“False Flag” was a phrase that was originally coined to describe the practice of pirate ships that fly the colors of other nations to trick merchant ships into thinking that they were friendly vessels. Once they were close enough, the pirates would raise their real flag, followed by attacking the unsuspecting victims. Sometimes, the false flag would still be flown while the raid was happening, creating the term “attacking under a false flag.”  Believe it or not, in naval warfare, this kind of ruse of war was permissible as long as the ship doing so raised its actual flag before firing its first gun.

Through time, the phrase evolved into any operation with the purpose of one nation blaming another for something that they did themselves to justify a further attack. In the long history of warfare, perhaps starting with the Trojan Horse used to gain entry to Troy by Greek troops, the practice of employing a false flag is rather common.  Recently, there have been accusations leveled against both the Russians and Ukrainians for mounting false flag operations, like the recent attack on an oil storage facility inside Russia by Ukrainian air force helicopters and Russian accusations that Ukraine murdered hundreds its own civilians and blamed the Kremlin for it.

Here are three instances of false flag attacks in history.

German Invasion of Poland

The German-soviet Invasion of Poland, 1939. (Planet News photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

On the night of August 31, 1939, German operatives sneaked in dressed in Polish soldiers’ uniforms and entered the Gleiwitz radio tower on the German side of the border between Germany and Poland. They used the tower to broadcast a quick anti-Nazi message in Polish, declaring that the station was now in Polish hands. The German SS soldiers also left behind the bodies of a pro-Polish German farmer and Dachau concentration camp prisoners that they dressed up in German uniforms to make it look like they were killed by Polish attacks. This was one of the covert actions that the Nazis did on the border to justify Germany’s Poland invasion. Lo and behold, Adolf Hitler made a speech the next day and cited the Gleiwitz “attack” as reasons why they were attacking the Poles.