Page:CIAdeceptionMaximsFactFolklore 1980.pdf/51

C00036554 ruse. The plan worked and the Germans came directly to Alam el Halfa (over rough going, incidentally). Some two months later, General von Thoma, then commander of the Aftika Corps, was taken prisoner and talked freely to the British. Sir David Hunt (56) recalled: ...he mentioned in particular the "going maps" which were so greatly sought as prizes. One of them, he said, had been of great use before the battle of Alam el Halfa because they had intended to make a wide outflanking movement but had fortunately been saved from this by the opportune capture of a map in an abandoned armored car which showed they would have run into bad going. The plan was accordingly changed before the attack. Like Lady Bracknell, I thought it wrong to undeceive him.

The foregoing two examples show both kinds of misclassification error; in the Belgian case a real windfall was dismissed as false, in North Africa a false map was accepted as real. Ironically, contrary to what might be expected, false positives and false negatives appear to be more the rule than the exception. Whaley (57), for example, in an analysis of the original cases in the data base involving receipt by the victim of detailed documents about the attacker's plans, observed that in four out of five cases true leaks were dismissed as plants, whereas in five out of five cases false plans were accepted as real!