False flag operations have always been an integral tactic in war. In the days when battle formations were identified by flags, and orders given by semaphore, false flags were literally used. During WWII, both sides flew captured planes, pretended to be the other side in radio communications and deployed special forces dressed in enemy uniforms.
Such sneaky methods are often used in politics as well. Sometimes the deception works, even if it is known to be a deception. For example, the Daily Mail of London published a letter on October 25, 1924, just four days before Britain voted in a general election. A Labour Party government, led by Britain's first Labour PM, Ramsay MacDonald, had lost a vote of confidence on October 8. The Daily Mail was owned by a Conservative media baron, who stood to gain from a Tory victory.
The Mail pushed the nationalist angle to the hilt in a news item headlined "Civil War Plot by Socialists' Masters". It was alleged that Moscow had sent out orders "to paralyse the British army and navy" so that revolution could be fomented in the United Kingdom. The Mail published a letter supposedly written on September 15, 1924, by the Soviet Peoples' Commissar, Grigori Zinoviev. Addressed to the comrades of the Communist Party of Great Britain, the letter hinted that the Labour Party might be sympathetic to the cause of revolution and the spread of Leninism in Britain and her colonies.
Zinoviev promptly denied having written this. The letter was later conclusively proved to be a forgery. Apparently MI5 (Britain's internal security service which is roughly equivalent to India's Intelligence Bureau or IB) knew it was a forgery the day it was published. But MI5 said nothing. Labour lost the election with the Conservatives returning to power.
The case had several interesting elements. The letter is believed to have been forged at the behest of Conservative Party sympathisers who were senior government functionaries. This is what we would refer to as the Deep State in modern terminology.
The document had multiple discrepancies as pointed out by Zinoviev. The organisation mentioned on the letterhead did not exist. Zinoviev had been on holiday on September 15. His designation as given in the letter did not exist, and so on. It did not matter. Those who knew the letter was forged, had reason to keep silent, while the Conservatives tom-tomed the perfidy of treacherous socialists and communists to good effect.
In order to be effective, the Zinoviev letter needed several elements to come together. It needed an unscrupulous forger. It needed a Deep State with bureaucrats sympathetic to a certain political ideology. it needed an unscrupulous media that stood to gain from hyping the forgery and playing the nationalistic card. Finally, it needed a gullible populace.
Obviously such a blatant false flag operation couldn't succeed in our far more sophisticated era, driven as it is by fearless citizen journalists and relentless 24x7 TV coverage. It is absurd to imagine a situation where, for example, incendiary slogans and images are spliced into video tapes of a political meeting to make it seem as though the meeting was "anti-national".
Even if such tapes were created, for arguments' sake, those would still have to be circulated. Surely the aforementioned fearless citizen journalists and mainstream media would be too responsible to circulate tapes which looked like blatant forgeries?
Even if, for arguments' sake, such a set of doctored tapes were circulated by some journalists, citizen journalists and media houses with known political sympathies, surely the police and judiciary would reject that "evidence"? Especially if officers of the IB were present at the meetings and knew for sure, that the tapes were faked.
In a historical battle, a false flag operation that fooled a formation into going left when it was supposed to go right would be accounted a great success. When a political false flag operation goes wrong on the other hand, the shift of opinion from right to left counts as a self-goal.
Twitter: @devangshudatta
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