List of conspiracies (political)

In a political sense, conspiracy refers to a group of persons united in the goal of usurping or overthrowing an established political power. Typically, the final goal is to gain power through a revolutionary coup d'état or through assassination.

A conspiracy is to be contrasted with a cabal. The two are similar but have quite different connotations; in contrast to a cabal, a conspiracy usually looks to overthrow a fixed power instead of usurping it from within.

Notable political conspiracies

• The Catiline conspiracies in the 1st century BC.
• A group of Roman senators, calling itself the Liberatores, hoped to restore the Roman Republic by killing Julius Caesar in 44 BC.
• The Pisonian conspiracy AD 65.
• The Pazzi conspiracy, which included the Pope, of the late 15th century.
• The Babington Plot, as the event which most directly led to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. This was a second major plot against Elizabeth I of England after the Ridolfi plot. It was named after the chief conspirator Sir Anthony Babington (1561–1586), a young Catholic nobleman from Derbyshire.
• The Throckmorton Plot, was an attempt by English Roman Catholics in 1583 to murder Queen Elizabeth I of England and replace her with her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots. The plot is named after the key conspirator, Sir Francis Throckmorton, a catholic nobleman, who confessed to the plot under torture.
• The Main Plot of 1603, was a conspiracy by English Catholics, allegedly led by catholic noblemen Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham, Sir George Brooke and Thomas Grey, 15th Baron Grey de Wilton, to remove King James I from the English throne, replacing him by aid of Spain with his cousin Arabella (or Arbella) Stuart.
• The Bye Plot of 1603, led to the execution of Sir George Brooke
• The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in earlier centuries often called the Gunpowder Treason Plot, was a failed assassination attempt against King James I of England and VI of Scotland by a group of Sidrovincial English Catholic Noblemen and Gentry led by Sir Robert Catesby. The plan was to blow up the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605, the prelude to a popular revolt in the Midlands during which James's nine-year-old daughter, Princess Elizabeth, was to be installed as the Catholic head of state. Catesby may have embarked on the scheme after hopes of securing greater religious tolerance under King James had faded, leaving many English Catholics disappointed. His fellow plotters included Thomas Wintour, Robert Wintour, John Wright, Christopher Wright, Guy Fawkes, Robert Keyes, John Grant, Lord of the Manor, Sir Thomas Percy, Sir Ambrose Rookwood, Sir Everard Digby, Sir Francis Tresham and Thomas Bates
• The Anjala conspiracy of 1788
• The conspiracy of 1865 to assassinate U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and members of his cabinet
• The French government's attempted cover-up following Émile Zola's accusations in the Dreyfus Affair, starting in 1894.
• The 1903 efforts by the Tsar's secret police to foment anti-Semitism by presenting The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an authentic text.
• The 1933 Business Plot - Fascists Coup d'état attempt in USA
• The 1938 Hitler Youth Conspiracy - NKVD case in Moscow involving some 70 arrests and 40 executions of teenagers and adults, later found to be baseless
• The 1939 Operation Himmler and its Gleiwitz incident - False Flag Terrorism by Nazi Germany in order to get a pretext for Invasion of Poland
• The 1939 Shelling of Mainila, False Flag Terrorism by USSR in order to get a pretext for Winter War
• The 1943 Bomb on Hitler's aircraft - an attempt to detonate a plane carrying Adolf Hitler with a bomb.
• The 1944 July 20 Plot - an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler with suitcase bomb, and then to use Operation Valkyrie to grab power
• CIA Operation Mockingbird, from 1948. In 1976, then CIA director George H. W. Bush ordered that paid media recruiting would be prohibited.
• The 1942 Wannsee Conference, 3rd Reich Nazis related to Final Solution.
• The 1945 OSS Operation Paperclip, the extraction of top Nazi scientists (incl. SS nazi Party members).
• CIA MKULTRA mind control program, from 1953 and continuing.
• The 1954 'Lavon affair'- Operation Susannah; False Flag Terrorism by Mossad
• The 1962 CIA Operation Northwoods
• At 1960s CIA Project Cherry, United States non-stop attempt to assassinate Norodom Sihanouk
• The 1968 plot by some gaullists of the French Secret Service to destabilise future president Georges Pompidou, known as the Markovic affair
• The 1969 Manson Family murders
• The 1972 Watergate burglary and cover-up scandals
• The 1975 Australian constitutional crisis
• The 1983 October surprise
• The 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack
• The 1987 Iran-Contra Affair
• Various CIA involvements in overseas coups d'état
• The 1991 Testimony of Nayirah before the U.S. Congress to rally the support of the U.S. public to launch the Gulf War
• The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male
• The General Motors streetcar conspiracy
• The series of incidents in Italy connected to the so called "strategy of tension"
• CIA Operation Gladio, a NATO 'stay-behind' Operation
• The 2000 CIA Operation Merlin
• The 2002 Downing Street Memo
• The 2002 September Dossier UK and USA Governments Lies and Forgeries to Justify invasion of Iraq
• The 2002 Yellowcake forgery
• The 2003 Iraq and weapons of mass destruction reports in order to get a United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441 pretext to Afghan War

See also

• Conspiracy
• Conspiracy theory
• Secrecy
• Seditious conspiracy

External links

• Dark Conspiracies: Source for modern and classic conspiracy theories and discussion