False Flags: Gustav III's Opera Costumes to Gleiwitz and The Sims 3 Raid

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The term false flag comes from ships flying friendly colors to close on a victim. Naval law long allowed it as a ruse of war, provided the true ensign went up before firing, a line between ruse and perfidy that survived into the 20th century. In 1942 HMS Campbeltown, disguised as a German torpedo boat under a German ensign, got within two miles of the St Nazaire docks before being spotted, and after the war Otto Skorzeny was acquitted at Dachau because his men had shed their American uniforms before fighting. In 1788 Gustav III of Sweden went further, having the Royal Swedish Opera's tailor sew Russian uniforms for a staged attack at Puumala to win war powers from the Estates.

The tactic grew darker with mass media. Japanese officers blew up their own railway at Mukden in 1931, the SS staged the Gleiwitz radio station raid in 1939 using murdered concentration camp prisoners, and the Soviets shelled Mainila to start the Winter War. Cold War cases include CIA agents posing as Iranian communists in Operation TPAJAX in 1953, Israel's Operation Susannah in Egypt in 1954, and Operation Northwoods in 1962, which President Kennedy rejected. Modern attempts collapse faster: Bellingcat used metadata to expose pre-invasion videos in February 2022.

• The German raider Kormoran posed as a Dutch merchant to ambush HMAS Sydney in 1941.
• Northwoods proposed faked hijackings, a sunken US ship and planes painted as Cuban MiGs.
• The Northwoods memo surfaced through the Assassination Records Review Board in the mid-1990s.
• An April 2022 FSB arrest video showed three copies of The Sims 3, likely a misread order for three SIM cards.
• A planted note in the same case was signed with the Russian for signature unclear, apparently copied from a script.