Covert operations

“History isn’t like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always – eventually – manages to spring back into its old familar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It’s been around a long time.” ~ Terry Pratchett, Mort

Discoveries and experiences are being shared, conspiracies disclosed, injustices revealed, the dead named, and sometimes governments change as a result of that. Or, when a government changes, more likely it is caused by covert operations.

Strategies

How it works? Around 80% is copycatting strategies Napoleon used . Scenario planning, the supportive application of systems theory, game theory, wargaming theory and many other modes of practical strategic thinking and strategic execution are also used.

Known operations

Operation Himmler

Operation Himmler was a series of unconventional operations undertaken by the SS in order to serve specific propaganda goals of Nazi Germany at the outbreak of the war. It was intended to create the appearance of Polish aggression against Germany in order to justify the subsequent invasion of Poland. Most known is the Gleiwitz incident. And it has been persuasively argued that Nazis set fire to their own parliament, the Reichstag, and blamed that fire on others. The Reichstag fire was the watershed event which justified Hitler’s seizure of power and suspension of liberties.

Shelling of Mainila

The Shelling of Mainila on November 26, 1939 was a military incident where the Soviet Union's Red Army shelled the Russian village of Mainila, declared that the fire originated from Finland across a nearby border and claimed to have had losses in personnel. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev admitted in writing that the Soviet Union’s Red Army shelled the Russian village of Mainila in 1939, and declared that the fire originated from Finland as a basis launching the Winter War four days later.

Stay Behind (Gladio)

Gladio is the infamous NATO “stay behind” operations in Europe during the Cold War that were revealed in the nineties, a tale of secret arms caches and exotic code names, of military stratagems and political intrigues. A chronology of events is described in Secret Warfare: Operation Gladio and NATO's Stay-Behind Armies.

Prime Minister Andreotti acknowledged that Gladio had developed into a branch of an extensive network, operated within NATO and abetted by a 1956 agreement between the United States and Italian secret services. Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece and Luxembourg have all acknowledged that they maintained Gladio-style networks to prepare guerrilla fighters to leap into action in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion. Many worked under the code name Stay Behind. In Greece it was named operation Red Sheepskin. According to news reports at the time, such operations existed also in Britain, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Austria, Turkey and Denmark, and even in neutral countries like Switzerland and Sweden.

Bombings and actions were denied, but note that the aim of the 1956 agreement with US agencies was to make sure that the italian communist party, the largest in the west, never got a foothold in the government. And there were long-reported links between Italian secret services and neo-fascists, and that the major unsolved acts of terrorism that rocked Italy in the 1970's are all presumed to be the work of people on the far right that were never caught while left-wing 'terrorists' somehow were caught and imprisoned.

In some countries, the Stay Behind networks were shut down. Greece's socialists say that they discovered theirs in 1981, subsequently abolished it and rounded up weapons in 1985. In France, Mitterrand said he eliminated the French branch, but he did not say when. Apparently the networks in most other european countries continued.

The Lavon Affair

An Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including U.S. diplomatic facilities, then left behind "evidence" implicating the Arabs as the culprits. One of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to identify the bombers, several of the Israelis later confessed, and three were honored by Israel later.

The CIA in Iran

Documented by the New York Times, Iranians working for the C.I.A. in the 1950’s posed as communists and staged bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected president.

Operation Northwoods

Declassified documents show that in the 1960s, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan code-named Operation Northwoods to blow up American airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. The operation was not carried out because the Kennedy administration refused to implement these Pentagon plans.

Macmillan backed Syria assassination plot

The plans, frighteningly frank in their discussion, were discovered in the private papers of Duncan Sandys, Mr Macmillan's defence secretary, by Matthew Jones, a reader in international history at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Part of the "preferred plan" reads: "In order to facilitate the action of liberative forces, reduce the capabilities of the Syrian regime to organise and direct its military actions, to hold losses and destruction to a minimum, and to bring about desired results in the shortest possible time, a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals. Their removal should be accomplished early in the course of the uprising and intervention and in the light of circumstances existing at the time."

The CIA’s new black bag is digital

Over the past decade specially-trained CIA clandestine operators have mounted over one hundred extremely sensitive black bag jobs designed to penetrate foreign government and military communications and computer systems, as well as the computer systems of some of the world’s largest foreign multinational corporations. Spyware software has been secretly planted in computer servers; secure telephone lines have been bugged; fiber optic cables, data switching centers and telephone exchanges have been tapped; and computer backup tapes and disks have been stolen or surreptitiously copied in these operations. In other words, the CIA has become instrumental in setting up the shadowy surveillance dragnet that has now been thrown into public view. Sources within the U.S. intelligence community confirm that since 9/11, CIA clandestine operations have given the NSA access to a number of new and critically important targets around the world, especially in China and elsewhere in East Asia, as well as the Middle East, the Near East, and South Asia. (I’m not aware of any such operations here on U.S. soil.)

See timeline masters of the internet and surveillance.

Resources

News and watchdogs

• Secret bases: http://www.secret-bases.co.uk/

Books

• @War: The rise of the military-internet-complex http://cryptome.org/2014/11/at-war-mil-net-complex.pdf

Documentaries

• 25 Most Top Secret Military Operations In History https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dWiRtkzaAQ

Counterintelligence

• Counter-Intelligence: I - The Company https://vimeo.com/65148608
• Counter-Intelligence: II - The Deep State https://vimeo.com/65942057
• Counter-Intelligence: III - The Strategy of Tension https://vimeo.com/66019647
• Counter-Intelligence: IV - Necrophilous https://vimeo.com/66019647
• Counter-Intelligence: V - Drone Nation https://vimeo.com/66183267

Related

• Timeline merchants of death
• Propaganda
• Psychological warfare
• Game of Drones