I dunno about the state actor hypothesis, but if there is, it all sounds like Charles Stross's description of future cold war in Halting State:

"And that's the twentieth-century model, what they used to call an electronic Pearl Habour. Things have moved on since then. Footnotes inserted in government reports feeding into World Trade Organization negotiating positions. Nothing we'd notice at first, nothing that would be obvious for a couple of years. You don't want to halt the state in its tracks, you simply want to divert it into a sliding of your choice."

Who knows what will appear after the archives are restored?