On a hot Saturday afternoon in June 1967, a smiling Israeli Defence Minister, Moshe Dayan, announced to a press conference that he was going to spend the weekend playing golf.
And Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin said that he planned to enjoy the weather by going on a sailing trip. Their comments were quickly dispatched by intelligence agents to their masters in Cairo, Damascus and Amman — which was just what Dayan and Rabin wanted. They had been playing an elaborate bluff, called Operation Fog of War, launched on the eve of the Six-Day War to mislead the enemy. Israel’s deception techniques were closely studied by British intelligence officers after the war.
They produced a secret report for the Ministry of Defence, marked “For UK eyes only”, which has now been released by the National Archives. The document contains intriguing details of scams devised by Israeli intelligence officers and planners to hoodwink the Arab military. So successful were they that the MoD decided to beef up its own “techniques in the area of deception”.
The document pinpointed a series of highly successful deceptions. Just a day before the war began, the MoD officials said, several thousand IDF soldiers were given weekend leave and ordered to gather on beaches and in parks.
“This was duly reported by the press and by word of mouth to Arab agents and the impression was given that Israel was not going to war.”
The most effective techniques were used once hostilities were under way. Particularly successful was the Israeli use of dummy tanks. Two of the three armoured brigades on the border with Egypt on the first day of the war were in fact camouflaged dummies. But while they attracted fire, another — real — strike force outflanked the Egyptians, causing confusion in their ranks. Israel made good use of its Arabic-speaking soldiers.
After the capture of El Arish airfield, where the Israelis kept the Egyptian flag flying, they acted as “air-traffic controllers”, inducing Egyptian pilots to land, only to be captured. In Jerusalem, Arabic speakers concealed their identities when challenged by the Jordanians, thus gaining access to the Arab area of the city.
On the Egyptian front they penetrated the Egyptian army’s radio network and fielded messages intended for Egyptian units. British officers were particularly impressed by Israel’s disruption of Arab communications centres through which the IDF fed false reports of Arab successes, confusing their commanders on the ground.
The Navy too kept the enemy busy, using empty landing-craft that gave the impression that Israel was planning an amphibious assault on the southern Straits of Tiran. “The Israeli Six-Day War presented an example of how deceptions can be employed in the modern era to disrupt the enemy’s decision-making process and place it at a distinct disadvantage,” said an MoD analyst.