Last August, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, gave her "werewolf" speech. At the time, the Iraq occupation was losing public support because of continued attacks on U.S. troops three months after President Bush declared the war over. Rice sought to calm fears.

Not to worry, she said. The violence in Iraq was "normal" postwar chaos that soon would pass. Just as Hitler's "werewolves" had attacked U.S. occupying forces in Germany in 1945, she said, Iraqi diehards were attacking U.S. forces today. As in Germany, it would come to nothing.

Rice gave her speech the first week of August, when 58 U.S. troops had been killed since Bush declared the war over in May. Today that figure is 356, for a total U.S. Iraq death figure of at least 495.

Rice's reference to Germany surprised me. History barely mentions the werewolves, who never posed a security problem. Antony Beevor, in his "The Fall of Berlin, 1945," mentions werewolves only as a demented idea in the mind of propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and dying with him in Hitler's bunker on May 1, 1945.

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Then last week, I came upon remarks in the current Foreign Affairs by Allen W. Dulles, head of the Office of Strategic Services (later CIA) during World War II, based in Bern, Switzerland. Dulles was closely involved in postwar German occupation. He addressed New York's Council on Foreign Relations Sept. 3, 1945, three weeks after the date on the alleged Reuters dispatch.

In opening his talk, Dulles said: "There is no dangerous underground operating there (Germany) now although some newspapers in the United States played up such a story."

It's one thing to hear from German experts today that there was no postwar German resistance to U.S. occupation, quite another to get it, beyond the grave, from spy chief Dulles who had just returned from Germany in September 1945. In an editor's note, Foreign Affairs said it had opened its archives "as a contribution to public debate" on Iraq.

I dug out the Reuters dispatch, reread it, and called historian Fritz Stern, professor emeritus at Columbia and an expert on Germany.

Werewolves?

"They didn't amount to much at all," said Stern.

Rice's speech?

"I found it absurd," said Stern.

I read him some of the dispatch.

"It sounds fraudulent," said Stern.

I called Reuters in London. No help.

Thanks to my Internet friends, I can now identify the source of the bogus 1945 Reuters news dispatch I wrote about Monday. That forgery likely served as the basis for White House and Pentagon comparisons of Iraqi resistance to German resistance in 1945, part of its sorry attempts to compare Iraq to World War II.

The source for the bogus news (one should have known) is Fox News.

A Fox contributor named Rand Simberg, described as "consultant in space commercialization, space tourism and Internet security" made up the Reuters dispatch for Fox on July 30 (posting it on his own Web site two days later). This was only a week before the first Bush references were made to German "werewolves" in one of several inept comparisons to World War II.

Rice claimed German werewolves "engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces" and cooperating Germans, "much like today's Baathist and Fedayeen remnants."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld embellished the story still further. Werewolves, he said, "plotted sabotage of factories, power plants, rail lines. They blew up police stations and government buildings. Does this sound familiar," he asked?

Only in Rice's and Rumsfeld's minds. The total number of post-conflict U.S. combat casualties in Germany was zero. In Iraq, that number is, so far, 357. Some comparison.

"The first casualty of war," said Hiram Johnson a century ago, "is truth." It is one thing, however, to manipulate truth to fool the enemy, and quite another to try to fool your own people. Since the Pentagon Papers, Americans should be determined that it never happens again.