Uncovering the KGB's Best Conspiracies

[Ivan Seeking]

One of my all time favorites was a gotcha on us by the KGB during the early years of the cold war. I think it was either the head of NATO, or our highest ranking NATO official that was given a large wood carving of an Eagle - really a large wood shield about two to three feet in diameter [IIRC] with the elaborate carving on the face of it. It was presented as a personal "gift" from the Soviets along with a full serving of U.S. patriotic hype...I mean they really suckered us. This "gift" was mounted on the wall directly behind this official's desk in his private office - again, I'm thinking that this was the head of NATO but it may have been some other very high ranking military or intelligence official.

The eye of the eagle was a microphone port. The internal circuitry was obviously well hidden, but the key was that it was only active if a KGB agent was across the street and pointing a microwave transmitter at the office window. The microwave energy would power the audio circuit and transmitter hidden in the shield. Since no local power source was present within the carving, and since the transmissions could be turned off by cutting the microwave source, it went undetected for many years. All bug scans of the time assumed that listening devices were powered with batteries so it never showed up during the regular sweeps. The damage was said to be immeasurable.

 

[matthyaouw]

Microwave transmitter eh? Have many of the people involved sued due to the cancer risk yet?

Is this a confirmed conspiricy, or one of those that floats around a lot but is never confirmed?

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Oh no, this is from a documentary about espionage. Many of the original spies were still around to talk about it - now being a matter of public record. Btw, similar technology is now called RFID.

Believe it or not folks, the world really does run on conspiracies - from young siblings who agree to lie to their parents, to the KGB spies who lived false lives here for decades. I remember that at least several KGB agents lived here for up to decades - with wives and families who knew nothing of this - only to suddenly return to mother Russia and leave their families behind. Can you imagine the shock! In fact, IIRC, even one of the 911 terrorists lived here for ten years or so under similar false pretenses.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

This is an interesting site. Take a look.

CI-TV host David Major introduces an episode on Russian Illegals in front of the Arlington House apartments in Rosslyn, VA where the Peter Herrmann, the son of Russian Illegal Rudi Hermann, lived. Peter was being groomed to continue his father's work lived. Peter grew up, though, thinking his parents were far right-leaning Germans who had immigrated to the US. Before he went to college, his father sat him down and told him that they were in fact Czechs and that Rudi was actually a Soviet intelligence office--a KGB Lt. Colonel--and his mother also worked for the KGB.

The KGB gave Peter his codename, INHERITOR, and provided training for him. He was accepted into Georgetown University and was told to befriend students with fathers in government, those with personal problems who could be approached, "progressives" among students and professors, Chinese students, and look for part-time employment with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The FBI was on to the Soviet Illegal family and turned them in 1977.

http://www.cicentre.com/LINKS_CI-TV.htm

 

[Ivan Seeking]

I would also nominate Watergate as great by reason of consequence.

Note that the only conspiracies elegible here are those that we know about.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

"In war truth is such a precious good that it has to be surrounded by a strong body guard of lies". - Winston Churchill

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Okay I may have a few more...

I think the deception perpetrated on the Germans ala Normandy and Calais is one of the all time greats!
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/battles/dday/ds03.htm

I also remember a great story about a imaginary spy that the Brits created so as to feed the Germans false information. I'm not certain about all of the details, but British intelligence went to great efforts to create an entire life for a non-existent person. This person was allegedly a spy for the British [I think] who then defected and started spying for Hitler. Even though the Germans never sent any agents to meet this imaginary person, they bought the hoax so completely that we used it effectively for I think the last couple of years of the war. Edit: Actually...after thinking about this, I think they may have used someone to assume the role of the pretend spy for meetings with German agents.

There was another gut wrenching story about either Roosevelt or Truman [obviously]. We had decoded the Germans Enigma machine
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/decoding/
but we didn't want the Germans to know that. On one occasion we realized that a troop transport [or some other large ship with many men aboard] was going to intersect the path of a German U-boat, but we only knew this because we had decoded Enigma. The President was left with the following decision: Either warn the ship and chance revealing our knowledge of the German code, or preserve our ace-in-the-hole and sacrifice the ship. In the end there was no choice. Our knowledge of the code was so critical that the ship and all aboard had to be sacrificed. Can you even imagine having to make such a decision?

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Medics reject Ukraine 'poisoning'
...The government in Ukraine has denied trying to kill Mr Yushchenko.

The Austrian hospital would not say what it thought caused Mr Yushchenko's symptoms, but released a statement saying: "False information about Mr Yushchenko having been poisoned has been widely disseminated in Ukraine and taken up by the international press, in which our hospital was directly referred to.

"The information disseminated about an alleged poisoning is absolutely unfounded in medical terms," it said. "In order to silence these rumours ... [the hospital] has decided to abandon its usual attitude of reserve and make a public statement." [continued]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/europe/3699748.stm

 

[Evo]

Nothing tops Jasper Maskelyne. I saw a documentary about him a couple of years ago. He's the guy that made the Suez Canal disappear and relocated Alexandria Harbor during WWII, among other incredible hoaxes that contributed to winning against Rommel forces in N Afirca. Here are a couple of sights that discuss his feats.

http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/R/real_lives/jasper.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4450121,00.html

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

It's not exactly a conspiracy but the whole idea that Hitler was involved in the occult was such a phenomena that it survives as "common knowledge" even today. At that time it made for some interesting events. A supposed astrologer defected to the US during the war and succeeded in getting us to believe that he was one of Hitlers advisors. He claimed that based off of his knowledge of astrology he could give the US information about Hitler's moves in advance by telling the US what Hitler's supposed astrological advisors would tell him based on the stars.
I found a book called Hitler and the Occult...

It systemmatically goes through most of the rumours about Hitler and debunks them. Very good read in my opinion.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Jonestown massacre

Perhaps the word "best" is not the best choice, but this event must qualify as a highly significant conspiracy. I don't mean to imply that additional conspiracies existed, but 913 people died; that is a fact. There was at least one conspiracy at work.

Jonestown massacre + 20: Questions linger
SAN FRANCISCO (CNN) -- Twenty years after the world was shocked by the mass murder-suicide in the supposedly utopian community known as Jonestown, the questions linger: How and why did 913 people die? Some believe answers may lie in more than 5,000 pages of information the U.S. government has kept secret. [continued]

http://www.cnn.com/US/9811/18/jonestown.anniv.01/

 

[Ivan Seeking]

The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for “bad blood,”1 their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all. The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis—which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death. “As I see it,” one of the doctors involved explained, “we have no further interest in these patients until they die.”

PF Thread: https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=424116#post424116

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Tobacco

The nation's biggest tobacco companies worked together for decades to mislead the public about the dangers of smoking, a federal lawyer alleged Tuesday at the start of a civil racketeering trial in which the government seeks a record $280 billion from the industry.

In his opening statement, Justice Department attorney Frank Marine, a tough organized-crime expert, said starting in the 1960s the industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars on organizations set up to counter the growing body of scientific evidence linking smoking to cancer. (Related video: Tobacco suit goes to court) [continued]

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/2004-09-20-tobacco_x.htm

 

[Alkatran]

Haha I guess the tobacco companies at one point, brought a statistician into court to tell them how correleation doesn't imply causality.

IE: Maybe smoking causes cancer, but maybe having cancer causes people to smoke!

LOL

 

[Ivan Seeking]

The Holocaust

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. - George Santayana

The years 1940-45 saw the greatest human-sourced cataclysm in recorded time. In that period forces under the command of Hitler's Nazis engaged in a carefully planned, clinically executed campaign of murder against the Jewish race. A third of the Jewish race was destroyed, the Jews in Europe annihilated in custom designed "death-factories". The processes of this - rounding up, transportation, & execution were each performed in the main by psychologically normal people. In other words, ANY large number of people set in that place & time would almost certainly have acted in the same way, & with the same results. The Holocaust is like a black mirror to human nature & psychology. To understand the motivation of its perpetrators is to know where the human weaknesses are which change normal men (very few women were allowed to participate) into murderers. The vital, crucial question is "how", in the psychological sense, this cataclysm could happen. Uncountable murders inflicted by people who patently were not insane or evil, but fitted into the normal profiles. Desk operators & bureaucrats who coordinated the deaths of millions. At the front, ordinary folks who fired until they were soaked in their victims blood and the human remains piled around them into a wall. How could they do it? [continued]

http://members.tripod.com/~Propagander2/index-13.html

 

[polyb]

‘Plutonium Files’ sheds light on inhuman experiment

For 50 years, the scientists, military men and bureaucrats who ran the U.S. nuclear-weapons program kept their activities secret.

One of the nastiest secrets was an experiment designed to determine how much plutonium a human could safely handle. In that experiment, conducted in the mid-1940s, 18 people -- 17 American adults and one Australian child -- were injected with plutonium without their knowledge or consent.

http://www.post-gazette.com/books/reviews/19991121review372.asp

In a gruesome plot that is impossible to square with our triumphalist ideology, between April 1945 and July 1947 doctors and scientists working for the US atomic weapons program injected plutonium directly into the bloodstreams of eighteen unwitting Americans, thereby committing all but one to slow, painful death. Their urine and stool samples were packed up and sent to Los Alamos for study.

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20000228&s=alterman

This is one for the thread! Apparently there were thousands who unknowingly were exposed to radioactive materials in experiments carried out covertly and kept quiet by the U.S. government. Just when you thought it was safe to pay taxes.

 

[polyb]

U.S. Military Drafted Plans to Terrorize U.S. Cities to Provoke War With Cuba

More conspiracy by the U.S. Government.

In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.

Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.

The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba's then new leader, communist Fidel Castro.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=92662&page=1

Boy, you can't put anything past anybody!

 

[Moonbear]

There was another gut wrenching story about either Roosevelt or Truman [obviously]. We had decoded the Germans Enigma machine
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/decoding/
but we didn't want the Germans to know that. On one occasion we realized that a troop transport [or some other large ship with many men aboard] was going to intersect the path of a German U-boat, but we only knew this because we had decoded Enigma. The President was left with the following decision: Either warn the ship and chance revealing our knowledge of the German code, or preserve our ace-in-the-hole and sacrifice the ship. In the end there was no choice. Our knowledge of the code was so critical that the ship and all aboard had to be sacrificed. Can you even imagine having to make such a decision?

What's interesting to me about this is that looking back on this information, and distanced by several decades, we see it as a tough decision, and a mark of good leadership to have had to make such a decision to keep a secret essential to wartime strategy. However, if we caught wind of a modern-day president or general doing the same thing, we'd be crying for their impeachment or dismissal and wanting to see them hung from the rafters by their toenails...then again, if we were catching wind of it, then the secret isn't much of a secret, is it?

 

[Ivan Seeking]

I doubt that a leak back then would have been taken much better by the public. I am quite sure that this remained classified for many years, or even for decades after the war. The Freedom of Information Act has resulted in a landslide of previously secret information.

Note also that like many presidents, FDR had an affair, which wasn't really a secret but was kept from the public.

 

[polyb]

911

OK, let's face it, there a million conspiracies about 911! Whose conspiracy theory do we believe? Should we believe the 'official' conspiracy theory of 19 Arabic hijackers? Do we believe a conspiracy theory of DC insiders who wanted to instigate more war? How about the conspiracy theory of Israeli intelligence operatives trying to influence Middle Eastern policy and budget allocations to Israel?

I personally just don't really know which conspiracy theory is true. I do know enough to say that whichever conspiracy theory you can propose about 911, you can find inconsistencies and contradictions regardless of the source.

Personally I think 911 will go down as the most unresolvable conspiracy theory of all times and I doubt any of us will ever hear the truth about what really happened. Because of this 911 should be considered the 'best' conspiracy theory ever!

 

[russ_watters]

I personally just don't really know which conspiracy theory is true. I do know enough to say that whichever conspiracy theory you can propose about 911, you can find inconsistencies and contradictions regardless of the source.

Personally I think 911 will go down as the most unresolvable conspiracy theory of all times and I doubt any of us will ever hear the truth about what really happened. Because of this 911 should be considered the 'best' conspiracy theory ever!

Every engineer I've ever heard from thinks its about the most open-and-shut conspiracy case ever. The "alternative" theories are being pushed by people with obvious credibility/expertise issues.

However, for the magnitude of the accomplishment, this would rank as one of the "best" real conspiracies ever.

 

[RonRyan85]

What about the "Spear of Destiny"

It's not exactly a conspiracy but the whole idea that Hitler was involved in the occult was such a phenomena that it survives as "common knowledge" even today. At that time it made for some interesting events. A supposed astrologer defected to the US during the war and succeeded in getting us to believe that he was one of Hitlers advisors. He claimed that based off of his knowledge of astrology he could give the US information about Hitler's moves in advance by telling the US what Hitler's supposed astrological advisors would tell him based on the stars.
I found a book called Hitler and the Occult...

It systemmatically goes through most of the rumours about Hitler and debunks them. Very good read in my opinion.

----------------------------------------------------------------
Sounds like a good book I should have.
Have you ever heard of the story that Hitler's people sought out a
museum relic that was said to be the spear tip that was used to
pierce CHRIST's side while he was on the Cross? The legend said that
any country that possesed the spear would be victorious in war so
the spear blade (Tip) was found in a museum somewhere in Europe
and Hitler had it buried under his bunker? Maybe the Nazi SS head-
quarters building in Berlin? Anyway it was just a story? or maybe
not but in any case...the power was NOT with NAZI Germany as
we all know now.

 

[RonRyan85]

Best Conspiracies: Murder of Microbiologists?

I know I need to search out the truth for myself but I have
been hearing of the deaths (Murders?) of several fairly famous
Microbiologists in the past 2 or 3 years. Some say this might
be the work of terrorists who want to limit the work of these
microbiologists so when a plague/and or germ warfare is put
upon US in the future ,we will all have a better chance of
being wiped out. Sounds like the start of a Michel Critchton
novel does it not? But could it be for real? Anything is
possible but if a real bad germ thingy was released into the
air or water supply...perhaps it would not matter much if
we had one or 100 microbio guys working 24/7 on a cure.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Please keep this on topic: proven conspiracies. The danger of this thread spiraling out of control is too great to allow any slack here.

 

[polyb]

The Invasion of Iraq?

Considering the news lately about the how the rationale for the invasion has proven to be bogus and how the 'coalition' has officially been scrapped, can "The Invasion of Iraq" be deemed a 'conspiracy'? Or was the whole thing just too obvious to be given such a status?

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Although many people believe this to be true, it is not proven to be a conspiracy.

 

[polyb]

Although many people believe this to be true, it is not proven to be a conspiracy.

Well I guess it is a bit difficult to call it a conspiracy considering that it has been openly debated and talked about since Gulf War I. Plus the fact that PNAC and AIPAC and a few other alphabet lobbyists have been talking about it for a while. I guess a more covert and/or clandenstine circumstance would be necessary in order to fit the current connotation of the word 'conspiracy'.

Perhaps a better fit would be: "A conspiracy to decieve everyone in order to justify invading Iraq"! My only problem with that is they were so obviously lying that you had to be a fool to buy the BS they were pushing! So once again it really does not fit the present connotation of the word. Oh well!

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Dazzle me with patriotism

Here is a little discovery that I made some years ago. While researching dazzle - the temporary blindness associated with a bright flash - for a special project, I found a report in the archives at OSU about testing done by the military, which was about the only information available at the time [pre-internet days]. The USAF was studying the effects of the bright flash from a nearby nuclear detonation, and how this might affect pilots and their ability to complete a mission. After reading through pages and pages of how the experiments were done, I finally came to the data plots.

Young men are seated, one eyed blindfolded, and with the other eye an actual above ground nuclear detonation is seen through through a periscope. Inside of the scope is a shutter that limits the time of exposure. From there a little red dot is projected onto the closed shutter, and the time until vision returns sufficiently to see the red dot is plotted as a function of the length of exposure. Real data is plotted as a solid line, and extrapolated data is plotted as a dotted line.

As I read through the material, it finally hit me that we had plenty of real data in which the period of dazzle was infinite. In other words, they sat these guys down and said, "hey soldier, look here", and blinded them. I have thought about digging those up and sending copies to some news agency.

 

[Moonbear]

As I read through the material, it finally hit me that we had plenty of real data in which the period of dazzle was infinite. In other words, they sat these guys down and said, "hey soldier, look here", and blinded them. I have thought about digging those up and sending copies to some news agency.

Infinite, or just longer than the test duration? Not that I would put it past the military to have truly blinded people in a study in that era of history, but it's also a common practice to assign a value to data when the latency for an event to occur is longer than the sampling period. Noting it as infinity would be an easy way to identify that these were not actual data, but assigned values. For example, you might not sit around having the guy staring into a periscope looking for a dot for more than an hour before someone needs to move or he starts panicking that you really have blinded him, but his sight may return by two hours or two days later, long beyond the termination of the experiment. In that case, you need to represent that data in some way. Either you can assign it a value equal to the maximum observation period, which makes people uneasy because it's confusing to distinguish the real from the undetermined data, or you give it a value clearly larger than that of the test period and tell your statistician to censor those values, which somehow accounts for them not being exact values but something that is real data in that there was a long latency to response, so you can't just drop those subjects and not include them at all.

Anyway, I'd look into that before you decide to send it off to a reporter who really won't understand statistics.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

That may be a valid point but I don't think so. Long term dazzle in the order of hours was addressed.

 

[mouseonmoon]

"I personally just don't really know which conspiracy theory is true."
polyb re 911

"In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war..."

OK,some 'nut cases' "drafted plans"-but obviously not carried out (and hopefully not seriously considered)- BUT, you got to wonder-this time the 'nut cases' are in control?

however, looks like a similar choice as Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor(did he know it was coming?)-to clarify,did Bush 'let it happen'...did FDR 'allow' the attack on Pearl Harbor?
<<it's really a 'damned if you do,damned if you don't' predicament.>>

-----
and contact with ET-honestly, this is bigger than 'anything'!--i can handle it, but I'm sure this World wouldn't be able to ... microbes on Mars-no problem.

Flying Saucer on the White House lawn-BIG problem!

the Debunkers seem to believe ET would want to make themselves known-this is ridiculous...

(don't get me started!)

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Deep Throat

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=77530

 

[zoobyshoe]

As I read through the material, it finally hit me that we had plenty of real data in which the period of dazzle was infinite. In other words, they sat these guys down and said, "hey soldier, look here", and blinded them.

This can't be as cut and dried as you think. What blinds people is UV, and UV doesn't pass through ordinary glass. Feynman, if you recall, sat in the cab of a pickup and watched the first bomb go off with no protection except the truck's windshield. I think the people who've been blinded by nuclear blasts saw the flash with no protection whatever.

 

[zoobyshoe]

One of my all time favorites was a gotcha on us by the KGB during the early years of the cold war.

This dosn't fall squarely into the definition of a conspiracy. I would call this an "act of espionage." I think this whole thread is running a bit eccentric, stemming from the lack of a good working definition of "conspiracy". Espionage, conspiracy, deception, fraud etc. are often related, but aren't interchangable terms.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

This can't be as cut and dried as you think. What blinds people is UV, and UV doesn't pass through ordinary glass. Feynman, if you recall, sat in the cab of a pickup and watched the first bomb go off with no protection except the truck's windshield. I think the people who've been blinded by nuclear blasts saw the flash with no protection whatever.

That's not true. Even a fairly low intensity red LASER can do damage.