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There is so much more going on in this war. Maybe when we are very old we will learn about it. I think most of what we see is only the tip of the iceberg.

Indeed. I have a feeling that we're going to find out a lot of really surprising things, and a lot of things about which to be very proud of our country, our President, our troops, and our intelligence services.

During the lead-up to the first Gulf War, I remember hearing on the news about several helicopters full of Iraqi Army officers heading into Saudi Arabia who were defecting from Saddam before the war started. Then, nothing about it afterwards. Only years later did I read about the real story -- it was helicopters full of US Special Forces guys, in fake Iraqi helicopters, who were returning from a mission they had been conducting in order to "soften up" Iraq in preparation for the war. The Saudis spotted them flying back into Saudi airspace, and challenged them. So as not to blow their cover on a public channel, and in order to explain why they were flying "Iraqi" helicopters, they radioed that they were Iraqi officers defecting. That hit the news real fast, but when the helicopters came in to land the Special Forces guys told the Saudis to just shut up about the whole thing, and they did.

Another hush-hush story that subsequently came out was that the Iraqi military had sent a computer printer to the manufacturer (in the US) to be fixed under warantee, and the CIA got access to it and tweaked the hardware to contain a high-tech computer virus. When the printer was sent back to Iraq and put back online, the US triggered it at the appropriate time and it brought down most of Iraq's air-defense network just as our jets were coming in for the first wave of attacks.

And those are just a couple which have been able to see the light of day -- I'm sure there are countless more which are still classified.

I love stuff like this, and there are a million stories from World War II like them also. One of my favorites involves an op that was done to protect the fact that we had broken one of the most secure enemy encryption codes. We were routinely reading their encoded traffic, and wanted to act on one of the things we had learned, but knew that if we did it would spill the fact that we *could* read the coded messages (and if so, the enemy would just switch to a new code). So the US mounted a secret operation which was done just to make it look as if we had acquired the info from *another* source -- I forget the details right now (I read it years ago), but it involved breaking into the office of a foreign ambassador which we knew had received a copy of the sensitive info, in a clumsy enough way that it looked as if we had acquired a cleartext copy of the letter from that office instead. So when we acted on the info, the enemy thought that only the stuff in the ambassador's office was compromised, not their entire code system. Clever work.

Not only OPS , but, actual military tactics.

Remember in the first Gulf War ?

when ? we had the USS IOWA pound the Kuwait shoreline ?
and sent out news reports ( this is how we can use the MSM towards our advantage ) that we were going to do a amphibious landing, but, instead ?
it was a move to make Saddam and his Generals think we were going to land on shore in Kuwait, but, as they ( Saddam's Armies ) were heading east-southeast into Kuwait, our divisions were doing a hooking flanking move from the west-southwest and came in behind them and crushed Saddam's armies.

Another hush-hush story that subsequently came out was that the Iraqi military had sent a computer printer to the manufacturer (in the US) to be fixed under warantee, and the CIA got access to it and tweaked the hardware to contain a high-tech computer virus. When the printer was sent back to Iraq and put back online, the US triggered it at the appropriate time and it brought down most of Iraq's air-defense network just as our jets were coming in for the first wave of attacks.

What a great post. I love this story! Hadn't heard it before.