false flag

false flag, harmful, often militant, event or action that is designed to appear as though perpetrated by someone other than the person or group responsible for it. False flag operations are often calculated to generate sympathy for the attacked group. The term is sometimes used to describe a deliberate misrepresentation of one’s motives, although this sense is less frequent in contemporary usage.

Because false flag operations are usually covert, the concept of false flag has often been co-opted by conspiracy theorists to explain away tragedies that challenge their values or worldview. The storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, for example, was purported by one conspiracy theory to have been led by antifa, a loose association of left-wing activists, to undermine efforts by Donald Trump’s supporters to challenge the results of the U.S. presidential election of 2020. Such claims are usually based on mere suspicion rather than actual evidence, although adherents to those claims often cling uncritically to details, factual or nonfactual, that affirm their expectations (see confirmation bias).

The earliest known uses of the term false flag referred figuratively to a friendly flag flown by enemy ships in order to get within striking distance. The term first appears in a 16th-century anti-Roman Catholic polemic that claims Catholics pretend to faith while engaging in irreligious activities. Texts over the next few centuries show that the term continued to be used in a religious sense until the 1800s, when it started appearing in a literal sense to refer to deception at sea.

One notable example in modern warfare took place at the outbreak of World War I, when the German cruiser SMS Cap Trafalgar disguised itself as the British HMS Carmania and subsequently attacked the actual HMS Carmania off the coast of Brazil. On September 18, 1931, Japanese troops executed a likely false flag attack near Mukden (now Shenyang, Liaoning province, China). A small explosion on the Japanese-controlled South Manchurian Railway was used as the pretext for a Japanese attack on the Chinese garrison in Mukden and eventually the invasion of all of Manchuria. There were many instances of false flag operations during World War II, such as the raid on Saint-Nazaire, in German-occupied France, by British commandos, who disguised an explosive-laden vessel as a German warship to get within a short distance of an important German-occupied harbour before detonating the masquerading ship. In land warfare, the perhaps most infamous false flag occurred in August 1939, when Nazi operatives disguised themselves as Polish soldiers and attacked a German outpost in Gleiwitz (now Gliwice, Poland), which Adolf Hitler used as a pretext for the invasion of Poland.

During the Cold War, the United States considered staging several attacks (under the code name Operation Northwoods) in 1962 around southern Florida to look like acts of Cuban aggression. The goal was to give the United States a pretext to invade Cuba.

Suspicions of false flag operations are common in the 21st century. Among the most notable examples took place during the Russian invasion and annexation of the Crimea region in Ukraine in 2014, where Russian operatives were disguised as local separatists. This tactic was repeated in the Donbas region of Ukraine later in 2014. The falsification of reports of attacks on Russian speakers was also used to justify a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.