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Source: https://lennybendavid.substack.com/p/by-way-of-deception-thou-shall-do
How Deception Helped the British Conquer Beersheba in World War I
(Substack) Lenny Ben-David - In World War I, the British Army sought to capture Beersheba from the Turks in 1917. A British intelligence officer, Col. Richard Meinertzhagen, developed a clever gambit to draw Turkish forces away from their Beersheba base. He rode near a Turkish mounted patrol near Gaza, and when the horsemen chased him and fired, he slumped in his saddle as if wounded, "accidentally" dropped his haversack, and escaped. The haversack was full of official intelligence reports showing that the British-led forces would be making an attempt to capture Gaza. In response, the Turks moved troops from the Beersheba region west to Gaza. The way for the British, Australians, and New Zealanders to move against Beersheba was made infinitely easier. Meinertzhagen is also credited with arranging an aerial drop of cigarettes for front-line Turkish soldiers. The tobacco was laced with opium, which befuddled their behavior. The writer, a former Israeli diplomat in Washington, is a Research Fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs and the author of Secrets of World War I in the Holy Land.