A number of small quadcopter drones found laden with explosives last month at Leipzig Airport have been identified by German authorities as originating in Russia, the Kremlin’s presumed intent being to blow up some Ukrainian cargo aircraft using the runway. Naturally, Russia has denied all responsibility, calling the accusation “absurd” and saying Germany put the devices there itself.   

Who would possibly be so gullible as to believe such a line? Hard-left politicians like the habitually anti-Western UK Labour Party backbencher Diane Abbott, who at precisely the same time as Berlin was blaming Moscow, went online to allege, “The imminent threat from Russia is a NATO fiction to justify their complete capitulation to Trump’s demands for more military spending. The increase should not go ahead.”

I can understand why it may be that some people out there might find it difficult to accept the extent of Russia’s campaign of hybrid warfare across Europe: because, in an alleged parallel campaign, alongside attempting quite logically to blow up airplanes, the Kremlin has purportedly attempted to undermine the West via a far more low-key infinitude of microscopically trivial “cognitive strikes” against NATO nations too. In practice, this seems to mean little more than perpetrating a series of strange practical jokes against them.

Leaked documents suggest a Kremlin-linked PR firm, the Social Design Agency, has been engaged to design what amount to a series of infantile open-air pranks across European cities, intended to unsettle the domestic population. In Paris, severed pig’s heads were lined up outside mosques to upset Muslims and green paint thrown over a Holocaust museum to offend Jews; there were also plans to float blow-up sex dolls bearing the message “F*ck migrants!” down the Seine. In Germany, hundreds of cars had their exhaust pipes blocked with expanding foam overnight, with the aim of making motorists think environmentalists had done it, whilst plastic skeletons were dotted around near the Brandenburg Gate to disturb the easily frightened.     

Faced with accounts of such hard-to-believe events, you can perhaps see why persons like Diane Abbott could have trouble accepting Putin is up to no good. If you can create an environment in which every tiny little thing that goes wrong gets blamed on Russia, then eventually people will just stop listening, and even the plausible hybrid warfare attacks like those at Leipzig Airport will be drowned out amid the noise. 

When we are seriously told that the Russians were even behind a supposed plot to get young male models from Ukraine to bomb the previous homes of the former UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer to make it look like he was gay (voters were supposed to conclude they were angry rent-boys he hadn’t paid), then many more people than Abbott will find it incredibly difficult to accept the Russians really are doing such unlikely-sounding things.

I recall some strange events here in the UK from 20 or more years ago, the very period when Putin was just consolidating his early power, when people in towns across the country woke up one morning to find biscuits had been senselessly sellotaped across their front doors, or their car windows had been smashed open and the interiors completely filled with Rich Teas and chocolate digestives. At the time, I blamed either art students or some very bored extraterrestrials. In retrospect, maybe they were early proof-of-concept trial exercises for Putin’s future cognitive shock-troops?   

I joke, but such laughably small-scale death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategies are not solely Putin’s own modern-day invention. During the Second World War, the United States pursued a similar crusade of micro-scale hybrid warfare when the military’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS) launched its Simple Sabotage Field Manual in 1944. Intended for use by disenchanted Germans against their unwanted Nazi overlords on home-soil, the booklet suggested rebels attempt to undermine Hitler’s war-machine via such incredibly quotidian means as surreptitiously urinating inside cars’ gasoline-tanks, or removing toilet-paper from restrooms. Other saboteurs were encouraged to enter cinemas and open up bags containing moths, to allow them to flutter around in front of the screen, thereby ever-so-slightly obscuring the propaganda message being imparted by Goebbels.

Telegraph operators were instructed to cause confusion by intentionally misspelling the words “minimum” and “maximum” (which are the same in German as in English) as “miximum”, so recipients wouldn’t know which instruction to follow. Bureaucrats, meanwhile, could gum up the machinery of government by asking “endless questions,” constantly delaying, and insisting upon making use of byzantine and interminable back-office procedures rather than just allowing people to get on with simply doing anything useful. (What did the OSS think bureaucrats spent their time doing all day long anyway?)    

Besides wasting Germans’ time, some of the OSS’s more fantastical minds wasted that of their own men too. Perhaps the strangest example was “Operation Cornflakes,” which aimed to completely destroy German morale by the fiendish means of substituting ordinary Nazi postage stamps featuring images of Adolf Hitler with fake ones bearing a doctored image of the Führer as a living skeleton, complete with his trademark toothbrush mustache on his skull’s upper-jaw. Intelligence officers were enlisted to type or handwrite real German addresses onto envelopes to create around 96,000 fake pieces of mail. Then, U.S. warplanes were to bomb Nazi mail trains, but only just enough to damage them and make the postal bags fall out onto the tracks. 

After this, substitute mail sacks, filled with fake letters containing free samples of the skull-stamps, would be dropped in the hopes everything would get mixed together, and the fake stamps begin to circulate through Nazi Germany. Then, Germans on the homefront would collect their mail, open it up and find a free stamp tucked inside, containing a small image of Hitler looking like an hirsute Skeletor, before—what? Feeling a bit puzzled for 10 seconds, maybe? Will such otiose tactics have helped shorten the course of the war by even a single second? It seems doubtful to say the least. Yet the cost, in time, money, lives, and even stamps (which can be quite expensive) must have been considerable, or at least vastly out of all proportion to any possible utility.

In the 1950s, as the Cold War began to blossom, the OSS’s successor organization, the CIA, took up the reins, employing a whole suite of people to sit around thinking of ridiculous ideas. One scheme was to float balloons over Soviet territory bearing gifts for citizens which would “prove” Yankee Western imperialism was preferable to Stalinist autocracy after all—wonderful “proofs” of the innate superiority of capitalism like cheap wristwatches with pictures of Mickey Mouse painted on them.

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To really get imaginative in this respect, the CIA actively sought out crazies to dredge up new ideas about what else could be tied onto the balloons. One recruit was habitual prankster Hugh Troy, who became known to CIA agents after he had carved a human ear out of beef and attempted to display it at New York’s Museum of Modern Art as having once belonged to Vincent Van Gogh. 

Allegedly, Troy’s big idea (possibly apocryphal) was to float boxes of giant-sized condoms over Moscow, but with the words “EXTRA SMALL” printed on the side, to make Americans, fed up on apple-pie and steak since birth, appear to be innately more masculine than the gruel-raised Muscovites. “Mine’s bigger than yours” was the implied message; as with members, so with missiles. It has all the hallmarks of a Thomas Pynchon novel—except this Department of Absurdist Warfare, unlike that depicted in Gravity’s Rainbow, was actually real. 

So, to those like Diane Abbott who still prove skeptical towards the suspicion Vladimir Putin might genuinely be getting bemused spies to meaninglessly chuck sex-dolls into rivers, or position large model skeletons in the rough vicinity of major European urban landmarks, I say they should just take a look back at history—which is, and will likely continue to be, a tapestry of absurdities