"Shaping of public perception has always existed. It could be to prop up a stock market, justify a war, win an election, or lure a terrorist out of hiding.
Russia is one of the masters at this. As far as the sixties, the Russians built an entire fake spy network that dead dropped bad intel that the British intercepted for years. In 1947, the U.S. Air Force manufactured an elaborate UFO hoax to divert attention from a classified plane crash in Roswell, New Mexico. And more recently, the world had been led to believe the weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq." - Dan Brown