Operation Northwoods

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Operation Northwoods memoranda (March 13, 1962).[1]

Operation Northwoods, or Northwoods, was a false-flag conspiracy plan, proposed within the United States government in 1962. The plan called for CIA or other operatives to commit apparent acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Castro-led Cuba. One plan was to "develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington".

This operation is especially notable in that it included plans for hijackings and bombings followed by the use of phony evidence that would blame the terrorist acts on a foreign government, namely Cuba.

The plan stated:

The desired resultant from the execution of this plan would be to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba and to develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere.

Operation Northwoods was drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and signed by then-Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer, and sent to the Secretary of Defense.

Several other proposals were listed, including the real or simulated actions against various U.S military and civilian targets. Operation Northwoods was part of the U.S. government's Cuban Project (Operation Mongoose) anti-Castro initiative. It was never officially accepted or executed.

Contents

[edit] Origins and public release

The main proposal was presented in a document entitled "Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba (TS)," a collection of draft memoranda written by the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) representative to the Caribbean Survey Group.[1] (The parenthetical "TS" in the title of the document is an initialism for "Top Secret.") The document was presented by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13 as a preliminary submission for planning purposes. The Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended that both the covert and overt aspects of any such operation be assigned to them.

The previously secret document was originally made public on November 18, 1997, by the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board,[2] a U.S. federal agency overseeing the release of government records related to John F. Kennedy's assassination.[3][4][5][6][7] A total 1521 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 National Security Archive on November 6, 1998 in a joint venture with CNN as part of CNN's 1998 Cold War television documentary series[8][9]—specifically, as a documentation supplement to "Episode 10: Cuba," which aired on November 29, 1998.[10][11] "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 National Security Archive on April 30, 2001.[12]

[edit] Content

In response to a request for pretexts for military intervention by the Chief of Operations of the Cuba Project, Brig. Gen. Edward Lansdale, the document lists methods (with, in some cases, outlined plans) the authors believed would garner public and international support for U.S. military intervention in Cuba. These are staged attacks purporting to be of Cuban origin.

1. Since it would seem desirable to use legitimate provocation as the basis for US military intervention in Cuba a cover and deception plan, to include requisite preliminary actions such as has been developed in response to Task 33 c, could be executed as an initial effort to provoke Cuban reactions. Harassment plus deceptive actions to convince the Cubans of imminent invasion would be emphasized. Our military posture throughout execution of the plan will allow a rapid change from exercise to intervention if Cuban response justifies.

2. 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 (not in chronological order):

(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. Some damage to installations.

(8) Capture assault teams approaching from the sea or vicinity of Guantanamo City.

(9) Capture militia group which storms the base.

(10) Sabotage ship in harbor; large fires -- napthalene.

(11) Sink ship near harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock-victims (may be in lieu of (10)).

b. United States would respond by executing offensive operations to secure water and power supplies, destroying artillery and mortar emplacements which threaten the base.

c. Commence large scale United States military operations.

3. A "Remember the Maine" incident could be arranged in several forms:

a. We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba.

b. We could blow up a drone (unmanned) vessel anywhere in the Cuban waters. We could arrange to cause such incident in the vicinity of Havana or Santiago as a spectacular result of Cuban attack from the air or sea, or both. The presence of Cuban planes or ships merely investigating the intent of the vessel could be fairly compelling evidence that the ship was taken under attack. The nearness to Havana or Santiago would add credibility especially to those people that might have heard the blast or have seen the fire. The US could follow up with an air/sea rescue operation covered by US fighters to "evacuate" remaining members of the non-existent crew. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.

4. 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 refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute 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. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement, also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.

5. A "Cuban-based, Castro-supported" filibuster could be simulated against a neighboring Caribbean nation (in the vein of the 14th of June invasion of the Dominican Republic). We know that Castro is backing subversive efforts clandestinely against Haiti, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Nicaragua at present and possible others. These efforts can be magnified and additional ones contrived for exposure. For example, advantage can be taken of the sensitivity of the Dominican Air Force to intrusions within their national air space. "Cuban" B-26 or C-46 type aircraft could make cane-burning raids at night. Soviet Bloc incendiaries could be found. This could be coupled with "Cuban" messages to the Communist underground in the Dominican Republic and "Cuban" shipments of arm which would be found, or intercepted, on the beach.

6. 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. An F-86 properly painted would convince air passengers that they saw a Cuban MIG, especially if the pilot of the transport were to announce such fact. The primary drawback to this suggestion appears to be the security risk inherent in obtaining or modifying an aircraft. However, reasonable copies of the MIG could be produced from US resources in about three months.

7. Hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft should appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the government of Cuba. Concurrently, genuine defections of Cuban civil and military air and surface craft should be encouraged.

8. 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 to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight.

a. 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 a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone.

b. Take off times of 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 being 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. This will allow ICAO radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to tell the US what has happened to the aircraft instead of the US trying to "sell" the incident.

9. It is possible to create an incident which will make it appear that Communist Cuban MIGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack.

a. Approximately 4 or 5 F-101 aircraft will be dispatched in trail from Homestead AFB, Florida, to the vicinity of Cuba. Their mission will be to reverse course and simulate fakir aircraft for an air defense exercise in southern Florida. These aircraft would conduct variations of these flights at frequent Intervals. Crews would be briefed to remain at least 12 miles off the Cuban coast; however, they would be required to carry live ammunition in the event that hostile actions were taken by the Cuban MIGs.

b. On one such flight, a pre-briefed pilot would fly tail-end Charley at considerable interval between aircraft. While near the Cuban Island this pilot would broadcast that he had been jumped by MIGs and was going down. No other calls would be made. The pilot would then fly directly west at extremely low altitude and land at a secure base, an Eglin auxiliary. The aircraft would be met by the proper people, quickly stored and given a new tail number. The pilot who had performed the mission under an alias, would resume his proper identity and return to his normal place of business. The pilot and aircraft would then have disappeared.

c. At precisely the same time that the aircraft was presumably shot down a submarine or small surface craft would disburse F-101 parts, parachute, etc., at approximately 15 to 20 miles off the Cuban coast and depart. The pilots returning to Homestead would have a true story as far as they knew. Search ships and aircraft could be dispatched and parts of aircraft found.

[edit] James Bamford summary

Journalist James Bamford summarized Operation Northwoods in his April 24, 2001 book Body of Secrets:

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.[13]

[edit] Related Operation Mongoose proposals

In addition to Operation Northwoods, under the Operation Mongoose program the U.S. 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. Edward Lansdale, the commander of the Operation Mongoose project.[5][6][7][14]

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 Lemnitzer lost his job as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Joint Chiefs of Staff still planned false-flag pretext operations at least into 1963. A different U.S. Department of Defense policy paper created in 1963 discussed a plan to make it appear that Cuba had attacked a member of the Organization of American States (OAS) so that the United States could retaliate. The U.S. Department of Defense 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."[13][15]

Included in the nations the Joint Chiefs suggested as targets for covert attacks were 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 United Kingdom into supporting a war against Castro.[13] As the U.S. Department of Defense 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."[13]

The U.S. Department of Defense 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."[13]

[edit] Reaction

It has been shown that President John F. Kennedy personally rejected the Northwoods proposal. A JCS/Pentagon document (Ed Lansdale memo) dated March 16, 1962 titled MEETING WITH THE PRESIDENT, 16 MARCH 1962 reads: "General Lemnitzer commented that the military had contingency plans for US intervention. Also it had plans to for creating plausible pretexts to use force, with the pretext either attacks on US aircraft or a Cuban action in Latin America for which we could retaliate. The President said bluntly that we were not discussing the use of military force, that General Lemnitzer might find the U.S so engaged in Berlin or elsewhere that he couldn't use the contemplated 4 divisions in Cuba."[16] The proposal was sent for approval to the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, but was not implemented. Kennedy removed Lemnitzer as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly afterward, although he became Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in January 1963.

The continuing push against the Cuban government by internal elements of the U.S. military and intelligence community (the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Project, etc.) prompted 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, Kennedy fired then CIA director Allen W. Dulles, Deputy Director Charles P. Cabell, and Deputy Director Richard Bissell, and turned his attention towards Vietnam.

Kennedy also took steps to bring discipline to the CIA's Cold War and 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 the U.S. Department of Defense as well as a major change in the role of the CIA to exclusively deal in intelligence gathering.

On August 3, 2001, the National Assembly of People's Power of Cuba (the main legislative body of the Republic of Cuba) issued a statement referring to Operation Northwoods and Operation Mongoose wherein it condemned such U.S. government plans.[17]

[edit] See also

Cuba portal

[edit] Further reading

  • Jon Elliston, editor, Psywar on Cuba: The Declassified History of U.S. Anti-Castro Propaganda (Melbourne, Australia and New York: Ocean Press, 1999), ISBN 1-876175-09-5.
  • James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency From the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century (New York: Doubleday, first edition, April 24, 2001), ISBN 0-385-49907-8. Here is an excerpt from Chapter 4: "Fists" of this book.

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, "Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba (TS)," U.S. Department of Defense, March 13, 1962. The Operation Northwoods document in PDF format on the website of the independent, non-governmental research institute the National Security Archive at the George Washington University Gelman Library, Washington, D.C. Direct PDF links: here and here.
  2. ^ "The Records of the Assassination Records Review Board," National Archives and Records Administration.
  3. ^ "Media Advisory: National Archives Releases Additional Materials Reviewed by the Assassination Records Review Board," Assassination Records Review Board (a division of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration), November 17, 1997. A U.S. government press-release announcing the declassification of some 1500 pages of U.S. government documents from 1962-64 relating to U.S. policy towards Cuba, among which declassified documents included the Operation Northwoods document.
  4. ^ Jim Wolf, "Pentagon Planned 1960s Cuban 'Terror Campaign'," Reuters, November 18, 1997.
  5. ^ a b Mike Feinsilber, "At a tense time, plots abounded to humiliate Castro," Associated Press (AP), November 18, 1997; also available here.
  6. ^ a b Tim Weiner, "Documents Show Pentagon's Anti-Castro Plots During Kennedy Years," New York Times, November 19, 1997; appeared on the same date and by the same author in the New York Times itself as "Declassified Papers Show Anti-Castro Ideas Proposed to Kennedy," late edition—final, section A, pg. 25, column 1.
  7. ^ a b Jon Elliston, "Operation Mongoose: The PSYOP Papers," ParaScope, Inc., 1998.
  8. ^ "National Security Archive: COLD WAR: Documents," National Security Archive, September 27, 1998-January 24, 1999.
  9. ^ U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, "Appendix to Enclosure A: Memorandum for Chief of Operations, Cuba Project" and "Annex to Appendix to Enclosure A: Pretexts to Justify US Military Intervention in Cuba," U.S. Department of Defense, circa March 1962. First published online by the National Security Archive on November 6, 1998, as part of CNN's Cold War documentary series. "Annex to Appendix to Enclosure A" is the section of the Operation Northwoods document which contains the proposals to stage terrorist attacks.
  10. ^ "Episode 10: Cuba; Cuba: 1959-1968," CNN (Cable News Network LP, LLLP).
  11. ^ "Cold War Teacher Materials: Episodes," and "Educator Guide to CNN's COLD WAR Episode 10: Cuba," Turner Learning (Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.).
  12. ^ "Pentagon Proposed Pretexts for Cuba Invasion in 1962," National Security Archive, April 30, 2001.
  13. ^ a b c d e James Bamford, Chapter 4: "Fists" of Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency From the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century (New York: Doubleday, first edition, April 24, 2001), ISBN 0-385-49907-8. Here is an excerpt from Chapter 4: "Fists" of this book.
  14. ^ Memo from Brig. Gen. William Craig to Brig. Gen. Edward Lansdale, "Possible Actions to Provoke, Harass, or Disrupt Cuba," U.S. Department of Defense, February 2, 1962. The following are photoscans of this document in JPEG format: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4. (Note: the foregoing links to Brig. Gen. Craig's memo are at this time offline. The following are backup links: text in HTML; JPEG photoscans: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4.)
  15. ^ Mike Feinsilber, "Records Show Plan To Provoke Castro," Associated Press (AP), January 29, 1998.
  16. ^ Lansdale Memo of 16 Mar 1962. This memo records a high-level meeting in the White House 3 days after McNamara was presented with Operation Northwoods. [1]
  17. ^ "Statement by the National Assembly of People's Power of the Republic of Cuba," National Assembly of People's Power of Cuba, August 3, 2001; also available here.
  18. ^ Matthew Ward, COHA Research Fellow, "Appendix A: Timeline of Events" from "Washington Unmakes Guatemala, 1954," Council on Hemispheric Affairs, 2004. Accessed February 2006.

[edit] External links

See the above "References" section for documents cited in the body of this article.

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