Headscratchers / Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War

Recognising Bell

• In the mission second part of the mission "Desperate Measures", you play as your customisable player character Bell. But as you know, Bell was in reality a high ranking Soviet officer who was supposably Perseus' favourite. So this begs the question of, how was nobody in the KGB Headquarters able to recognise you? Least of all, Kravchenko or Zakhaev who were with you in board meetings with Perseus.
  • As it turns out, Bell doesn't cross paths with Kravchenko and Zakhaev seems to have missed a spot check prior to walking away oblivious or being beaten into next week. That or the uniform really does something for one's looks.
    • But how not a single Soviet Officer recognised you still remains a question.
    • Maybe the people who knew Bell weren't on duty that day? If Perseus is operating without the approval of the Soviet high command, it stands to reason that anyone who knew Bell, and by extension Perseus, wouldn't be around for Perseus to pull favors with, otherwise he wouldn't have had to go digging around in Yamatau for Dragovich's files, he could've just rung one of them up and asked for the information.
    • Most of the Soviet officers that Bell encounters are probably low-level grunts who do not know who Perseus or Bell is.
  • Zakhaev and Kravchenko were not part of Perseus' plan, the conspirators in the flashback were Arash, Volkov, Rudnik, and Aldrich. Of those, the only KGB man was Rudnik, and he is not in the Lubyanka (he can even be dead by that time). The only one you meet after Bell's brainwashing is Volkov, who does recognize you (but is then immediately killed or captured). Further, if you replay the Lubyanka briefing, it's clear that Hudson is worried about exactly that: Bell being recognized in the KGB and blowing their cover.
  • Belikov probably helped forged Bell and Adler's identities to make them as nondescript as possible.
    • Hudson literally said that Belikov didn't have the time for forging identities for Bell and Adler and that they would have to make up ones of their own.
    • Sorry, meant to say that Belikov could've arranged for a security detail where most of the guards are recent hires/low-level grunts who wouldn't know much about Perseus.
  • Perseus' clothing suggests he wasn't a KGB officer, but a GRU one, possibly Spetznaz specifically. It stands to reason that his flunkies were GRU/Spetznaz too, which would also account for Bell's exceptional combat ability. As the Soviet military intelligence was very secretive, and had a longstanding rivalry with the parts of secret police who even knew they existed, the guards and random low-ranking officers would never have come in contact with any GRU personell and thus couldn't recognize Bell.

Greenlight Radio Activation

• So, at the end of the "End of the Line" mission, the CIA learns that Perseus is planning to activate all Greenlight bombs by broadcasting a radio signal. They proceed to deal with the threat by looking for the place Perseus plans to make that broadcast from and stopping him. However, couldn't they have nullified this threat not by preventing the signal from being emitted, but simply by preventing the bombs themselves from receiving the signal? That could be done either by jamming the frequencies with a wide radio broadcast of their own, or just shielding the bombs with a material that blocks radio waves (very easy to come by). Concerning the "shielding the bombs idea", the CIA surely must know where exactly their own bombs are hidden, and they probably have local agents in these major european cities who can access the bombs and neutralize them at their command.
  • A problem is always best solved from its root. In this case, the broadcast is best stopped from where it is being sent from in the first place, aka Solovetsky. That way there are less points of failure for the CIA. On the other hand, if the radio signal manages to reach any one of those nukes, that's a Western European City in flames.
    • Depending on how many nukes there are, it may not be possible to get the materials out to shield every nuke before Perseus sets them off. Storming Solovetsky, trashing the place and killing everyone in there is a much more definitive solution rather than shoving all the bombs in, I dunno, the 80's equivalent of a Faraday Cage and crossing fingers.'
    • Also it is implied that the countries that the nukes are placed in does not know about them. U.S sees detonation of them as worst case scenario, but for the allied countries to find out that U.S placed them there is a big second worst option
• Also, why exactly didn't Perseus set off the nukes immediately after escaping from Cuba?
  • As he says in Bell's flashbacks, he wants to detonate them "from the safety of Solovetsky".

Adler's Brainwashing

• Story-wise, why would Adler feel a need to brainwash Bell into thinking he wasn't a man? Aside from it being extra and unnecessary work, one of them (non-binary) wasn't used by activists until the 1990s. Last I checked, Adler doesn't seem like a gender activist to me...
  • The Doylist explanation is that the the other characters' dialogue are tailored to fit each of the three different genders (male, female, non-binary) that a player can choose to make "Bell". So if the player chooses Bell to be female and Adler addresses her as such, it's because Bell was actually a female - and being the token woman in Perseus' circle - when Adler captured her in Turkey. Playing as female in "Desperate Measures" will cause Belikov to lure a female Soviet guard into the furnance room so that Bell can kill her and steal her women's uniform. Thus, if the player chooses Bell to be non-binary, Bell probably is actually an inter-sex person. Adler must have discovered Bell's intersex condition when treating their gunshot wounds from Arash.
    • The problem however is that Bell's model clearly shows a male character when Mason is zooming into the car that Arash is shooting at. It's also clear that a lot of Bell's memories are fake, and as the fridge portion suggests there's quite a lot of 'Your Mind Makes It Real' in play.
    • I think it’s really as simple as Raven didn’t want to create many different models to account for Bell’s gender, so they took the easy way out and used a placeholder model (Harry Stone from MP). It’s in no way representative of canon. Bell is whoever you want them to be.

Greenlight Nukes' Locations

• So these nukes are placed to "protect" NATO members and allies in Europe by destroying all Soviet personnel occupying a city containing one after they are done doing so. But the map indicates that some of the Greenlight nukes are also in neutral countries (Austria) and even some Warsaw Pact members (Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.) How and why ?
  • So Perseus wants to glass Western Europe to Take Over the World, cool. But, have I forgot to tell you that the fallout from the nuke in Southeastern Finland could actually affect Leningrad ?
    • The world initially would be crappier and more dangerous due to the fallout, but that world would be more vulnerable to communism and in the long run an ideal one for someone like Perseus.
    • You are getting it all wrong. Remember it's the US, not the NATO that put the bombs in strategic points to STOP a Soviet advance. If you take a look at the map you will see that the circles create a nuclear border that blocks the important chokepoints of Europe. The two bombs in Finland make the port of Leningrad useless, while the one in Sweden blocks the Oresund strait. The bombs were put in place solely to stop the Soviet Union from using Europe to attack America AFTER the continent was lost.
    • The Question I'm asking is how did US hid American nukes in cities like Krakow or Prague. The US putting nukes in NATO is one thing, them managing to sneak it into Warsaw Pact itself, right through the Iron Curtain, is quite another.
    • The Warsaw Pact was formally created in 1955, which is two years after Eisenhower took over the presidency in the U.S. - plenty of time to smuggle in a nuke before the Soviets would've cracked down on those countries and to hide it from Soviet interference.
    • But it doesn't explain how the US managed to upgrade all the nukes to neutron bombs in 1974, 19 years after the formation of the Warsaw Pact.

Brick in the Wall intel

Intel in 'Brick in the Wall' has Richter claiming to be working with a mole that's playing the Americans for fools. Is this mole Aldrich? Is it Bell? Is it one of the targets that you'll need to eliminate in the side-missions?

Park or Lazar during "The Final Countdown"

• Bell can choose between saving Park, saving Lazar, or letting both die in Cuba. During "Break on Through", whoever Bell chose to save will thank them for saving their lives, and then serve as the medic who monitors Bell's health as they relieve the implanted memories. If Bell chooses to lie to Adler and lure his team to Duga, whoever Bell chooses to save will also accompany them, giving Bell the ability to kill them if Bell chooses to set up a Soviet ambush. So Park or Lazar, despite being injured in Cuba, are clearly fit enough to continue fighting in "Ashes to Ashes". However, if Bell chooses to tell Adler the truth and give away Perseus' location, Park or Lazar will not accompany and fight alongside them in Solovetsky. Why don't Park or Lazar accompany the team if they are fit enough to fight in "Ashes to Ashes"? There arguably would have been better payoff for the player's actions if the ally they saved in "End of the Line" shows up to return the favor in the game's finale.
  • It is implied that the CIA is generally better supplied/funded in "The Final Countdown" than in "Ashes to Ashes". Therefore, they aren't so starved for manpower that they bring Park/Lazar to the battlefield.
    • That, and the mission types for "The Final Countdown" and "Ashes To Ashes" are very different. In the former, Adler and company are backed up by several Navy warships, fighter support, and a small army of CIA operatives, while in the latter, Sims explicitly mentions that only a "small team" can be sent in due to the Duga array being so remote. Presumably, bringing along Park/Lazar during "The Final Countdown" is unnecessary because of the forces being sent in, while their presences is necessary during "Ashes to Ashes" because Adler can only take so many people with him.
  • Potentially Fridge Brilliance. Adler was planning to kill Bell after the mission was completed to tie up any loose ends and didn't want Park or Lazar - who is only still alive because of Bell - there to try and stop him.
    • But then that brings up the question of why Adler didn't make such an arrangement in "Ashes to Ashes"

Operation Greenlight's Very Existence

• Why would such an operation even need to exist when both France and Britain had their own nuclear arsenals that they could use, both as a Soviet deterrent and last-resort?
  • Having nukes buried there would eliminate the possibility of the ICBM or the Plane carrying the nukes being shot down by the Soviets. But, letting Britain and France in on this would compromise the operation, not to mention the fact that the operation also places nukes on British and French soil.
  • And, in-universe, thirteen years prior, Soviet agents nearly gassed the entirety of the US with a nerve agent as a way of softening the country up for an invasion. It stands to reason that the US may have decided that in the event of a similar event, having nuclear bombs planted beneath the major cities in Europe would be a good way to invoke Taking You with Me against the Soviets, who would be expecting all resistance to have been neutralized by Nova 6 and certainly wouldn't be expecting to be put on the receiving end of Nuke 'em.
    • But if you think about it, Op Greenlight was unnecessary. There wouldn't be a need to risk filling those countries in on the Op either if it was never greenlit in the first place (pun intended). With or without Op Greenlight, the US alone could overwhelm the Soviet's meager ABM defenses (even assuming any meaningful number of them were carried along in a Western European invasion and didn't miss). France and Britain had more than enough nukes to do the same, especially if they were nuking targets across Western Europe in a defensive action. MAD was effectively guaranteed, and Dragovich's plan would've also gotten the Soviets nuked into oblivion in retaliation. Given that all of this was possible in both the IRL and COD timeline, would the US really need to go through the trouble of sneaking neutron bombs into the capitals of NATO and Warsaw Pact nations?

Arash Kadivar

• Why would Adler just kill him instead of capturing him? He already decided to spill his guts about Perseus and him being alive. Capturing someone that embedded with him would serve Adler far better.
  • It is in Adler's "take no prisoners" approach character to kill such people rather than to capture them. This can also be seen with Qasim Javadi and Anton Volkov later on.
    • But then why capture Bell? And if there was some rationale that compelled Adler to do this, then why not extend it to someone else that close to Perseus?
    • Adler witnessed Arash betraying Bell and probably only saved him because it would make it easier to fulfill the brainwashing. I doubt that they would've captured Bell if Arash didn't shoot him and they both died in the crash.
    • But the CIA could've easily kept Kadivar separate from Bell, and brainwash him into thinking Kadivar was killed. I'm sure that a few extra arrangements could be made so that the CIA would have a potential goldmine of actionable intel against Perseus.
  • When Arash is cornered, he starts taunting Adler about Perseus and Adler thinks he is bullshitting. It's possible that the folder that Bell is found with convinced Adler that Perseus was, in fact, alive and justified the whole mindwipe operation. Had Adler found the folder first, before killing Arash, maybe he does try to capture him alive.

Operation Greenlight info being compromised

• The Soviet computer system in Redlight Greenlight has audio files of conversations between Hudson and PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN HIMSELF. Wouldn't it be important to find out who in the US government/CIA tapped a line that secure ?
  • Woods is more freaked out about the fact that Operation Greenlight is a US initiative run by Hudson, who he hates, and Bell is essentially a thing to be pointed at enemies to make them go away, so presumably, Adler had to hand off finding that particular mole to some other team because Woods was too busy beating up Hudson to listen to anything else and Bell is nowhere to be seen when Woods and Hudson throw down.
    • The side missions wasted a serious opportunity in hunting down that mole just like Robert Aldrich...
  • Bell being a turned Soviet mole means we might have a case of Unreliable Narrator. He might be hearing what we, as the audience, are audio files between Hudson and Regan. But at the same time, the computer he is typing on is in Russian and he can read those fine - despite the game never giving us confirmation that we were fluent in that language?
    • Between accessing that computer, the one in desperate measures and the conversation with the Soviet Guards and Imran Zakhaev in Russian, it is pretty much confirmed that Bell is fluent in Russian. And so is Woods, the one other person in that computer room, who we learnt knows Russian from the Call of Duty: Black Ops mission "Executive Order".