Literature / False Flag Operation

False Flag Operations seen in Literature.

In Animorphs: Visser, Visser Three has two of his Hork-Bajir controllers attack during his trial of Visser One, along with an ordinary starved bear and tiger, so that he can end the "Andalite Bandits" while in front of his bosses and look good. Visser One doesn't buy it and calls Marco (who she knows, at this point, to be one of the "Andalite Bandits") to attack for real, discrediting his attempt.
In Artemis Fowl and the Arctic Incident, Opal Koboi has the B'Wa Kell goblin gang torch several of her own facilities as a "smokescreen", to hide the fact that she's the one arming them.
The Arts of Dark and Light: A conspiracy of this sort is a major part of the plot of Summa Elvetica. A group of warmongers with backing in the Senate intend to assassinate protagonist Marcus and Bishop Claudo and blame their deaths on the elves, thereby destroying the peace negotiations they are attending and providing a casus belli for renewed conflict with the elf-kingdom Elebrion.
In Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts, Hideyoshi dresses up as his twin sister (the vice-representative of Class A) in order to goad Class C into attacking Class A.
Variations on this theme were a favorite tactic of Murgo infiltrators in the Belgariad and Malloreon, to the point where several characters make cracks about the Murgo lack of originality.
In Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Carlo and Francesco are sent to carry out such an operation. They are not told this is what they're doing and (as they realize when they figure out what they've actually done) they weren't supposed to survive it.
In the Cloud Atlas anthology, the fabricant Sonmi-451 (protagonist of the eponymous story "An Orison of Sonmi-451") is entrapped by a false resistance movement created by the Unanimity corporate-state, which is ultimately designed to galvanize public opinion against the "threat" of an ascended fabricant rebellion.
In The Daevabad Trilogy, King Ghassan tells his highly-moral son, Ali, to deal with the shafit unrest in no uncertain terms. When Ali reports back that the shafit are keeping their heads down and not causing any unrest, Ghassan rolls his eyes and tells him to go out and get them to, because Ghassan needs to make a show of "justified" force against the city's part-human inhabitants.
Vladimir Vasilyev's Death or Glory: In 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.
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.
Dr. Gorner in Devil May Care hates England so much he wants it to be destroyed. Initially he was going to produce and sell as much of drugs as he can to destroy it slowly from the inside, but he wants faster results, so he is going to frame them for an attack against Soviet Union by destroying Stalingrad and Trekhgorniy, thus locking them into a nuclear conflict which they can't win.
Discworld:
- Subverted in Jingo. There is an assassination attempt on a ~~Arabi~~Klatchian 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.
- Small Gods: Omnia goes to war against Ephebe because the Ephebians killed one of their emissaries. In fact, he was murdered on Vorbis' orders as a Pretext for War.
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.
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 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.
Firebird Trilogy: 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.
Two of them in the Frederick Forsyth novel The Fourth Protocol:
- A British Ministry of Defense official is a staunch anti-Communist who felt that South Africa was entitled to be included in NATO planning to help fight the U.S.S.R. and that it was only on "dubious moral grounds" (i.e., Britain and most of Europe's disgust for apartheid) that they were excluded from such planning. So he passes classified information to a sympathetic South African diplomat to help South Africa fight Soviet influence—and is horrified to learn that the diplomat is actually a Soviet mole.
- The Premier of the Soviet Union instigates a covert operation to detonate a nuclear bomb near a US Air Force base, making it look like an accidental detonation, to cause the election of the Labour government which was running on an anti-nuclear platform at the time. There's also a pro-Soviet faction within the Labour Party that will seize control of it—and by extension the British government—and institute a disarmament policy and withdrawal from NATO.
Gate: Zorzal's forces attempt to frame the JSDF for attrocities by disguising themselves as JSDF members and massacring villages. They fail miserably. Their disguises weren't very good, only wearing green outfits that barely look like JSDF uniforms. They used their regular swords, spears, and bows and rode wyverns and horses instead of using guns, cars, and helicopters. Their biggest mistake was having undisguised Imperial generals commanding them in plain sight.
Genocide Online: In order to cause war between Kingdom of Hermagne and Empire, Rena decided to mess with corpses of a squad, which commander is an Emperor's daughter, so it seemed like daughter was raped by the soldiers of Hermagne by spilling white magic fluid on her body. After she sends a message to the Emperor about this act in the name of the Princess, he was outraged and immediately started a total war against Kingdom.
The main plot of Hammer of the Witches starts rolling when someone commits a massacre of a refugee camp to frame Hexenhammer, the nationalist anti-terrorist vigilante group led by one of the main characters.
Hammer's Slammers: In Paying the Piper Steuben and a unit of his White Mice dress as members of a rival mercenary company hired by the other side and assassinate an anti-war politician, who was being paid by the enemy.
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, ostensibly 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, but acquitted, partly due to his being a dim bulb and popular athlete who they saw could easily be taken in.
Honor Harrington:
- The Harris Assassination that led to the Committee of Public Safety's rule over the People's Republic of Haven was masterminded by committee chairman Robert Pierre, but he and his co-conspirators arrange things so that the People's Navy seems to be responsible, allegedly attempting a coup d'état, by the simple expedient of having naval personnel who are part of their conspiracy carry out the actual attack. All so that Pierre and his co-conspirators becoming the new leaders of the government is widely accepted by the general public.
- 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.
  - Mesan agents pull a particularly nasty one during Shadow of Freedom, in which they visit planets on the Verge and promise their various La Resistances aid in Manticore's name against the local and Frontier Security forces exploiting them. It's essentially a Xanatos Gambit because the Manticorans, upon finding this out, will either stretch themselves thin out of an obligation to help people who genuinely thought they were receiving Manticoran aid, or leave them to their fate and look like they stirred up rebellions and hung them out to dry. The fact that they do in fact provide significant (but typically insufficient) material aid to the rebels also serves to further inflame relations between the Manties and the Sollies, as the Solarians believe the Manticorans are helping the numerous uprisings.
Horatio Hornblower:
- 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 Republican 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 Ship of the Line, intentionally creating a fake French tricolour to get close to a group of Spanish ships. This is technically allowed under the Articles of War because he strikes the fake colors before he opens fire, but it still 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 seizing control of the port for the British and leading into the fall of Napoleon.
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.
In the Hyperion Cantos novel Fall of Hyperion, the TechnoCore attacks dozens of Web worlds with fake Ouster Swarms in a ploy to convince the Hegemony of Man that the Ousters are genocidal monsters who can't be stopped by conventional means. This fake invasion makes the Hegemony's leaders desperate enough to consider using a hideously destructive superweapon against the real Ousters, which is exactly what the Core wants.
In The Initiate Brother, false flag operations are apparently a favoured tactic of Jaku Katta, the Emperor's guard commander. Some are small incidents - arranging for Lord Shonto to be attacked at home and Lady Nishima to be detained while travelling, in both cases allowing him to come to their "rescue" and win their trust. He tries a bigger one when he arranges an attack on Shonto's army in the expectation that his boss the Emperor will be blamed for it, hoping to exploit the resulting outrage. However, it falls apart when the attack fails miserably and the Emperor finds out what he was up to.
Jack Ryan novels:
- In 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".
- 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 Dragon, 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).
Kentucky Fried Politics: Bulgaria attempts this in 1971 by having agents commit arson against Orthodox churches in Turkey in order to fan tensions with Greece, in the hopes of destabilizing NATO and forcing America to pick sides between them in any resulting conflict (and therefore draw whichever one loses into the Warsaw Pact's orbit). Fortunately, the agents are caught in the act and the plot exposed, bringing the two countries closer together instead.
KG 200 by J.D. Gilman and John Clive is about a Luftwaffe unit that specializes in flying captured Allied aircraft (the unit actually existed, but used them for long-range reconnaissance and dropping enemy agents). In the novel however the intention is to use American aircraft to attack London, to sow discord between the US and British forces.
Libra by Don DeLillo portrays the assassination of John F. Kennedy as an attempt to fake a Communist assassination attempt on JFK, only for postmodern confusion to twist the false flag operation into a real, successful assassination.
Magic, Metahumans, Martians and Mushroom Clouds: An Alternate Cold War: The Americans give the Lazarus zombie virus to a cabal of rogue Haitian generals to unleash on their own population, so it will look like Duvalier is using voodoo to enforce his regime, and thus lead to his downfall. Unfortunately, good ol' Papa Doc does have access to voodoo, which he uses to put down the viral zombies with zombies of his own, and thereby stay in power.
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.
Mortal Engines: In A Darkling Plain, Lady Naga is attempting to negotiate a lasting peace between the Green Storm and the cities of the Traktionstadtgesellshaft. The more war-like supporters of the Storm send their agents to assassinate her, wearing uniforms stolen from the Traktionstadt, in the hopes of collapsing the peace process.
In Crux, the second book of The Nexus Series, it's discovered by Dr. Holtzmann that the Posthuman Liberation Front's failed assassination attempt on the President was in fact designed to fail, with the assassin's targeting program adjusted to fire half a meter to the left of the president. After some digging, Holtzmann realizes that this and several false flag operations were planned and executed by then ERD director Maximilian Barnes. Later, Holtzmann is killed by Barnes for figuring this out, but not before Holtzman has used his secret Nexus application to upload all his evidence to the Internet and, for good measure, record and transmit Barnes explaining his role in the operations and forcing a heart attack pill down Holtzmann's throat.
George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four 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.^note
In Warrior Born, the first book in the Nova Refuge science fiction universe: The empire of Xarkon, one of the four largest factions on Terra Nova, the planet which humanity has fled to after our solar system's destruction by the Sun going supernova, orchestrate this on one of their major cities in order to frame and suppress an independent city-state micronation called Mordark located north of their country. They lock down the city, called Shardasha, and when all major human factions join in the fight, send in their Enomeg super-soldiers to take down Mordark's alien leader Lord Zegaldorph, who is visiting Shardasha. Following the events, at a meeting among the major human factions in the CONON space station (Council of Nations of Nova Refuge), Lucas Augustus Mars, High Commander of the Armed Forces of Xarkon, a Honorable Villain a firm believer in the philosophy of War is Natural and the de facto ruler, declare the nation's emperor a weak and cowardly leader and proceeds to execute him by decapitation while the rest of the nations watches. Subsequently, he declares war with the rest of the nations and the CONON station, usually known as a Placeof Protection and peace, becomes a scene of bloodshed. Many of the Xarkonian soldiers involved in the coup are not even aware of the truth behind the incident, including the Enomeg super-soldiers.
Of Fire and Stars: Lord Kriantz framed the Zumordans for attacks against the Mynarian government, so that they'd go to war with him against Zumorda, winning land he wants.
In events leading up to the events of The Osmerian Conflict the Terrans attack their own people to conjure enough sympathy that the populous would support a war with the Osmerians as part of their Pretext for War operation.
The Outside: The Keres, a collective of failed Gods, has spent the last seven centuries periodically attacking human-inhabited planets, causing huge amounts of death and destruction until Nemesis fights Her off. But in The Infinite, Elu discovers that the Keres is actually taking orders from Nemesis, who arranges these attacks in order to justify Her existence by fighting them off.
The attempts on Queen Sabran's life in The Priory of the Orange Tree turn out to be this. First, the assassins at the start of the book are intended to remind her of her mortality so she'll marry and have a daughter already. Ead works this out when the final cutthroat has a key, which he could only have obtained from someone in the palace. (In fact, Ead killing all the previous assassins before Sabran even knew they were there is why the last one has a key; their employer got desperate.) The later attack on Sabran's retinue in public was part of an attempt by Truyde to convince her that the royal line is not sufficient to avert the Big Bad's return. The first assassins' employer, Sabran's mentor Igrain Crest, usurps that plot and makes it a real assassination of Sabran's new husband. He wasn't the man Igrain suggested, and Igrain wanted Sabran to do as Igrain said.
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 disproven repeatedly, but it keeps resurfacing nonetheless.
In The Warsaw Document, Quiller is assigned to babysit an Embassy official investigating an impending Polish uprising that might disrupt East/West peace talks. Quiller conducts his own investigation 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 Red Storm Rising, the KGB sets up a bombing of the Politburo to manufacture a casus belli as part of their "maskirovka" (Russian for "camouflage" or "concealment").
Rebuild World:
- Yanigisawa works with Kagumayama city officials to set up one of these, by convincing a terrorist to sacrifice himself to lead monsters from the ruins into the city, in an Inside Job. The purpose of this was two-fold: To justify the defense budget to the middle district citizens who've been complaining, and to clear out a path for a forward base within the ruins to secure Lost Technology artifacts and thus wealth.
- It turns out, it's business as usual for MegaCorp in the One Nation Under Copyright government to raid one another and blame it on the terrorists via Propaganda Machine, sometimes even involving them, paying hush money to each-other in secret. This is all because the companies are in a cold war like situation with one another as part of an Enemy Mine alliance against the Neglectful Precursors machines. Sakashita's rivals hire Tatsukawa and Mercia to lure monsters towards Kagumayama City, and they stage a spec ops mission to capture or kill a Superhuman Trafficking old world connector on an inter-city Big Badass Rig convoy, both attempts being foiled with Akira's help.
The Reynard Cycle: In Defender of the Crown, Reynard captures the fortress of Kloss using this technique. It helps that all Calvarians wear uniforms, even the civilians.
Done several times in Romance of the Three Kingdoms. One of the most important ones was the raid on Wuchao (the climactic incident of the Battle of Guandu) which has two of these occur. First, Cao Cao disguises his troops as Yuan Shao's soldiers to get to Wuchao in the first place. Then, once Wuchao has been raided and burnt to the ground, he sends several soldiers in the guise of the Wuchao 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 Wuchao to help raid Cao Cao's headquarters 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.
- In a more minor example, Sun Ce desecrates the grave of one of his officers before blaming it on a rival force so as to motivate his troops and officers.
- Sun Quan offered a birthday present to Cao Cao of Guan Yu's severed head, but Cao Cao saw right through the attempt at misplacing blame and had Guan Yu's head buried with a body of fragrant wood and a noble's honors.
Rogue Warrior: Richard Marcinko's special forces Navy SEALs group Red Cell operated as terrorists conducting mock attacks on military installations in preparation of a real attack. So the story goes, there was also a covert side to the team where while most of them were off playing fun and games a few would slip off and execute high value targets, such as going after car bombers in the Middle East while helping with American security.
Rollerball, one of the Commander Shaw spy thrillers by Philip McCutchan, has a flanged sphere twelve feet in diameter, with a bomb inside, rolling on an unstoppable course towards a Soviet base. As the rollerball was built in Britain, the Soviets naturally accuse the British government of building it, especially when a Soviet diplomat walks alongside the rollerball and finds UK departmental markings stamped on it. When it's pointed out that the British government would hardly put their own markings on a Secret Weapon, the Soviets argue that bureaucratic incompetence is responsible.
Safehold: Played with near the end of At the Sign of Triumph. After a planned uprising in Chisholm collapses miserably, an Inquisition agent provocateur and one of the nobles involved in the plot (try to) flee the country. They're expecting to be picked up by a Desnairian privateer, so when they see a schooner flying Desnair's flag they think they're safe. Then the schooner lowers the Desnairian flag and raises that of the Empire of Charis. It seems the privateer in question had lost an argument with the Imperial Charisian Navy a few five-days prior, and its secret orders captured. The naval schooner was specifically sent out to collect the last two conspirators.
A convoluted example in Scarecrow And The Army Of Thieves. The titular Army of Thieves is an anti-American militia/terrorist group and seizes an old Soviet atmospheric weapon to use against the United States. It turns out that while the Army itself is genuine in its beliefs, its leader is a ruthless CIA agent manipulating them and aiming to protect America's interests. While the weapon will damage the US, it won't be crippling. On the other hand, the harm done to China, which everyone is overlooking, will be far more severe, preventing China from replacing America as the world's dominant superpower.
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.
The Secret Life of Kitty Granger: Lowell, Smythe, and their organization of Nazis are planning to blow up Parliament and claim it was carried out by the heroic spy organization The Orchestra as part of a communist uprising.
Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Was Not: In "The Angel of Truth", Sherlock Holmes discovers that a seeming Catholic plot against Queen Elizabeth I was in fact instigated by her spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham to allow him to continue his crackdown on Papists.
The Silerian Trilogy: Tansen and his men pretend to be assassins, leaving shir at the scenes of attacks against waterlords which implicate others, setting them against each other.
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 another, like the odious conspiracy theory Israel was behind 9/11. Sadly, it works at least temporarily all too well.
In Son of the Black Sword, this is done multiple times to frame Ashok and turn public opinion against him.
The Specialist by Gayle Rivers. The Spanish government hires mercenaries to assassinate Basque terrorists operating across the border in France. It's decided to pin the blame on Spanish right-wing extremists who've done this thing before; in fact, the extremists mess up one planned assassination by planting a car bomb in a vehicle right after the mercenaries have done so!
Star Trek: The Lost Era: Serpents Among the Ruins 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 the Federation's side in the Treaty of Algeron. Facing this alliance and the possibility of the Federation developing some kind of "superwarp" drive (the test flight is faked using a cloaking device and an unstable transwarp drive), 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.
In the Star Wars novel Master and Apprentice, the terrorist acts were not the product of the Opposition but were instead the work of Princess Fanry and her supporters as part of her plan to seize absolute power in the Pijal system. Fanry and her supporters used the Opposition as a conveient scapegoat for the attacks.
Star Wars Legends:
- In the Hand of Thrawn duology, Supreme Commander Pellaeon of the Imperial Remnant is preparing for a Peace Conference with the New Republic. Some of his people disagree, violently. Pellaeon sends an envoy in a shuttle to request the talks and then quietly takes his flagship to a neutral part of space to wait for a response, preferably the Corellian New Republic general he respects the most. His dissidents capture the envoy's shuttle and prevent it from sending any messages, and later pay a pirate force to disguise their ships as a midsized Corellian force and then attack Pellaeon's ships before retreating. Pellaeon, who studied under Grand Admiral Thrawn, is not fooled; he determines that these are not the Corellian general's forces based on their tactics (they fall for the same trick invented by said Corellian general), then destroys most of them and sits back to wait, aware now that there is 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 of Isard's plots in the X-Wing Series consist of losing the galactic capital planet, leaving terrorist sleeper cells and a virus which only affects nonhumans behind, to fracture the young New Republic's human and nonhuman factions.
- In Shatterpoint, Mace Windu steals a pair of enemy gunships and uses them to launch a Macross Missile Massacre at a swarm of droid starfighters harassing his clone troops' landers. Because of High Speed Missile Dodges and Beam Spam, only nine out of fifty-nine missiles hit, but that's not the point: by droid logic, a coordinated attack from two "friendly" gunships is evidence of treachery from all sixty-nine gunships, and suddenly the fighters and gunships are too busy attacking each other to worry much about his clones. Later, he uses one of the gunships as a distraction to take the enemy spaceport, by claiming that it's heavily damaged from the battle and leaking radiation, and needs to reach port to protect civilians from a possible explosion. The entire city is so enthralled by this drama that no one notices the clone ships sneaking up on the spaceport until it's too late.
In The Survivor, Vermoulin and McCabe plan to detonate a suitcase nuke and then blame it on terrorists. Vermoulin thinks this will alert the United States to the danger of terrorism. McCabe wants to start Armageddon.
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 Tales from Netheredge, Calistan raiders attacked the nation of Genzies so ruthlessly and stealthily they were thought of as a mythical Eldritch Abomination. After they were defeated, they naturally credited themselves with the victory over "the Horror" — which helped them secure an increasingly unfair protectorate over the Genzies under the guise of "keeping them safe".
Orson Scott Card's The Tales of Alvin Maker: Red Prophet has William Henry Harrison offering his old friend Hotch Palmer a hefty sum to recruit desperadoes, dress as Indians, and raid Vigor Church, killing women and children. Fink, after a moment, bursts into laughter; Harrison has managed to find something Hotch won't do.
- Palmer is ambushed and murdered on his way back to his boat, as he expected, and Harrison's war starts on schedule.
Tortall Universe: In The Immortals, Emperor Ozorne disguises Carthaki ships as pirates when they attempt to capture or kill Tortall's Queen and her children. Even though it's dead obvious they're to blame, Tortall can't officially do anything. The events of the next book make it more obvious as actual documents are uncovered with The Emperor's name and seal, and after that book an alliance of northern countries unites with Tortall, forcing the Carthaki empire to sue for peace. Ozorne attempts to pull this again when he kidnaps Daine and hides her away, forging a note to make it seem like she ran off to foment dissidence against him. This causes the other countries to assume the talks failed because of Tortall and her specifically, so they won't help Tortall in an impending war against the much larger empire.
A meta example: Austrian writer Robert Neumann (1897-1975) specialized in criticizing authors by writing one- or two-page parodies of their works. He entitled the second collection of his parodies Unter falscher Flagge ("under false flag") in 1932.
The Vazula Chronicles: In A Kingdom Discovered, Percival is attacked by ten men in peasant cloaks. During the fight, one man's cloak slips, and Percival recognizes the uniform of the royal guard. He thinks the royal family sent the men to attack him in order to wipe out magic users. But Heath senses that some of the men had magic, even though no one in the royal guard has powers. The Record Master of the triple kingdoms had his two bodyguards, who can transform from mermen into humans, as well as a group of mercenaries dress in stolen uniforms to attack Percival. The Record Master views magic users as a threat to the triple kingdoms and hopes that by stirring up discord on land, he can cause the extinction of the magic users.
In the Warhammer novel Vermintide, Skaven attempt to stir up a war between their enemies by constructing airships mimicking dwarf design and setting them to attack a human city.
Warhammer 40,000:
- Ciaphas Cain
  - 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.
  - 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.
- In Graham McNeill's Ultramarines novel Nightbringer, Vedden and his men disguised themselves as Arbites and attacked a demonstration, to produce a riot.
In Water Margin, General Qin Ming fails to defeat the outlaws Song Jiang and Hua Rong and is captured. They invite him to join them, but although he is impressed with their gallantry he refuses to turn traitor, and they let him go the next day. He returns home to learn that during the night the outlaws had sent a force led by a man on his horse and dressed in his armor to sack everything outside the town walls. His wife has already been executed, and he is sent away. The outlaws did all this, nearly driving Qin Ming to suicide, with the sole purpose of forcing him to join them, and it works. Note that these are all protagonists, especially Song Jiang. Apparently you're supposed to recognize that they're the "good guys" because they admit to Qin Ming exactly what they did and apologize.
In Chapter 16.13 of Worm, we learn about an operation in which Coil used a young child soldier and a device made by Leet to fake a betrayal of the Undersiders by Skitter, thereby allowing him to both kill Skitter and keep his captive seer, Dinah, whom Skitter wanted freed. Unfortunately for his plans, Skitter survived.
In the Young Bond novel By Royal Command, the Nazis get British communists to attempt to assassinate the king by pretending to be Soviets.

False Flag Operation / Literature

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