So, I was wondering, has there ever been an April Fools joke played by one national government on another? Or jokes on a national scale or between heads of state?
Unless you mean the Halloween radio broadcast of the War of the Worlds, then I don’t think so… but would be very interested to hear of any 
Now that I think about it, I recall an incident during WWII when a British spy was captured by the Germans, and made to send false radio reports back to England, coordinating covert supply and personnel drops, etc., so that the Germans could capture the men and material being smuggled into France. There were protocols in place where a message would be considered fake if certain key words were not included, and the fellow even went so far as to code in extra words like “Trap” and “Ambush”, but whoever was on the other end wasn’t paying attention, and a number of Allied spies were captured by the Germans as soon as their feet touched French dirt. The Germans decided to end the ruse by sending a message alerting the British to their mistake on April Fools day.
That said, I can’t seem to find a cite for it (it was in a book, very tall and broad but very thin, part of a longish series I saw in a library, and the story sounds kinda fishy (ie: Why would the Germans decide to call such a profitable operation off like that?)
One point to remember is that not all nations celebrate something equivalent to April Fool’s Day, and some nations have a similar observance, but on a different day. Say or do something at the wrong time, and the other guy thinks you’re serious, and you could have a major international incident.
Of course.
The top one hundred April Fool’s Day hoaxes.
I wish I could find the one about a water hole out west, that talked about people being found dead and a Bigfoot creature was killed that had been doing the killing. It was published in a southwest newspaper about a hundred years ago, and they didn’t use the term bigfoot. I think it raised some excitment in the Californian public, with rumors that the body was coming to town for display.
You mean like this.
I ran across this looking for the old one I mentioned.
Page contains a drawing of a boxsom female bigfoot, so if you can’t handle it, don’t go there.
How about the Taco Liberty Bell?
Would the “who is Cartman’s dad” fiasco count as being a joke on a national scale? I don’t see why it wouldn’t.
That’s one of the top 100 in the list, but there are much better ones on that linked site. You will laugh at the old pranks and remember many of them I’m sure. National pranks abound and I think that some of the preinternet ones had better gulability displayed, because many more people weren’t used to being hoaxed.
I believe I read an article about that book, or at any rate an article on somebody in British intelligence that mentioned that story, although it wasn’t the main focus. The article I read was about a woman.
That’s the gist of it, but it’s worth fleshing out the details a bit. It’s a reference to the operation, which the Germans variously called Nordpol or Englandspiel, that rounded up the entire SOE operation in the Netherlands and then kept up the pretence that everything was okay for two years. The initial arrest was in March 1942 when one of the SOE radio operators was arrested in The Hague after his set was pinned down using radio direction-finding. The codes in use were extremely easy to break. They were based on each agent being issued with a poem to remember and then randomly selecting five words from it to encipher. It was fairly easy to break one message, find the five words being used and from those recognise the poem. That then allowed the Germans to both read all that agent’s back traffic and encipher fake messages. As you mention, there were additional security checks, unique to each agent, that were meant to be included, but agents had turned out to be extremely sloppy and London initially ignored the warning signs from Holland. By a combination of using the back traffic, arresting any new agents as they arrived and - astonishingly - persuading London to allow several supposedly distinct networks to send traffic for each other, the Germans managed to wrap everything up.
They then did deliberately blow the whole operation by sending a sarcastic message - from about a dozen “operators” simultaneously - on April Fools Day 1944.
M.R.D. Foot’s tally (in Resistance, 1976; Granada, 1978, p264) is that SOE lost 51 agents (and one MI9 guy) as a result in the period up to May 1943. Most died in German hands.
Yet the story is a bit more complicated than this. SOE’s head of codes, Leo Marks, had fairly early on realised that none of the agents in Holland were including their security checks. He was also struck by the fact that, uniquely amongst networks, the Dutch messages were being sent without any ciphering mistakes. (With agents having to do the fiddly task of enciphering under pressure in the field, a good chunk of SOE’s traffic included mistakes and deciphering the resulting apparent gibberish, to avoid the agent having to resend the message at additional risk, was a major headache for the Wireless Section.) Marks also wholesale distrusted the existing SOE codes anyway. Concerns led to various tests across the air. Marks sent an agent a message with enough deliberate mistakes that he was sure that the particular agent couldn’t unravel it. But the Germans might. The agent carried on as if there was no problem with the earlier message. Someone else came up with the ruse of signing off with “HH”. Sure enough, the German radio operator on the other end unthinkingly Heil Hitlered back out of habit.
However, the whole question got bogged down in the internal politics of SOE’s Baker Street HQ (the head office of Marks and Spencers in peacetime). The senior levels of the Wireless Section became convinced that the networks were compromised, those in charge of the networks weren’t. It didn’t even help when MI6, who had entirely independent agents operating in the country, warned that things were wrong; Baker Street tended to regard MI6 as enemies on a par with the Germans. Eventually two of the captured agents escaped and made it to Lisbon. But even then SOE had to continue sending agents in - without warning them - in order to keep up the pretence on their side that nothing was amiss and some still held out the hope that some of the networks were functioning.
Both sides wound up telling the story in postwar memoirs. H.J. Giskes, the Abwer officer in charge, and J. Schreieder, the SD one involved, both published their accounts shortly afterwards. More recently, Marks - who went on to be scriptwriter on Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom - published Between Silk and Cyanide (Harper Collins, 1998) a few years before his death. Extremely highly recommended as a readable, and blackly very funny, version of the story from his perspective. Deliberately written to balance Foot’s official history, he sees it as a farce in which incompetents in London, obsessed with Baker Street office politics, needlessly sent brave men and women to their deaths.
I haven’t read Giskes or Schreieder, so I don’t know how they explain the April Fools message. It puzzled Marks, on whose desk it initially wound up. He tentatively suggested that it was their attempt to discredit SOE in Whitehall ahead of invasion. But it seems unlikely that their knowledge of political situation in London was quite that acute.
I should have mentioned that at least one of the captured wireless operators did apparently try something like this. He kept misspelling “stop”, which Marks interpreted as a deliberate warning.