his generation.
A false flag operation is an act committed with the intent of disguising the actual source of responsibility and pinning blame on another party. The term "false flag" originated in the 16th century as an expression meaning an intentional misrepresentation of someone's allegiance. The term was famously used to describe a ruse in naval warfare whereby a vessel flew the flag of a neutral or enemy country in order to hide its true identity. The tactic was originally used by pirates and privateers to deceive other ships into allowing them to move closer before attacking them. It later was deemed an acceptable practice during naval warfare according to international maritime laws, provided the attacking vessel displayed its true flag once an attack had begun.
Military deception (MILDEC) is an attempt by a military unit to gain an advantage during warfare by misleading adversary decision makers into taking action or inaction that creates favorable conditions for the deceiving force. This is usually achieved by creating or amplifying an artificial fog of war via psychological operations, information warfare, visual deception, or other methods. As a form of disinformation, it overlaps with psychological warfare. Military deception is also closely connected to operations security (OPSEC) in that OPSEC attempts to conceal from the adversary critical information about an organization's capabilities, activities, limitations, and intentions, or provide a plausible alternate explanation for the details the adversary can observe, while deception reveals false information in an effort to mislead the adversary.
The London Controlling Section (LCS) was a British secret department established in September 1941, under Oliver Stanley, with a mandate to coordinate Allied strategic military deception during World War II. The LCS was formed within the Joint Planning Staff at the offices of the War Cabinet, which was presided over by Winston Churchill as Prime Minister.
Abram Shulsky is a neoconservative scholar who has worked for U.S. government, RAND Corporation, and the Hudson Institute. Shulsky served as Director of the Office of Special Plans, a unit whose function has been compared to the 1970s Team B exercise. In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Shulsky approved OSP memos with talking points about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. Shulsky is critical of the traditional intelligence analysis, which is based upon the social-scientific method, and of independent intelligence agencies. Shulsky favors a military intelligence model which can be used to support policy as, in Shulsky's words, "truth is not the goal" of intelligence operations, but "victory". Shulsky signed a letter to the Clinton White House on Iraq.
Russian military deception, sometimes known as maskirovka, is a military doctrine developed from the start of the 20th century. The doctrine covers a broad range of measures for military deception, from camouflage to denial and deception.
Operation Cascade was the codename for an Allied military deception operation during the Western Desert Campaign of World War II for North Africa. Operation Cascade was one of the first successful Allied deception operations in World War II, and provided valuable experience for later operations.
National intelligence programs, and, by extension, the overall defenses of nations, are vulnerable to attack. It is the role of intelligence cycle security to protect the process embodied in the intelligence cycle, and that which it defends. A number of disciplines go into protecting the intelligence cycle. One of the challenges is there are a wide range of potential threats, so threat assessment, if complete, is a complex task. Governments try to protect three things:
The Abwehr was the German military-intelligence service for the Reichswehr and the Wehrmacht from 1920 to 1945. Although the 1919 Treaty of Versailles prohibited the Weimar Republic from establishing an intelligence organization of their own, they formed an espionage group in 1920 within the Ministry of Defence, calling it the Abwehr. The initial purpose of the Abwehr was defence against foreign espionage: an organizational role which later evolved considerably. Under General Kurt von Schleicher the individual military services' intelligence units were combined and, in 1929, centralized under Schleicher's Ministeramt within the Ministry of Defence, forming the foundation for the more commonly understood manifestation of the Abwehr.
Theodor Rowehl was a German pilot who founded the Luftwaffe's strategic air reconnaissance programme, and headed what became known as the Rowehl Squadron and became Kampfgeschwader 200 after his resignation in December 1943.
Information Operations is a category of direct and indirect support operations for the United States Military. By definition in Joint Publication 3-13, "IO are described as the integrated employment of electronic warfare (EW), computer network operations (CNO), psychological operations (PSYOP), military deception (MILDEC), and operations security (OPSEC), in concert with specified supporting and related capabilities, to influence, disrupt, corrupt or usurp adversarial human and automated decision making while protecting our own." Information Operations (IO) are actions taken to affect adversary information and information systems while defending one's own information and information systems. In the United States Navy, information operations are often supervised by a Navy Information Operations Command (NIOC), for example in the United States Tenth Fleet which has several NIOCs.
Operation Graffham was a military deception employed by the Allies during the Second World War. It formed part of Operation Bodyguard, a broad strategic deception designed to disguise the imminent Allied invasion of Normandy. Graffham provided political support to the visual and wireless deception of Operation Fortitude North. The operations together created a fictional threat to Norway during the summer of 1944.
Datafication is a technological trend turning many aspects of our life into data which is subsequently transferred into information realised as a new form of value. Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger introduced the term datafication to the broader lexicon in 2013. Up until this time, datafication had been associated with the analysis of representations of our lives captured through data, but not on the present scale. This change was primarily due to the impact of big data and the computational opportunities afforded to predictive analytics.
Datafication is not the same as digitization, which takes analog content—books, films, photographs—and converts it into digital information, a sequence of ones and zeros that computers can read. Datafication is a far broader activity: taking all aspects of life and turning them into data [...] Once we datafy things, we can transform their purpose and turn the information into new forms of value
Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism is a 2015 non-fiction book about disinformation tactics and history rooted in information warfare. It was written by former general in the Securitate, the secret police of Socialist Republic of Romania, Ion Mihai Pacepa, and law professor Ronald J. Rychlak. It was published in 2013 along with a companion film, Disinformation: The Secret Strategy to Destroy the West.
The KGB and Soviet Disinformation: An Insider's View is a 1983 non-fiction book by Lawrence Martin-Bittman, a former intelligence officer specializing in disinformation for the Czech Intelligence Service and retired professor of disinformation at Boston University. The book is about the KGB's use of disinformation and information warfare during the Soviet Union period.
Dezinformatsia: Active Measures in Soviet Strategy is a non-fiction book about disinformation and information warfare used by the KGB during the Soviet Union period, as part of their active measures tactics. The book was co-authored by Richard H. Shultz, professor of international politics at Tufts University, and Roy Godson, professor emeritus of government at Georgetown University.