In the spring of 1962, the most senior military officer in the United States walked a typed memo into the office of the Secretary of Defense. The cover sheet was marked Top Secret. The memo proposed a list of things the U.S. military could do to start a war with Cuba.
One of the items on the list was sinking a boat full of Cuban refugees off the coast of Florida. Another was bombing a building in Miami. Another was shooting down an empty drone aircraft over open water and pretending it was a passenger jet full of college students. The plan had a sentence in it that I want you to read twice, because the first time it doesn’t quite register. It says — and this is verbatim, from the declassified document — “Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.”
Now sit down, because this one is going to take a minute.
The plan had a name. They called it Operation Northwoods. It was drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, signed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs himself — General Lyman Lemnitzer — and presented to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962. The official title of the document was “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba.” The opening line stated the goal plainly: provide a believable pretext for invading Cuba. Everything that followed was a menu.
The menu was not vague. It included staging a “Communist Cuban terror campaign” in Miami, in other Florida cities, and in Washington, D.C. It included blowing up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and conducting mock funerals for the imaginary dead — actual processions, with caskets, in front of cameras — to give the press something to photograph. It included hijacking civilian airliners by remote control, after secretly swapping the real passenger plane for a repainted military drone. It included the assassination of Cuban exiles living in the United States. It included, and I am still not making this up, an entirely separate proposal that the same Joint Chiefs were quietly running on the side called Operation Dirty Trick. That one was the contingency plan for what to do if astronaut John Glenn’s Mercury capsule failed during launch in February of 1962. The objective, in the document’s own words, was to “provide irrevocable proof” that “the fault lies with the Communists et al Cuba.” The Joint Chiefs of the United States military had a written, filed plan to blame Fidel Castro if John Glenn died in space.
Glenn made it home safely. Operation Dirty Trick went back in the drawer. Operation Northwoods went up the chain.
It landed on President Kennedy’s desk three days after Lemnitzer signed it. On March 16, 1962, Kennedy and Lemnitzer met in the Oval Office. According to the Lansdale memo from that meeting, Kennedy told the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — to his face — that the United States was not going to use military force against Cuba. He didn’t say maybe. He didn’t say later. He said no. Then he sent the general back to the Pentagon and started looking for a reason to remove him. Within months, Lemnitzer was out as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Here’s where the story gets the kind of ending you don’t quite know what to do with. Lemnitzer wasn’t court-martialed. He wasn’t disgraced. He wasn’t even quietly retired. In January of 1963, less than a year after proposing the United States military stage terror attacks against its own civilians, Lyman Lemnitzer was promoted. He was named Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. The man who signed Operation Northwoods spent the next six years running the entire military alliance of the Western world.
The document went into a vault. It stayed in that vault for thirty-five years. It was finally pried loose in November of 1997, not by a journalist and not by Congress, but by the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board — a federal agency created to release every government file that touched the JFK assassination. Northwoods got pulled along in the dragnet. The author and journalist James Bamford was the first person to really sit with what the documents said. In his 2001 book Body of Secrets, he called Operation Northwoods “the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government.” Parts of it, he said, “would have amounted to treason.”
So here’s what we know, and here’s what we don’t know. We know the plan existed. We know it was signed. We know exactly what was in it because the Pentagon’s own typewriter put it there in 1962 and the National Security Archive has the scans online to this day. We know Kennedy said no. What nobody can fully explain is what was going on in the room when fifteen of the most senior military officers in America agreed, in writing, that murdering their own citizens was an acceptable way to start a war. The minutes of that meeting were never released. The conversations were never recorded. The men who signed it are all dead.
The document is still there. You can read it yourself. It’s about a hundred pages, depending on which annex you count, and it’s online for free. The casualty-list line is on page eight.
I’m just telling you what’s in the file.
Conspiracy Confirmed
