History's Most Shocking False Flags

Originally named after the act of deception in swapping your ship’s flag for those of your enemy, the term ‘false flag’ has evolved from its naval beginnings and now is defined by orchestrating a situation and blaming it on another nation, generally to begin a war with them. This can be anything from assassinating one of your own officials, bombing one of your own cities, or just straight up fabricating an entire story out of thin air, as long as, in the end, the blame gets pinned on your opponent.

It’s a dirty and incredibly risky tactic, taking a chance that the truth won’t be uncovered before it’s been buried in the ensuing conflict. If the truth does make it out, there’s the risk of losing alliances, plummeting public support, and much more, but despite the danger, it’s been attempted many, many times throughout history.

Today we’re going to go over some of history’s most influential and most shocking false flags, the lies that changed the course of history.

World War 2

It comes as no surprise that the deadliest war in all of history contained its fair share of false flags, after all, the Axis Powers needed some way to convince their population that invading their neighbor was entirely justified.

Germany achieved this by orchestrating an attack on the Gleiwitz radio station and blaming it on Poland. Specifically, on August 31st, 1939, SS officers dressed in Polish uniforms murdered a man inside the station and began broadcasting anti-German messages. Despite having many international teams nearby and ready to take a look, not a single neutral party was allowed to investigate, for obvious reasons.

This was the culminating event after months and months of anti-Polish propaganda and several other provocations. The very next day, Germany withdrew from their non-aggression pact, and the invasion of Poland was announced. The European theatre of the Second World War had begun.

The Fuhrer was confident that he would get away with his lie, telling his generals a week earlier: “I will provide a propagandistic casus belli. Its credibility doesn’t matter. The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth.”

But this lie was shattered in the Nuremberg Trials, when SS officer Alfred Naujocks spilled the beans that he had helped carry out the attack under orders from the Gestapo.

Imperial Japan’s attempt was far less convincing. And yes, this one was technically before World War 2, but it’s in the events leading up to it so we’ll include it in this section. Craving an excuse to invade the region Manchuria, Japanese officers set up explosives on one of their own rail lines rather close to a Chinese garrison. The idea was that the explosion would attract the Chinese to run over and investigate, which is when the Japanese would show up and blame them for the attack, citing their proximity as evidence.

On September 18th, 1931, the bombs were set off, but they were so poorly placed that they barely even damaged a small section of the rail. In fact, the rail was still fully functional, and a few minutes later a passenger train passed over it without difficulty and arrived at its destination on time.

Regardless, Japan began shelling the city of Mukden, today known as Shenyang, in response to this alleged provocation. The garrison in Mukden was overrun almost immediately, and Japan soon began occupying northern China, granting them the resources and boosting their industrial capacity they needed to continue their conquest of Asia and the Pacific. It was honestly quite a pathetic attempt at a false flag, and that’s probably because the Japanese government didn’t even plan it.

According to most historians, it may have actually been the local officers who came up with the idea, because it would give them a quick boost in their careers, and force the government’s hand to support them. This makes the most sense, because if the Imperial Japanese government was behind it, they probably wouldn’t have even bothered with a false flag, as they weren’t really concerned with justifying their brutal conquest anywhere else. After all, they didn’t bother coming up with an excuse to invade the Philippines, they just went and did it.

But the Axis powers weren’t alone in their tactics of deception. In 1939, the USSR also tried their hand at a false flag attack, this time with the intent of starting a war with Finland.

You see, the beef between the Soviet Union and Finland went back decades, since Finland was actually a territory of Russia until it gained independence during the collapse of the Russian Empire, and Stalin was not a fan of how it had all turned out. He also didn’t like how close the Finnish border was to Leningrad, today St. Petersburg, and feared it would be an easy target if Finland ever turned on them.

First, the Soviets tried to buy some land to create a buffer zone, offering a sizeable chunk of frozen tundra in northern Russia in exchange for several of Finland’s islands, a peninsula, and a 30-year lease for military bases on their soil. Finnish leadership rejected these negotiations, and that’s when everything started going downhill.

On the 26th of November 1939, artillery shells began landing near the Soviet village Mainila, which was only about 800 meters from the Finnish border. The Soviets immediately blamed Finnish artillery for the incident, quickly painting Finland as an aggressive state in national media, and four days later launched the Winter War, with the goal of invading and annexing a large portion of Finland’s territory.

But what actually happened that morning? According to modern historians, the shelling of Mainila was actually carried out by the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB. This is supported by the finding that not a single Finnish artillery piece was in range of Mainila on that day, and that Soviet soldiers had already for months been training in a war game in which Mainila was bombed by Finland. Finland had also suggested a neutral investigation into the alleged shelling, but just as Germany had done, the USSR refused to let anyone else investigate the scene.

The Winter War ended up causing the deaths of nearly 500,000 people, mostly Soviet soldiers, and even led to a sequel, the Continuation War, when Finland later allied itself with Germany and struck back, and all of this because of one single lie.

The legacy of the shelling of Mainila is a bit mixed. Many modern Russian historians agree that it was a false flag operation, and even Russian President Boris Yeltsin stated in 1994 that the Winter War had been an act of Soviet aggression. But others don’t see it that way.

Specifically, in a meeting with military historians, Vladimir Putin stated in 2013 that the Winter War had been launched in an attempt to correct alleged mistakes in the recently drawn Finnish borders.

Russia

Speaking of Vladimir Putin, the modern face of Russia is no stranger to false flags either. Following the more traditional definition of the word, one false flag operation occurred during the annexation of Crimea in 2014, in which Russian troops entered and annexed the peninsula, but had carefully removed all insignias off their clothing beforehand, only wearing plain green uniforms into Ukraine. This gained them the nickname ‘little green men’, as their allegiance was intended to appear anonymous, but it was no secret where they’d come from. Once they’d secured the region, the proper Russian armed forces moved in.

Similarly, in 2008, Russia utilized so-called ‘peacekeepers’ to aid in their brief invasion of Georgia, which was sparked after a few border provocations in a Russian-annexed region known as South Ossetia. Of course, both sides claim that the other instigated the conflict there, but the Russian Armed Forces just so happened to have several armored columns right next to the Roki Tunnel, which led directly into Georgia. This was not a standard place for these units to hang out, and according to military expert Ralph Peters, anyone above the grade of private knew that the Russian response to the situation in Georgia was not spontaneous, as it would have taken weeks of considerable effort to move the necessary troops over the Caucasus mountains, set up pre-planned missile strikes, and bring in a fleet to blockade Georgia’s waters the moment the conflict erupted. Suffice to say, this had been in the works for quite some time, and it was absolutely not a coincidence that the “provocations” happened while the Russian military was at its highest level of readiness.

But this was not Putin’s first attempt at a false flag operation. For this, we need to head back to the very end of the 20th century, when the biggest issue on Russia’s plate wasn’t a war with a neighboring country, but rather how to handle its rebellious province of Chechnya. The First Chechen War had been a catastrophe, with as many as 100,000 civilians losing their lives as Russian forces tried to reassert control over the region. No one wanted a repeat of this disaster, but in the late 90s it seemed that another war might inevitably be on the horizon as tensions once again began to build.

And in early September, 1999, any chance of a peaceful resolution was smashed in the wake of several apartment bombings in three Russian cities, including Moscow. In total, 307 people died in these bombings, and more than 1,700 were injured. The blame was immediately pinned on Chechen separatists, and an invasion of Chechnya was soon underway, starting the Second Chechen War. Russia’s victory in this brutal conflict would propel Putin’s status as a leader, winning him the 2000 presidential elections and securing his spot as the face of Russia until the present day.

But the story that Chechen militants bombed those apartments isn’t so solid, and there is a strong belief by many that the bombings were actually orchestrated by the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, to instigate a war. That’s a pretty big accusation, so let’s get into the evidence.

For starters, two months before any of the bombings happened, Russian journalist Aleksandr Zhilin warned that the government would stage terror attacks in Moscow as a precursor to war, citing leaked Kremlin documents as his source, but this didn’t lead to any investigations.

When the explosions began to happen, the primary evidence to quickly blame it on Chechens was a series of phone calls made to news agencies speaking in a Chechen accent and claiming responsibility, but the problem here is that the caller claimed he was from the Liberation Army of Dagestan, but no such organization has ever existed.

Then we have the incredibly suspicious incident in which Gennadiy Seleznyov, a member of the Russian State Duma, said on September 13th: “I have just received a report. According to information from Rostov-on-Don, an apartment building in the city of Volgodonsk was blown up last night.” But there’s one big problem with this. The attack he was describing didn’t happen for another three days; he’d announced it too early.

When this bombing later happened, exactly where he said it would, a different member of the government pressed: “Remember, Gennadiy, how you told us that an apartment block has been blown up in Volgodonsk, three days prior to the blast? How should we interpret this? The State Duma knew that the apartment block was destroyed on Monday, and it has indeed been blown up on Thursday.”

Seleznyov turned off his microphone and didn’t respond. Later, a defector from the FSB, Alexander Litvinenko, confirmed that the event had been set up by the FSB, and that they’d accidentally mixed up the date of the pre-planned announcements when they gave Seleznyov the announcement note. And yes, Litvinenko was assassinated by poisoning after defecting to the UK.

But perhaps the most damning evidence that these attacks were not from Chechens came on September 22nd, 1999, when a small group of men were spotted carrying large sacks into the basement of an apartment building. A bystander called the police, and in no time flat, bomb squads stormed in. Sure enough, they found explosives, as well as a detonation timer set for 5:30 AM.

Three men were arrested for their involvement in placing the device, which was found to contain large amounts of something called RDX, or Hexogen, a military-grade explosive that was a highly controlled substance and only produced in a single, well-guarded plant in Russia. Putin praised the police for finding the bomb, and ordered the invasion of Chechnya the very next day.

But then the story changed a bit, because the three men arrested for their involvement turned out to be none other than FSB agents. Suddenly, the official story was not that the police had heroically stopped another bombing, but that the sacks had actually been filled with sugar, this was all nothing more than a training exercise and a big misunderstanding. The FSB agents were released, and the incident swept under the rug.

But not everyone took the official narrative at face value, not even members of the government. For months, and a few years, many Russian politicians continued to press the issue regarding the inconsistencies and unanswered questions of the bombings, but all their efforts came to an end when a few men were blamed, arrested, and convicted, and, considering the case closed, the FSB sealed all investigative files for the next 75 years. So, whether or not this truly was a false flag, we may not know until the 2070s.

USA

To many, it’s no surprise that Russia has engaged in its fair share of false flag operations, after all, it just seems so Putin, but across the globe, the United States too, is far from innocent.

Accusations of American false flags go all the way back to 1898, when the USS Maine, sitting in harbor just outside Havana, Cuba, was suddenly destroyed in a devastating explosion, killing hundreds on board. US media, and the US government, jumped at the chance to blame the sinking of the Maine on Spain, specifically a Spanish naval mine, and soon, the Spanish-American War had begun, a war which greatly boosted America’s status as a global power and secured its position as the dominant force in the western hemisphere. It also ripped Spain’s hands off of its colonies in the Philippines, Cuba, Guam, and Puerto Rico, leaving them heavily under the influence of the United States for decades to come.

But no one really knows what happened to the Maine. To be honest, the last thing Spain would have wanted at the time was an unwinnable war with the United States in which they would lose half of their fleet, all while Spain was already dealing with a rebellion in Cuba. In fact, when the Maine had sunk, it was Spanish ships that first arrived on the scene, rescuing survivors and taking them back to shore and sending them home. This would be truly puzzling behavior if Spain had intentionally sunk the ship as an act of war.

Even the famed journalist Pulitzer said at the time that nobody outside a lunatic asylum believed that Spain had sanctioned the sinking of the Maine. Regardless, the newspapers he owned, and every other newspaper, continued to sensationalize the story, painting Spain as an aggressor and demanding Cuban independence. Public opinion was heavily swayed, and the government eventually gave in.

Later investigations have found that an internal explosion of the ammunition storage is a far more likely explanation than a mine, so what probably happened is the Maine and her crew were lost in a tragic accident, which the US jumped at the chance to use as an excuse to kick Spain out of the Americas.

And this wouldn’t even be the last time Cuba would be involved in US false flags. Fast forward a few decades, and with Fidel Castro now in power, and getting really tight with the Soviet Union, relations between the US and Cuba were less than ideal.

The US desperately wanted to remove Castro from power, but with a long history of failed CIA assassinations, it seemed the only way to achieve this would be an all-out invasion with the entire might of the US military. But this was the 1960s, and invading Cuba without a solid reason would be an international scandal for the US, especially considering the Cold War politics at the time. They needed justification, and the CIA had the perfect idea.

Operation Northwoods was the codename for a series of plans to harm Americans while blaming Cuba, and the CIA came up with dozens of ideas, such as: a Communist Cuban terror campaign in Miami, the bombing of civilian targets and the hijacking of airliners, orchestrating the shoot-down of a US Air Force jet, and blowing up civilian and military ships, and much more. They imagined that all this carnage would paint such a bad image of Castro that an invasion of Cuba would be all but guaranteed.

Fortunately, Operation Northwoods was shut down by John F. Kennedy, and never saw the light of day.

The same, however, can’t be said for the Gulf of Tonkin. On August 2nd, 1964, US forces were engaged in covert operations near the coast of North Vietnam when they were fired upon. This event is fairly well-documented, but another incident, occurring two days later, lacks any sort of credibility. Allegedly, on August 4th, 1964, the crew of the USS Maddox was informed that an attack was imminent, and, spotting several approaching signatures on their radar, opened fire.

The Navy claimed that two attacking torpedo boats had been sunk.

Just before midnight that same day, President Lyndon B. Johnson interrupted national television with an announcement of the attack, speaking of North Vietnam as the aggressors, and carefully describing the incident as having taken place “on the high seas,” making it sound more like it had happened in international waters and not right on the coast of Vietnam as it actually had. He assured the American public that he had no desire for war, but that they had a commitment to South Vietnam, and requested authorization to prepare a military response.

The real issue here is that the evidence of these attacks was still up in the air. Johnson had jumped the gun, and it would later turn out that the second attack, on August 4th, literally did not happen. It was merely a communication mix-up and the ship firing at radar errors, and this is why no wreckage from the two supposed sunk torpedo boats was ever located. But Congress too didn’t wait for the evidence to be compiled, and quickly authorized official military landings in Vietnam.

According to many historians, politicians, and even men aboard the USS Maddox, this had been the plan all along. National security advisor McGeorge Bundy stated that the Maddox had been permitted to get as close as eight miles from North Vietnam’s coast, and its appearances often coincided with legitimate South Vietnamese hit-and-run commando attacks, giving the North Vietnamese the impression that the US warship was already involved.

US Navy intelligence analyst James Bamford adds that the true purpose of the Maddox “was to act as a seagoing provocateur—to poke its sharp gray bow and the American flag as close to the belly of North Vietnam as possible, in effect shoving its five-inch cannons up the nose of the communist navy.”

In essence, it was baiting out any sort of response from North Vietnam, and the Johnson administration latched onto an attack the moment it seemingly appeared, regardless of the evidence at the time. And it worked, too, because in just a few short years the US would have a full military presence in Vietnam, fighting one of the most controversial wars in American history.

Key Takeaways

• False flag operations involve orchestrating events to blame opponents, often to justify war.
• Historical examples include Germany’s attack on Gleiwitz and Japan’s Mukden Incident.
• The USSR’s shelling of Mainila and Russia’s annexation of Crimea are modern false flag incidents.
• The US has been accused of false flags, such as the sinking of the USS Maine and the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
• False flags are risky and can backfire if the truth is revealed, leading to loss of alliances and public support.

Sources

• Original Side Projects video: History’s Most Shocking False Flags
• Hero image source by Wolfmann / openverse, by-sa.

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