How could a secret terrorist organization rise to great power without anybody really noticing?

Question

My first question, be kind please! :)

I'm thinking about an organization like COBRA from the G.I. Joe comics. For those unfamiliar, COBRA is a nationless terrorist organization bent on world domination.

In the comics, there isn't really much deep thought put into their existence. They're just there to be a foil for the G.I. Joe team to defeat and sell lots of toys to children. Many of the leaders and "agents" of COBRA obviously come from various nations, but COBRA itself is a borderless entity. They have a VAST pool of resources like money, weapons, military tech, training & research facilities all over the globe, secret R&D projects into future tech, a standing army of tens of thousands of foot soldiers, tanks, planes, submarines and specialists...yet they remain mostly unheard of to the general population of the world, and even the people who do know about their existence know very little else.

Obviously there are friendly countries that harbour/hide/protect them to an extent, but what would this organization give them in return?

I'm looking for a plausible explanation to how such an organization could come into being in today's real world and stay (mostly) hidden.

Answer 1

No such organization could come into existence without the intelligence agencies and governments of the world being aware.

Housing, feeding, clothing, training, and arming tens of thousands of soldiers is not a trivial task. The space, and resources required to do this would cripple some countries, never mind a nameless organization looking to remain utterly anonymous.

You would need a front under which to buy these training facilities, sign arms contracts, get permission to operate in certain countries, etc.

In other words, welcome to the Atlas Corporation. (From Call of Duty)

Private Military Contractors

Use your illicit funds (which of course you've laundered) to start a private military corporation (PMC). Your original start-up location should be some corrupt little country where few questions will be asked, however you will have to register in the US, Europe, and other places in order to operate internationally.

Buy, Hire, Train

Now that you have a legitimate reason to hire troops, buy military supplies, weapons (in quantity), etc. start doing so.

Set up training operations in different countries. Build up your facilities. Maybe publicly buy or partner up with weapons manufacturers and researchers.

Be prepared for plenty of healthy interest from various spy agencies.

Build a Front

Hire "regular" mercenaries (for US Marines, British SAS, French Commandos, etc.) as your "public image troops". Send them out on fully legitimate contracts for various governments: hunt down terrorists, protect VIP's, rescue hostages, etc.

This will build your reputation as an above-board, profitable heavy hitter, and distract attention from your true operations.

Behind the Scenes

Some of your bases of operations should be open only to those loyal to your true goals. The "regular" troops would not mingle much with your true believers, or only those who know to maintain absolute secrecy.

No one would be promoted past a certain level who does not share your views and objectives. Those to whom the secret is revealed and reject it should be killed in such a way that it all looks accidental - experimental weapon malfunction, a training exercise, a terrorist attack, etc.

Buildup

Take advantage of the anti-military feelings sweeping the world. There are so many conflicts which the public is against sending more troops into - offer your services, and do a solid job. Use your shadowy powers of manipulation and intimidation to keep any negative news regarding your actions in those conflicts from leaking to the public.

The governments of the world will find it quite convenient to turn to you rather than send in their own troops to fight/die (which would fuel public opinion against them).

You can fabricate your own terrorist threats and conflicts (you invent something like ISIS), and then become "heroes" defeating them.

Of course many spy agencies will be suspicious, but I trust that you will be able to manipulate or distract them as required.

Use your massive profits to build yet more military bases, buy even more equipment, and research new and terrifying weapons.

Global Take-Over

When the governments of the world have relaxed and become unintentionally dependent on you, strike.

Launch massive terror campaigns around the globe, then convince everyone that a world-wide deployment of your elite troops will put an end to the situation.

At that point it's all over but the mass executions.

Answer 2

Perhaps not the answer but maybe we could name some organizations in real world which could be compared to COBRA

Gladio and other secret stay-behind armies of NATO Many used to conduct attacks against their own people to persuade public opinion for certain actions (Strategy of tension) - Years of Lead as an example. Remained in absolute secrecy throughout cold war.

Answer 3

I would agree with @Jim2B. A good example is "Atlas Corporation" in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. They are a private military corporation that is able to secure military contracts, similar to Blackwater in the US today.

Eventually, Atlas Corp gets deeply involved in multiple wars and secretly starts pursuing its own agenda. In the game, the reason for their rise is an unstoppable terrorist organization, which cripples most nations; thus leading to their rise. But, an even crazier plot twist would be: Atlas Corporation was behind the rise of this terrorist organization and it was all a much bigger plan towards world domination.

Pretty insane to even think about.

Answer 4

In my opinion it would be easiest to achieve if the organization included a legitimate front-end connected loosely and clandestinely with the secret organization on the back-end.

The members/employees of the front-end organization would have no knowledge of the true purpose of the entire organization or its association with the secret terrorist organization on the back-end.

The front-end could be a giant megacorporation but it might be even better for it to be the government of a powerful country (think of the resources that it could divert!).

In point of fact, consider all the "secret" 3 letter organizations in the US (or other) government whose operation is secret. Create another such organization or subvert an existing one for your purposes. Since these organizations tend to be compartmentalized (one isn't permitted to know what another is doing), this mode of operation might make keeping your secret organization's purpose and operations even easier.

I suggest keeping very tight reins on the operations of your secret organization. The more it operates, the more clues it leaves, the more opportunities the world's population has of figuring it out. So as much as possible allow the front-end organization to achieve intermediate legitimate goals of your secret organization. Only employ the secret organization to achieve a goal when it would be obvious to the front-end organization that the ultimate goals were nefarious.

Answer 5

How would you distinguish this from the U.S. government? It has a lot of secret operations, it has organized street gangs doing "civil forfeiture", it tortures, uses illegal eavesdropping devices, maintains secret courts not subject to the law of the land, generally has a dim view towards the country's Constitution and ideals, builds large computing centers in a scale not commensurate with legal operations, maintains a blackmailing scheme instead of due legal process ("plea deals"), subverts elections ("popular" vs "electoral" votes anybody, let alone all of the voting machine scandals), kills thousands of people yearly without due process, incarcerates people for decades without due process, openly allows bribes to govern political decisions, does not accept the jurisdiction of the International Court in The Hague, let's armies attack without declaring a state of war...

What does it take to pass into the category your question is aiming at? Any decisive qualitative or quantitative criterion you want to see met?

Answer 6

Take advantage of an existing country. Quietly insert your own people into the politics and through bribery, blackmail, intimidation, assassination, fraud, etc. Have them rise to the correct positions of power, where they are able to take control of the military and the military's decision-making processes.

Answer 7

Of course it could. It clearly did, most of a generation ago…

I don't follow GI Joe but which part of your description of Cobra doesn't fit Al Qaeda, and to a lesser extent the Taliban and then Boko Haram, among others?

Answer 8

A familiar trope that is sadly very much in line with reality is that if they have sufficient money, influence, manpower and cunning to begin with, they could begin by seizing control of the many (and large) areas of the planet that other people with money and influence tend not to think about very much. They could, for example, deal with/infiltrate/ultimately control the hundreds of little terrorist groups we probably haven't heard of. They could operate in any or all of the countries that westerners can't name and tend to lump together as our vague concept of "Africa". The only thing they would have to be careful of is not interfering with (and thus attracting the attention of) all the other powerful developed-world interest groups that are operating under more or less the same general principles right now, i.e. don't interfere with the supply of minerals to US corporations, recruit too many sweatshop labourers, or pirate any essential shipping routes.

Think what had to happen for you to hear about Al Qaeda; now as long as our shadowy organisation doesn't do something like that, they're free to control the Afghan heroin trade, the South and Central American cocaine industries, any number of diamond and rare earth mines, and oil fields; think of the manpower they could muster simply by feeding and housing the millions of desperate people in any number of different places, or by creating an ideology that spoke to the even larger number of people with a great deal to be angry about and very little to lose.

The best part about this strategy is that if any one of their proxy groups or individual operatives were to attract attention, it would be trivial to cut them loose, and let people's prejudices lead them to assume "those people" are "naturally like that". Anyone who suggested there was a monolithic organisation arming hundreds of unconnected terrorist groups and drug cartels, inventing new religious sects, and working in accordance with a colossal master plan would be dismissed as totally demented. Meanwhile, when the world powers responded by crushing the little people who got caught holding the rocket launchers, burning their fields, bombing their villages, and so on, they would only be exacerbating the desperate, unjust and anarchic conditions that made the developing/underdeveloped world ripe for their taking in the first place...

Answer 9

° establish an international organization (league) of nations, the primary control of said league would reside in the richest and most powerful member nations, and more specifically in the richest and most powerful citizens or possibly corporations of the primary member nations.

° This arrangement would be legitimate for a clandestine "inner sanctum", yet in appearance only for others, and the real purpose would be to arrange agreeable circumstances in which to manipulate the target nation, or nations.

° a medium in wich foreign policies and political influences could be used to steer the target nation into a desired and pressured conformity that would permit control of the target nation's course and would also "allow" control over the top levels of government. That government in turn affecting the necessary alterations and changes themselves in their own levels of administration throughout said country, so that appearances remain legitimate before the sight of the common citizens and infiltration is not discovered (at first). This is often accomplished by various tactical manipulations, and could include some of the following....intentional economic destabilization, political espionage, false peace processes, implied possibility of threat, demands for change by factions within the society, or the ever popular global sanctions.

° The unaware public would not be made aware of this condition of international "influence" on their homeland, and would be behind the curtain (so to speak) on the real issues at hand. The public having been convinced of the absolute necessities of this league to their country's, as well as the world's countries well being, this through billions of dollars of public relations effects over a large amount of years. This also the effect of many changes being implemented in their society, that were perceived by themselves to be random, or self improvements, an obvious evolution directed (it would appear) by their own course, yet in truth would be the policies being put in place by the league or the entities within the leage that want to overthrow, or maneuver the target country.

° The policies having redesigned (right in plain sight of the people) the infrastructures of their country, government, constitution, and culture over an extended period of many years, and in strategic increments to align the target country with the intended outcome set by complicit parties within the inner sanctum of the league and their "assets within the target government".

° over prolonged years of "membership" the target country's policies and infrastructures would be steered to the desired outcome, the national identity that was necessary for them to defend against foreign threat or takeover would be eventually changed into an international identity that holds no loyalties to an "outdated" republic. A republic that has been reinvented by it's infiltrators and their conspirators within it, and as older generations of people age out, the new generations rise to power with none of the essentials of sovereignty or independence. They eventually after a few generations will not even know what they lost, and policies once that were foreign.....now are their new masters.

Answer 10

Information is power, science goes were the data is, so if you were able to collect a large amount of information on humans- this would effectively privatize neuro-science and psychology.

You would be able to subtile manipulate them, guide them into outcomes you prefer. It wouldnt be perceptable, just alot more emotions, alot more gambling of the humand reward system, strange movements that form and disperse, driven purely by emotiona flukes. The threat is not immediatly obvious, after all its just a oily film over reality, but as soon as you would become a threat- a wild mob would appear out of nowhere to lynch you for "treason against the people/ " and you would vannish from the world.

Such a organisation if it would hack the species, would do strange this with said species. For example would you see "Calibrate & Control" motions, where political movements are formed and aimed at something, just to see if the model of control still holds up.

The people inside the organisation would just do their job, silenced by the NDA, and unable even to percieve the political goals beyond "making money". You could have terrorists, without them knowing about that. Even funnier, you could have a terrorist organisation without a "head" - since we are living in times were software, aka "smart" contracts can lead a company.

I cant imagine how a battle between such meta-beeings would look like, pupettering civilisations into apocalyptic showdowns over nothing.

Answer 11

Use What is Already There

Throughout the world, governments maintain secrete operations military units designed to operate off the books and with minimal public exposure. They are very well trained and protected by their respective governments from scrutiny, even by said governments. These units are fed, armed, trained, and quartered entirely off of existing black budgets that very few people have the authority to even question. Since these operatives have to work in such secrecy, there is a lot of assumed trust and loyalty between the people operating these special units and those carrying out the missions. So, what your terrorist organization focuses on is circumventing the chain of command and/or budgets of these secrete operations units. All over the world you have generals, senators, and other people of power in your back pocket pulling the strings, and all the fodder underneath doing the actual terrorist attacks are real-for-true patriots believing that they are serving their countries when they are really serving this global alliance of tyrants.

Want to raid an American weapons factory, send one of your Mexican units. Want to steal some Russian Nukes, send one of your North Korean units. You can't necessarily convince any given unit to attack whatever target you want, but you can spin each unit's narrative such that each unit thinks they are doing things for their country.

But, you can take this one step further. When you isolate a person from all other opinions, you have a lot of power to control over how their perspective will change over time. Normally military mantras and training are meant to inspire devotion to one's nation and weed out "civilian" thoughts that would make you a less ideal soldier. But, these mantras can be subtly changed to shift devotion to the idea of a better world rather than to your country. So, that when the time comes to solidify your global power, these operatives are already primed to serve a global order which better reflects the ideals you've been cramming down their mouths for the past 5 years than their actual governments which they originally signed up for.

The reason you can keep your organization secrete is because every time one of your operations is discovered, it is always blamed as an official operation by their respective government which everyone already expects said government to disavow.

Answer 12

diplomatic processes, economic manupulation, economic incentives and or sanctions, cultural and educational reforms, artificial peace processes, religious infultration, military intimidation, executive orders, clandestine international agreements, or simply put, united nations signitory legislative compliance.