Two inept CIA impersonators tried to pin the MH17 bombing on America — and Russian media lapped it up

A piece of debris from Malaysia Airlines flight MH17

(Image credit: Bulent Kilic/Getty Images)

published 13 August 2015

In an attempt to plant a conspiracy theory about what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, which crashed in Ukraine last year, Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda released a recording of what they claim is a discussion between two CIA agents conspiring to down the flight. There's just one big problem with the recording, however — it sounds incredibly fake. Foreign Policy calls the "comically bad" audio recording "so poorly produced that it borders on the absurd."

The conversation between two alleged spies, David Hamilton and David L. Stern, sounds like it was "translated to English from Russian via Google Translate," Foreign Policy writes. As the two alleged CIA agents discuss "preparations" for an operation to shoot down a plane with a surface-to-air missile, the men's accents slip between American, British, and Russian.

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While Russians have offered theory after theory about what may have happened to the doomed MH17, which crashed killing all 298 aboard, experts believe that the plane was most likely shot down by a Buk missile fired by Russian-backed separatists. On Tuesday, Dutch investigators announced that they had found parts of a missile system close to where the plane went down in Ukraine. However, investigators have not yet proven that there is a connection between the missile and the crash; their investigation is expected to wrap up by the end of October.