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Operation Northwoods

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Operation Northwoods, or Northwoods, was a 1962 plan to generate U.S. public support for military action against the Cuban government of Fidel Castro, as part of the U.S. government's Operation Mongoose anti-Castro initiative. The plan, which was not implemented, called for various false flag (WP) actions, including simulated or real state-sponsored acts of terrorism (such as hijacked planes) on U.S. and Cuban soil. What distinguishes this from other false flag operations is that the target of the attacks was to be property and personnel of the US itself; the object was not to do an attack and get away with it, but to make people believe that the US had been attacked, in order to escalate conflict.


Content[edit]

In response to a request for pretexts for military intervention by the Chief of Operations, Cuba Project (Col. Edward Lansdale), the document lists methods (with, in some cases, outline plans) the author believed would garner public and international support for US military intervention in Cuba. These are staged attacks purporting to be of Cuban origin, with a number of them having real casualties. Central to the plan was the use of "friendly Cubans" — Cuban exiles (WP)s seeking to oust Fidel Castro.

The suggestions included:

  • Starting rumors about Cuba by using clandestine radios.
  • Staging mock attacks, sabotages and riots at Guantanamo Bay and blaming it on Cuban forces.
  • Firebombing and sinking an American ship at the Guantanamo Bay American military base — reminiscent of the USS Maine incident at Havana in 1898, which started the Spanish-American War (WP) — or destroy American aircraft and blame it on Cuban forces. (The document's first suggestion regarding the sinking of a U.S. ship is to blow up a manned ship and hence would result in U.S. Navy members being killed, with a secondary suggestion of possibly using unmanned drones and fake funerals instead.)
  • "Harassment of civil air, attacks on surface shipping and destruction of US military drone aircraft by MIG type [sic] planes would be useful as complementary actions."
  • Destroying an unmanned drone masquerading as a commercial aircraft supposedly full of "college students off on a holiday". This proposal was the one supported by the Wikipedia:Joint Chiefs of Staff. A purported threat to US college students studying there was one of the pretexts for the Invasion of Grenada (WP)
  • Staging a "terror campaign", including the "real or simulated" sinking of Cuban refugees
  • "We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute Wikipedia:sic to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized."
  • Burning crops by dropping incendiary devices in Haiti, Dominican Republic or elsewhere.

James Bamford summarized Operation Northwoods in his Body of Secrets thus:


"Operation Northwoods, which had the written approval of the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war. -Body of Secrets, page 82[1]"

The report begins: "The Joint Chiefs of Staff have considered the attached memorandum for the Chief of Operations, Cuba Project, which responds to a request of that office for a brief but precise description of pretexts which would provide a justification for US military intervention in Cuba."[2]

From wanttoknow.info, a precis of the main points:[3]

Page 133 of file (page 2 of actual Joint Chiefs report)
The suggested courses of action ... are based on the premise that US military intervention will result from a period of heightened US-Cuban tensions which place the United States in the position of suffering justifiable grievances. World opinion, and the United Nations forum should be favorably affected by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere.
Page 136 of file (page 5 of actual Joint Chiefs report)
This plan ... should be developed to focus all efforts on a specific ultimate objective which would provide adequate justification for US military intervention. Such a plan would enable a logical build-up of incidents to be combined with other seemingly unrelated events to camouflage the ultimate objective.
Page 138-139 of file (page 7-8 of actual Joint Chiefs report)
A series of well coordinated incidents will be planned to take place in and around Guantanamo to give genuine appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces.
A. Incidents to establish a credible attack:
(1) Start rumors (many). Use clandestine radio.
(2) Land friendly Cubans in uniform "over-the-fence" to stage attack on base.
(3) Capture Cuban (friendly) saboteurs inside the base.
(4) Start riots near the base main gate (friendly Cubans).
(5) Blow up ammunition inside the base: start fires.
(6) Burn aircraft on air base (sabotage).
(7) Lob mortar shells from outside of base into base.
(8) Capture assault teams approaching from the sea or vicinity of Guantanamo City.
(9) Capture militia group which storms base.
(10) Sabotage ship in harbor; large fires – naphthalene.
(11) Sink ship near harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock-victims.
A "Remember the Maine" incident could be arranged: We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.
We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington.
Page 140 of file (page 9 of actual Joint Chiefs report)
Use of MIG type aircraft by US pilots could provide additional provocation. Harassment of civil air, attacks on surface shipping and destruction of US military drone aircraft by MIG type planes would be useful as complementary actions. Reasonable copies of the MIG could be produced from US resources in about three months.
Page 141 of file (page 10 of actual Joint Chiefs report)
Hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft should appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the government of Cuba.
It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner enroute from the United States. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday.
An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At the designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual aircraft would be converted to a drone.
The drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida. From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Eglin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will be transmitting on the international distress frequency a "MAY DAY" message stating he is under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft which will be triggered by radio signal.

The plan was proposed by senior U.S. Wikipedia:Department of Defense leaders, including the Wikipedia:Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lyman Louis Lemnitzer. The proposal was presented in a document entitled Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba,[4] a collection of draft Wikipedia:memoranda written by the Wikipedia:Department of Defense (DoD) and the Wikipedia:Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) representative to the Wikipedia:Caribbean Survey Group. The document was presented by the JCS to Wikipedia:Secretary of Defense Wikipedia:Robert McNamara on Wikipedia:March 13 with one paragraph approved, as a preliminary submission for planning purposes.

The previously secret document was originally made public on November 18, 1997 by the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board, a U.S. federal agency overseeing the release of government records related to John F. Kennedy's assassination. A total of about 1500 pages of once-secret military records covering 1962 to 1964 were concomitantly declassified by said Review Board.

"Appendix to Enclosure A" and "Annex to Appendix to Enclosure A" of the Northwoods document were first published online by the Wikipedia:National Security Archive on November 6, 1998 in a joint venture with Wikipedia:CNN as part of CNN's 1998 Cold War Wikipedia:television documentary series — specifically, as a documentation supplement to "Episode 10: Cuba," which aired on November 29, 1998.[5] "Annex to Appendix to Enclosure A" is the section of the document which contains the proposals to stage terrorist attacks.

The Northwoods document was published online in a more complete form (i.e., including cover memoranda) by the Wikipedia:National Security Archive on April 30, 2001.


Related Operation Mongoose proposals[edit]

In addition to Operation Northwoods, under the Operation Mongoose program the Department of Defense had a number of similar proposals to be taken against the Cuban regime of Fidel Castro.

Twelve of these proposals come from a February 2, 1962 memorandum entitled "Possible Actions to Provoke, Harass or Disrupt Cuba," written by Brig. Gen. William H. Craig and submitted to Brig. Gen. Wikipedia:Edward Lansdale, the commander of the Operation Mongoose project. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] (Note: the foregoing links to Brig. Gen. Craig's memo are at this time offline. The following are backup links: [7] [8] [9] [10] [11].)

The memorandum outlines Operation Bingo, a plan to, in its words, "create an incident which has the appearance of an attack on U.S. facilities (GMO) in Cuba, thus providing an excuse for use of U.S. military might to overthrow the current government of Cuba."

It also includes Operation Dirty Trick, a plot to blame Castro if the 1962 Mercury manned space flight carrying John Glenn crashed, saying "The objective is to provide irrevocable proof that, should the MERCURY manned orbit flight fail, the fault lies with the Communists et al Cuba [sic]." It continues, "This to be accomplished by manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans."

Even after General Wikipedia:Lyman Lemnitzer lost his job as the Wikipedia:Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Wikipedia:Joint Chiefs of Staff still planned pretext operations at least into 1963. A different Department of Defense policy paper created in 1963 (reported on by the Associated Press on January 29, 1998 [12] and later in journalist Wikipedia:James Bamford's book Body of Secrets, published April 24, 2001[13]) discussed a plan to make it appear that Cuba had attacked a member of the Wikipedia:Organization of American States (OAS) so that the Wikipedia:United States could retaliate. The Pentagon document says of one of the scenarios, "A contrived 'Cuban' attack on an OAS member could be set up, and the attacked state could be urged to take measures of self-defense and request assistance from the U.S. and OAS." The plan expresses confidence that by this action "the U.S. could almost certainly obtain the necessary two-thirds support among OAS members for collective action against Cuba."

Included in the nations the Joint Chiefs suggested as targets Wikipedia:United States for covert attacks were: Wikipedia:Jamaica and Trinidad-Tobago. Since both were members of the British Commonwealth, the Joint Chiefs hoped that by secretly attacking them and then falsely blaming Cuba, the United States could incite the people of the Wikipedia:United Kingdom into supporting a war against Castro.[14] As the Pentagon report noted, "Any of the contrived situations described above are inherently, extremely risky in our democratic system in which security can be maintained, after the fact, with very great difficulty. If the decision should be made to set up a contrived situation it should be one in which participation by U.S. personnel is limited only to the most highly trusted covert personnel. This suggests the infeasibility of the use of military units for any aspect of the contrived situation."

The Pentagon report even suggested covertly paying a person in the Castro government to attack the United States: "The only area remaining for consideration then would be to bribe one of Castro's subordinate commanders to initiate an attack on [the U.S. Navy base at] Guantanamo."


Reaction[edit]

It has been reported that Wikipedia:John F. Kennedy personally rejected the Northwoods proposal, but no official record of this exists. The proposal was sent for approval to the Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, but was not implemented. President Kennedy removed General Wikipedia:Lyman Lemnitzer as Chairman of the Wikipedia:Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly afterward, although he became Wikipedia:Supreme Allied Commander of Wikipedia:NATO in January 1963.

The continuing push against the Cuban government by internal elements of the U.S. military and intelligence community (the failed Wikipedia:Bay of Pigs Invasion, Wikipedia:The Cuban Project, etc.) prompted President John F. Kennedy to attempt to rein in burgeoning hardline anti-Communist sentiment that was intent on proactive, aggressive action against communist movements around the globe. After the Bay of Pigs, John F. Kennedy fired then CIA director Wikipedia:Allen W. Dulles, Deputy Director Wikipedia:Charles P. Cabell, as well as Deputy Director Wikipedia:Richard Bissell, and turned his attention towards Wikipedia:Vietnam.

Kennedy also took steps to bring discipline to the CIA's Wikipedia:Cold War and Wikipedia:paramilitary operations by drafting a National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) which called for the shift of Cold War operations to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Wikipedia:The Pentagon as well as a major change in the role of the CIA to exclusively deal in intelligence gathering.


Conclusions[edit]

The scale and depth of its betrayal of human values is among the best direct evidence of the intent of US intelligence and the military to dominate the world at any cost; at one time, they did stoop this low. Even if this one plot against humanity is considered on its own, the possibility, at the very least, therefore exists that their schemes continue. When the historical record is considered in its entirety; those CIA crimes that are exposed, let alone the ones that have escaped investigation, still make a list with no discernible end. There is only a pause for the current CIA director to lie again; apologize and tell the world that this latest confession will be the last. It would therefore seem prudent to consider US world domination to be a probability, rather than a possibility, and to prepare accordingly.

The sinking of the Maine and the Lusitania, the inaction in the face of clear warnings about Pearl Harbor, the fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident (WP), the pretexts for the Invasion of Panama (WP) and the World Trade Center demolition (WP) are evidence for a continuous stream of false flag operations and escalation in which innocents and even friendlies die for the purposes of propaganda, operations that are no more than business as usual for those who instigate them. It does not seem to be necessary that the military were involved at the Pentagon and WTC-the Air Force had been removed from the scene on exercises, the CIA has a well-known degree of covert and hard-to-trace access to military planes. The US nationalist, imperial thinkers had shown themselves to be capable of conceiving of such a plot: Northwoods, the Project for a New American Century (WP), and other related documents show a steady devolution of morals and evolution of deception. But they also show plans that have in common, particulars of the 911 plan itself.

"Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor" -
PNAC-Rebuilding America's Defenses-Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century[6]

Operations, both covert and overt, continue after the threat of communism (to capitalists) has ended. Rather than merely considering this to be merely a bizarre and unfortunate mutation of US military thought, it is more likely that the Wars for Oil are in fact a battle, albeit a penultimate one, in the Wars for Capitalism (and thus, Wars for Inequality). The new threat is that the CIA's operations are more likely to be carried out in the open, with support not only manufactured by, but largely composed purely of, a prevalence of propaganda over true popular opinion. However, since we do not have to merely assume that the CIA has not given up covert operations entirely, but have evidence of it in Iran and China, we must also speculate that there are other actions continuing. The Arab Spring, in particular, shows signs of having been in effect (opportunistic adventurism gaining control of Libya entirely over UN objections), if not in origin (if a person can convince themselves to set themselves on fire, surely someone trained in persuasion could convince them instead), part of the US plan of Seven countries in five years


See also[edit]

Further reading[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ↑ [James Bamford, Body of Secrets (Doubleday; 1st edition, 24 April 2001) ISBN 0-385-49907-8
  2. ↑ Northwoods gwu.edu
  3. ↑ Operation Northwoods -Want to Know
  4. ↑ Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba. Wikipedia:National Security Archive.
  5. ↑ Cold War - Episode 10: Cuba. Wikipedia:CNN.
  6. ↑ PNAC -full text
  7. ↑ http://www.coha.org/NEW_PRESS_RELEASES/Matt%20Ward/MW_Appendix_A.htm, Accessed February 2006

External links[edit]

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