General Tommy Franks, the U.S. war commander in Iraq, is revealing the secret behind the fall of Iraq.
The former general tricked the toppled Iraqi President Saddam Hussein into fatally bungling the defence of his country through a double agent called April Fool.
Thus, while U.S. armored columns raced to Baghdad from southern Iraq, Saddam kept many of his best divisions to fight expected U.S. attacks from the north and west, which is not what happened.
Inadequately defended, Baghdad fell and the regime collapsed.
"Because of the sensitivity of the deception, only a few in the U.S. government were aware of it," Franks writes in his memoirs, American Soldier (Regan Books), which is about to be published.
Franks says that April Fool was an American officer who was approached by an Iraqi intelligence operative working undercover as a diplomat.
With Franks' knowledge, April Fool sold the Iraqi false "top secret" invasion plot.
"The story line we sold them went as follows: the coalition was planning to build up only a portion of its ground force in Kuwait, while preparing a major airborne assault into northern Iraq," Franks says in his book.
"This would then be reinforced by the 4th Infantry Division, which the Turkish government would permit - at the last possible minute - to pass through Turkey and steamroll its way south to Baghdad.
"The purpose of April Fool's work was to create doubt among Iraq's leadership as to where, when and with what force the coalition would launch its attack. If the deception succeeded, Saddam would keep the better part of 13 divisions north of Baghdad to defend against the 4th Infantry until it was too late to use them to counter the main coalition attack coming out of Kuwait."
The interrogations held after the war confirmed that "the Iraqis believed we would attack from either the north or the west, and that is a major, major success," Franks said last week.
Another aspect of the war kept secret from the eyes of the public, Franks says, was the mass bombing of Republican Guard positions south of Baghdad for three consecutive nights through the sandstorm that bogged down the early phases of the conflict.
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