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/p.../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/micr...es/jasper.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Ar...450121,00.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...
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...49768?v=glance
It systemmatically goes through most of the rumours about Hitler and debunks them. Very good read in my opinion.

Ivan Seeking

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

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: http://www.physicsforums.com/showthr...116#post424116

Ivan Seeking

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/indust...-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

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

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/re...1review372.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.mh...228&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

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 cant put anything past anybody!

Similar Threads for: Best Conspiracies
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9/11 Conspiracies	General Discussion	1
Conspiracies	General Discussion	2

matthyaouw Recognitions: Gold Member	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 Recognitions: Gold Member Science Advisor Staff Emeritus	I would also nominate Watergate as great by reason of consequence. Note that the only conspiracies elegible here are those that we know about.

Alkatran Recognitions: Homework Help Science Advisor	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