I agree that the Manhattan Project and the various WWII deception plans are strong contenders.
How about early Christianity: widespread messianic religion, conducted in secret under the noses of the authorities?
Protocol of Sevres - Nasser/Egypt
Operatioin Ajax - Mohammad Mosaddegh/Iran
Wait, what? This isn’t even a little bit true. They could easily have stopped him if they’d wanted to, and our prime minister isn’t even close to being any kind of dictator. Not so, pal. Sorry.
How about MERS and the robosigning scandal?
Essentially the US banking industry set up their own property registration system to circumvent the tedious state and county level requirements of registering who holds a mortgage over a particular piece of land. If the holder of a mortgage wants to transfer their interest to someone else then that transfer is required to be registered on the local land registry. Obviously this would be inconvenient and expensive when you’re dealing with large groups of mortgages, so MERS was created to be the entity noted on the land register while the mortgages were traded under it’s umbrella. By 2007 more than two-thirds of US mortgages were being registered as held by MERS.
[QUOTE=The court in In re Agard]
“MERS and its partners made the decision to create and operate under a business model that was designed large part to avoid the requirements of the traditional mortgage recording process. The Court does not accept the argument that because MERS may be involved with 50% of all residential mortgages in the country, that is reason enough for this Court to turn a blind eye to the fact that this process does not comply with the law.”
[/QUOTE]
The MERS system has come under scrutiny with the massive rise in foreclosures. In order to satisy the requirements of the foreclosure process the creditor needs to demonstrate it has the right to enforce the mortgage. Traditionally this was simply a matter of producing a copy of the land register showing the mortgagee was registered, however that can’t happen under MERS, so instead masses of affidavits were signed by ‘robosigners’ testifying that the creditor did in fact have standing to enforce the foreclosure process.
How bad is it? Well one studyof foreclosures in San Francisco found:
[QUOTE=Aequitas sf report]
Overall, we identified one or more irregularities in 99% of the subject loans. In 84% of the loans, we identified what appear to be one or more clear violations of law.
[/QUOTE]
So it appears that a very high percentage of the record number of foreclosures in the US didn’t meet the legal requirements.
…and at the heart of it, the greatest bullshit artist who ever lived, Juan Pujol.
Hell, there are plenty of places today (mainly in Muslim countries) where Christians have to be, if not secret, at least very low-key, in practicing their religion.
Juan rocks!
That is really neat. Not many people can claim his record. 
Indeed. More than 60 of his bogus reports would up on Hitler’s desk. Not to Godwinize the thread, but this guy pranked Hitler.
I seem to recall it was revealed by someone important in Saddam’s regime that he was mainly bluffing to keep Iran at bay, and to keep his regime propped up, secure from civil uprising. No cite at the moment – will try to find one when I get a chance.
They did not have to be all that secret most of the time. Official persecution of Christians only occurred very intermittently, and, even when it did, it was more a matter of getting enough to put on a good show in the arenas, not really a concerted effort to round them all up.
Diocletians persecution was probably the most seriously pursued, and it could not have been a bigger failure. A few years later, Constantine was on the throne and the Empire was Christianized.
this part made me giggle
The largest conspiracy I can think of involves millions of co-conspirators and including government support at the federal level and is still ongoing after over a hundred years.
Santa Claus
My favorite bit, the part that tickles me endlessly, is that he received an MBE from King George VI and the Iron Cross from Hitler! It was awarded by radio, but he got the actual Iron Cross after the war from his German handler, still under cover. He faked his own death in 1949 and moved to Argentina, and I’d like to imagine that he had something to do with finding fugitive Nazis. He didn’t get his physical MBE until 1984 from Prince Philip, when he attended the 40th anniversary of D-Day.
As difficult and horrible as the Normandy invasion was, I can’t imagine how much worse it would have been if all the German forces where there, including Rommel’s tanks.
These 1st 3 sure sound like conspiracies to me:
WW2
- Nearly all of Germany’s spies in England were ‘turned’; discovered and given the choice of either feeding false messages back home or a brick wall with firing squad. From what I’ve heard, every one, even the die-hardest Nazi, chose life. Thus every single active German agent in England was actually working for the British, feeding false info (Eye of the Needle notwithstanding)! Credit for this must go to the diligence & hard work of MI6 counter-intelligence.
- On the other hand, every *British *agent in Holland was similarly turned, despite many obvious warnings (a security check of misspelling the 16th letter wasn’t done, yet the messages continued to be accepted). Something like 60 agents were captured soon after parachuting in, and put to work sending false info back to England, just like the compromised Germans in England were being simultaneously co-opted. Part of the conspiracy was that the head of the (British) Holland section running the operation was a suspected Nazi sympathizer - post-war, he was discovered to have been born in Holland, and have had cousins in *Abwehr *(German intelligence)!
- The Enigma machine - the famous German coding typewriter was captured early on in the war, and many critical messages were being routinely intercepted by the Allies. It’s thought that the heavy use and subsequent message interception is hugely responsible for the turnaround in the Battle of the Bulge, and the divulging of U-Boat wolfpack locations, leading to victory in the Battle of the Atlantic.
Cambodia
For the last years of the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge presented itself as Socialist freedom fighters; while some were aware of their brutality, Pol Pot’s move of deporting the entire urban population overnite to the countryside, and trying to turn Cambodia into an agrarian economy, took every1 by surprise. His plan must’ve been a closely guarded secret, know to only a few of his inner circle (the definition of a conspiracy). The fact that 2.5 million Cambodians were murdered in ~ 5 years just compounds the conspiracy; no one expected Pot & the Rouge to not only be so backward, but also so savage against their own people.
The sounds like Englandspiel. Most of the captured agents were executed rather than turned, but of course the Germans had access to their codes etc. Definitely not SOE’s finest hour.
They were eventually executed, but 1st were used by the Germans to feed false info. At the end, when some1 at MI6 figured out they were compromised, the German spymaster running the *Englandspiel *sent them a taunting message, something like ‘thanks for the business all these years & we can assure you anyone reading this that you’ll get the same reception as your spies if you set foot in Europe’