Cold War-era story on special forces unit secretly increasing conspiracy threats. Big Bad (or Major enemy) ideas.

Formerly tried to do this via RPs, but never works out. So I'm considering writing this.

Basically inspired by Rainbow Six and Silent Storm, story is in the Cold War (after Munich) where the CIA (and/or KGB) creates a special forces unit that's under their control. They do covert work against the other bloc and investigate major threats against Washington DC/Moscow, but work with friendly countries. Later on the unit finds out that some of the actions from the other side (and sometimes, by a Dirty Cop, Rogue Agent or Rogue Soldier) is revealed to be done by a mysterious group that wants both side to kill each other off.

Not sure on any bad guy ideas. SS did use Thor's Hammer as a bad guy, in where they do terrorist operations by being an arms dealer.

PS - I did try to RP both sides of the Cold War conflict.

PPS - I have some idea on the CIA/KGB (maybe) names.

Edited by Ominae on Jul 7th 2023 at 1:28:48 AM

Ok maybe an obvious question, but why would anyone on earth want to end the entire world?

Not really on having a Big Bad (or major enemy) kill everyone. It's more of making both sides think that they're escalating the war with false flags. Although they want to run things behind the scenes, so they draw the line at anyone who advocates for going nuclear.

If you're looking for a major world-destroying enemy, you could go with Posadists. Posadists are a fringe Trotskyist movement that exists IRL.

They are UF Ologists who believe that aliens would strongly tend to be communists, and if contacted would try to help liberate the Earth from capitalism and imperialism. If your story has supernatural elements, they could be poking around them.

More disturbingly, they also believe that a nuclear war would benefit humanity by basically destroying civilization as it currently exists so that a communist utopia can rise from the ashes.

More modern Posadists downplay the UF Ology elements, but are still in favor of starting a nuclear apocalypse.

Also, because they're Trotskyists specifically they're a logical mutual enemy of both the US and the Soviet Union.

Actually had to read up on them. Reminds me of the sci fi stuff in Silent Storm.

Ok but in the cold war, escalation is directly proportional to the threat of nuclear annihilation. You can't both believe it's a good idea to let the cold war escalate while also believing nuclear annihilation is a bad idea.

"Better Dead than Red."

Reason enough for some people.

But that's an argument from one side. The premise here is a secret organization trying to escalate the cold war by playing both sides, which is just insanity.

That was my point, actually.

"I don't want our side to win, I want the other side to lose. Collateral damage is irrelevant."

It took me a moment to parse that.

In the context of nuclear war though, "better dead than red" makes some sense. Both first and second strike doctrines rely on the threat of annihilating your enemy to discourage them from annihilating you. Riding this doctrine all the way to hell is at least a consistent principle that relies on either victory or death.

Doing this for two opposing ideologies is what makes no sense: what kind of person believes in escalating the cold war but also not in nuclear war, the thing the entire cold war is based upon? At least a doomsday cult has an irrational reason to do this

There were any number of people back then who believed that a limited nuclear war was possible and even desirable.

@Protagonist 506 suggested the Posadists as a major enemy group.

The problem here is that playing the two superpowers against each other isn't going to lead to a "limited nuclear war".

We can't know that, and specifically if they have high level people in both camps, they may believe (rightly or wrongly) that they can control this.

Unless you're gonna go for a *radically* different Cold War, yes we do know that

Someone from another forum told me another major bad guy group could be some kinda shadowy group from NATO/Warsaw Pact trying to do sh*t on the other bloc for some secret agenda.

TBH, i think your problem is that your story lacks concrete focus and ideas. You have a basic idea of "what if a shadow organization both-sides the cold war" but you don't seem to have an idea for who this could be, why they would do it, and what sort of end-state they'd want to achieve. And all three are fairly basic and important to writing a conspiracy story about shadowy orders.

Given the ingredients, you basically have these choices:

-an apocalyptic cult that wants to destroy basically the entire established order for vague and insane reasons. it's hard to see how they would really get the ears of the CIA or KGB or whoever.

-A revengist organization that wants to destroy the established order but believes the damage is basically localized (or perhaps believes nuclear war is too impractical to go beyond some nuking left and right). Hard to see how the west and east would get in bed with people who believe this.

-A realpolitik group who believes they can Hearts of Iron this and guide humanity through their darkest hour -plausible though doesn't align with what you wanted.

-Accidental shadow organization: the USSR and USA fish from the same puddle and the fish both quite like the fishfeed they're getting and also think they can get more out of this. Would still demand an organization outside the nominal West and East, so it's not really clear who could even fulfil this role. Europe was pretty split on the issue, and is also in the heat of the fire. African and Middle Eastern countries don't really come to mind. So WW 2 would likely have to go very differently for this to really matter.

Or:

-the actual shadow group largely does what you described but it's actually a small group in the middle east and the actual danger they pose is minimal. Basically the previous stated option, but the scope is much smaller, like a PMC or something. Or well, the shell holdings of PM Cs that get hired by both sides to go shoot the other and they like double the pay for half the work.

The shadowy group you’ve suggested is similar to what Thor’s Hammer is doing in Silent Storm. They just act as arms dealers for both sides for providing so-called Panzerklein to give (mostly) the Axis a boost in their fighting power.

Also for the operators in the black ops unit, I’ll have to limit their size like how Tom Clancy did it for the Rainbow Six novel.