Originally Posted by
Danny42C
One of the US Radio networks inanely went on air with sufficient detail of the US build-up in the West to alert any half-witted Intelligence Officer. Luckily they did not pick it up, and the rest you know.
As an aside, an Iraqi officer of my acquaintance (from an ACSC some years ago; he flew Mig-21s/F-7s during the 1991 war) said he was told that there were so many talking heads pontificating on what the coalition was going to do that the deluge of information made the western media a rather less useful source than might have been hoped.
Saddam wasn't quite able to compute that George HW Bush didn't have the sort of control that the Iraqis did over their media and thus assumed that information that was value must have been planted as a deception measure and could be ignored. This then changed to a view that the real information must be out there somewhere, but thanks to a mixture of good luck, the actual deception plan and a failure by Iraqi intelligence to guess which media report was correct, the leak did no damage - except, if I remember General de la Billiere's book correctly, to the career of the officer who blabbed to the press.