was a leading proponent of Soviet military deception.
Beginnings The
Battle of Kulikovo in 1380 was cited by Smith as an early example of the successful use of deception; a regiment had hidden in the forest, and the battle is seen as the beginning of the freeing of the Russian lands from
Tatar rule. At least three elements, namely deception, concealment, and disinformation with false defensive works and false troop concentrations, were used by
Georgy Zhukov in the 1939
Battles of Khalkhin Gol against Japan. The deceptions included apparent requests for material for bunkers, the broadcasting of the noise of pile-drivers and wide distribution of a pamphlet
What the Soviet Soldier Must Know in Defence. In his memoirs Zhukov described them as such, noting that they were worked out at army group or "operational-tactical" level.
Rzhev-Vyazma, 1942 The first offensive to have its own deception operation was in Zhukov's part of the attack on the
Rzhev-
Vyazma salient to the west of Moscow in July and August 1942. The offensive was conducted by
Ivan Konev's
Kalinin Front on the north, and Zhukov's
Western Front with 31st Army and 20th Army on the south. Zhukov decided to simulate a concentration of forces some to the south near
Yukhnov, in the sector of his 43rd, 49th and 50th Armies. He created two deception operation staffs in that sector, and allocated 4 deception () companies, 3 rifle companies, 122 vehicles, 9 tanks and other equipment including radios for the deception. These forces built 833
dummy tanks, guns, vehicles, field kitchens and fuel tanks, and used their real and dummy equipment to simulate the unloading of armies from a railhead at
Myatlevo, and the concentration of armour and motorized infantry as if preparing to attack Yukhnov. The radios communicated false traffic between the simulated armies and Front headquarters. The real tanks and other vehicles made tracks like those of troop columns. When the Luftwaffe attacked, the deception units returned fire and lit bottles of fuel to simulate fires. The deception had the immediate effect of increasing Luftwaffe air strikes against the railhead and false concentration area, while the two railheads actually in use were not attacked, and the Wehrmacht moved three Panzer divisions and one motorized infantry division of
XL Panzer Corps to the Yukhnov area. Meanwhile, the real troop concentration to the north was conducted at night and in thick forests. Zhukov's attack began on 4 August, and the 20th and 31st Armies advanced in two days. The Russians claimed that surprise had been achieved; this is confirmed by the fact that German intelligence failed to notice Zhukov's concentration of 20th and 31st Armies on Rzhev. Other small offensives on the same front had poorly planned and executed deception measures, but these were largely unsuccessful. The successful deception for the attack on Rzhev showed that military deception could be effective, but that only certain
Red Army commanders applied it correctly.
Battle of Stalingrad, 1942–1943 (left), with his chief of staff
Arthur Schmidt (centre) surrender the encircled
German 6th Army at the end of the
Battle of Stalingrad. Military deception based on secrecy was critical in hiding Soviet preparations for the decisive
Operation Uranus encirclement in the
Battle of Stalingrad. In the historian Paul Adair's view, the successful November 1942 Soviet counter-attack at Stalingrad was the first instance of
Stavka's newly discovered confidence in large-scale deception. Proof of the success of the Soviet deception came, Adair notes, from the
Chief of the German General Staff, General
Kurt Zeitzler, who claimed early in November that "the Russians no longer have any reserves worth mentioning and are not capable of launching a large-scale attack." This was two months before the
German 6th Army capitulated. Hitler's own self-deception played into this, as he was unwilling to believe that the Red Army had sufficient reserves of armour and men. Further, the many ineffective Red Army attacks to the north of Stalingrad had unintentionally given the impression that it was unable to launch any substantial attack, let alone a rapid army-scale pincer movement. Careful attention was paid to security, with greatly reduced radio traffic. The Germans failed to detect the creation of five new tank armies. Troop movements were successfully concealed by moving the armies up only at night, and camouflaging them by day on the open, treeless
steppes. Strategic deception included increasing military activity far away, near Moscow. At the sites of the planned attack, elaborate
disinformation was fed to the enemy. Defence lines were built to deceive German tactical reconnaissance. Civilians within of the front were evacuated, and trenches were dug around the villages for
Luftwaffe reconnaissance to see. Conversely, along the uninvolved Voronezh Front, bridging equipment and boats were prepared to suggest an offensive there. The five real bridges that were built for the attack were masked by the construction of seventeen false bridges over the
River Don. File:Operation Uranus Deception German View 18 Nov 1942.svg|
Operation Uranus Deception: The German intelligence view on 18 November 1942, showing six to eight Soviet armies (red) near Stalingrad. A = Army File:Operation Uranus Deception Actual Soviet Dispositions 18 Nov 1942.svg|Operation Uranus Deception: The actual Soviet dispositions on 18 November 1942 (red), showing ten Soviet armies. A = Army, TA = Tank Army. Subsequent attacks 19–26 November 1942 (gray arrows) To the south of Stalingrad, for the southern arm of the pincer movement, 160,000 men with 550 guns, 430 tanks and 14,000 trucks were ferried across the much larger
River Volga, which was beginning to freeze over with dangerous ice floes, entirely at night. Overall, Stavka succeeded in moving a million men, 1000 tanks, 14,000 guns and 1400 aircraft into position without alerting their enemy. Despite the correct appreciation by German air reconnaissance of a major build-up of forces on the River Don, the commander of the 6th Army,
Friedrich Paulus took no action. He was caught completely by surprise, failing either to prepare his armour as a mobile reserve with fuel and ammunition, or to move it on the day of the attack. The historian David Glantz considered that the concealment of the scale of the offensive was the Red Army's "greatest feat".
Battle of Kursk, 1943 s: a
Tiger tank damaged by a mine early in the
Battle of Kursk, under repair Deception was put into practice on a large scale in the 1943
Battle of Kursk, especially on the Red Army's
Steppe Front commanded by Ivan Konev. This was a deception for a defensive battle, as Hitler was planning to attack the Kursk salient in a pincer movement. The Soviet forces were moved into position at night and carefully concealed, as were the extensively prepared defences-in-depth, with multiple lines of defence, minefields, and as many as 200 anti-tank guns per mile. Soviet defences were quickly built up using deception techniques to conceal the flow of men and equipment. This was accompanied by a whole suite of deception measures including feint attacks, false troop and logistics concentrations, radio deception, false airfields and false rumours. In mid-June 1943 German army high command (
OKH) had estimated 1500 Soviet tanks in the Kursk salient, against the true figure of over 5100, and underestimated Soviet troop strength by a million. The historian Lloyd Clark observes that while the Wehrmacht was "feeding on intelligence scraps", the Soviets were "mastering ". File:Kursk German Intelligence View of Belgorod front 2 August 1943.png|The German intelligence view of the
Belgorod front, on the south of the Kursk salient, 2 August 1943 (GA: Guards Army; TA: Tank Army) File:Kursk Actual Red Army Dispositions Belgorod front 2 August 1943.png|The actual Red Army dispositions on the Belgorod front, showing concentrated forces ahead of the
4th Panzer Army, 2 August 1943 The result was that the Germans attacked Russian forces far stronger than those they were expecting. The commander of the Soviet
1st Tank Army,
Mikhail Katukov, remarked that the enemy "did not suspect that our well-camouflaged tanks were waiting for him. As we later learned from prisoners, we had managed to move our tanks forward unnoticed." Katukov's tanks were concealed in defensive emplacements prepared before the battle, with
only their turrets above ground level. Glantz records that the German general
Friedrich von Mellenthin wrote
Operation Bagration, 1944 spanned about 1000 kilometres from
Estonia in the north to
Romania in the south. The encirclements of three components of the German
Army Group Centre at
Minsk,
Vitebsk and near
Bobruisk are shown by dashed red lines in the middle of the area. The 1944
Operation Bagration in Belarus applied the
strategic aims and objectives on a grand scale, to deceive the Germans about the scale and objectives of the offensive. The historian Paul Adair commented that "Once the Stavka had decided upon the strategic plan for their 1944 summer offensive [Bagration], they began to consider how the Germans could be deceived about the aims and scale of the offensive ... the key to the operation was to reinforce the German conviction that operations would continue along this [southern] axis". In particular, the
Stavka needed to be certain that the Germans believed the main Soviet attack would be in the south. The Soviet plan successfully kept the German reserves doing nothing south of the
Pripyat marshes until the battle to the north in Belorussia had already been decided. Stavka succeeded in concealing the size and position of very large movements of supplies, as well as of forces including seven armies, eleven aviation corps and over 200,000 troop replacements. As for the strategic offensive itself, its location, strength and timing were effectively concealed. Stavka and the Red Army applied the doctrine of military deception at three levels: •
Strategic (theatre-wide): Stavka hid the location, strength, and timing of the attack, with dummy troop concentrations on the flanks displayed to the enemy before the battle, other offensives timed to work as diversions, and forces left where the enemy expected an attack (three tank armies in Ukraine), away from the true location of the attack (Belarus) •
Operational: the Red Army hid the locations, strengths and objectives of each force •
Tactical: each unit hid its concentrations of troops, armour and guns The German
Army Group Centre (where the main attack fell) underestimated Soviet infantry by 40%, mechanised forces by 300% and the number of tanks as 400 to 1800, instead of the 4000 to 5200 in fact arrayed against them. The German high command (OKH) and Adolf Hitler grossly underestimated the threat to Army Group Centre, confidently redeploying a third of its
artillery, half its
tank destroyers and 88% of its tanks to the Southern front where OKH expected the Soviet attack. Only 580 German armoured vehicles were in place for the battle. In the battle, Army Group Centre was almost totally destroyed, losing its
Fourth Army encircled east of
Minsk, its
3rd Panzer Army (LIII Corps encircled in
Vitebsk), and its Ninth Army encircled east of
Bobruisk. In military historian Bruce Pirnie's view, "the Germans were more completely fooled prior to Operation Bagration than they had been prior to Operation Uranus [at Stalingrad]". Pirnie concluded, based largely on Bagration and Uranus with a look at other Second World War operations, that the Soviet military deception in Bagration was unsophisticated, but "clever and effective". The Soviets succeeded in distorting OKH's intelligence picture, given that German intelligence had to rely mainly on radio intercept, aerial photography and agents left behind in the territory they had once held. Stavka deceived OKH by playing to their three sources of information; Stavka systematically denied the Germans real intelligence on Red Army forces as they concentrated for the attack, and revealed other real and simulated forces in other places. However Stavka may have come to do this, it "played well to the Germans' mental attitude". Hitler's own reckless optimism and determination to hold on to captured territory at all costs encouraged him to believe the picture suggested by the Russians. Meanwhile, his advisors believed the Soviet Union was running out of men and
materiel, with much less industrial production than it in fact had. Thus they underestimated the forces ranged against them, a belief encouraged by continued deception operations. Pirnie points out that it did not have to succeed in every aspect to be successful. In Belarus, the German armies involved had a good idea of the locations and approximate timing of Operation Bagration, but the higher levels, Army Group Centre and OKH failed to appreciate how strong the attacks would be, or the intention to encircle the Army Group. The "combination of display and concealment, directed at the highest command levels, typified their most successful deception."
Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 , 14 October 1962 The Soviet intelligence services and the Soviet military used deceptive measures to conceal from the United States their intentions in
Operation Anadyr, which led to the
Cuban Missile Crisis. According to
CIA analyst James Hansen, the Soviet Army most likely used large-scale battlefield deception before the Cuban Missile Crisis "more frequently and with more consistent success than any other army". The soldiers involved in Anadyr were provided with winter clothing and informed they would be going to the east of the Soviet Union. On board ship, intelligence officers allowed the 40,000 soldiers involved on deck only during the hours of darkness. The force, including missiles, reached Cuba before US intelligence became aware of it. Anadyr was planned from the start with elaborate denial and deception, ranging from the soldiers' ski boots and fleece-lined parkas to the name of the operation, a
river and
town in the chilly far east. Once America had become aware of Soviet intentions, deception continued in the form of outright denial, as when, on 17 October 1962, the embassy official Georgy Bolshakov gave President
John F. Kennedy a "personal message" from the Soviet premier
Nikita Khrushchev reassuring him that "under no circumstances would surface-to-surface missiles be sent to Cuba". Hansen's analysis ends with a recognition of the Soviet advantage in deception in 1962. In Hansen's view, the fact that the Killian Report did not even mention adversarial denial and deception was an indication that American intelligence had not begun to study foreign D&D; it did not do so for another 20 years. Hansen considered it likely that with a properly-prepared "deception-aware analytic corps", America could have seen through Khrushchev's plan long before
Maj. Heyser's revealing U-2 mission. In Hansen's view, it would take four decades before American intelligence fully understood the extent of Soviet deception before the Cuban Missile Crisis, especially the way the Soviets hid the truth of its strategic missile deployment behind a mass of lies, on "a scale that most US planners could not comprehend".
Czechoslovakia, 1968 The Soviet Union made substantial use of deception while preparing for their military intervention of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The historian Mark Lloyd called the effect on the
Prague Spring "devastating". When the Kremlin had failed to reverse the Czechoslovak leader
Alexander Dubček's liberal reforms with threats, it decided to use force, masked by deception. The measures taken included transferring fuel and ammunition out of Czechoslovakia on a supposed logistics exercise; and confining most of their soldiers to barracks across the northern
Warsaw Pact area. The Czechoslovak authorities thus did not suspect anything when two
Aeroflot airliners made unscheduled landings at night, full of "fit young men". The men cleared customs and travelled to the Soviet Embassy in the centre of Prague. There they picked up weapons and returned to the airport, taking over the main buildings. They at once allowed further aircraft to land uniformed
Spetsnaz and
airborne troops, who took over key buildings across Prague before dawn. Reinforcements were then brought in by road, in complete
radio silence, leaving
NATO electronic warfare units "confused and frustrated".
Ukraine, 2014 army base,
Crimea, 9 March 2014 The 2014
annexation of Crimea was described in the West as . As the
BBC writer, Lucy Ash put it: "Five weeks later, once the annexation had been rubber-stamped by the Parliament in Moscow, Putin admitted Russian troops had been deployed in Crimea after all. But the lie had served its purpose. is used to wrong-foot your enemies, to keep them guessing." The area was swiftly occupied by so-called
little green men, armed men in military trucks who came at night, with no insignia, so that even pro-Russian activists did not understand what was happening. They were later revealed as Russian special forces, but at the time
Vladimir Putin denied this.
Time magazine reported in April 2014 that the troops in eastern Ukraine described themselves as
Cossacks, whereas analysts in Ukraine and the West considered at least some of them to be Russian special forces. Their obscure origins made them seem more menacing and harder to deal with. In April 2014, the
Huffington Post asserted that "President Putin's game plan in Ukraine becomes clearer day by day despite Russia's excellent, even brilliant, use of its traditional ". The subsequent war in the
Donbas region of Ukraine has also been described as a Russian campaign. As with Crimea, the conflict began when armed 'rebel' forces without military insignia began seizing government infrastructure. Unlike the action in Crimea, there were no Russian military bases to deploy soldiers from. Support for Russia amongst the local population was not as high, Russia sent "humanitarian" convoys to Donbas; the first, of military trucks painted white, attracted much media attention, and was described as "a wonderful example of " by Maj. Gen. Gordon 'Skip' Davis, a US Army General. == See also ==