For seventy years, Hydra has been secretly feeding crisis, reaping war--not to intimidate their enemies, but to make potential allies turn to SHIELDRA as the only option for peace.
And when history didn't cooperate--say, by not staying safely dead and frozen in the Arctic ice...
Or: Steve joins SHIELD after the battle of New York, and Hydra decides to kill two birds with one stone. They pick an unstable region that's getting a little too close to a ceasefire, come up with an excuse for Steve to lead a SHIELD mission there, and pay off some mercenaries to capture the mission commander and make it look like one of the warring factions is making a humiliating public example of him. Once the identity of the poor guy getting raped and tortured to death in the propaganda videos gets out, the region will explode and Captain America's posthumous reputation will be forever tarnished.
Except Steve can take a lot more punishment than anyone expected, and eventually he gets loose and wipes the floor with these losers, even with two limbs out of commission and a dozen loads still leaking out his ass. But it would've been a great plan if history had been a tiny bit less stubbornly uncooperative.
False flag operation
And when history didn't cooperate--say, by not staying safely dead and frozen in the Arctic ice...
Or: Steve joins SHIELD after the battle of New York, and Hydra decides to kill two birds with one stone. They pick an unstable region that's getting a little too close to a ceasefire, come up with an excuse for Steve to lead a SHIELD mission there, and pay off some mercenaries to capture the mission commander and make it look like one of the warring factions is making a humiliating public example of him. Once the identity of the poor guy getting raped and tortured to death in the propaganda videos gets out, the region will explode and Captain America's posthumous reputation will be forever tarnished.
Except Steve can take a lot more punishment than anyone expected, and eventually he gets loose and wipes the floor with these losers, even with two limbs out of commission and a dozen loads still leaking out his ass. But it would've been a great plan if history had been a tiny bit less stubbornly uncooperative.