Kremlin drone 'attack': False flags, international lies, disinformation and other misapprehensions

8 May 2023

The drone 'attack' on the Kremlin and Moscow’s response to it fit into a larger tapestry of false flags, disinformation, other misrepresentations or even outright lies as justifications to commence or escalate hostilities against another nation.

Just the other day, the world was treated – perhaps “entertained” is a more suitable word – to some dramatic video imagery said to be depicting two drone craft in the act of attacking a flagpole atop a dome inside the Kremlin’s walls in Moscow.

The video images, amazingly, just happened to have been captured at about 2.30 in the morning. Whoever recorded it just happened to be facing that very flagpole at precisely the right moment, and providentially, was equipped with sensitive night-vision optics for their video camera. What kind of planning ahead is that, hey!

Fortunately, the flag and flagpole seem not to have been seriously wounded (although Russian pride took a hit). Notwithstanding Russian embarrassment over the attack and the inability of their supposedly overwhelming air defences to prevent such an attack on the Kremlin, almost immediately the Kremlin spokesperson blamed the Ukrainians for this dangerous affront to national pride, and then warned of appropriate retaliation, swift and sure, against those who committed this deed.

The specific charge was that the launchers of those drones had been engaged in a plot to kill Russian President Vladimir Putin – a rather serious breach of international protocol despite the state of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine. This charge was made despite a well-known understanding that Putin generally does not stay in a Kremlin apartment but instead in secluded locations around the city.

The accusation was made despite the lack of any evidence (not even a telling photograph of a tail fin with Ukrainian nomenclature written on it) of the drones’ original ownership or their operators. Not even redacted radar tracking data have been released to bolster this claim.

Similarly, the Russians did not release any information pointing to a Ukrainian capability to launch something that far from the Ukrainian border. Alternatively, it could have been even worse for Russian pride if they could prove the Ukrainians had been able to operate in and around Moscow equipped with military hardware to send a drone, or two, directly to the Kremlin.

Clearly less than satisfied by the lack of any international opprobrium about that presumed Ukrainian attack on a core symbol of Russian authority, the Kremlin ratcheted up charges, next accusing the US of carrying out the attack, or, alternatively, guiding (or directing or ordering) the Ukrainians somehow to do it. For their part, both the Ukrainian president and the US defence department spokesperson both denied it – with the latter, John Kirby, saying point blank that the Kremlin spokesperson had lied about it.

There are, of course, other theories floating around over this assault on Russian pride, but not causing substantial damage. First, there is the possibility it was done by partisan groups operating in the Moscow area, including those who might be trying to highlight the danger to the state from their nation’s Ukrainian invasion – or, alternatively, those hoping to make it clear that Vladimir Putin’s Russian government cannot fully protect itself.

There is also the possibility the attack was a deliberate governmentally planned false-flag operation, carried out by sub rosa Russian operatives. That would have meant it was an attack to gin up some patriotic fervour just before and in tandem with one of the country’s most symbolic national celebrations – 9 May, commemorating the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. (Keep in mind that no one was injured in this attack.)

A false-flag operation is an attack on an opponent – or even on oneself – crafted to make it seem like it was the opponent’s doing or that it was carried out by an unwitting tool of one’s opponent who is really responsible for the attack.

Or, could it even be possible the attack was carried out at the behest of someone like Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the private militia organisation, the Wagner Group, beyond several layers of efforts to obscure his role. Could this possibly have come as an outgrowth of Prigozhin’s increasingly bitter squabble with Russia’s military establishment? Very murky, this whole thing, but a false-flag op is designed to sow doubt.

Any of these alternatives may have been at work in this symbolic attack. Absent a highly public show trial or two, it is unlikely any culprits will ever end up being confronted by their accusers.

Lessons from history

We should be especially reluctant to take these most recent charges at face value, especially given some history. For example, in 1983, the Soviet Union shot down a fully occupied Korean Air passenger jet that had veered off course and entered Soviet airspace over Sakhalin Island, near the Soviet Far Eastern mainland. The response to the mid-air destruction of the craft became another version of the false-flag approach.

In justifying their fatal shooting down of the plane, the Soviet response was to accuse the Koreans of operating a secret reconnaissance operation behind the guise of a civilian flight and thus that, while the loss of life was regrettable, they were justified in protecting their nation. There was lots of breathless speechmaking and writing (including articles and even a few books by rather gullible American authors), all aimed at proving the plane had been on a super-secret mission on its own or that it had been used to obscure the radar signature of a real reconnaissance jet operating in the same general area – well, okay, it was flying hundreds of kilometres away, but no matter.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Wanted: A rallying cry to hold back the coming ‘Dark Time’ — and someone to write it

While the final reason for the plane’s mistaken course has never been precisely pinned to a 100% certainty, the most likely culprit seems to have been the pilots mistakenly entering some of the coordinates for their intended flight path and thus the electronic check-in points along the way such that the course took them over Sakhalin before their approach to Korea. That the Soviet jet fighter pilots had easily made visual contact with the passenger jet precluded the likelihood it was on a super-secret spy mission. (The civilian pilots and the Soviet pilots did not, however, make radio contact to forestall the catastrophe because they were tuned to different radio frequencies – civilian versus military.)

Most recently there is the break in the Nord Stream II gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea, a pipeline built (and paid for by Germany) to bring Russian natural gas to Germany. The incident occurred just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine was beginning. There has been much speculation as to who carried off the attack, most notably by American journalist Seymour Hersh who finger-pointed American forces. Hersh has had some very notable hits (and some misses) in investigative journalism, but this claim seems to have hung on the words of one anonymous source. Was this particular effort one of deliberate disinformation or false flagging? Why, precisely, the US would want to damage Germany’s economy to make a point about the need for Germany to stand with Ukraine has never been explained effectively.

However, in recent days, there have now been reports that shortly before the gas line was ruptured, Russian ships were suspiciously close to the very spot where the break occurred. Why the Russians would sabotage the feed of gas to Germany just as the war was going forward could be explained by understanding the rupture as a heads-up to Germany, making the case that supporting Ukraine has major costs to Germany’s citizens who were dependent upon Russian gas to cook, keep warm and fuel industry. The cause of the line break remains, so far, unsolved conclusively.

Go back further in history and it is easy enough to point to other false flags. Perhaps most famous was the Reichstag (parliament building) fire in Berlin on 27 February 1933. The fire broke out just four weeks after Nazi leader Adolf Hitler had been sworn in as chancellor of Germany. In the ensuing rhetorical fire, and with the ostensible culprit an itinerant Dutch house painter and Communist Party supporter, Marinus van der Lubbe, who was captured and accused of being the arsonist, the fire became the excuse for onerous political repression decrees, advancing official anti-Semitism by the Third Reich, and ultimately the catastrophe of World War 2 once Germany invaded Poland. There remains debate and much speculation about whether the fire had been planned by the Nazis to serve as pretext for the incoming repressions – and thus a domestic false-flag event.

The run-up to World War 2 also provided other false-flag ops that helped trigger the actual conflicts. One of these was an abortive, and very low-scale attack on the railroad in southern Manchuria controlled by the Japanese that provided a pretext for Japanese forces to carry out new attacks on China proper that led to the much larger invasion of China by Japan thereafter – another false flag that ultimately had dramatic and appalling consequences.

During World War 2, the Russians attempted to make the case that the deaths in the Katyn Forest of thousands of Polish army officers and other leaders had been the work of Nazi killing squads. By contrast, the Germans tried to make the case that the victims had been killed by the Soviet Union just after they had been rounded up when the Soviet Union invaded their half of Poland in 1939. Post-Cold War research in archives has shown it was Soviet forces who did the killings, but, as the old adage goes, in war, truth is the first casualty. Duelling disinformation efforts perhaps.

These versions of false-flag and disinformation operations are different from deceptions for both strategic and tactical purposes in war time. Typical of these has been the construction of tanks and other military vehicles that are actually inflatable balloon-like objects that could be observed by the other side to lead them to draw false conclusions about troop deployments.

During World War 2 there was even an entire chain of faux communications for an army led by General George Patton that was being prepped to land elsewhere than Normandy to confuse the Germans, reportedly because they feared a Patton-led invasion more than one led by any other Allied general.

But lest readers wonder if such variations on the theme of the false flag or dangerous and fatal confusion are solely the province of American enemies, we can consider three other examples: the 1898 Spanish-American War, the Gulf of Tonkin attack of 1965, and those weapons of mass delusion provoking the Iraq invasion of 2003.

For the first, with an America eager to carve out an overseas empire emulating the major European powers, in 1898 a US naval vessel, the Maine, was on a port call in Havana harbour. Cuba is just 145km from the American coast and it had been a Spanish colony since the beginning of the 16th century, although there was by then a guerrilla war there that the Spanish had been only partially successful in quashing.

The fog of battle can lead to serious misapprehensions – with devastating consequences.

When the Maine exploded in the harbour, the reckless charge in the American popular press was that it had been a Spanish mine or torpedo designed to teach Americans a lesson about messing with the Spanish empire. (Ultimately the most likely culprit was an internal explosion from a build-up of coal gas in the ship’s hold in poorly designed and ventilated coal bays.) Regardless, this was quickly seen as a casus belli and the US opened hostilities in Cuba and the Philippines.

The Spanish empire collapsed, Cuba was granted full independence in 1903, and the Philippines theirs after World War 2. As a result of his action leading a unit of volunteers he had recruited, Theodore Roosevelt became a national hero, was nominated and won the vice-presidency in 1900, and then became president when William McKinley was assassinated.

Read more in Daily Maverick: WWII and Vietnam War, the conflicts that defined the modern world

Then there was the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1965. The US government was slowly ramping up its engagement in South Vietnam in response to a belief in the domino theory of communist advances in Asia and officials were keeping an eye out for a justification to extend limited military actions against North Vietnam. Reports of an apparent attack on a US naval craft in the Gulf of Tonkin (but, crucially, sailing in international waters) ultimately derived from radar readings that, in retrospect, are now understood to have been false, very suspect or, at the very best, inconclusive. The fog of battle can lead to serious misapprehensions – with devastating consequences.

Regardless, the reports of the attack provided the Johnson administration with enough justification to demand congressional support for much further participation in the ground war, as well as an air action over North Vietnam. The resulting tragedy – and the vast roster of death with it – was rooted in anomalous information that actually meant very little, but which was used to back further hostilities, regardless. Beyond all the death and destruction, as collateral damage, the war tore apart American society and instilled a mistrust of government that lingers in the country’s political discourse until now.

And then, still closer to our own time, there is the example of Iraq. Twenty years ago, on the basis of data that was misleading or worse, that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein’s government was pursuing a vigorous programme of building nuclear devices and weapons, the US government determined a full-scale attack was the appropriate course of action.

In each of these three cases, the result of misunderstood information or because of a deliberate willingness to use information that was flawed or non-existent that put the blame for a crisis on another nation meant major military action was initiated. Not entirely false flags, but certainly the use of misleading or incorrect information to spur on government actions.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Under pressure: And so, Mr Putin, how has your war been going these days?

No one now seriously expects the Russians to attack the White House in retribution for those two drones hitting the Kremlin. But it is not beyond the realm of possibility that they might undertake new efforts to decapitate Ukrainian President Zelensky’s government in response to those drone attacks.

The week of the Russian commemoration of the 9 May victory over Nazi Germany is upon us, as is the reported advance planning for a major Ukrainian spring counteroffensive. It may be a difficult week ahead, like so many others. DM

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Lessons from history