What were the greatest intellingence successes and blunders?
Operation Barbarossa for Stalin - he got so much information that germans are about to attack that it blinded him ;-D
If Heydrich really lured Stalin to purge Tukhachevsky and Red Army by forging couple of documents, I would count that being pretty good achievement.
_
Not familiar with the ‘Heydrich’ intelligence coup, though I am aware of the purges.
I have read (somewhere?) that Stalin thought the intelligence delivered to him from the British (Ultra), was a plot by Churchill to drag him into the war. Also, that he wouldn’t accept that Hitler, a fellow dicator, would break the pact that they had signed. As a result, and please correct em if I’m wrong, when Barbarosa was launched, he took to his retreat (forget the name for it) for quite some time, thus leaving his army somewhat operationally fragmented.
Europe? Pacific? CBI? All of the above?
JT
Why not all of the above?
OK. Then it will be a genuine WORLD war.:mrgreen:
If we include cryptanalysis, the American deciphering of the Japanese naval codes would be a major success. The information pointed our carriers to the Japanese advance toward Midway Island in June of 1942, with disastrous results for Adm. Nagumo’s striking force. It also allowed the Americans to ignore the simultaneous attack on the Aleutians, which the Japanese intended as a demonstration as a well as an effort to neutralize American air power there.
JT
“Then it will be a genuine WORLD war.”
Don’t quite follow, chum??
Colonel Bonner F. Fellers, the U.S. military attaché to Cairo (and unwitting ally of the Africa Korps) affectionately dubbed by Rommel: “My ‘Little Fellers”.
Over a period of several months, a stream of intelligence was provided by Fellers, by way of coded messages intercepted on their way to Washington. As one of Rommel’s staff officers states, after the war, it was “stupefying in its openness” and "contributed decisively to our victories in North Africa.”
The impenetrable ‘Black Code’ book in which he transmitted his top-secret information to Washington was far from secure. The Italians had extracted the code book from a safe in the US Embassy in Rome one night in September 1941. The pilfering of the code book was a masterstroke of Mussolini’s military intelligence. They had duplicate keys to the Embassy and two agents inside it. One of them opened the Ambassador’s safe and extracted the Black Code book. The book was copied and returned. The Italians were thenceforth able to intercept and read the secret military attaché traffic to Washington from every US mission in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.
In a dispatch dated 23 January 1942, Fellers was able to inform Washington (and thus the Germans) that the British were withdrawing 270 warplanes from North Africa and sending them to the Far East. Six days later, he was able to telegraph a complete run-down on British armoured strength, including the number of tanks in working order, the number undergoing repair, the number available for action and their whereabouts. And so forth, right into mid-summer 1942, when he would give the Pentagon and Rommel full details of British tank losses - “…70per cent were put out of action and at least 50 per cent destroyed” – in crucial battles which would see the fall of Tobruk and Mersa Matruh. He would also tip the Germans off to pending British commando raids on Axis airfields.
Hitler himself was aware of Fellers’ inadvertent contributions to the Axis cause. In one of his after-dinner monologues, the Fuhrer expressed the hope that the US attaché would “…Continue to inform us so well over the English military planning through his badly enciphered cables"
Lady Ranfurly recalls that when she mentioned Fellers’ name, approvingly, to General Dwight D Eisenhower, at a Cairo dinner party in November 1943, he cut her dead – “Any friend of Fellers is no friend of mine!”
The IJN JN25 code was never completely broken. Decipehering was often slow and incomplete, and lagging behind events by days or weeks. It did, however, with some inspired analysis of incomplete decrypts by Commander Joseph Rochefort who ran the main deciphering exercise, provide significant advantages to the Allies
Possibly the most inspired, and simple, case of establishing gaps in the code in relation to Midway was this:
In the spring of 1942, Japanese intercepts began to make references to a pending operation in which the objective was designated as “AF.” Rochefort and Captain Edwin Layton, Nimitz’s Fleet Intelligence Officer, believed “AF” might be Midway since they had seen “A” designators assigned to locations in the Hawaiian Islands. Based on the information available, logic dictated that Midway would be the most probable place for the Japanese Navy to make its next move. Nimitz however, could not rely on educated guesses.
In an effort to alleviate any doubt, in mid-May the commanding officer of the Midway installation was instructed to send a message in the clear indicating that the installation’s water distillation plant had suffered serious damage and that fresh water was needed immediately. Shortly after the transmission, an intercepted Japanese intelligence report indicated that “AF is short of water.” Armed with this information, Nimitz began to draw up plans to move his carriers to a point northeast of Midway where they would lie in wait. Once positioned, they could stage a potentially decisive nautical ambush of Yamamoto’s massive armada.
http://www.nsa.gov/publications/publi00023.cfm
One consequence of the code-breaking activities was that officers with knowledge of it could not be put at risk of capture by the Japanese.
The US had broken the Japanese diplomatic code before the war, which gave it a great deal of useful information and forewarning about some events before and during the war, but not detailed military plans.
Often a ‘success’ on one side is paired with a failure, or ‘blunder’, on the other side. Midway has to be up there, as the Japanese had hoped to force to battle and finish off the remaining capital ships of the USN, and instead got ‘ambushed’ themselves.
Barbarossa is another example, where the Soviets were caught unprepared, convinced (at least at the top level) that the Germans were not about to attack at that particular moment. Staying on the Eastern front for a moment, the Soviet Stalingrad offensive and Kursk should be rated as significant ‘intelligence’ successes for the Soviets / failures for the Germans.
In the West - the conduct of the French and British in 1940 has to be counted as a significant blunder - concluding that the Germans would not / could not come through the Ardennes, which is exactly what they in fact did. The Allied landings in France in 1944 were another significant success / failure situation, as the Germans left their powerful 15th Army in the Pas de Calais, waiting for a second invasion which never came, instead of releasing it to help crush the real invasion in Normandy.
The truth should be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies!