Revealing Coverup: Difference between revisions

...well, unless you're so clever you've thought of a cunning plan that does the exact opposite. Instead of having your agent sneak into the embassy to photograph the codebook, you're going to make huge splashy headlines to get everyone looking the other way. Why, with your plan to fake aliens landing and [[Fiery Coverup|blowing up the embassy]], surely no one will notice a code book gone missing. It would be the ''last'' thing they'd suspect.

See the [[Conspicuous Trenchcoat]] for this same principle applied to costumes. Contrast this with [[Crime After Crime]]. Subtrope of the [[Kansas City Shuffle]]. For the comedic version, see [[Legitimate Businessmen's Social Club]].

== [[Fanfic]] ==

* In [[XSGCOM]], the SGC are being threatened with the public figuring out what's going on behind the scenes. The truth is that Anubis has attacked Earth but they obviously can't tell the public that. So instead of trying to cover up the attack, they pull out a unique version of [[Sarcastic Confession]], ''[[Batman Gambit|posing the aliens as coverup of something else and leaking THAT out to the public in order to make the aliens appear as just another conspiracy theory]]''. And it works!

** On the other hand, his brother did it perfectly in the first ''[[Die Hard]]'', {{spoiler|disguising a bank robbery as an act of terrorism so the FBI would treat it as one and [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero|cut the power so they could break into the vault]]. Hell, they even counted on the whole "The United States Does Not Negotiate With Terrorists" thing, and planned on suckering them into strafing the rooftop full of hostages with helicopter gunships - that and the explosives they planted would mean that by the time they figured out that they weren't among the casualties, they'd be "sitting on a beach, earning twenty percent".}} Too bad that McClane didn't care about the plan and was just trying to [[Spanner in the Works|screw things up any way he could]].

** Simon's plot in Die Hard 3 is actually yet another example of this, {{spoiler|detonating bombs around New York City, forcing Mc}}{{spoiler|Clane personally to jump through hoops to find the others, then convincing the police there's a bomb planted in an unspecified NYC school - all so the Federal Reserve Bank on Wall Street will be relatively free of emergency services. Additionally, his first bomb detonation blew a hole in the street adjacent to the Federal Reserve, allowing him to openly move his tunneling crew into position in the guise of city engineers sent to repair the damage}}.

* In ''[[You Only Live Twice]]'', SPECTRE could have completed their scheme if they hadn't given themselves away on ''three'' separate occasions, all but red flags to [[James Bond (film)|James Bond]] and Tiger Tanaka. The first was one where Bond finds a photo of a cargo vessel with a secret message saying the tourists who took the photo were killed, leading him to wonder what in the photo was worth killing for (of course, the photo was in a safe in a office building Bond broke into, perhaps a reasonable level of security). In the second, Bond was doing an aerial search and was about to give up when he was attacked by 4 choppers. They obviously had to have come from SPECTRE, whose base therefore had to be in the general area. Lastly Bond learns of a local woman's mysterious death in a cave, which leads to him and Kissy to investigate it, dodge the poison gas trap and find SPECTRE's base.

** In another Bond example, the scheme to steal nuclear weapons in ''[[Thunderball]]'' would have had a greater chance to succeed if a SPECTRE agent hadn't tried to off Bond while he was on leave and alerting him that something was up. Said SPECTRE agent was then killed for getting Bond's attention.

* In the [[James Bond]] novel ''[[You Only Live Twice]]'', evil mastermind Blofeld decides to best way to lie low is to operate a castle with a poison garden for people wanting to commit suicide. If they change their mind, the "gardeners" assist them. No one is going to pay any attention to that, right?

** The novel explicitly points out that Blofeld had gone entirely off his nut by this point, and had actually been expecting the authorities to shut him down soon. In fact, the entire reason Bond was asked to go there in the first place was to kill "Shatterhand" in exchange for some intelligence, seeing as the garden itself was perfectly legal. He just happens to recognize Shatterhand as the man who killed his wife.

** Partially justified in that informing the mark that he was being robbed and ordering him to play along meant that the Gentlemen Bastards didn't have to go through all the trouble and cost of pretending to prepare for a long and expensive journey. It was simply exceptionally unlucky that {{spoiler|the nobleman's wife was unknowingly friends with the real head of the secret police and confided in her}}.

** The second book takes it all [[Up to Eleven]], with Locke running this trope back and forth between at least two different marks, at once exposing his plans and yet diverting suspicion away from himself.

* In ''[[Sherlock Holmes|The Hound of the Baskervilles]]'', the villain steals one of an intended victim's new boots, then returns to swipe one of an older pair, while ''returning the first one'', presumably so the owner would assume he'd just misplaced it. Granted, Holmes was bound to solve the case anyway, but the fact that the boot ''not'' bearing its owner's smell was brought back again clinched his suspicion that there was a real, trained dog involved. Had the culprit stolen all four boots and returned nothing, Holmes couldn't have ruled out the possibility that one of the hotel staff had a profitable sideline stealing guests' possessions.

* Both of the Fargo Adventures by Clive Cussler written so far depend on this. The Fargos find some obscure item which is at least four steps away from in one case an artifact the villain wanted to find, and the other a secret the villain wants to conceal. So the villain sends assassins after them, letting the Fargos know that their totally innocuous discovery was important somehow. Had they just purchased the item at a fair price, or simply ignored them entirely, the villain would have succeeded.

* [[Don Quixote]], [[Older Than Steam]], presents a parody: In his first sally, [[Daydream Believer]] in [[Chivalric Romance]] books, Alonso Quijano, [[Mad Dreamer|pretends he is an]] [[Knight Errant]] don Quixote. He tries to live the [[Medieval European Fantasy]] in [[Real Life]] Spain. He doesn’t find any [[Instant Awesome, Just Add Dragons|dragon]], [[Robe and Wizard Hat|enchanter]] nor any [[Damsel in Distress]]. He is very disappointed when he comes back to his house, where their family and two [[Moral Guardian|MoralGuardians]] have made a [[Book-Burning]] of his [[Chivalric Romance]] books. To avoid Don Quixote’s ire, the [[Moral Guardian|MoralGuardians]] [[Pitying Perversion|advise the family to tell him, literally]], that [[A Wizard Did It]]. That excuse was the Don Quixote’s first contact with the [[Medieval European Fantasy]] he so desperately wanted to live! If the [[Moral Guardians]] would have tell him the truth, he never would persevered in his madness.

* In the ''[[Warrior Cats]]'' novel ''Forest of Secrets'', [[Big Bad|Tigerclaw]] wants to kill [[Big Good|Bluestar]], leader of ThunderClan, so that he can take her position. To do this, he lures a large pack of rogues into ThunderClan camp, then sneaks into Bluestar's den to kill her with nobody interfering.

* ''[[Deep Space Nine]]'' invokes this trope in the opener of the last season; it's not until an assassin from the cult of the Pah Wraiths shows up to kill him and vows that he "will never find the orb of the Emissary" that Sisko learns it even exists (let alone that he needs to find it).

** Pulled earlier {{spoiler|by [[Spy Master|Garak]] when he sees a Romulan assassin on the station. Garak blows up his own shop to make Odo think the assassin did it, but Odo discovers otherwise that the assassin works with ''poisons'' not explosives.}}

* An episode of ''[[Simon and Simon]]'' had a tourist hire the Simon Brothers to find out why she was the victim of a series of petty thefts: first her camera, then her purse, then her hotel room was broken into... Turned out she'd snapped a picture that showed a man someplace he wasn't supposed to be in the background, and he was trying to get the film. (She had already dropped it off to be developed, when he started stealing her stuff looking for it.)

* In a variant compressed into less than five seconds, the team on ''NCIS'' needs to locate some terrorists hiding among any of a dozen warehouses. Knowing they're pressed for time, Gibbs whips out a shotgun and blasts a nearby street light, which causes the terrorists' rooftop lookout to immediately open fire and give away the bad guys' position. Had he had the sense to quietly keep his head down, the team would've been too late to stop them.

* This trope is the reason (some) government agencies will simply flat out deny/refuse to comment on any and everything. Saying that something is incorrect/won't work may imply that someone is on the right track of duplicating something or similar situations.

* The scenes of [[Serial Killer]] Ted Bundy's crimes were suspiciously free of evidence, including doorknobs and light switches with absolutely no fingerprints on them.

** Averted in the case of the science fiction story "Deadline", which featured a fairly accurate description of the atomic bomb—in 1944. ''[[Analog|Astounding]]'' editor John Campbell convinced the FBI agents who showed up at his office that attempting to pull the issue from distribution would only [[Streisand Effect|call attention to it]].

[[Category:Stupidity Tropes]]

[[Category:Plots]]