False Flag Operation

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;
• Secretly being an ally of the villains and having them "attack" you in order to shift suspicion away from yourself;
• 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.
• With Pirates, pretending to be the same as a victim's nation to get in close and attack the enemy.
• Using anonymity, such as that provided by some forum websites and via mail, to pretend to be on the side you're fighting against, and then saying something really extreme in order to turn people against whatever the other side is rooting for.

It's not limited to violence; spreading misinformation or committing sabotage in someone else's name can work wonders too. Basically it is a Frameup scaled up to target large organizations and nations. Heroes typically end up trying to Prevent the War or Avoiding the Great War.

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.

Any False Flag Operation can be used to generate a Pretext for War. If a False Flag Operation is perpetrated by an individual villain or group to start a war for private benefit, it's a case of War for Fun and Profit. If the attack is directed against the guys you're posing as (as opposed to your own), it's Dressing as the Enemy. When done on an individual level to justify a killing, it's a Self-Defense Ruse. 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. Thus, it is the third of The Thirty-Six Stratagems.

This was named after a ruse in naval warfare whereby a vessel flew the flag of a neutral or enemy country in order to hide its true identity. However, unlike the modern definition of the term, it was originally used to deceive other ships into allowing them to move closer before attacking them, provided the attacking vessel displayed its true flag once an attack had begun. You could also interpret the term to be a shortening of "false red flag", since the person employing the tactic is planting a false red flag on their opponent to taint their reputation.

Compare Government-Exploited Crisis, when the government causes, fakes or otherwise exploits a crisis to further its own goals. Also compare Staged Populist Uprising, when the leadership of a rebellion doesn't actually support the uprising's cause.

WARNING: Because this is often used as a plot twist, there will be spoilers below, many of which will not be covered.

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Examples:

• Anime & Manga
• Comic Books
• Fan Works
• Literature
• Live-Action TV
• Video Games
• Western Animation

Audio Plays

• Big Finish Doctor Who:
  • In "The Church and the Crown", Buckingham stages a series of attacks designed to have the Musketeers and Cardinal's Guards at each other's throats so no one will be in a position to prevent his troops invading Paris.
  • In "Mistfall", Solus is making his acts of sabotage look like the work of Outler radicals. He has even set up a naïve Outler to be killed and take the blame for the attacks.

Films — Live-Action

• In 8th Wonderland, the countries opposing the virtual nation initiate bombings and blame 8th Wonderland for them.
• 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.
• 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.
• In Terry Gilliam's Brazil, random bombings occasionally erupt, implied to be false flags.
• 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 actual sabotage.
• In the epilogue of Cleanskin, Ewan finds a safe deposit box key in the jacket of the man he killed earlier. He discovers a folder and video camera. He watches the tape, which identifies the man as Hussein Malik, an undercover SIS agent. Ewan, after seeing the file and recording, deduces that Charlotte engineered Malik's death, Ewan's assassination attempt, and framed Scott for being corrupt to cover her tracks.
• In Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Koba shoots Caesar and burns down the apes' home, pinning the blame on the humans, in order to both take control of the apes and start a war to wipe the humans out.
• Four Lions: One of the Muslim terrorists proposes bombing a mosque to unite the Muslim world against the west. In preparation, he records a message taking credit for bombing a mosque and admitting that he's a Muslim terrorist. His compatriots point out that this contradicts the whole concept of a false flag operation and ultimately nix his plan.
• Godzilla vs. Kong: After Godzilla (who has been regarded as a savior since the events of the previous movie) attacks Pensacola seemingly unprovoked and destroys a local Apex Cybernetics facility, Apex CEO Walter Simmons takes advantage of the resulting shift in public opinion to declare Godzilla is a threat to humanity rather than a guardian, and that Apex are going to take him down for good. In actuality, Apex are the ones who provoked Godzilla to attack in the first place, and now they're planning to deliberately repeat the incident on a much larger scale by covertly luring an aggravated Godzilla to Hong Kong (putting eight million people in the line of fire), where they intend to fight and kill him using Mechagodzilla. By making it appear to the world that Godzilla has suddenly decided to terrorize humanity, Apex will be able to justify Mechagodzilla's creation and their plan to topple the Alpha Titans (which they started mainly out of hubris and ambition) as a necessity, with no-one realizing they were actually the ones behind Godzilla's new aggression.
• Hercules (2014): It turns out that Cotys attacked his own villages, and framed the rebels (who he claimed followed a warlord) for doing this.
• In The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, a bomber painted to look like a Capitol ship drops aid canisters containing fire bombs. This makes it look like Snow bombed his own citizens just to slow down the rebels trying to overrun his mansion, causing his troops to turn on him and handing the rebels victory.
• A favorite of Big Bads in some 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 with the goal of sparking a nuclear war between them so that China will be the only surviving superpower in the world.
  • The Spy Who Loved Me has a similar plot, with two nukes being simultaneously launched towards Moscow and New York, prompting nuclear war. The Big Bad plans to ride it out in his undersea base and then rebuild the world in his image.
  • For Your Eyes Only had one on a smaller scale, with Locque pretending to be working for Colombo when he is really working for Kristatos.
  • Octopussy has rogue Soviet General Orlov attempting to smuggle in and detonate a nuclear bomb on a US military base in West Germany. 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 of Western Europe, confident that without nukes, NATO will be powerless to stop him.
  • The Living Daylights featured a fake KGB defector blaming his superior, General Pushkin, for assassinations of Western agents that he himself had caused. It's all planned to provoke the British into killing Pushkin before he uncovers said underling's illegal weapons and drug smuggling operations.
  • Tomorrow Never Dies also reused this plot, with an evil media mogul trying to provoke a war between Britain and China.
  • Spectre: The titular criminal organization is up to its shenanigans once again by staging terrorist attacks so that they could secretly seize control of the world's major intelligence agencies through their network of moles, which would enable SPECTRE to permanently stay ahead of their enemies and to counter-act on investigations into their illegal operations.
• 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. The league is created by MI6 attempting to avoid an early start to WWI. Supposedly. The League's formation is actually part of a whole other gambit by the Fantom, intending to obtain the abilities and technology used by four of the League's members so he can reproduce and supply said abilities and technology to the warring nations.
• 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.
• In The Lone Ranger, Butch Cavendish and his gang disguise themselves as Comanches and attack white settlements in order to make it look like the Comanche have violated the treaty.
• The Long Kiss Goodnight has a plot of the CIA staging a terrorist attack and "blaming it on the Muslims" so as to justify a budget increase.
  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 Machete, Machete is hired to carry out a Conspicuously Public Assassination on Senator McLaughlin. However, the attempted assassination is part of a false flag operation to gain public support for McLaughlin's secure border campaign by leaving Machete dead and McLaughlin a wounded hero shot by a dangerous illegal immigrant.
• Master and Commander: The crew of the HMS Surprise disguises the ship to look, and act, like a whaler ship, which the Acheron (the ship they'd been hunting for months) was hunting. The Acheron falls for it, the captain issues one order, and within a minute, the colors are raised, the Marines take aim, and the Surprise manages to get a full broadside off while the Acheron's crew was still reeling from the Oh, Crap! of seeing that the whaling ship they were after was in fact a British Royal Navy Frigate.
• The Milagro Beanfield War: After the developers try to bribe Joe with a job and have him seriously considering abandoning the beanfield, Joe's closest ally Armarante fires a shot through Joe's window to make him think that one of Devine's people was willing to endanger him and his family and sour him against the job offer.
• Missile X: The Neutron Bomb Incident: The Baron's plan is to detonate a nuclear bomb and let the superpowers blame one another and retaliate in both directions.
• Momentum: It turns out that the Senator is behind a plot to set a huge bomb off in Chicago, which he says is going to outdo 9/11. This will be blamed on someone else, starting a war that will greatly enrich the arms dealers who back his campaign for President, with the event used as a pretext to restore the US into the past glory and strength he thinks it's lost. He's in cahoots with high-ranking military officers. Alex gets ahold of a flash drive which holds details of the plot, vowing to reveal it even with dire risk as they go after her.
• The November Man: The CIA is revealed to have committed the bombing which caused the Second Chechen War. It was blamed on Chechen terrorists.
• The massacre of the McBains in Once Upon a Time in the West is carried out by Frank's henchmen (really working for Morton's railroad company) while dressed in dusters like Cheyenne's outlaw gang. A posse spends the first part of the film unsuccessfully tracking Cheyenne.
• Patton: After hostilities end in Europe, General Patton tells one of his colleagues that the allies next had to attack the Russians and he could make it look like the Russians attacked first. This leads to his getting relieved from command.
• In Prince Caspian, King Miraz has his general kill several of his own men in order to be able to blame their deaths on Narnians, thus justifying a "retaliation" against them.
• 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.
• In Prince Valiant (1997), the vikings of Thule raid Camelot and steal Excalibur while dressed in Scottish garb (The Dragon even rips off a piece of his kilt ^note which would not be invented until hundreds of years later and drops it on the floor). Naturally, King Arthur and his knights assume Scotland was responsible for the attack.
• The Quiet American: The bombings Pyle orchestrates are blamed on Communists to justify further American involvement. The same may also be true of the village massacre earlier.
• The Rawhide Terror: The white renegades conduct their raids disguised as Indians.
• Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows: Moriarty's plan revolves around starting a War for Fun and Profit between France and Germany; first by manipulating a group of Bomb-Throwing Anarchists into destroying several carefully chosen targets in Strasbourg and Paris, so that each nation blames the other, then by disguising one of his mooks as an ambassador with Magic Plastic Surgery and getting him to shoot another ambassador at point-blank range during a peace summit.
• In Siege of the Saxons, Duke Edmund betrays King Arthur by dressing his own troops up as Saxons (while also being allied to the actual Saxons), ensuring that the people thinks of him as a loyal and legitimate successor.
• Sleeping Dogs (1977) 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.
• The Standoff At Sparrow Creek: The police funeral shooting was actually the police themselves staging a shooting by firing into propane tanks with automatic weapons, all to drive the nearby militia members into paranoia and make create a standoff where they would be justified in gunning them down.
• Starship Troopers 3: Marauder: The government stages a bombing to cover up Anoke's death and also get rid of the peace protesters who are framed for committing it.
• 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 Starfleet officers.
  • In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country there were a bunch of false-flag operations going on, with Klingons firing on themselves to kill the Klingon Chancellor to try and start a war, then (at least in the video releases) Humans pretending to be Klingons to assassinate the Federation President at a peace conference. (Both incidents were part of the same conspiracy: Humans, Klingons, and Romulans coming together to prevent peace. Awww...) Not to mention the Enterprise pretending to be a Klingon freighter in order to rescue Kirk and McCoy from Rura Penthe.
• Star Wars: The Prequel Trilogy is 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 plays off both sides, both of which are controlled by him.
• Swordfish: Gabriel Shears is part of a secret U.S. government agency that plans to attack terrorist states in more horrific ways than attacks they have supported, ostensibly as right-wing terrorists themselves. The idea is the terrorist states will become too afraid of a group that can carry out such attacks that none would dare support a group for attacking the U.S. Of course, it first requires they make a terrorist attack on US soil themselves, partly to seize a DEA slush fund for their bankroll (since the secret government money gets cut off), which helps establish their terrorist bonafides at the same time.
• In The Terror of Tiny Town, Bat Haines rustles Pop Lawson's cattle and leaves behind a branding iron to make it look like it was the work of Tex Lawson.
• In Thunderheart, the GOONs draw the ARM symbol and leave behind eagle feathers at the scenes of their murders to justify the FBI conducting a violent crackdown on ARM.
• In Total Recall (2012), it turns out that the series of supposed Resistance bombings across the UFB were actually organized by Chancellor Cohaagen in order to justify expanding his Synthetic army, until he has enough to launch a full scale invasion of the Colony.
• 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.
• Watchmen: Ozymandius' plot is to fake an atomic attack by Dr. Manhattan to unite the world against a common threat.
• In We Summon the Darkness, the villains are fundamentalist Christians led by the televangelist John Henry Butler who are carrying out a cross-country killing spree and making it look like the work of a Satanic cult, all in order to spur a religious revival by making their propaganda about Satanists menacing society look genuine.
• 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 a mole.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • In X2: X-Men United, Stryker has the brainwashed Nightcrawler attack the President in order to provide an impetus for his campaign against the mutants.
  • X-Men: First Class: This is the villains' plan, to use their powers to escalate the Cold War so the superpowers will resort to nukes to wipe each other out so that mutants will be the only ones left.

Pro Wrestling

• On the October 20, 1997 WWE Raw, DGeneration X raided The Nation of Domination's locker room and covered the walls with a mix of racist graffiti (e.g., "HOMIE GO HOME") and pro-Canadian slogans to make it look like The Hart Foundation were responsible. Nobody bought it.

Religion

• The Book of Mormon: Some Lamanites who have deserted to the Nephites conceal their change of allegiance, pretending to be escapees, in order to get close to the guards over the city of Gid.

Roleplay

• Tessa Cole in Survival of the Fittest believes the titular game to be a false flag operation by the US Government meant to encourage compliance and military support.

Tabletop Games

• 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 they actually had secret backing from the Khans posing as pirates in an attempt to break the truce between the Clans and the Inner Sphere.
• Unlike Stratego, you can totally do this in Game of the Generals since you can move the Flag, and is in fact an important factor in playing this game depending on your planned win condition. One example is having a Private or low-ranking officer impose as a "scared" Flag piece. Or, more daringly, move the flag like it was an officer to avoid being challenged.
• In the backstory for Shadowrun, the TerraFirst! attack on Shiawase's private nuclear power plant was one of these, with the real TerraFirst!'s headquarters bombed to destroy evidence that they weren't really responsible.
• In Warhammer, the Dark Elves used this 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.

Visual Novels

• Aviary Attorney: During route 4A (Liberté), an element trying to make sure The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized murder a Disposable Vagrant while disguising themself as a member of the police force. Later they murder a random girl, lure the policeman over to her, and then tell the Rebel Leader it was his fault.
• In Victor Frankenstein's route of Code:Realize, Queen Victoria stages a "terrorist attack" involving chemical weaponry on Buckingham Palace itself and blames Victor for it, knowing that he will try to clear his own name and thus come to Buckingham to negotiate with her. This is only a precursor to a much larger plan involving several more Zicterium gas attacks on London which will be blamed on agents of other European nations, followed by similar attacks on the capitals of every other major European power, with the ultimate intent of sparking a world war while Britain still has a technological advantage decisive enough to allow them to come out on top.

Web Animation

• Happens on GoAnimate when a bad user false flags an innocent user's video from YouTube and giving them a community guideline strike. The innocent user would call the police to arrest the bad user for false flagging.
• Red vs. Blue; Season 12 reveals that a third party (the Space Pirates) are behind the civil war on the planet Chorus in Seasons 11-13. Their leaders (Locus and Felix) hired themselves and others off as mercenaries for one side or another, supplying them with weapons and alien technology in the hopes that they will kill each other off and allow their employer, Charon Industries, to move in and take all the relics hidden on Chorus for themselves.
• RWBY:
  • By the end of Volume 3, the four kingdoms are on the verge of a world war, as the last thing anyone got out of Vale before the trans-continental network went down was images of Ironwood's Atlesian military robots attacking the city and shooting people. Of course, the robots had really been hacked by Salem's faction.
  • In "Dread in the Air", Adam murders Sienna Khan, the leader of the White Fang, and claims the humans did it. This gets him leadership and galvanizes the White Fang for his anti-human cause.

Web Comics

• 8-Bit Theater: King Steve tried to hire the Dark Warriors to attack his own kingdom so that he could declare martial law, but his plan failed miserably.
• Fate/type Redline: The story is set near the end of WWII, when many of the Japanese are weary of war and advocate surrendering to the Allies. When one of the military commanders starts to think of surrender, Major Magatsu has him assassinated. He claims the factions talking surrender did it, angering his troops and ensuring they won't surrender anytime soon.
• Heroine Chic: Side-character superhero The Nation and his sidekick Liberteen foil what appears to be a terrorist attack on the Hudson Yards perpetrated by ISIS operatives in Episode 10. When the terrorists are unmasked, they turn out to be blonde-haired, blue-eyed white men wearing brown-face makeup. The motive for their attack is debated briefly at the end of the episode, but the plotline is dropped and never re-visited.
• Schlock Mercenary has one that happens right before the public reveal of immortality-granting nanotechnology. While it's presented as an In-Universe case of class warfare, the group (race) ultimately deemed responsible had already been shown to have tried once before, on a space station, with the only known rationalization being "surface dwellers are violent, so let's use that against them."
• TwoKinds has one that turns out to be two levels deep: Tiger Keidrans and one of the dwindlingly few well-meaning Templars meet up for peace talks, and are attacked by "Templars" that turn out to be wolf Keirdans... and were in turn, hired by a Templar.
• One happens during the third arc of Weak Hero. Jared, an underling of Ganghak's Wolf Keum, gets two lackeys to steal Wolf's prized bag containing important business files. He also orders them to steal it while wearing Eunjang uniforms and then sets things up so that the Eunjang student Rowan ends up toting the empty bag. This is all to direct Wolf's attention to Eunjang High in the hopes that he'll conquer it.

Web Videos

• Critical Role Campaign 2 centers on one long operation, pitting the Dwendalian Empire against the Kryyn Dynasty to allow cultists worshipping Tharizdun, the Chained Oblivion, to open rifts between the Material Plane and the Abyss and weaken the boundaries between the planes unopposed—with the end goal of unbinding Tharizdun and allowing it to consume the world.
  • Episode 85 has a more specific, immediate example: The Mighty Nein, having learned that agents of the cult are entering the Empire's capital city of Rexxentrum, teleport there in pursuit. They arrive to learn that the city has just come under attack by the forces of the Kryyn Dynasty. But after failing to ascertain any concrete information on the attack, Jester scrys on another man they know to be a part of the cult...and sees him in a cathedral in the city, delivering a rift-generating device to the church's cardinal, who is also a part of The Conspiracy. The Dynasty attack doesn't exist, and while the Crownsguard is preparing for it, demons will be able to overrun the city and break one of the chains binding Tharizdun.
• Internet Historian: While discussing The Independence Day Wars of 2014 between Tumblr and 4chan, he mentions at the end of the video the possible Conspiracy Theory that it was in fact 4chan's /pol/ board who originally riled up Tumblr with the "declaration of war" post that called for Tumblr to raid 4chan's /b/ board and start the whole thing, which ended in 4chan's decisive victory when they counter-raided. The reasoning? To watch the fireworks.
• In Noob, Tabris wants a total war between the factions, so he killed the Coalition's leader and framed spys from the Empire and the Order for it. The Coalition got hit with this again when the members of the council ruling in the dead leader's place all got killed by one of their own while the Coalition was having a Cooperation Gambit with the Empire. The killer pretended to be the Sole Survivor and pinned everything on the Empire via framing its help to fight a mutual threat as a cover for assassination.
• World War II: One is conducted by German SS officers dressed in Polish uniforms on the radio station at Gleiwitz on the German-Polish border as a justification for the invasion of Poland.
  • The Soviet Union shells the Russian village of Mainila near the border with Finland, claiming the artillery fire to have come from across the nearby Finnish border, despite Finland having withdrawn its artillery to preempt such an accusation.

Real Life

• The Gleiwitz incident, when Nazi Germany provided justification for its war with Poland at the start of World War II by dressing some soldiers up in Polish uniforms, then attacking a German radio outpost while leaving behind a body, 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.
• Later in 1939, the Shelling of Mainila started the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland. The event was semi-officially admitted as a false flag by the Soviet and Russian leaders from the '70s to the '90s, but under Vladimir Putin, the Russian official stance has reverted to Stalin's version of events.
• The Church of Scientology used 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.
• 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, informing the Brits and Americans, neither of whom were amused. As for the Egyptians themselves, they considered it evidence that their Jewish population was all potential agents of Israel, and could potentially be a threat to security (this was probably wrong, but that didn't matter at the time), and so proceeded to de facto expel the Jews from Egypt (they weren't direct about it of course; mostly, the government let life get unbearable for them). 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.
• The Mukden Incident provided the pretext for the invasion of Manchuria by Japan. Two officers of the Imperial Japanese Army staged an act of sabotage on a railway under their control, then blamed it on the Chinese.
• Hostels in southern France inhabited mainly by Muslim immigrants were bombed in 1988; notes were left at the scene of one of the bombings with the perpetrators describing themselves as the Zionist "Masada Action and Defense Movement". 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.
• In the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a Mormon militia disguised themselves as local Ute braves, attacking and massacring emigrants moving through the area. While the massacre was intended to Leave No Witnesses, this failed because one of the participants later confessed to his crimes and identified the ringleaders.
• In 1956, incensed that Nasser had nationalized the Suez Canal, the British government conspired with France to encourage Israel to start a war with Egypt. The goal of the operation was for Britain and France to step in as peacekeepers and to make sure that hostilities did not spill over from the Sinai Peninsula once that conflict ended, Britain and France would occupy and control the canal. This backfired spectacularly. Israel made it to the edge of the Sinai Peninsula but was forced to withdraw. Alexandria was occupied, but the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. forced Britain and France to admit that they had violated Egypt's right as a sovereign nation to take control of the canal, and forced them to withdraw their forces from the territory they captured. In Britain, Prime Minister Anthony Eden was forced to resign, in no small part because U.S. President Eisenhower warned that the U.S. would in no way support Britain's endeavor in Suez, and warned that the U.S. would decrease military aid.
• During World War I, the German navy disguised the auxiliary cruisery SMS Cap Trafalgar as the British ocean liner RMS Carmania and sent it out to sink British shipping. The first (and last) British ship the Cap Trafalgar encountered was the real RMS Carmania, which the British navy had converted to an armed merchantman. The Carmania immediately recognized the deception and subsequently engaged and sank the Cap Trafalgar in the Battle of Trindade. It is often claimed that Carmania was also disguised as Cap Trafalgar, when in truth they both simply had the same wartime paint job that caused initial confusion on both sides. It is just more amusing to say that they were both disguised as each other.

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