AMERICA’S Iraq war commander, General Tommy Franks, has disclosed the best-kept secret of the conflict: through a double agent called April Fool, he tricked Saddam Hussein into fatally bungling the defence of his country.

As a result, while American armoured columns raced to Baghdad from southern Iraq, Saddam held back many of his best divisions to fight expected attacks from the north and west, which never came. Inadequately defended, Baghdad fell in less than three weeks and the regime collapsed.

“Because of the sensitivity of the deception, only a few in the US government were aware of it,” Franks writes in his memoirs, which will be published on Tuesday and are serialised today in News Review.

April Fool, he reveals, was an American officer who was approached by an Iraqi intelligence operative working undercover as a diplomat. With Franks’s knowledge, April Fool sold the Iraqi false “top secret” invasion plans created by central command.

“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 from above Tikrit to the oil fields around the city of Kirkuk. Helicopter-borne air assault forces would then reinforce the paratroopers.

“Then, once several airstrips were secured, C-17 transports would deliver tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles to join them,” writes Franks.

“This small armoured force 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.”

Franks was unsure at the start of the war whether the deception had been successful or not. “But I knew what our reconnaissance imagery told us: despite our sizeable build-up of forces in Kuwait to the south, Saddam’s Republican Guard and regular army divisions had not moved significantly from their northerly position — no doubt waiting for an assault that would never come.”

Interrogations 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 from the public eye, Franks says, was the mass bombing of Republican Guard positions south of Baghdad for three nights through the sandstorm that bogged down the early phases of the land conflict.

While “armchair generals” on television wrote off the war as a failure, coalition aircraft carried out “one of the fiercest and most effective” bombing campaigns in the history of warfare, but “no one in the international press understood what was happening”.

The general also reveals one of the bungles of his campaign — an attempted mass attack on the Republican Guard by Apache helicopters, which failed due to inadequate intelligence, poor communications and missing supplies. Of 30 Apaches, only one reached the target and another was shot down by small-arms fire.

Franks, who retired after the war, insists he was never in any doubt that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, nor that President George W Bush and Tony Blair sincerely believed this.

Shortly before the war Franks visited Jordan’s King Abdullah and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. Both said they had been told by Saddam that he had WMD which he would use against the Americans.

“Well, my gracious,” said Franks last week. “If your intel assets are telling you something and all of a sudden you’re hearing from heads of state that they have been told the guy has WMD,” said Franks last week, “what are you going to believe?”

Franks also revealed last week that he steered clear of Israel while he was a senior US military commander and openly told Arab leaders that he was sympathetic to their issues: “For years, I had told my Arab friends that I had ‘no Israeli visa’ in my passport. This was an unofficial way of letting them know that I understood their side of the story.”

His memoirs are loyal to President Bush and to Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary. The book is brutally contemptuous, however, of some lesser figures. Service chiefs who sniped at him were “self-serving assholes”; and Douglas Feith, the cerebral undersecretary of defence, is labelled “the dumbest f****** guy on the planet”. He says middle-ranking defence and state department figures who “fought like cats in a sack” over Iraq policy were “ disruptive and divisive”.

By contrast, Franks describes his arch enemy, Osama Bin Laden, as not just “a deadly adversary” but also “a worthy, bold commander of dedicated and capable forces”.

• American intelligence officials are reported to have revealed that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a captured Al-Qaeda commander who was a principal source for Bush administration claims that Bin Laden collaborated with Saddam Hussein’s regime, has changed his story, setting back White House efforts to shore up its original case for the invasion of Iraq.

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