False-Flag Operation

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

3rd & 4th Messengers: My Lord, news: the Swiss have invaded France.
King Richard IV: Excellent! Wessex, while they're away, take ten thousand troops and pillage Geneva!
Lord Chiswick: But the Swiss are our allies, My Lord.
King Richard IV: Oh yes... Well, er, get them to dress up as Germans, will you?

—The Black Adder

Whenever people from one nation or organization pretend to be members of another, to stir up trouble. Common scenarios include:

  • Pretending to be an enemy and attacking another enemy, to get them to fight;
  • Pretending to be an enemy and attacking yourself, to justify a counterattack;
  • Pretending to be a member of a terrorist organization and attacking your own people, to better control them.
  • In espionage, pretending to be from either the victim's nation or an allied one to fool someone into betraying secrets.

It's not limited to violence; spreading misinformation or committing sabotage in someone else's name can work wonders too. Basically it is a Frame-Up scaled up to target large organizations and nations.

This is an example of Truth in Television, since false flag operations have been used in real life to do all of this. It's generally frowned upon by the Geneva Convention. You're allowed to do it in naval warfare, but have to raise your true colours before opening fire.

Any False-Flag Operation can be used to generate a Pretext for War. If a False-Flag Operation is perpetrated by an individual villain to start a war for his own benefit, it's a case of War for Fun and Profit. If the attack is directly against the guys you're posing as (as opposed to your own), it's Dressing as the Enemy. When they disguise someone else it's Disguised Hostage Gambit. If the intent is to incite two villainous groups to wipe each other out, it can either be Evil Versus Evil or Enemy Civil War. Gambit Pileups occasionally involve these - sometimes more than one per plot.

Examples of False-Flag Operation include:

Anime and Manga

  • Baroque Works in One Piece occasionally pose as Alabastan troops attacking civilians in order to discredit the real army. Later, one agent actually transforms to look like the King of Alabasta to drive people into violent rebellion.
    • Don Krieg has also been known to use this strategy, specifically wanting to capture the Baratie to do it more easily.
  • In MS Igloo the Zeons made a Zaku disguised as a GM for this purpose. It was so good that it was shot down by its own ship on the way back from its mission.
    • At a distance, maybe. This is the disguised Zaku and this is what a regular GM looks like.
  • In Fullmetal Alchemist, the shape-changing homunculus Envy took the form of an Amestrian soldier and fired the shot that started the Ishballan War.
  • In Transformers: Robots in Disguise, the Predacons disguise themselves as Autobots and fire on the Decepticons, hoping that the two groups will annihilate each other.
  • In Baka To Test To Shokanjuu Hideyoshi dresses up as his twin sister (the vice-representative of Class A) in order to goad Class C into attacking Class A.
  • In Zoids: Chaotic Century, a member of the Guylos Empire hired some mercenaries to pose as members of the Republic to stage an attack on their own forces to start the war the Empire's been itching to have. While it worked initially, the commanders from both sides fortunately knew it was a False Flag Gambit and found an excuse to stop the fighting.

Comic Books

  • In an issue of G.I. Joe: Special Missions, the G.I. Joe team breaks a group of Russian soldiers out of prison in Afghanistan while posing as Russian military, and then gets the Russians to undertake a mission for them in the Middle East, posing as members of G.I. Joe in a bizarre double False-Flag Operation.
  • Ozymandias pulls one of these in Watchmen by creating a psychic "alien" to attack New York City. The idea was to create an outside threat to the entire world in order to pull the United States and the Soviet Union into an alliance, thereby cutting off the Cold War before it went hot.
  • In the Tintin book The Blue Lotus, the Mukden Incident is depicted as happening near Shanghai. (See Real Life section below)
  • In a move that borders on Dangerously Genre Savvy, the Stunticons of all groups pull this in the course of the original Transformers Marvel comic run. They end up realizing that the anti-robot human organization RAAT and their Psycho Electro Broken Bird Circuit Breaker are indiscriminately targeting Transformers, completely blind to faction affiliations. They wise up to the fact faster than the Autobots, and during a battle with the Aerialbots, the Stunticons rally around the Autobot Skids, pretending to protect him from his allies, and ultimately convincing the mentally unhinged Circuit Breaker that her hunch was right—all the robots were working in concert to overthrow Earth and that the factions are just a ruse. Naturally, she attacks the Aerialbots while the Stunticons make a hasty escape. This is a case of an inverted false flag operation, with one faction pretending to protect their enemies in the middle of a clear fight between the two groups in order to have their mutual enemies start blindly attacking. Now bear in mind that this is the Stunticons we're talking about here.
  • In the Marvel Universe, one version of the terrorist group the Mutant Liberation Front was in fact organised by anti-mutant fanatic Simon Trask, and consisted of normal humans given drugs or wearing costumes to give them superpowers who masqueraded as mutants in order to convince the general populace that mutants were a dangerous threat that needed to be eliminated.
  • In Prelude to Civil War, Iron Man hired his old enemy the Titanium Man to make an attempt on his life in order to provide a cause for not passing the registration act (basically, America's enemies would take advantage of the division and wipe them all out).
  • The origin of the Golden Age Western heroine Firehair involved a group of whites disguising themselves as Dakota Indians and attacking a wagon train to steal the shipment of rifles on board.
  • The GCPD pulled a few of these to get various gangs to fight each other during the No Man's Land arc by painting over the territory markers of Gang A with the markers of Gang B and vice versa.
  • Deff Skwadron, of all things. Orks probably won't bother to do it on purpose, but since they stole an enemy aircraft already... could as well take "a quick detour over Karnage Sqwadron's base" on the way home.

Uzgob: We've got a bommer 'ere painted with enemy markings, so who's gonna know it's really us if we bombs the place to zog?!

Fan Works

  • In the Derelict campaign for Freespace 2, this happens accidentally when the Shivans attempt to reach a jump node blockaded by the GTVA. When Shivan capital ships larger than the blockade can handle start showing up, it seems like the Shivans will rip through them like paper. Cue the MMC-controlled Auriga, an Orion-class destroyer modified to have More Dakka, ripping through the Shivans like paper as it runs for the node. The Shivans, unaware the Auriga isn't friendly to GTVA interests, assume the GTVA is far better equipped than they actually are and retreat.
    • Played straight in another (otherwise unrelated) Freespace 2 campaign - In Sol: A History, a group of Earth Alliance pilots use ships generally used by another faction (the Independent Peoples of Pluto) and attack a Neptunian convoy, causing the two groups to start fighting each other.
  • In Code Geass Lelouch of Britannia, Lelouch's company is deliberately under-supplied by the logistical higher-ups due to Lelouch being the Black Sheep. Thus, a supposed "enemy raid" on a Britannian supply column by EU Knightmares was totally not perpetrated by Jeremiah and the Black Knights operating captured machines.

Film

  • V for Vendetta has the British government stage a biological warfare attack against the London Underground and a primary school, also imitating the Reichstag incident.
  • The Princess Bride has the bride-to-be almost becoming the victim of a False Flag Operation when her fiancé, evil Prince Humperdinck, hires agents to pose as enemy soldiers and murder her. This, so her death can be blamed on the neighboring country of Guilder, whom the Prince wants to go to war with.
  • A favorite of Big Bads in many James Bond movies.
    • You Only Live Twice has S.P.E.C.T.R.E. running a dual false flag operation against both the US and the USSR space programmes, making it look like each nation is hijacking the other's capsules out of orbit.
    • The Spy Who Loved Me has a similar plot, where two nukes are simultaneously launched towards Moscow and New York, prompting nuclear war. The Big Bad, of course, is safe in his undersea base.
    • Tomorrow Never Dies also reused this plot, with an evil media mogul trying to provoke a war between Britain and China.
    • Octopussy has rogue Soviet General Orlov attempting to smuggle in and detonate a nuclear bomb on a German Air Base. Since there will be no detected missile launch, he hopes it will be assumed the explosion was an accident and that the European powers will respond by demanding removal/disarming of all stockpiled nuclear weapons. Once they are gone, Orlov plans to launch a massive land-based invasion, confident that without nukes, NATO will be powerless to stop him.
  • In the Woody Allen comedy Bananas, the dictator of San Marcos (a Fictional Counterpart of Cuba) attempts to assassinate a bumbling American tourist and frame a revolutionary group, in order to obtain American aid against the insurgents. It backfires, ultimately leading to the tourist becoming the leader of San Marcos.
  • Star Trek:
    • Star Trek II the Wrath of Khan had Khan and his crew using the hijacked USS Reliant to sneak up on and attack the Enterprise, effectively disguising themselves as Star Fleet officers.
    • In Star Trek VI the Undiscovered Country there were a bunch of false-flag operations going on, with Klingons firing on themselves to try and start a war, then (at least in the video releases) Humans pretending to be Klingons to assassinate the Klingon Chancellor at a peace conference. (Both incidents were part of the same conspiracy: Humans, Klingons and Romulans coming together to prevent peace. Awww...)
  • Star Wars 1 through 3 was all about false flag operations. To trigger the creation of the Republic Grand Army for instance, to later become his own Imperial Army, and one huge galactic, totalitarian dictatorship, Palpatine/Sidious played off both sides, which he both controlled.
  • Body of Lies (2008) features the CIA creating a fictional terrorist group and orchestrating a bombing (with fake victims) in order to draw a real terrorist out of hiding.
  • The League of Gentlemen (1960). While stealing weapons from a British army base for The Caper, the protagonists have a couple of men speaking in Irish accents, knowing that the IRA will get the blame.
  • Watchmen : The fictitious threat in the movie differs from that in the graphic novel but it has the same result - uniting the world against a common enemy.
  • The Long Kiss Goodnight has the Harsher in Hindsight plot of the CIA staging a terrorist attack and "blaming it on the Muslims" so as to justify a budget increase. Paranoia Fuel? They were referencing the... oddities... surrounding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

CIA man: During the trial, one of the bombers claimed the CIA had advance knowledge. [Chuckling] The diplomat who issued the terrorists visa was CIA.

  • In Terry Gilliam's Brazil, random bombings occasionally erupt, and are implied to be false flags.
  • In Where Eagles Dare, the British shoot down one of their own planes, containing a (fake) American general, over Germany as a pretext to sending in a team of undercover agents in a convoluted effort to flush out The Mole.
  • In 8th Wonderland, the countries opposing the virtual nation initiate bombings and blame 8th Wonderland for them.
  • The film version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen starts with the Fantom and his Mooks attacking the Bank of England in London disguised as Germans and speaking German. They then attack a zeppelin factory in Berlin disguised as British soldiers. This is done for two purposes. First, the Fantom wants to escalate the animosity between the European powers in order to start World War I. Second, he wants the gold and plans for the foundation of Venice in the Bank of England and German scientists to design new war machines. Once the war starts, he wants to sell advanced weapons to both sides.
  • In Canadian Bacon, the government wants to create another Cold War, this time with Canada, in order to shift the blame from the current President to the hypothetical enemy. Besides a massive propaganda campaign, they send a squad of troops in Canadian uniforms to sabotage the Niagara Falls power plant. Unknown to them, the local sheriff believes all the anti-Canadian propaganda and organizes a militia to defend his town, including the power plant. The saboteurs are caught before they can do any damage. Despite this, the operation still succeeds, as the news of the attempt achieves the same result as an actual sabotage.
  • Sleeping Dogs has a member of the government pay thugs to shoot soldiers during an altercation with pro-union protesters to escalate tensions and give them an excuse for creating a police state.
  • Used by the protagonist in Layer Cake who fakes a police drugs raid on a warehouse full of ecstasy in order to a) claim the pills for himself and b) get the Serbian gangsters (from whom the pills were originally stolen) off his back.
    • Actually, the raid itself was real (though presumably on the protagonists tip off). The two detectives who came to pick up the evidence, on the other hand, weren't.
  • Gabriel Shear in Swordfish is, supposedly, part of a secret U.S. government agency that attacks the U.S. under the guise as terrorists in a more grossly horrific manner than any terrorist group has tried. The idea is the other terrorist groups become too afraid of one that can carry out such attacks that no group would attack the U.S.

Literature

  • Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent involves a combination of false flagging and an agent provocateur—the main character is a member of the Tsarist secret police and he joins an anarchist group in London and plants a bomb in the Royal Greenwich Observatory to discredit them.
    • False flagging of this sort happened (or was suspected to happen) all the time in those days. The infamous Protocols of Zion was in fact written by a Tsarist secret service agent to discredit revolutionary groups as working for an "international Jewish conspiracy." This has been proven repeatedly, but it keeps resurfacing nonetheless.
  • Subverted in the Discworld novel Jingo. There is an assassination attempt on a ArabiKlatchian dignitary, and the evidence that the Klatchians themselves were behind it (i.e. the assassin was paid with foreign currency and there was sand on the floor) is so insultingly obvious, Commander Vimes assumes someone in Ankh-Morpork was framing them to make it look like they were trying to provoke a war. A Klatchian turns out to have planted the evidence to hide the fact that he did hire an assassin for this very purpose. After a couple hundred pages of messages against racism, the author points out that true equality means giving minorities the chance to be bastards.
  • In the Frederick Forsyth novel The Fourth Protocol, a Soviet spy pretends to work for South Africa to get a British official to reveal secrets. The British official was a staunch anti-Communist who felt that South Africa needed to know information to help fight the USSR and that South Africa was being denied information because of their "minor" problems with oppressing blacks. So he tells the spy classified information to help South Africa fight Soviet influence. Ironic, huh?
    • Not to mention the Russian plot in the book to detonate a nuclear bomb near a US Air Force base, to cause the election of an anti-nuclear, pro-Soviet government (Labour at that time were anti-nuclear. While not pro-Soviet, they had quite a few fellow travelers attempting to influence them from within. In the novel a faction of these are thus waiting in the wings to take control and remove the US nuclear missiles from the UK, eliminating this threat to the Soviet Union).
  • In one of Daniel Silva's novels about an Israeli spy, the hero is captured by Palestinian terrorists who want to place him at a suicide bombing in France they carry out as a False-Flag Operation framing Israel for a False-Flag Operation, like the odious conspiracy theory Israel was behind 9/11. Sadly, it works at least temporarily all too well.
  • In Tom Clancy's Executive Orders, China heightens political tensions in Asia by orchestrating an air battle between their air forces and the air forces of Taiwan. It fits this trope, in that the Taiwanese pilots were tricked into opening hostilities when they were caught in the middle of a Chinese "training mission."
    • For a more straight-up example, see Red Storm Rising, when the KGB sets up a bombing of the Politburo to manufacture a casus belli as part of their "maskirovka" (Russian for "camouflage" or "concealment").
    • The terrorists in The Sum of All Fears have several False Flag operations going, first trying to frame the Russians for nuking Denver, and starting a shooting war in East Germany, and when that falls through, blaming the Iranians (who in this case actually had nothing to do with it) for being behind the whole thing.
    • Also discussed in The Bear And The Tiger, when China is preparing to invade Russia. The Chinese Defense Minister suggests that they shoot down a Russian recon plane, and then claim that it had invaded Chinese airspace as a justification for the invasion. Whether that actually happens is not mentioned (but it probably doesn't, as the Russians stop their recon flights in favor of the American UAVs).
  • In one of the spy novels by Adam Hall, Quiller is assigned to babysit an Embassy official investigating an impending Polish uprising that might disrupt East/West peace talks. Quiller conducts his own investigations and is surprised to find the Poles believe the British government is backing their revolt. It turns out the Embassy official is a KGB Double Agent manufacturing evidence that the entire uprising is a Western-instigated plot, thereby justifying a crackdown by the Soviet military.
  • In Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain novel Cain's Last Stand, Cain is suspicious of some soldiers and sees they are wearing standard Imperial armor. When one says he has a message for Cain, Cain shoots him: any message would have been sent through secure official channels. With the ploy blown, the others open fire.
  • Earlier, in For The Emperor, a Tau ambassador is killed during a fete at the governor's palace; naturally, the Imperials and the Tau blame each other for setting up the murder and nearly come to blows. In truth, the whole thing was set up by an underground Genestealer cult--including the governor himself--in order to provoke a war between both parties and soften them up for the coming Tyranid invasion.
  • In Graham McNeill's Warhammer 40,000 Ultramarines novel Nightbringer, Vedden and his men disguised themselves as Arbites and attacked a demonstration, to produce a riot.
  • Done several times in Romance of the Three Kingdoms. One of the most important ones was the raid on Wu Chao which has two of these occur. First, Cao Cao disguises his troops as Yuan Shao's soldiers to get to Wu Chao in the first place. Then, once Wu Chao has been raided and burnt to the ground, he sends several soldiers in the guise of the Wu Chao garrison to tell Yuan Shao that Cao Cao's raid has been successfully fought off. This causes Yuan to divert forces that would have gone to the defense of Wu Chao to help raid Cao Cao's camp...where the rest of Cao's forces were waiting in ambush. This victory is almost enough to transform Smug Snake Cao Cao into a Magnificent Bastard.
  • Done by Darken Rahl in the Sword of Truth series. His forces disguised themselves as soldiers from Westland and began sacking towns loyal to him, making him appear like a benevolent savior and Westland as a nation of Knight Templar fanatics.
  • In the Honor Harrington series, this has been the Mesan Alignment's MO for the last few centuries. In recent years they've run multiple False Flag operations intended to heat up the shooting war between Manticore and Haven whenever it starts to cool down, and more recently to start a war between Manticore and the Solarian League.
  • In the Hand of Thrawn duology, Supreme Commander Pellaeon of the Imperial Remnant was preparing for a Peace Conference with the New Republic. Some of his people disagreed violently. Pellaeon sent an envoy in a shuttle to request the talks and then quietly took his flagship to a neutral part of space to wait for a response, preferably the Corellian New Republic general he respected the most. His dissidents captured the envoy's shuttle while not letting it send any messages, and later paid a pirate force to disguise their ships as a midsized Corellian force and then attack Pellaeon's ships before retreating. Pellaeon, who'd studied under Grand Admiral Thrawn, was not fooled; he determined that these were not the Corellian general's forces based on their tactics, then destroyed most of them and sat back to wait, aware now that there was treachery among his people.
    • Meanwhile, the fake returning Thrawn and his associates assign Imperial Intelligence agents to trigger speciesist riots on Bothawui and eventually frame Han Solo for murder.
    • Most glorious tactician Isard's plots in X Wing Series consist of losing a planet and leaving a massive sleeper cell and traps behind, to fracture the young New Republic's human and nonhuman factions.
  • Alan Dean Foster's Kees vaan Loo-Macklin, The Man Who Used the Universe, created a false attack by a previously unknown alien species to prevent war between humanity and the Nuel by forcing their militaries to work together against the new threat. In the interests of making the deception convincing, he had himself shot repeatedly to the extent that he lost an arm.
  • In the Young Bond novel By Royal Command, the Nazis get British communists to attempt to assassinate the king by pretending to be Russians.
  • Variations on this theme were a favorite tactic of Murgo infiltrators in The Belgariad and the related books, to the point where several characters make cracks about the Murgo lack of originality.
  • Used quite fittingly in a number of Napoleonic naval warfare novels, most notably in the Aubrey-Maturin and Horatio Hornblower series. A particular example from Horatio Hornblower stands out: while still a midshipman, Hornblower takes part in a cutting-out expedition to capture the Papillon. His own ship, the Indefatigable, is attacked by 3 French corvettes before the Papillon can get away, and so Hornblower (having wound up in command by an unlikely series of events) orders the Papillon to engage the corvettes, taking advantage of the fact that the boarding party had yet to replace the Bonapartist tricolor with the Blue Ensign (or rather the Ensign over the tricolor). He (and pretty much every RN officer) deems it a legitimate ruse de guerre. In the television adaptation, he instead claims ignorance of the rule when warned against this strategy by one of the more experienced sailors, sarcastically offering to let the sailor show him the rule after they save the Indy.
    • He does this again as a Captain in A Ship Of The Line, intentionally creating a fake French tricolour to get close to a group of Spanish ships. This comes back to bite him in the next book when he is convicted of piracy in absentia by the French and sentenced to be executed after his ship is captured.
    • In Lord Hornblower, he does this yet again: A small vessel has been taken by mutineers who intend to seek offered refuge in France. Hornblower finds himself aboard that vessel's sister ship, and has the rigging modified to match before launching a raid on the nearby French port, guaranteeing that the mutineers' ship will now be presumed hostile by the French. This sets in motion a chain of events climaxing in Hornblower siezing control of the port for the British and leading into the fall of Napolean.
  • In Dale Brown's Fatal Terrain, the Chinese set up and/or stage attacks on their own resources to create the impression that Taiwan and the US are attacking them. In Warrior Class, the Big Bad Pavel Kazakov stages a Macedonian attack on Albania to get the two countries to fight. In Edge of Battle, Zakharov attacks illegal immigrants using the same weapons as the American Watchdogs in order to make it seem that they killed the immigrants.
  • The Fall Of The Galaxy, the rebelling biomechanical ships of the Bargon Empire are invading the Solar System - the heart of the Galaxy (yes, that is the name of one of the human galactic powers). The fleet of the Seven Systems' Union arrives to help the Galaxy defend Earth. However, as all three human powers distrust each other, the biomechanical ships use it to their advantage to trick the Galaxy into thinking that they are allied with the Seven Systems' Union. This causes additional confusion and more loss of life before the biomechanical ships are finally defeated.
  • In Crown of Fire, the Shuhr were planning to fake a Sentinel attack on Tallis in order to turn the Federacy against the Sentinels, the only people who could stand against the Shuhr.
  • One of Orson Scott Card's novels about an alternate America has (if memory serves, which it may not) Andrew Jackson offering famed riverboat scoundrel and murderer Mike Fink a hefty sum to recruit desperados, dress as Indians, and raid white settlements, killing women and children. Fink, after a moment, bursts into laughter; Andy has managed to find something Mike won't do.
    • Mike is ambushed and murdered on his way back to his boat, as he expected, and Jackson's (Black Hawk?)war starts on schedule.
  • George Orwell in his book 1984 had The Government use agents who posed as anti-government dissidents to recruit real anti-government dissidents who are then rounded up for torture and liquidation.
  • In Blood of the Mantis, how the Empire tries to break up the alliance.
  • There was a book called something like The Double Invasion in which Earth had learned that a warlike species planned to attack a planet of Human Aliens soon. Instead of telling the targets, Earth's government sent a force to invade a year or so in advance, claiming to be the bad guys and committing "atrocities" just bad enough to piss off the locals and make them willing to mobilize and increase their industry to wartime levels. The fake invaders then allowed themselves to be "captured" and agreed to help improve the locals' defenses. The defenders were very surprised when the real alien invaders arrived and, after getting clobbered, were shown to be quite nonhuman.
  • In Vladimi Vasilyev's No One but Us, a group of Space Marines are forced to pretend to be rogues and pirates in order to invade a planet of Human Aliens in another galaxy in order to secure a cache of extremely-powerful portals left behind by Precursors. This gets to the point that they're forbidden from using official ranks or even words like "army" and "division" (these being replaced with "cohort"). This is despite the fact that the Human Aliens in question have never even seen an alien before and would probably assume the heavily-armed invaders were part of a government anyway.
  • One of the Star Trek Expanded Universe novels has John Harriman (the captain of the Enterprise-B) take part in a Starfleet Intelligence false flag operation against Federation outposts in the Foxtrot system (which were all automated and whose crew manifests consisted of dead officers) by sneaking aboard the Romulan flagship Tomed, commanded by his arch-nemesis Admiral Aventeer Vokar, and rigging it for a suicide run against the Federation outposts. When the ship enters the system at high warp, the rigged artificial singularity powering the ship breaks containment and destabilizes space-time in the area, destroying the outposts and a single Federation ship. The incident is recorded as a terrorist action by a crazed Romulan admiral (who conveniently perished in the attack), which causes the previously-neutral Klingons to take Federation's side in the Treaty of Algeron. Facing this alliance, the Romulan withdraw and close their borders. This was what SI planned all along. Harriman himself is forced to resign, though, leaving Demora Sulu in command.
  • The intelligence-based version is mentioned in the backstory of the Harry Potter books. During the First Wizarding War, a wizard named Rookwood, who worked for the Department of Mysteries, set up at least one agent (Ludo Bagman) to pass along intelligence for the war effort, obsensibly to help the Ministry. Of course, Rookwood was actually a Death Eater spy who was passing this info on to Voldemort, and after the war Bagman was hauled in front of a tribunal and accused of being a Death Eater as well.
  • During the Time of Troubles in the Deverry novels, Lady Merodda arranges for her brother and his warband to kill one of her rivals while using enemy equipment to make it look like the result of a raid rather than a deliberate assassination. Unfortunately for her, Merodda's daughter figured it out and told the rival's husband what had really happened, prompting him to defect.
  • Mockingjay, the final book of The Hunger Games trilogy, describes a bomb attack on children from the Capitol using a plane with the Capitol's emblem. Katniss recognizes the attack as a strategy developed by Gale and District 13.

Live-Action TV

  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine did this in one of its most celebrated episodes, "In the Pale Moonlight". Sisko puts aside his principles to get the Romulans to join the war against the Dominion. First a holographic recording is faked to make it appear that the Dominion were intending to attack the Romulans, and when this falls through, the Romulan ambassador is assassinated, his shuttle bombed, to make it appear that the Dominion didn't want the truth to be discovered. It is learned that this was the plan all along, Garak knowing the recording would not pass inspection... unless the flaws could be explained as being due to the explosion.
    • In another (two-part) episode, a Starfleet admiral brings down Earth's power grid and blames it on Changeling sabotage, so that the Federation will declare martial law (which he thinks is necessary to prepare for a Dominion invasion).
    • The Founders of the Dominion also employ this trope by using shapeshifter infiltrators to manipulate the Klingon invasion of Cardassia, not to mention the the withdrawal of the Klingon Empire from the Khitomer Accords, and the Second Federation-Klingon War that results, all in order to weaken the Alpha Quadrant powers for a Dominion invasion
    • Also used by the main cast in a captured Jem'Hadar warship to take out a White facility.
    • Star Trek: Enterprise did this one when the Romulans used a ship with a holographic display to fake various species around human space to try and get them fighting each other. Brilliantly unsuccessfully, as it turns out, as the joint effort to find and defeat the ship forms the basis for the Federation and Starfleet.
  • In V, the Visitors use a staged terrorist attack against a Visitor-run chemical processing plant as grounds to institute martial law throughout most of the world. V being loosely based on the rise of fascism in pre-WWII Germany, this incident was inspired by the Reichstag fire of 1933, supposedly set by Nazi operatives posing as Communists.
    • Also in V the Visitors claim a conspiracy by Earth scientists is the reason they must take control, to keep order.
  • A group of English football (soccer) fans pull one of these to incite a riot with a rival group of fans in Life On Mars.
  • The Drakh run a False-Flag Operation to get the entire galaxy mad at the Centauri in Babylon 5.
  • In the Doctor Who story Frontier in Space, ships from the Earth Empire are apparently being raided by the Draconian Empire, and vice versa; the attacks are actually being staged by a third alien power that hopes to provoke a war that will weaken both Empires and leave them vulnerable to invasion.
  • Parodied in The Black Adder: King Richard tells a lord to attack the Swiss. The lord informs him that the Swiss are on their side. Pondering for a moment, King Richard then tells him to "have them dress up as Germans".
  • In one Law and Order: Criminal Intent episode, part of the backstory involved the well-publicized death of an American woman at the hands of Israeli soldiers while protesting on the West Bank. It's later revealed that far from being innocent she was actively supporting Palestinian militants, who set her up to be killed to garner international sympathy. Although Israel is aware of this, they don't say anything and take the bad press because she was actually a spy for them, and they don't want it revealed that they have infiltrated the peace movement by using foreign nationals and were stupid enough to kill their own agent.
  • In Volume 4 of Heroes, Homeland Security Black Ops leader and evil Jack Bauer Expy Danko (aka The Hunter) attempts to stage a nuclear suicide bombing of D.C., with the intention of blaming the whole thing on Supers to create justification for his anti-Super crusade.
  • In Burn Notice, Fiona pretends to be a CIA agent in order to get an allied nation's intelligence agent to hand over documents concerning a black flight landing in his home country. She does this because Michael's similar attempt as a pretend Russian agent backfires spectacularly when it turns out that the Polish agent hates the Russians with a passion despite (maybe even because of) the fact that his mother was a Russian.
    • Also, there was an entire episode titled "False Flag" in which an assassin pretends to be a client to get Micheal's help in finding a man in hiding.
    • In Burn Notice: the Fall of Sam Axe, Veracruz plans to destroy a medical clinic and blame the rebels; using the attack as a justification for receiving greater US military aid.
  • The Lone Gunmen pilot had the heroes foil a plot to slam a 727 into the towers. Somebody obviously thought they could do better...

Newspaper Comics

Tabletop Games

  • In Warhammer Fantasy Battle, the Dark Elves used a False Flag Operation to set in motion the events that led to the War of the Beard War of Vengeance between the High Elves and the Dwarfs.
    • Later on Manfred von Carstein tried to do it again, by resurrecting dead Dwarfs in an Elf-Dwarf alliance and having them turn on their allies.
  • Happens repeatedly in the BattleTech universe, where interstellar communications lag makes it hard enough to get accurate intelligence in a timely fashion even without any deliberate trickery. Which doesn't prevent the assorted players from trying their hand at deception anyway, of course. Just three of the better known examples are: ComStar troops striking at a Davion research center disguised as Capellans, ComStar faking a Davion strike on one of their own installations as an excuse for Interdiction, and rogue Jade Falcons posing as pirates in an attempt to break the truce between the Clans and the Inner Sphere.
  • Forgotten Realms have Gambit Pileup as one of inherent features, so it should not be surprising.
    • Volo’s Guide to the North mentions that one of the nastiest secret societies of the Sword Coast started this way:

According to Elminster, one of the founding reasons for the Kraken Society was the need of the bargewrights for constant employment. For years, certain agents of the merchants of Yartar have carried on a practice of destroying barges up and down the Three Rivers. They'd do their work at night, leaving orc bodies or weapons to suggest that the deed was done by raiders.

    • Surface dwellers usually interact with the drow too rarely to tell the factions apart anyway, so it's not hard to set up another. Some Vhaerunites raid humans near cave exits used by Lolthites, then call it win-win when "spider-kissers" who only wanted to attack them (this time, anyway) walk out and find themselves swarmed by angry locals.
    • Zhentarim pretend they are "honest traders" and as such raid unaffiliated caravans under Plausible Deniability, including trying to pass as yet another rival merchant group. Not that they were alone in this.
    • It's not quite all over the place because of the Heralds. Their main job is to keep straight use of heraldry (all sorts) and prevent confusions in this area. And for the same reason they got mighty influence, especially with feudal types and anyone even considering to work for or with them, or contemplating a diplomatic visit anywhere in indefinite future... and that's almost everyone with formal power and/or military force. Thus -

it’s absolutely verboten to ride into battle in the colours or displaying the arms of someone else, as a deception, for example, and no mercenary will accept employment with someone the Heralds have deemed to have done so, for fear of themselves being declared “outlaw,” and therefore reduced to brigandry

Video Games

  • In Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, the Spiritual Successor to Civilization, your Probe Teams can perform various acts of terrorism at your opponents - and with an additional expenditure in Energy Credits, and a somewhat higher risk of failure, blame it on another faction at the same time. Takes a lot of guts and funding, but can truly work wonders.
  • In Master of Orion framing another empire is an option for very successful spy missions. Or just about any spy mission if you're playing the Darloks.
  • And in Birth of the Federation. After a successful espionage/sabotage op, you can either leave no trace, or plant evidence incriminating another faction. It's a lot easier for the Cardassians and Romulans to do this than the Federation though.
  • Early on in Suikoden II, the hero's army of about seven defend their castle from a major arm of the Highland Army, while the nebbishy Yamamoto slips between enemy platoons and plants false information. The immediate result of this false flagging Within one turn-of-play, THE ENTIRE ARMY outside of the main general's platoon- themselves- switch their flags before the player's eyes. The turncoats were actually conscripted soldiers that fought because they had no other choice, since the majority of the City-States have been taken over at that point. Only when they have a chance to win, basically, a hope, do they actually revert to their previous allegiance.
    • Another example in the same game, is the massacre of the Youth Brigade in the beginning. Prince Luca Blight, in order to justify starting a war with the enemy, betrays and slaughters his own Youth Brigade, for the sake of propaganda.
    • There's also the infamous Kalekka Incident, mentioned a few times in the first Suikoden, in which Scarlet Moon soldiers slaughtered the entire town of civilians, while claiming it was actually Jowston soldiers that had done the horrible deed, in order to rouse support for the coming war among the anti-war citizens of the empire.
    • According to the Backstory of Suikoden IV and Suikoden Tactics, Scarlet Moon did this before, trying to spark a war with the Kooluk Empire. Unfortunately for them, they weren't aware that a little boy in the town they attacked had the Rune of Punishment, which he used to destroy them all before the Rune ate his soul and jumped to another host. That boy also happened to be the son of one Graham Cray; the empire then blamed him for the incident, causing his Start of Darkness, defection to Kooluk and setting him up as the Big Bad of IV. So they had a history of pulling this sort of stunt, and having it blow up in their faces.
  • World of Warcraft:
    • One quest on the Horde side involves setting the Scarlet Crusade (even more) against The Scourge by burning down their camp and planting a literal false flag.
    • There are a couple of other examples from that game, too. Often, you end up having to gather the flags yourself. Also, a short example from Warcraft III: in the expansion Undead campaign, a couple of banshees body-jack a group of guards in order to get close to Arthas, who is in for some serious hurt from the banshees' leader. They pull it again against a different foe's mooks to get into a fortified city.
    • Occurs again in the expansion for both Alliance and Horde. During the Nagrand questline that puts you in service to Lantresor of the Blade. In order to stop the Boulderfist Ogres from attacking Telaar (Alliance) or to gain a powerful Ogre ally (Horde), the player needs to stop the two enemies of the Boulderfist Clan, the Laughing Skull Clan and the Warmaul Clan, from attacking. Obviously, Lantresor of the Blade suggests that you use flags and corpses to create the appearance of a battle between the two. It works.
    • In The Shattering Prelude to Cataclysm, some orc members of the Twilight Hammer cult attack a meeting of druids and kill all the night elves present while pretending that Garrosh ordered the massacre. Cairne is outraged at Garrosh's apparent responsibility for the attack, and challenges him to a duel for leadership of the Horde.
    • In Battle for Azeroth, the Alliance does this before the Battle of Dazar'alor. They send a relatively small force of soldiers to Nazmir while cloaking the swamp in mist using magic to make the small force seem larger than it appears. Th Horde sends a large force to intercept, believing the Alliance is invading through Nazmir. While the small force is cut down with ease - as they were Suicide Mission volunteers - the true Alliance fleet assaults Dazar'alor itself. This leads to the Battle of Dazar'alor Raid Instance, where the Horde is dealt their most serious defeat in the war to date.
  • Sturm's plan in Advance Wars was to incite a war between various countries with clones of their commanders so that he could sweep in when each faction was at its weakest and attack. He gets found out at the last minute by Sonja, who notices that Orange Star forces (led by Andy) were attacking Green Earth at the same time the real Andy was attacking Blue Moon.
  • Command & Conquer occasionally does this with Nod campaigns. In Tiberian Sun, the Brotherhood uses stolen GDI units against the mutant faction in order to win their trust. In the Kane's Wrath expansion to Tiberium Wars, Alexa Kovacs runs a double false flag - first she disguises her army as troops loyal to Kilian Qatar, then she has them assist GDI in attacking Temple Prime (thus framing Qatar as a GDI mole).
  • In EndWar, a new World War erupts when the European Federation, leery of the United States achieving clear military dominance through completion of a militarized space station, fund terrorist attacks on them and when that fails, they use their anti-ballistic-missile Kill Sat to shoot down the Freedom IV shuttle headed up to complete the station. Actually, the terrorists were funded by Russia, who was leery of being the world's largest supplier of oil once several other nations have hit Hubbert's Peak, and wanted the US to declare war on Europe so they could "aid their allies" in making Europe go away before the United States and Europe would turn Russia into Iraq II for their oil. As false flag operations go, this one is subverted; the plan goes off without a hitch...until the United States wigs right out when Russia starts making gains in the conflict and declares war on them, too.
  • In Final Fantasy Tactics, Dycedarg Beoulve and Duke Larg conspire to have Princess Ovelia kidnapped (and subsequently assassinated) by agents wearing the colors of Larg's rival, Duke Goltanna. This would remove Goltanna as a rival to the crown and allow Larg to enthrone his own candidate, Prince Orinus. However, the captain of the operation, a sellsword named Delita, is actually a Double Agent working in Goltanna's favor, and instead has Larg's agents die to Ovelia's bodyguards as he rescues the princess himself and delivers her to the Church.
  • In Tactics Ogre, this is done at the end of chapter 1, by your own side.
  • The Grand Theft Auto series is extremely fond of this trope. It starts in the second game when the Rednecks have the player use a Zaibatsu car to run down members of the Scientist gang, then vice versa.
    • In Grand Theft Auto III, corrupt businessman Donald Love wants to create a gang war that will lower real estate values across Liberty City. So, he hires your "services" to assassinate Kenji, one of the heads of the Yakuza in Staunton Island, while in the guise of a Colombian hitman. And you can do this while you're in Kenji and Asuka's (his sister) employ. In fact, Asuka, the ruthlessly intelligent and absolutely terrifying Yakuza mastermind, goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the Colombians, and yet she never finds out who really killed her brother.
    • In Grand Theft Auto Vice City Love is shown to have learned the trick from his mentor, corrupt land developer Avery Carrington, who starts a gang war between the Cuban and Haitian factions in Vice City by hiring Tommy to dress up as a member of the Cuban gang and shoot-up a Haitian gang member's funeral.
  • Saints Row has mission where you try to break the tentative alliance between the Vice Kings gang and the Stillwater Police Department.
  • Grand Maestro Mohs from Tales of the Abyss attempts to do this to restart the war between Malkuth and Kimlasca, using replicas for suicidal bombings, but the attempt is so shabby and poorly thought out that no one is fooled for even a second.
  • Dead Cell were essentially method actors employed by the Patriots and the US Government, staging impromptu terrorist attacks in order to better prepare a VR-trained US army for war. Eventually they were so good at it that they went rogue.
  • From Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is the level "No Russian". Player Punch and What the Hell, Player? all wound up into one level of endless bloodshed.
    • This is later proved to be a Subversion or a Double False Flag, because the American General was behind the massacre the whole time.
  • Deus Ex had two (or more) examples of this trope.
    • The Statue of Liberty is reported to have been destroyed (beheaded) by terrorist groups. It is later suggested, and given the context of all you discover, very likely, that the government itself destroyed the Statue of Liberty to raise outrage against "terrorists."
    • The national pandemic "Grey Death" is revealed to be a corporate creation to reap massive profits of a vaccine, weed out the "undesirable" (poor) population, and ensure complete complicity from the population (even, in some cases, the government.)
  • You can pull this yourself, if you want to, in Uplink. When performing a high-profile hack, you can wipe the records incriminating yourself clean. Or, for added giggles, you can alter them and get some poor sap arrested.
  • Alpha Protocol has the Halbech corporation setting up one of these to trigger increased tensions between Taiwan and China, in order to sell weapons to both sides. The plan is to have an assassin kill the pro-independence Taiwanese president during an independence rally, thus turning him into a martyr for the independence movement, while at the same time having agitators in the crowds incite violence and riots, in order to push the island further toward favoring independence and thus toward conflict. Oh, and you can only stop one of these plans.
    • Likewise in Rome; the VCI are hired to set off a "terrorist" attack, in order to influence an upcoming vote on terror and terror protection device system things. Beyond that, of course, the evil plot is a False-Flag Operation writ large; Halbech wants to keep the world angry and scared so they'll continue buying Halbech systems; The China/Taiwan war will make a huge market for weapons, as will the continued hunt for terrorists in the Middle East following the airliner incident that kicks everything off, and the Italian paranoia over terrorists will provide an endless market for terrorist-stopping systems.
  • Final Fantasy XII begins with this as Gabranth poses as Basch and assassinates King Raminas, preventing him from signing Dalmasca's formal surrender to Archadia, giving Vayne Solidor the pretext to move in and serve as regent to clamp down on the resulting unrest. In a twist of fate, Basch permanently poses as Gabranth at the end.
  • In Mechwarrior 2: Ghost Bear's Legacy, the sequel to the original Mechwarrior 2, the player takes the role of a Ghost Bear Mechwarrior and fights their canonical Inner Sphere enemy, the Draconis Combine, whose 'Mechs are responsible for a raid on a Ghost Bear genetics facility. Naturally, the Bears attack the Combine, but in this case, it actually is Draconis 'Mechs that were first captured by the Smoke Jaguars, which in turn leads you to fight the Jaguars, only for the Jaguars to admit they lost the 'Mechs to Clan Wolf's Crusader elements, finally leading you to the real culprits. That's a double false flag op, first discrediting the Combine, then the Jaguars.
  • Dragon Age II has one in which Sister Petrice murders the Viscount's son and makes it look as though Qunari had murdered him on holy ground while he was praying in an attempt to start a war with the Qunari, whom she regards as blasphemous heathens.
  • During the Guild Wars 2 Charr storyline if you're an Ash Legion soldier, you have to fight a plot of the Flame legion to attack Blood and Iron legion leaders while wearing Iron and Blood legion uniforms respectively.
  • One of Vega Strike loading screens involves the screen with Luddite propaganda apparently inserted where it was via hacks, followed by a message of the user being automatically fined by the Homeland Security. The thing is, while "Luddites" is the commonly used moniker for the guys from "Interstellar Church of True Form's Return", they don't appreciate it. In fact, addressing them this way is how you taunt them to stop whatever they're doing and try to shoot you instead.

Web Comics

Western Animation

  • In the first episode of The Legend of Calamity Jane, outlaw Bill Doolin fakes raids by both the Comanche tribe and the Cavalry, threatening to cause already-poor relations to flare into war. The long-term implications don't really concern him, though—he just wants to draw security off of a shipment of gold.
  • In South Park, the US Government is trying to convince the world that 9/11 was a False Flag in order to make them to look more competent. They do this by posing as conspiracy nuts, and running an actual False Flag campaign. This is subverted in that the plan is apparently to prevent trouble: the idea is that if people are determined to suspect the Government of treachery, those people should believe the Government is all powerful, so that they cause don't cause problems.
    • What's actually amazing is how many conspiracy theories have similarly sinister origins.
  • In Regular Show episode Prankless, Pops sets up one of these to make Muscle Man go back to the park and help stop the prank war, which had devastated the Park at that point. Gene was hurting people, but after Muscle Man accidentally injured Pops with one of his pranks (making him skip town in the first place), he needed an extra nudge in the right direction.
  • The Transformers Generation 1 cartoon has this happen when Megatron has the Stunticons built. People automatically assume that 'car transformer = Autobot" and think they're the good guys, until the Stunticons go wild. The Autobots are, naturally, blamed for the attacks.
  • Archer's mother, in a drunken fit of jealousy, issues a burn notice on her son after he quits ISIS to work for the agency's nemesis ODIN. To save Archer from being killed by his new coworkers, Lana sends a retraction of the burn notice from a Telex in the ODIN office building. Lana's false flag is compounded, as it implies that the burn notice itself was an ODIN false flag operation designed to discredit ISIS and its best field agent.
  • In DuckTales, General Lunaris successfully persuades his people that the citizens of Earth are evil and that they're plotting to invade the Moon (which he humorously continually refers to as a planet), so he advises them to beat them to the punch. He then takes charge and spearheads the invasion. They realize their mistake when General Lunaris decides to blow up Earth with his people still on it, since apparently having the citizens of Earth die in fear of the moon is just as good as having them live in fear of it.
  • The SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Shopping List". Mr. Krabs tells Spongy and Sandy that they're getting low on the Secret Ingredients for his Krabby Patties, and sends them on a mission to get them. Plankton overhears and decides to follow in order to discover what the ingredients are. This mission seems rather dangerous, requiring them to gather get a hair of a yeti, milk from a fangtooth fish, and dandruff from the Flying Dutchman. They succeed at getting them without getting hurt; Plankton isn't so lucky. It turns out, however, that Mr. Krabs was purposely sending them out to get fake ingredients to fool Plankton so he could go shopping for the real ones. Unfortunately, Krabs really should have let them in on this first, considering how angry Sandy is once she finds out...

Real Life

  • Some claim the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty during the Six Days War was one of these. On the one hand, the fact that Israel quickly accepted blame for the incident, claiming it to have been a tragic mistake, sort of defeats the notion of it being a "false flag". On the other hand, there is still much controversy over aspects of the incident and how deliberate it may have been, and the theory that Israel would have shifted responsibility to Egypt, if it could have, is certainly in the spirit of the term.
  • The Celle Hole
  • The German police has used (and may still use) agents provocateurs during demonstrations to start riots and give their uniformed comrades a reason to crack down on the demonstrators. It backfired at least once, when the uniformed riot cops battered a group of protesters, including some undercover officers. It would have been hilarious, if it hadn't been for the dozens of injured protesters.
  • The Gleiwitz incident, when Nazi Germany provided justification for its war with Poland at the start of World War II by having some soldiers dress up in Polish uniforms, then attack a German radio outpost and broadcast anti-German messages. Then they dressed up concentration camp prisoners as Polish soldiers and shot them "in self-defense". It was just one of a number of independent operations collectively named "Operation Himmler". Noteworthy in that this was such an Epic Fail (absolutely no one believed it), the fact that Germany claimed self-defense as a reason to go to war is regarded as an interesting bit of trivia instead of an important historical fact.
    • They never explained of course why the German Army was fueled and equipped and capable of starting a massive campaign without a hitch. One supposes they could have said that there was a diplomatic crisis going on at the time so naturally they would have sent the word round. But no one bothered to ask anyway so they never gave that excuse.
    • More to the point, why in the heck was the first thing they did to launch a massive campaign? Surely if they were honestly haggling over disputed borders and there had been a minor skirmish on the borders, the thing to do would be to make a complaint, demand reparations, and all the other stuff to be expected of such an event? Unless they were actually claiming the Poles were about to make a major invasion of Germany of which their False Flag gave no hint. In fact, were it not for the fact that real people got killed in the process, the whole thing looks as gawky as a High-school prank.
  • Some Anonymous accuse the Church of Scientology of trying a form of this during the earliest parts of Project Chanology. The problem being, it may never, ever be clear which actions being accused as a False-Flag Operation actually were, especially since being Anonymous is rather easy, and anything evil Anonymous does could just as easily be For the Evulz.
    • On the other hand, the Church did use stationery stolen from the apartment of author Paulette Cooper, who wrote an anti-Scientology book, to fake two bomb threat letters sent to Scientology facilities, and as part of Operation Freakout were planning on faking some more bomb threat letters to send to (among others) the US Secretary of State at the time, Henry Kissinger.
  • Westboro Baptist Church attempted this on Anonymous as well. However, Anonymous called them out on it, basically saying that Westboro wasn't worth their time, despite how odious Anonymous found them. When told during an interview by a representative of the Westboro Baptist Church that the hack could have been Anonymous, despite assertions from the Anonymous representative that the hacks lacked all the signatures of a typical Anonymous attack, the Anonymous representative proceeded to hack the Westboro Baptist Church website while on the air to demonstrate how easy it was, and to post a message about how ludicrous the church was being.
  • Rush Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos" during the 2008 Democratic primaries certainly tried its very hardest to be one of those. The idea was for Republicans to switch their party registration to Democrat and then vote for Hillary Clinton (the underdog, at that point) in the primaries, in an effort to draw the primaries out and encourage more intra-party warfare between Clinton and Obama supporters, with the end result of a divided Democratic Party, who would then lose to the Republicans in the general election. How well it succeeded in its initial goals is debatable—the primary fight went through all 50 states (an event not seen in American politics for close to 40 years prior), and False Flagging Republicans certainly had some effect, but it's hard to know precisely how much and where. How well it succeeded in the "split the Democrats down the middle and make McCain win" goal is a bit more obvious.
  • Britain used disguised ships to trap German commerce raiders during WWI. They sailed under neutral flags (often American) with the guns hidden, lured a commerce raider into challenging them, then hoisted the White Ensign and opened fire. Since the raider was 1) at close range and 2) probably surprised, this was an effective tactic. (Supposedly, at least one of these ships had special rigging to let it lower the decoy flag and raise the correct one simultaneously with a pull on a single rope.)
    • This had the (possibly) unintentional side effect of German raiders not even bothering to challenge merchant ships and sink them on sight. Unprovoked attacks on American shipping was one of the factors that led to the United States' entry into the war.
    • Similar tactics were used in both world wars to engage u-boats and Japanese subs. Merchant ships (called Q-ships) retrofitted with heavy armament would lure subs to the surface before revealing their guns and blasting the delicate submarines. (At the time torpedoes were expensive and unreliable, so subs would surface and use their deck guns to shell defenseless merchantmen.)
  • The Shelling of Mainila started the Winter War.
  • The Lavon Affair: In 1954, Israeli agents in Egypt (mostly Egyptian Jews) planted bombs at British and American targets in Egypt, hoping it would be blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood, the Communists, or any number of nationalistic groups in the country. The Egyptian authorities found out about it, informed the Brits and Americans, neither of whom were amused. To this day, the episode is often called "haEsek haBish (the Unfortunate Affair) in Israel. The eponymous Pinhas Lavon, who OKed the plot, was forced to resign as Defense Minister as a result of the botched operation.
  • There are also many recent operations such as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, to trigger the Vietnam war; the Iranian Coup of 1953, the Reichstag Fire of Nazi Germany, among others.
    • The Gulf of Tonkin is still disputable, particularly since Hanoi can't make up its bloody mind and even admitted to it once before retracting. The Reichstag fire is also disputable: for all we know the Nazis actually DID catch the guys responsible, it just that that wasn't the reason they were interested in it. Indeed, that's actually the most commonly accepted explanation in the mainstream.
  • Otto Skorzeny of the Waffen SS was a Class S dick, among his other exploits he organized a team of Nazis to ride around in captured American uniforms and jeeps to screw with the Allies during the Ardennes Offensive, and even getting General Eisenhower put on lockdown during Christmas due to rumors of Skorzeny himself coming to kill him. While many of his men were killed as spies when captured, Skorzeny himself made it out of a post-War tribunal unscathed, as technically none of his men were ordered to engage in offensive action.
    • This had more to do with the fact that the West viewed him as being potentially useful in any shooting war with the Soviets than because they believed he was on the up and up. Indeed, they actually went so far as to hang a noose in his bedroom with an attached note saying that he would make himself available to Western high command or he would be in effect placing his neck into said noose.
  • Operation Northwoods, a Cold War-era program declassified in the 2000s, was a series of military proposals to commit false-flag operations and frame Cuba for it to justify an invasion, such as pretending to send a plane full of college students over the Gulf of Mexico, shooting it down, and blaming Castro; and planting false evidence of a Cuban attack should John Glenn be killed in his spaceflight. The scary thing? The plan was approved by all the Joint Chiefs of Staff and sent to the desk of the Secretary of Defense. JFK however, was not at all amused when he found out, as General Lemnitzer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was forced to resign afterwards. Cue conspiracy theories galore in 1...2...3...
  • The Mukden Incident provided the pretext for the invasion of Manchuria by Japan.
  • Whenever a crime is committed by a member of a radical political faction in a first-world country (the KKK, for instance), expect its members to claim that it was a False-Flag Operation and that the culprit was a patsy for The Government.
    • However a real terrorist group will often invert this trope, claiming responsibility for crimes they didn't do.
  • You know those ads for secrets "the credit card companies don't want you to know"? Most of those companies are owned by credit card companies. The logic being that if one goes bankrupt, they get nothing, but if they arrange even a partial payment, they get some kind of money.
  • The Lindsay Pamphlet Scandal: Prior to the 2007 Australian election, Liberal Party members were caught distributing pamphlets purportedly from a radical Muslim organisation (that did not actually exist) supporting the Labor Party.
    • While in American politics this sort of provocations seems to be no less popular than 419 Scam in Nigeria. Loud, memorable pratfalls include the Mysterious Swastikas Case in 2007 and black "KKK members" "supporting" Donald Trump in 2016. Then cases of self-bullying Jussie Smollett (who went for silly implausible theatrics and hired two assistants) and self-burglarizing Edawn Louis Coughman (who in addition to false report caught a bonus charge of insurance fraud).
      • Done several times and on a large scale for 2016 Alabama senate race Doug Jones vs. Roy Moore — or, as The New York Times called it, "secret experiment" — by "New Knowledge" group (it's a rather curious organisation).
    • And when entertainment gets overrun by politics, it results in things like "Down With Disney" account on Twitter and Facebook, aka "WORLD’S MOST HILARIOUS FAKE ACCOUNT". Which despite having tiny following was promoted by Disney-friendly press as the typical example of hatey haters in "toxic fandom". It even tried to associate itself with specific fans decrying Disney Star Wars, then vanished soon after being caught and denounced as fake.
      • …which turns out to be a part of larger campaign using the same tactics more. One participant even resorted to stealing the identity of his then- (now ex-)wife in order to collect a male fan following in an attempt to Divide and Conquer the fandom, and disseminate fake inside information. Articles here and here.
  • Operation Trust, in which the Cheka (the first USSR state security service) ran fake counter-revolutionary groups so they could expose and arrest real Soviet counter-revolutionaries.
  • In 1975, Indonesia tried to convince the international world that their invasion of East Timor was in fact an independent action by pro-Indonesia factions such as APODETI by giving their paratroopers Russian weapons, and... not much else. If that's too hard for you to believe, consider the fact that during the invasion, Indonesian cargo planes accidentally dropped troops on the sea and the forces on the ground traded so much friendly fire that there might've been more Indonesian casualties from friendly fire than from the poorly-armed Fretilin resistance fighters.
  • It is widely suspected that members of British intelligence (rogue or otherwise) secretly colluded with UVF terrorists and the RUC Special Branch in carrying out the Dublin and Monaghan bombings in order to influence a anti-terrorism vote which was going before the Irish parliament the next day.
  • In 66 AD, a band of Jewish Zealots known as the Sicarii infiltrated the city of Jerusalem and proceeded to commit a series of atrocities against their own people in order to ensure that they would have no choice but to continue warring with the Romans rather than negotiate for peace.
  • An incident in France involved Mosques being bombed and Muslim neighborhoods being vandalized; notes were sent with the perpetrators claiming to be a radical Zionist group. Once French police tracked and caught the perpetrators, they found them to be Neo-Nazis who were trying to stir up tensions between Muslims and Jews.
  • This is what trolls use the anonymity of the internet for.
  • The Cinema Rex fire in Iran.
  • The Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands, a fake pro-China communist party in the Netherlands set up by the Dutch secret service to develop contacts with the Chinese government for espionage purposes.
  • Mountain Meadows. Was basically Mormons pretending to be Indians and attacking emigrants moving through the area.
  • You know those "hidden camera" operations by certain animal rights groups which shall remain nameless? The ones where the camera is right in front of the workers abusing the animal, on a table? Bingo.
  • The presence of Pinkerton Detectives as agent provocateurs has been suspected in the Haymarket Riots; if not the bombing itself, the violences of the previous day.
  • According to Occupy Wall Street, just about any incident of anybody in the protest doing no-nos like setting a fire, breaking a store front window, or throwing something at the cops is "clear evidence of agent provocateurs sent by the police, the 1% and The Man to discredit the movement". Suggesting otherwise will either garner a link to the Wikipedia article on COINTELPRO, a very Hipster-like sneer of how you "just don't get it", or the more amusing suggestion that you yourself are in fact an agent of the government.
  • There have also been a lot of documented agent provocateur activities, both recently[when?] and a while back. In 1977, CBS News obtained a US Army document that detailing plans for dealing with protesters at the 1968 DNC. According to the document, about one out of 6 people at the protests was an FBI agent or some other type of government agent.
    • The same can be said of the more radical opponents of the US/NATO intervention in the Libyan civil war. There were claims flying all over the internet that the rebels were CIA stooges and that Gaddafi otherwise had the people's full support.
  • During the early stages of of the Russian-Ukraine conflict in 2014, there were many reports of "pro-Russian separatists" wearing unmarked (Russian-style) fatigues and performing military operations inside Ukraine with a remarkable professionalism.
  • During the 2019 Hong Kong protests, a violent, destructive attack on a government building was performed by the Chinese government to discredit the movement. Aside from the total lack of resistance by present police, the dead give away was that they followed it up with a press conference that was clearly filmed before the incident took place (as shown by an errant wristwatch).[context?]
  • Almost immediately after the end of the attack upon and occupation of the United States Capitol Building by a pro-Trump mob on January 6, 2021, right-wing news outlets Newsmax and One America News began pushing the false narrative that the attack was in fact orchestrated and performed in large part by left-wing Antifa (anti-fascist) operatives to besmirch the "good name" and reputation of the MAGA movement.
    • It didn't end there either. Phony claims of False-Flag Operations has become the catch-all excuse given by conspiracy theorists pushing "deep state" claims whenever blatant displays of hate groups publicly support their side, almost to the point where it has become a Dead Horse Trope as far as American politics is concerned.
  • Alex Jones notoriously claimed the Sandy Hook shootings was a hoax perpetrated by “crisis actors” in a broad scheme to trample on Second Amendment rights. Given the lawsuits that resulted and the media platforms he's been kicked off of, it seems this was one time he crossed the line and was unable to do so "twice".
    • Also, Jones is so nuts that many other Conspiracy Theorists who believe in New World Order scenarios have claimed he is pulling this type of thing on their behalf! Of course, he makes the same accusations towards them.
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