Shortly after ten p.m. on October 1, 2017, sixty-four-year-old Stephen Paddock smashed two windows of his hotel suite on the thirty-second floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel and opened fire on the country music festival crowd on the other side of the Las Vegas strip. Alternating between the two windows, he shot for several minutes using different weapons from the twenty-three he’d brought into the suite over the preceding three days. Fifty-eight people were killed and nearly 500 injured. It was the worst mass shooting by a single individual in the history of the US.
The massacre unleashed a nearly unprecedented wave of conspiracy speculation. People seemed unwilling to accept that Paddock had acted alone. Raising echoes of the infamous grassy knoll claims surrounding JFK’s assassination, there were accounts of a “fourth floor shooter.” Just like with the police audiotapes from the JFK assassination, people began to analyze the audio of the event to try to prove there were multiple gunmen. People who had never been to Vegas asked how Paddock could have smuggled the guns into his room past security (in suitcases, they don’t have metal detectors in hotels). They asked how he could possibly have got so many guns (legally, purchased from gun shops in Nevada). They asked why someone would do such a thing (we may never know, but we know that some people are insane and/or evil).
Beyond these more-or-less reasonable questions, some people even asked if the event had really happened at all. Were people just pretending to be shot? Why were there so few photos of dead bodies? Why were some people laughing after the event? Why did some people run, but others just stood there? The questions were ridiculous, specious, and endless, but they all were based on a specific suspicion (or sometimes belief): that the Las Vegas shooting was a “false flag.”
A false flag is an event that is intended to draw blame to a third party for an ulterior motive, often as a way of indirectly attacking that third party. One might use a false flag as a pretext for invading a country by first staging an attack using your own resources, but outfitted to look like your enemies’ forces. For example, in 1953, under “Operation Ajax” the CIA helped arrange a series of attacks in Iran by hiring infiltrators to pose as members of the communist Tudeh Party. The goal was to promote fears of a communist revolution to create conditions for the removal of the democratically elected government.
The idea of a false flag has a long history in conspiracy culture. The attack on Pearl Harbor that precipitated America’s entry into the Second World War, while a genuine attack, has long been something that people suspected that the US government had some foreknowledge of. The “false flag” aspect was the supposedly manufactured perception that it was a “sneak attack,” which created a higher level of outrage in the American public, leading to stronger support for the war and greater compliance with conscription.
Similarly, there are low-level conspiracy theories around 9/11, the “LIHOP” (Let It Happen On Purpose) scenarios where people anxious for “a new Pearl Harbor” have, by inaction, allowed the attacks upon the US. The 9/11 conspiracy theories further along the spectrum (the MIHOP theories) are also largely “false flag” theories. In both cases the supposed intent being to give the US a pretext for the “War on Terror,” restricting civil liberties, and allowing for more action in the Gulf region to further the goal of Big Oil and the Military–Industrial Complex.
The phrase itself was not particularly common in conspiracy culture in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
“False Flag” only started to be used reflexively by theorists after a sequence of three events: The Aurora theater shooting in July 2012, the Sandy Hook school shooting in December 2012, and then the largest spike after Boston Marathon Bombing of April 2013. Then there were minor spikes (in Google search traffic) for a chemical weapons attack in Syria and then the shooting down of flight MH17 over the Ukraine. Two attacks in 2015 in France (Charlie Hebdo and the Paris attacks) got the Alex Jones treatment, followed by the San Bernardino shooting and the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Florida.
Other than the Boston Marathon Bombing, these spikes were all eclipsed by the conspiracist frenzy following the Las Vegas shooting, where it quickly became apparent it was going to be in a class of its own as a target for conspiracy theory false flag speculation. Even though a similar number of people died in the Pulse nightclub shooting, the reaction seemed very different.
This is possibly due to the unfamiliarity of the perpetrator. The public had become used to mass killers being psychopathic young men or, more recently, Jihadist terrorists. A young Muslim extremist killing forty-nine in a gay nightclub might possibly be a false flag, but it’s also not without a context that explains it. An old white man acting alone with no discernible motive just seems inexplicable, and the conspiracy mind, abhorring the inexplicable, rushes to fill the void with an explanation: a false flag, designed to take away our guns.
_______
When you discuss with your friend why they believe in the false flag theories—regardless of if they are 9/11 related, LIHOP or MIHOP, or even fake mass shooting “take away our guns” scenarios—one question that should be given serious consideration is, “Is a false flag operation on US soil something that the government would even do?”
At a very simple level, the answer seems to be yes—in the mind of the conspiracist the government is a corrupt, evil entity who would stop at nothing to reach their goals of world domination. Suggestions otherwise will evoke responses like “don’t tell me you trust the government” and “they have done it before.”
The former can be partly addressed by explaining exactly how much you trust the government (probably, like me, not a great deal). The “they have done it before” claim deserves looking into. When exactly have “they” done this before? What exactly did they do? How did it work that time? What considerations went into the decision to perform a false flag in the US? What are the risks? What are the rewards? Was it worth it?
By the far the most common example that comes up when you ask your friend for evidence that the government does this type of thing is Operation Northwoods.
Operation Northwoods
Operation Northwoods wasn’t really an operation, it was a document. A 1962 report, a few pages long, suggesting a number of possible “false flag” operations that might be carried out in order to justify a US invasion of Cuba. It stated:
The desired resultant from the execution of this plan would be to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba and to develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere.1
The report is often presented as evidence that the US government plans false flag operations, and hence is used as supporting evidence that the 9/11 attacks were “an inside job.” In more extreme interpretations, it’s used as evidence that the 9/11 attacks were actually fake. Operation Northwoods exists at the messy intersection between truth and fantasy.
We don’t have much to go on at all—there’s the fifteen-page Operation Northwood’s document titled “Justification for Military Intervention in Cuba,” which consists of a few memos, and a list of nine ideas.
1. Harassing the Cubans in Cuba until they pushed back, giving a “legitimate provocation as the basis of military intervention.”
2. Stage fake attacks in or near the Guantanamo Bay US base.
3. Fake a ship being blown up by the Cubans, followed by a fake rescue operation, and fake casualties.
4. “Develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in Miami” and other US cities.
5. Stage intrusions into the airspace of the Dominican Republic, burn some Dominican sugar cane fields with Russian-made incendiary devices.
6. Use a fake MIG aircraft to buzz a real US civilian airline flight, creating eyewitness accounts.
7. “Hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft should appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the government of Cuba.”
8. Fake the appearance of Cuba shooting down a civilian aircraft, with fake casualties.
9. Fake the appearance of Cuba shooting down a military aircraft, with fake casualties.
But there’s very little recorded about the proposal beyond this memo. That does not stop people writing about it as if it’s some kind of well documented event in our history. Nobody has ever given interviews about their involvement, most of the high-ranking people listed in the document are now dead. The documents came to light in May 2001 in the book Body of Secrets by James Bamford.2 Note this is just before the 9/11 attacks of 2001, which might explain why some quickly made the connection.
The conspiracy community had a variety of interpretations of the documents.
JESSE VENTURA: The military and the Joint Chiefs wanted to use our CIA and military to attack certain parts of the United States and make it look like Castro did it, so that the country would get up in arms and support an invasion of Cuba.3
JAMES BAMSFORD: Have the CIA secretly create terrorism in the United States. People would be shot on American streets, bombs would be blown up.
These are referring to idea number 4, which says in full:
We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.
This is by far the most serious of the nine suggestions in that it actually goes as far as “wounding” Cuban refugees. More ominously, though with no real detail, they suggest a “real” sinking of “a boatload of Cubans”—although they don’t say if they would rescue them or not.
Is Ventura’s description accurate? At face value it initially seems so. However, the plan is not to “attack certain cities,” it’s a plan to appear to target Cuban refugees. Ventura is trying to link Northwoods to 9/11, and yet the plan is a far cry from murdering thousands of people and destroying billions of dollars’ worth of buildings. The possible wounding of a few Cuban refugees is very different to the carnage of 9/11.