Browse Conspiracy Theories

The CIA's covert programme to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro — encompassing Operation Mongoose and related activities — is among the best-documented cases of state-sponsored political assassination planning in Cold War history. The Church Committee (1975) documented at least eight distinct plots between 1960 and 1965. Methods proposed or attempted included poisoned cigars, an exploding seashell, a contaminated diving suit, and a poison-pen device. The CIA partnered with Mafia figures including Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana through intermediary Robert Maheu. Marita Lorenz attempted a botched poisoned-pill attack. Castro survived all attempts and died of natural causes in 2016.

Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was kidnapped, beaten, and executed near Élisabethville on 17 January 1961. His body was dissolved in acid to prevent a grave becoming a shrine. A Belgian parliamentary commission in 2001 admitted moral responsibility; Foreign Minister Reynders apologised in 2018 and a tooth relic was returned to the family in 2022. The US Church Committee documented a CIA assassination plot codenamed Project Wizard, though the CIA plot was not executed — Belgian and Katangan forces carried out the killing. Western complicity at political and intelligence levels is a matter of historical record, not conspiracy.

Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary President of Burkina Faso, was killed on 15 October 1987 along with twelve bodyguards by a commando unit in Ouagadougou. His close associate Blaise Compaoré took power the same day. In April 2022 a Burkinabé military tribunal convicted Compaoré and security chief Hyacinthe Kafando in absentia, sentencing both to life imprisonment. A 2015 forensic exhumation confirmed multiple gunshot wounds consistent with execution. The assassination and Compaoré's role are confirmed by court verdict.

Former GRU officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with novichok nerve agent in Salisbury, England on 4 March 2018. Both survived. Dawn Sturgess died on 8 July 2018 after her partner found a discarded perfume bottle containing the novichok and she applied it to her wrist. UK investigators identified the perpetrators as GRU Unit 29155 officers Anatoliy Chepiga (travelling as 'Boshirov') and Alexander Mishkin (travelling as 'Petrov'), with a third, Denis Sergeev ('Sergey Fedotov'), acting as handler. OPCW confirmed novichok A-234. The two suspects gave an implausible TV interview claiming they had visited Salisbury to see its cathedral.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny collapsed on a Tomsk-to-Moscow flight on 20 August 2020 and was evacuated to the Charité hospital in Berlin, where doctors confirmed poisoning by a novichok-class cholinesterase inhibitor. OPCW laboratories and independent German, French, and Swedish labs confirmed the finding. Bellingcat and the Insider published an investigation identifying an FSB team that had surveilled Navalny for years; a phone-call recording in which FSB officer Konstantin Kudryavtsev described the underwear contamination route went viral. Russia denied all involvement and refused to open a criminal investigation.

Former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned with polonium-210 in London in November 2006 and died on 23 November 2006. The UK Owen Inquiry (2016) found that FSB operatives Andrey Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun carried out the assassination and that Vladimir Putin "probably" personally approved the operation. Po-210 traces were identified at the Millennium Hotel, Itsu sushi bar, and the Pine Bar of the Millennium. Russia denied involvement and refused to extradite Lugovoy, who subsequently became a Russian MP.

Forged documents purporting to show Iraq had sought uranium yellowcake from Niger were used to support the case for Iraqi WMD acquisition. Ambassador Joseph Wilson publicly rebutted the claim in the New York Times on 6 July 2003. Days later, columnist Robert Novak revealed that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a covert CIA officer. The subsequent leak investigation resulted in the 2007 conviction of Vice Presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice. President Bush commuted Libby's sentence; President Trump issued a full pardon in 2018.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed "Curveball" by the German BND intelligence service, was an Iraqi defector whose fabricated claims of mobile biological-weapons laboratories formed a central pillar of the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. His allegations were featured prominently in Colin Powell's 5 February 2003 presentation to the UN Security Council. The Senate Intelligence Committee (2004) and the Iraq Survey Group Duelfer Report (2005) found the claims without factual basis. Alwan admitted fabrication to The Guardian in 2011.

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine on 17 July 2014, killing all 298 people on board. The Dutch Safety Board (October 2015) determined the aircraft was destroyed by detonation of a 9N314M warhead carried by a 9M38 Buk surface-to-air missile. The Joint Investigation Team (JIT) concluded in 2016 and 2019 that the Buk launcher belonged to the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade of the Russian Armed Forces based in Kursk. Russia has consistently denied involvement. In November 2022, a Dutch court convicted three individuals — two Russians and one Ukrainian — in absentia of murder. The verdict is confirmed by multiple independent investigations.

In 1983 the FBI planted a listening device in the White House mansion of Gambino family boss Paul Castellano on Staten Island, producing extensive recordings used in the 1985-87 Mafia Commission Trial. The operation was preceded by the 1957 Apalachin meeting — a multi-state Mob summit in upstate New York that, when discovered by New York State Police, first established the existence of a national criminal organisation to public and law-enforcement consciousness. Both events are documented in court records and FBI files and are confirmed historical facts.

From the late 1960s through the early 1980s, the Chicago Outfit and allied Mob families skimmed unreported cash from Las Vegas casinos operated through the Argent Corporation — fronting the Stardust, Fremont, Hacienda, and Marina properties. FBI operations Strawman and Strawman II produced wire recordings and informant testimony that led to the convictions of Chicago bosses Joseph Aiuppa and Jackie Cerone and associates in 1986. The scheme is documented in FBI files, court records, and testimony. It formed the basis for Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese's Casino (1995).

On 9–10 August 1969, Manson Family members murdered seven people including actress Sharon Tate in the Tate/LaBianca killings in Los Angeles. Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's "Helter Skelter" theory — that Manson directed the murders to trigger a race war he believed the Beatles' White Album prophesied — was established at trial, resulted in convictions, and is well-evidenced by testimony and Manson's own statements. The "Helter Skelter" doctrine was itself the conspiracy: a plan Manson designed and directed.

David Berg founded the Children of God (later The Family International) in 1968. Berg's "Mo Letters" institutionalised sexual contact between adults and children and introduced "Flirty Fishing" — recruiting new members through sexual contact by female members. Abuse testimonies from former members include accounts from relatives of celebrities including Rose McGowan and Joaquin Phoenix. Ricky Rodriguez, Berg's adopted son, documented abuse before killing his former nanny and himself in 2005. The abuse and its institutional cover-up are confirmed by survivor testimony, court proceedings, and organisational documents.

President Bush secretly authorised the NSA to conduct warrantless surveillance of Americans' international communications beginning in October 2001, in a programme codenamed Stellar Wind. The programme bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. A 2004 Department of Justice revolt — dramatised by the Comey/Ashcroft hospital confrontation — nearly ended it. The New York Times revealed the programme in December 2005 after sitting on the story for a year. Stellar Wind is confirmed by declassified NSA documents, congressional testimony, and multiple Inspector General reports.

Revealed in September 2013 by a joint ProPublica, New York Times, and Guardian investigation using Snowden documents, Bullrun was a classified NSA programme to covertly undermine encryption standards, introduce backdoors into commercial products, and work with or coerce technology companies to weaken their cryptographic implementations. The most specific confirmed element was the NSA's role in promoting Dual_EC_DRBG as an NIST standard with a likely built-in backdoor. A December 2013 Reuters report revealed that RSA Security had received $10 million from the NSA to make Dual_EC the default random number generator in its BSAFE toolkit.

XKeyscore is a global NSA analytic system that allows analysts to search across vast repositories of intercepted internet content and metadata by selector — email address, phone number, IP address, or keyword. Revealed by the Guardian in July 2013 using Snowden training documents, XKeyscore was described in NSA materials as the agency's 'widest-reaching' signals intelligence analytic tool. Analysts could query billions of records covering email, chat, browsing history, and search queries without prior court approval for individual searches.

The MUSCULAR programme, revealed by the Washington Post in October 2013 based on Snowden documents, showed that the NSA and GCHQ had secretly tapped the unencrypted fibre-optic links connecting Google's and Yahoo's data centres to one another. Unlike PRISM, which used legal orders to compel disclosure, MUSCULAR accessed data in transit on private backbone infrastructure without the companies' knowledge. The disclosure prompted both companies to encrypt their internal links. MUSCULAR is confirmed by NSA slides published by the Washington Post.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident comprises two alleged North Vietnamese torpedo attacks on US destroyers USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964. The first attack, on 2 August 1964, occurred and is documented. The second alleged attack, on 4 August 1964, did not occur. A 2005 NSA declassified historical study by analyst Robert Hanyok concluded that signals intelligence had been selectively reported to produce a false picture of a second attack that never happened. The Johnson administration used both incidents to secure the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, providing the legal basis for the Vietnam War. The fabrication of the second attack is confirmed by declassified intelligence records.

The Phoenix Program (Phung Hoang) was a joint CIA-South Vietnamese intelligence operation running from roughly 1965 to 1972, targeting the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI) through capture, interrogation, defection, and killing. CIA Director William Colby testified before Congress in 1971, confirming approximately 20,587 VCI kills through July 1971; South Vietnamese figures put the overall total at 40,994 by the programme's end. Declassified records confirm systematic extrajudicial killing and torture. The programme is a confirmed historical operation, not a conspiracy theory — its scale and methods were obscured from the public during the war, fitting the definition of a concealed government operation.

Operation Ranch Hand was the US Air Force aerial herbicide spraying programme in South Vietnam from 1962 to 1971. Approximately 19 million gallons of herbicides — including Agent Orange, which contained dioxin (TCDD) as a manufacturing byproduct — were sprayed over approximately 4.5 million acres. Internal documents from Dow Chemical and Monsanto, the primary suppliers, show that both companies were aware of the toxicity of dioxin contamination in their products before and during production. The US government did not publicly acknowledge health risks to veterans until the late 1970s and did not establish presumptive service connection for Agent Orange-related diseases until 1991. The concealment of known dioxin risks is confirmed by the documentary record.

The Lavon Affair (also called Operation Susannah) was a failed Israeli covert operation in 1954 in which Egyptian-Jewish agents recruited by Israeli military intelligence carried out a series of bombings against British and American targets in Cairo and Alexandria. The operation was designed to be attributed to the Muslim Brotherhood or Egyptian communists, with the aim of destabilising the relationship between Egypt and the Western powers and discrediting the Nasser government. The network was exposed by Egyptian security services; Israeli defence minister Pinhas Lavon resigned over the affair in 1955. Israel officially acknowledged the operation in 2005.

Project Azorian was a classified CIA operation in which the purpose-built ship Hughes Glomar Explorer raised portions of the sunken Soviet ballistic-missile submarine K-129 from a depth of approximately 16,500 feet in the Pacific Ocean in 1974. The project used a Howard Hughes cover story — ostensibly a deep-sea mining vessel — to conceal the operation. It was partially declassified in 2010. The operation is fully confirmed and represents one of the most technically ambitious covert operations in history.

Operation Gladio was a NATO-coordinated programme of clandestine "stay-behind" networks established across Western Europe from the late 1940s, designed to conduct sabotage and resistance operations in the event of a Soviet invasion. The networks were armed, trained, and funded by CIA and MI6 and operated in coordination with national intelligence services. Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti disclosed the Italian network to parliament in August 1990. The Italian parliamentary commission and subsequent national investigations in Belgium, France, Germany, and Switzerland confirmed the programme's existence across the continent.

Operation Mockingbird was a large-scale CIA programme begun in the late 1940s that recruited journalists, editors, and news executives to plant stories, shape narratives, and advance US foreign-policy objectives through ostensibly independent media outlets. The programme was exposed by the Church Committee investigations of 1975-76 and confirmed in detail by Carl Bernstein's October 1977 Rolling Stone exposé, which named over 400 US journalists and media organisations as having worked with the CIA. The programme is confirmed by declassified documents and congressional testimony.