The British people are natural deceivers, using guile by instinct, according to intelligence chiefs in the 1970s at a meeting of the newly formed Defence Deception Advisory Group, a declassified file has revealed.

After a visit to the United States to discuss American deception capabilities, the advisory group, which had been set up in 1969, reported: “There is a considerable difference in national characteristics between the US and UK. It's suggested that it's almost a way of life for a UK citizen to use guile in almost all dealings with fellow human beings, whether friend or foe.”

The report went on: “Therefore, in military circles even a junior commander will invariably, as part of his nature, attempt to fox his adversary as to his real operational intentions.”

The Americans did not have to worry about being cunning because they had so much money to spend on defence equipment that the subtleties of deception were not so important in defeating the enemy. The report said: “[In the US] no financial and logistic constraints have in recent times hampered the commander in the field. There has been little requirement to consider the use of tactical deception. For the British, on the other hand, it could be said that the inclination to deceive is already available as a natural asset.”

The file, declassified by the National Archives under the Freedom of Information Act, reveals however that the Americans did carry out a bizarre deception plan against the Soviet Union in 1968. “It was decided [no explanation given] to give the Russians the impression that considerable reinforcement of the Central Europe theatre was taking place and that additional nuclear weapons were being flown in,” the report disclosed. “This was done by increasing air movements into Europe and using call signs and radio traffic jargon normally associated with the movement of nuclear stores.”

Despite the British advisory group's doubts about America's instinct for deceit, the intelligence chiefs appear to have been impressed by a programme developed by Syracuse University in the United States that could analyse an individual's personality based on just three written articles.

The experts at the university studied three newspaper articles and a private letter written by Victor Louis, a flamboyant vintage-Bentley-driving Russian journalist and KGB spy who was accredited with perpetrating a number of disinformation operations in the Cold War.

The analysis concluded that Louis, who died in 1992, possessed all the attributes of a double agent and could have been working for the West as well. “His personal motivations are affluence, recognition and luxury. He seeks intrigue and self-importance. His predominant personality traits are petulance, pedantry and parsimony,” the report revealed, saying: “He either is, or could be, a double agent.”

The Defence Deception Advisory Group, which invited the head of MI6 to take part in its deliberations, concluded that deceiving needed to become a strategic capability, and listed some of the best examples where deception had won wars: Plan Fortitude for Operation Overlord, in which 19 German divisions waited at Pas de Calais for the Allied expeditionary force; and Hitler's Operation Sea Lion “hoax”, which kept a number of British forces in England from September 1940 to 1942 awaiting a German invasion “that was no longer intended”.

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