Foe Skilled at Trickery, Decoys Show

Decoy missile launchers. Phony weapons factories. “Cratered” runways that are really intact.

Iraq may not have impressed the world with its war machine so far, but its military technicians are showing consummate skill at fraud and trickery, according to U.S. military officials.

The tactics are all part of the science of deception-- maskorovka-- that the Iraqis learned from their longtime Soviet advisers and honed during eight years of bloody war with Iran.

“They’re quite good at it,” Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a Pentagon news briefing Wednesday. “They have a long history of using dummies to confuse the enemy.”

The advantage gained by such deceptions is limited because military photo interpreters “can tell in two seconds if this stuff is fake,” said Col. Ralph Cossa, analyst with the Institute for National Strategic Studies. But the tactics can fool ground-level spotters and bomber pilots, especially those flying in cloudy weather.

Powell said there have been reports that the Iraqis have been putting out phony Scud missile launchers to delude the allied forces into believing they have destroyed the weapons that have brought terror to Israel and Saudi Arabia.

The Iraqis also reportedly have been painting “craters” on their airfields to persuade the allied pilots that the fields already are damaged and therefore not worth bombing again. Conversely, they paper over airfields that are destroyed to make it appear that repairs have been made, thus encouraging bombers to waste missiles by attacking them again.

In London, British Armed Forces Minister Archie Hamilton said this week that some of the missile launchers that the allies have counted as destroyed may actually have been cardboard and plywood fakes. British military sources have said the Iraqis changed the contours of some buildings to make them appear to be communications centers, factories and chemical weapons plants.

A Jordanian security source in Amman recently reported that Iraq was using dummy missiles, complete with equipment that emitted electronic signals designed to fool attacking planes.

Iraq’s inventory of decoys includes “fake buildings, fake weapons, fake production plants,” said Marlin Fitzwater, White House press secretary. “It’s a well-known tactic, and they’ve used it throughout their country.”

An Italian newspaper, Corriere Della Sera, quoted a Turin manufacturer Wednesday as saying that Iraq was probably using life-sized decoy tanks, planes and missile launchers that his firm built between 1982 and 1988. The paper quoted Mario Moselli, head of Moselli Vendite Macchine Utensili, as saying the decoys were made of molded fiberglass mounted on metal frames. The decoys possess a metal mass that can mislead attackers’ radar, Moselli said.

He refused to say that his company had supplied such decoys to Iraq but added: “If they succeed, even in part because of me, I’m sorry.”

The Iraqis’ idea for imitating runway craters may have been borrowed from the Vietnamese, who were rumored to have used such a trick during the Vietnam War to dupe Americans into believing that their B-52s had already struck.

“The armed forces all study what happened during recent wars, and the Iraqis may well have picked that up from Hanoi,” said Cossa of the strategic studies institute.

But he said the Iraqi military’s greatest debt is clearly to the Soviet armed forces, which instructed them for decades in the arts of cover and deception, which are crucial elements of Soviet strategy.

That science, in turn, borrows heavily from Sun Tzu, a Chinese general of the 6th Century B.C. who became known as one of history’s great military thinkers for his teaching that the best way to win a battle is by guile and deception rather than a head-on assault. The Soviets, the Chinese and now even the American armed forces are closely studying Sun Tzu’s epigrams.

The Iraqis began practicing their decoy and camouflage skills in 1980, with the start of the Iran-Iraq War, when they feared an air attack by the Iranian air force, said Anthony J. Cordesman, a military analyst on the staff of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

The Iraqis put out some of their oldest, least capable aircraft in hopes that the Iranians would focus their attacks on them. They widely dispersed their other planes to make them harder to hit and also bought dummy and inflatable aircraft, he said. They also used earthen berms and shoulders to hide their troops, aircraft and artillery, according to Cordesman.

But military analysts said Iraq eventually found the use of decoys largely unnecessary during the war with Iran because the Iranian air force was so weak.

“They had virtually no attack capability after the first couple of months,” Cossa said.