COMMENTS FROM STREET TALK NETWORK ABOUT THIS POST-

1. Do your own research on the information provided and then come up with your own conclusions.

2. This article contains many names and other information that can be researched.

3. Trust your gut feeling on information provided as this post may contain slanted information.

4. There was about 39 years between Operation Northwoods and the events on 9/11 but the similarities of the two are so evident to many researchers.

5. It’s interesting that the use of drones was mentioned back in 1962 which was over 64 years ago.

6. Our own military government and CIA planned Operation Northwoods. It makes you wonder what else they had a part in such as Kennedy Assassination, 9/11, King Assassination, Drug Running, Mind Control, and so much more.

Operation Northwoods was a secret 1962 proposal in which the United States’ senior military leadership recommended manufacturing or manipulating violent incidents and blaming them on Fidel Castro’s government. The purpose was to create public and international support for a U.S. invasion of Cuba.

The surviving documents are authentic. They are not merely allegations found in books or on conspiracy websites. The central memorandum, dated March 13, 1962, was signed by General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and sent to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. It described proposals approved by the Joint Chiefs as a “preliminary submission suitable for planning purposes.”

The proposals included:

• Staging attacks against the U.S. naval base at
  Guantánamo Bay.
• Blowing up an American ship or an unmanned
  vessel.
• Publishing fabricated casualty lists.
• Sinking, or pretending to sink, a boat carrying
  Cuban refugees.
• Bombing locations in Miami, other Florida cities,
  and possibly Washington.
• Staging hijackings.
• Substituting a drone for a civilian airliner and
  destroying it over Cuba.
• Faking the shootdown of an American military
  aircraft.
• Using American pilots in aircraft disguised as
  Cuban MiGs.
• Manufacturing evidence tying the incidents to
  Castro.

The operation was never authorized or executed. No one died as a result of Operation Northwoods itself.

The complete declassified memorandum can be examined through the National Security Archive’s digital copy of the Northwoods documents.

The historical setting

Operation Northwoods emerged from the Kennedy administration’s continuing campaign against Castro after the disastrous CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961.

By late 1961, the administration had established the “Cuba Project,” better known as Operation Mongoose. Its purpose was to pressure, destabilize and ultimately remove Castro’s government through propaganda, economic disruption, intelligence activities, sabotage and support for anti-Castro resistance.

Operation Mongoose involved several parts of the government:

• The CIA conducted and supported covert
  operations.
• The Department of Defense developed military and
  paramilitary options.
• The State Department considered diplomatic and
  political consequences.
• Attorney General Robert Kennedy exercised
  considerable White House oversight.
• General Maxwell Taylor chaired the Special Group
  (Augmented), which supervised the project.
• Brigadier General Edward G. Lansdale served as
  chief of operations for the Cuba Project.
• CIA officer William K. Harvey headed the agency’s
  operational component, commonly called Task Force W.

Lansdale requested proposals that could provide a justification for direct American military intervention. The Joint Chiefs’ answer became Operation Northwoods. This chain of events is important. Northwoods was not an independent CIA plan secretly imposed upon the military. The surviving March 13 paper was a Department of Defense–Joint Chiefs proposal produced within the larger interagency Mongoose campaign.

What the Joint Chiefs wanted to accomplish

The document stated that the objective was to put the United States in the apparent position of suffering legitimate grievances from an irresponsible and dangerous Cuban government.

The planners wanted to influence three audiences:

1. The American public, which would have to support a war.

2. Foreign governments, particularly those in Latin America.

3. The United Nations, where the United States would need to defend its military actions.

4.

The paper explained that a single dramatic incident might not be sufficient. It therefore recommended an integrated, “time-phased” series of apparently unrelated events. Together, those events would create a public image of Cuba as an unpredictable aggressor.

The authors anticipated that selected incidents would be accompanied by:

• Fabricated or carefully managed evidence.
• Radio and newspaper coverage.
• Arrests of supposed Cuban agents.
• Prepared documents demonstrating supposed Cuban
  responsibility.
• Public funerals and casualty announcements.
• American diplomatic appeals based upon the
  manufactured evidence.

The military also wanted the incidents to unfold during the following several months, before closer Soviet military commitments to Cuba made an invasion more dangerous.

1. Provoke an actual Cuban reaction

The first proposal was a cover-and-deception campaign intended to convince Castro that an American invasion was imminent.

American forces would conduct harassment and deceptive military preparations around Cuba. The hope was that Cuban forces would react defensively or aggressively. If Cuba fired on American forces, the United States could present that action as legitimate provocation.

This differed from some of the more extreme proposals because the initial American deception was intended to produce a genuine Cuban response. Nevertheless, the underlying purpose would remain concealed: American actions would have been deliberately designed to make Cuba react.

The U.S. military would maintain enough forces nearby to turn the exercise quickly into an intervention if the Cuban response supplied the desired justification.

2. A manufactured attack on Guantánamo Bay

The second proposal was an elaborate series of incidents around the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay. The events were to appear to be attacks committed by hostile Cuban forces.

The suggested actions included:

Starting rumors

Clandestine radio stations and other covert channels would circulate reports that a Cuban attack was approaching. This would establish a narrative before the physical incidents began.

Using friendly Cubans in Cuban uniforms

Anti-Castro Cubans cooperating with the United States could be landed near the base dressed as Cuban military personnel. They would stage an attack or make it appear that Castro’s forces had crossed into the installation.

Capturing friendly “saboteurs”

Cooperating Cubans would permit themselves to be captured inside the base. Their uniforms, equipment, stories or planted documents would supposedly demonstrate Cuban responsibility.

Manufacturing riots at the main gate

Friendly Cubans would create disturbances outside the entrance to the base. The disorders could then be portrayed as Cuban-organized violence directed against American personnel.

Blowing up ammunition and starting fires

Explosions would be set off within the base’s ammunition supplies. Fires and damage would be attributed to Cuban saboteurs.

This was not merely a propaganda proposal. Explosions around ammunition and occupied military facilities would have carried an obvious danger of accidental deaths, even if planners intended to control the damage.

Burning an aircraft

An American aircraft at the base would be sabotaged or burned and its destruction blamed upon Cuba.

Firing mortar shells into the base

Mortar rounds would be lobbed from outside the installation. The memorandum specified that there should be some damage to American installations.

Capturing supposed assault teams

Cooperating forces posing as Cuban attackers could approach the base by sea or from the Guantánamo City area and then be captured.

Staging an attack by Cuban militia

A supposed Cuban militia group would storm or attempt to storm the base. The group would actually consist of friendly personnel under covert control.

Sabotaging a ship in the harbor

A vessel would be set on fire in Guantánamo harbor, possibly using a flammable compound such as napalm or thickened gasoline.

Sinking a ship and holding funerals

The planners suggested sinking a vessel near the harbor entrance. Public funerals could then be conducted for “mock victims.”

After these incidents, American forces would retaliate by seizing the base’s water and power supplies and destroying Cuban artillery or mortar positions threatening Guantánamo. These limited actions were then to lead into large-scale American military operations.

In effect, the plan outlined a ladder of escalation:

3. A “Remember the Maine” incident

The memorandum explicitly invoked the 1898 destruction of the USS Maine in Havana harbor, an event that helped generate American support for the Spanish-American War.

The Northwoods authors proposed two versions of a new “Maine” incident.

Blow up an American ship in Guantánamo Bay

One version stated directly that the United States could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantánamo Bay and blame Cuba.

The surviving text does not explain whether the ship would have a real crew aboard, a cooperating crew evacuated beforehand or a fictitious crew. For that reason, it is not possible to state conclusively that the Joint Chiefs approved deliberately killing American sailors in this particular proposal.

Nevertheless, deliberately exploding an American naval vessel and presenting it as a Cuban attack was plainly contemplated.

Destroy an unmanned vessel near a Cuban city

A less dangerous but equally deceptive alternative involved an unmanned drone ship. It could be blown up near Havana or Santiago, where Cuban aircraft or ships would likely investigate it.

The mere presence of Cuban forces in the area could be photographed or otherwise presented as evidence that Cuba had attacked the vessel.

American ships and aircraft would then stage a rescue mission, supposedly looking for survivors from a crew that had never existed. U.S. fighters would provide dramatic air cover.

Finally, newspapers would publish casualty lists. The authors expected reports of dead American servicemen to produce a “helpful wave of national indignation.”

This proposal illustrates how extensively the planners were prepared to manipulate not only an incident but also its aftermath:

• A destroyed drone would substitute for an
  occupied ship.
• A nonexistent crew would be reported as missing
  or dead.
• A rescue operation would be staged.
• Casualty lists would be given to the news media.
• Cuban forces investigating the vessel could be
  presented as its attackers.

4. A fabricated Cuban terrorist campaign in American cities

The Joint Chiefs proposed developing what the document called a “Communist Cuban terror campaign” in Miami, other Florida cities and possibly Washington, D.C.

Suggested actions included exploding plastic bombs in carefully selected locations. The document did not identify the proposed targets or specify whether they would be evacuated beforehand.

The planners also proposed:

• Arresting supposed Cuban agents.
• Producing prepared documents establishing Cuban
  responsibility.
• Directing violence against Cuban refugees.
• Attempting to kill selected refugees.
• Actually wounding people in some incidents so the
  events would receive extensive publicity.

The reference to wounding refugees is especially serious. It shows that at least part of Northwoods went beyond harmless simulation. Although the document did not approve a detailed target list, it contemplated real physical injuries as a means of influencing public opinion.

It would be inaccurate, however, to claim that Northwoods contained a fully developed program for indiscriminately killing large numbers of Americans. The surviving paper was a preliminary list of possibilities. Some relied on simulation, aliases and unmanned equipment; others created an obvious potential for real injury or death.

5. Sinking a boat carrying Cuban refugees

The document proposed sinking “a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida,” either actually or through simulation.

The phrase “real or simulated” is disturbing because it leaves two different possibilities:

• A controlled deception involving an empty or
  unmanned boat and fabricated passengers.
• The actual destruction of a refugee vessel.

The paper did not specify whether “real” meant genuinely sinking a boat after removing its passengers or sinking an occupied vessel. Consequently, claims that the Joint Chiefs explicitly ordered the murder of a boatload of refugees go beyond what the surviving words conclusively establish.

What is beyond dispute is that the planners wanted Americans and the international community to believe Castro’s forces had destroyed refugees fleeing Cuba.

6. Attacks on Cuban refugees in the United States

Northwoods proposed fostering attempts on the lives of Cuban refugees living in the United States.

Some refugees might be wounded in highly publicized incidents. Supposed Castro agents could then be arrested and incriminating records planted or produced.

This proposal was intended to influence both the American public and the politically important anti-Castro Cuban community in Florida. Refugees who had fled Castro would appear to remain in danger even after reaching the United States.

7. A fabricated Cuban attack on another Caribbean country

The Joint Chiefs considered simulating a Castro-supported expedition against a neighboring nation such as the Dominican Republic.

The idea drew on genuine Cuban support for revolutionary movements in Latin America but proposed magnifying or inventing evidence.

Possible elements included:

• Aircraft resembling Cuban B-26 or C-46 planes
  conducting nighttime raids.
• Burning sugar-cane fields.
• Planting Soviet-bloc incendiary devices at the
  scene.
• Fabricating Cuban radio messages to underground
  Communist organizations.
• Planting or intercepting supposed Cuban arms
  shipments on a beach.
• Portraying a local revolutionary movement as
  being armed and directed by Havana.

The purpose was to show that Castro endangered not only the United States but the entire Western Hemisphere. An attack on another country could help the administration obtain support from the Organization of American States.

8. American aircraft disguised as Cuban MiGs

The Joint Chiefs proposed using American pilots to fly aircraft made to resemble Soviet-built MiG fighters used by Cuba.

Possible missions included:

• Harassing civilian aircraft.
• Attacking surface ships.
• Destroying unmanned American military aircraft.
• Flying close enough to passenger planes that
  witnesses would report seeing Cuban fighters.

An American F-86 could be repainted to resemble a Cuban MiG. The pilot of a passenger aircraft could announce that passengers were seeing a Cuban military plane, reinforcing the witnesses’ interpretation.

The authors acknowledged that obtaining or modifying an aircraft posed a security problem. They estimated, however, that a reasonable MiG imitation could be produced from American resources within approximately three months.

These disguised aircraft could generate eyewitness testimony from passengers who had no idea that they were taking part in a deception.

9. Staged hijackings

The plan proposed a continuing series of apparent Cuban hijacking attempts against:

• Civilian aircraft.
• Civilian or commercial ships.
• Possibly American military transportation.

These incidents were to look like harassment condoned by Castro’s government. At the same time, genuine Cuban defections by aircraft and ships would be encouraged. Combining real defections with staged hijackings would make it more difficult for observers to separate authentic events from manufactured ones.

10. Destroying a drone disguised as a civilian airliner

This is perhaps the most frequently discussed Northwoods proposal.

The object was to make it appear that a Cuban MiG had shot down a chartered civilian airliner traveling from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The route would be selected so that it crossed Cuba.

The supposed passengers might be described as college students traveling on vacation or as another sympathetic group likely to generate public outrage.

The operation would work as follows:

1. A civilian aircraft belonging to a CIA-controlled proprietary organization would be selected.

2. A second aircraft would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate.

3. The duplicate would carry cooperating passengers traveling under aliases.

4. The original registered aircraft would be converted into an unmanned drone.

5. Both aircraft would take off at coordinated times.

6. They would rendezvous south of Florida.

7. The passenger-carrying aircraft would descend to low altitude and secretly return to an auxiliary field at Eglin Air Force Base.

8. The passengers would be removed and the aircraft restored to its original appearance.

9. The unmanned drone would continue along the civilian flight plan.

10. Over Cuba, it would transmit a false Mayday message reporting an attack by Cuban MiGs.

11. A radio signal would destroy the drone.

12. International and regional radio stations would hear the distress call and report the apparent destruction independently.

The document emphasized that this arrangement would permit other radio stations to tell the United States what appeared to have happened. That would be more believable than having the American government introduce the story itself.

An important factual distinction must be preserved: the Northwoods airliner proposal did not call for killing the college students or other passengers. They were to be secretly removed before the drone was destroyed. The public, however, would be led to believe that they had died.

11. Faking the shootdown of a U.S. Air Force fighter

The Joint Chiefs also proposed making it appear that Cuban MiGs had destroyed an American F-101 fighter over international waters.

Several F-101s would fly from Homestead Air Force Base toward Cuba as part of what crews believed was an air-defense exercise. The pilots would normally remain at least twelve miles from the Cuban coast.

On a selected flight:

1. A prebriefed pilot flying behind the formation would report that Cuban MiGs had attacked him.

2. He would broadcast that he was going down.

3. He would then fly west at extremely low altitude to avoid detection.

4. He would land at a secure auxiliary airfield.

5. The aircraft would be hidden and given a different tail number.

6. The pilot, who had operated under an alias, would return to his regular identity.

7. At the supposed crash site, a submarine or small ship would scatter aircraft parts and a parachute.

8. Search aircraft and ships would recover the planted wreckage.

The other pilots would not be told the complete truth. They could therefore provide sincere accounts of hearing the distress call and losing contact with the missing aircraft.

Once again, the proposal combined staged physical evidence with unwitting witnesses.

Related proposals: Operation Bingo and “Dirty Trick”

Northwoods was not the only proposal of this kind produced during Operation Mongoose.

A February 2, 1962 memorandum by Brigadier General William H. Craig included several suggested actions. Two are especially notable.

Operation Bingo

Operation Bingo proposed creating an incident that appeared to be a Cuban attack on American facilities at Guantánamo. The staged attack would provide an excuse for American military forces to overthrow Castro.

This anticipated the more detailed Guantánamo scenarios incorporated into Northwoods.

Operation “Dirty Trick”

This proposal concerned John Glenn’s Mercury orbital flight. If the space mission failed and Glenn was killed, the United States would manufacture evidence blaming Cuba and the Communist bloc for the disaster.

It apparently did not propose sabotaging Glenn’s flight. Instead, it contemplated exploiting an actual accidental failure by falsely attributing it to Communist electronic interference or other hostile action.

Glenn’s February 20, 1962 mission succeeded, so the proposed deception was never relevant.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff in March 1962

The Joint Chiefs at the time were:

The group is identified together in an official John F. Kennedy Presidential Library photograph of Kennedy and the Joint Chiefs. The Defense Department’s official history of the chairmanship also identifies Lemnitzer, Decker, Anderson, LeMay and Shoup as the service leadership of that period in The Chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1949–2019.

Lemnitzer signed the March 13 transmittal “For the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” The paper says the Joint Chiefs had considered the attached proposals and recommended forwarding them to McNamara for approval and transmission to Lansdale.

This establishes institutional JCS endorsement of the preliminary submission. The surviving pages do not tell us which individual chief originated or personally favored each particular scenario. It would therefore be unsafe to attribute the airliner plan, for example, specifically to LeMay or the Guantánamo plan specifically to Anderson without additional documentary evidence.

How the CIA was involved

The CIA’s involvement must be described carefully.

The broader Cuba operation was interagency

Northwoods arose inside Operation Mongoose, an interagency campaign in which the CIA played a central operational role. CIA personnel, facilities, front organizations, aircraft, Cuban exile networks and propaganda capabilities would have been essential to many contemplated covert activities.

Lansdale requested the proposals

Brigadier General Edward Lansdale, as chief of operations for the Cuba Project, asked the Joint Chiefs to provide possible pretexts for military intervention.

Although Lansdale had a long history of intelligence and covert-action work, he was a U.S. Air Force officer and Pentagon official—not a CIA officer at the time of Northwoods.

The civilian-airliner proposal expressly mentioned a CIA proprietary

The airliner scenario called for using an aircraft belonging to a “CIA proprietary organization” in the Miami area. A proprietary was a company secretly owned or controlled by the agency and used to provide cover, transportation or logistical support.

This is direct evidence that at least one Northwoods concept anticipated using CIA-controlled assets.

CIA resources would likely have been required

The proposals involving Cuban agents, refugees, false documents, clandestine radio, covert aircraft and anti-Castro organizations overlapped with capabilities maintained by the CIA, particularly its Miami station.

Nevertheless, the surviving Northwoods memorandum does not prove that CIA Director John McCone or the CIA’s leadership approved the Joint Chiefs’ complete list. In fact, Lemnitzer’s cover letter assumed that other agencies would make their own submissions and recommended that responsibility for both overt and covert military operations be assigned to the Joint Chiefs.

The National Security Archive summarizes the rivalry clearly: Lemnitzer wanted the Joint Chiefs, rather than the CIA, to control the military and paramilitary aspects of the contemplated plan. See the Archive’s historical discussion, “The Cuban Missile Crisis at 60”.

The most defensible conclusion is:

Northwoods was authored and endorsed as a preliminary Joint Chiefs–Defense Department proposal, developed in response to an interagency Mongoose request. It anticipated CIA assets and existed within a campaign in which the CIA was deeply involved, but the released document does not establish formal CIA approval of every Northwoods proposal.

Kennedy’s reaction

Popular accounts frequently say that Lemnitzer personally placed the entire Northwoods document in front of President Kennedy and that Kennedy rejected it on the spot. The historical record is somewhat less direct.

The March 13 memorandum was formally addressed to Secretary of Defense McNamara—not Kennedy. No surviving record provides a page-by-page White House conversation in which Kennedy responds individually to every Northwoods proposal.

Three days later, on March 16, Kennedy met with senior officials concerning the Cuba Project. Participants included Lemnitzer, McNamara’s deputy Roswell Gilpatric, CIA Director John McCone, Maxwell Taylor, Attorney General Robert Kennedy and McGeorge Bundy.

Lansdale’s memorandum recording the meeting states that Lemnitzer said the military possessed contingency plans for intervention and plans for creating plausible pretexts. Examples mentioned included attacks on American aircraft or a Cuban action elsewhere in Latin America that would permit retaliation.

Kennedy’s response was blunt: they were not discussing the use of American military force. He warned that the United States might need its available divisions in Berlin or another crisis and could not assume they would be available for an invasion of Cuba.

Another contemporary notation records Kennedy’s skepticism that circumstances would arise that would justify overt American military action. It explicitly stated that no decision approving the use of U.S. forces was expressed or implied, although contingency planning could continue. These records appear in the State Department’s official Foreign Relations of the United States collection.

Thus Kennedy did not authorize Northwoods, and no integrated Northwoods operation was implemented.

It is fair to say Kennedy rejected the path toward war for which Northwoods was designed. It is harder to prove that he studied every annex and personally rejected every item in a single recorded confrontation.

What happened to Lemnitzer?

Kennedy did not renew Lemnitzer for another term as chairman. General Maxwell Taylor replaced him on October 1, 1962.

This is sometimes presented as proof that Kennedy fired Lemnitzer specifically because of Northwoods. That causal claim is not securely established by the surviving records. Kennedy and his military leadership had broader disagreements involving Cuba, Berlin, nuclear strategy and civil-military relations.

Lemnitzer was also not disgraced or expelled from military service. He subsequently became:

• Commander in Chief of the U.S. European Command.
• NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe.

His continued assignment to one of the nation’s most important military commands makes the simple claim that Kennedy “fired him for Northwoods” misleading.

Operation Northwoods and September 11

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, writers and researchers frequently compared Northwoods with theories alleging that elements of the American government allowed or orchestrated 9/11.

The comparison usually rests on several superficial similarities:

Northwoods unquestionably proves that, in 1962, the highest uniformed military body in the United States was willing to recommend deceptive operations involving fabricated terrorism and false evidence as possible pretexts for war.

But that historical fact does not prove that 9/11 was a Northwoods-type operation.

The official 9/11 Commission did not find evidence that the U.S. government planned or conducted the attacks. Its investigation attributed them to al-Qaeda under Osama bin Laden. No authenticated operational order, financing record, participant testimony or comparable documentary trail has established that Northwoods was revived for 9/11.

Some academic and governmental studies of conspiracy theories have mentioned Northwoods as an example of a once-secret proposal that turned out to be genuine. Their point is generally that the existence of real government conspiracies can make later allegations appear plausible to the public. That is different from an official finding that Northwoods and 9/11 were operationally connected.

A sound historical conclusion is:

• Documented: Northwoods proposed manufacturing incidents, destroying unmanned
  aircraft and vessels, creating false casualties and blaming Cuba to
  justify military action.
• Documented: The plan reached Secretary McNamara as a JCS-approved preliminary
  proposal and was not implemented.
• Reasonable comparison: Both Northwoods and post-9/11 policy debates
  concern how traumatic attacks can produce public support for war.
• Not established: That Northwoods was a blueprint used on
  September 11.
• Not established: That the Joint Chiefs or CIA executed the 9/11
  attacks.
• Not established: That Kennedy’s rejection of Northwoods caused
  his assassination.

Why the documents matter

Operation Northwoods remains historically significant even without attaching it to unproven theories.

It demonstrates that senior officials were prepared to discuss:

• Deceiving Congress, the public, allies and the
  United Nations.
• Planting physical and documentary evidence.
• Exploiting unwitting witnesses.
• Publishing fictitious casualty lists.
• Creating or simulating terrorism inside the
  United States.
• Endangering refugees and possibly inflicting real
  injuries.
• Using front companies and disguised aircraft.
• Transforming manufactured incidents into a case
  for war.

At the same time, the episode demonstrates the importance of civilian control over the military. The proposals did not automatically become national policy merely because the Joint Chiefs supported submitting them for planning. Presidential and civilian authorization was still required—and was not given.

Operation Northwoods therefore should neither be dismissed as fantasy nor exaggerated beyond its documentary record. Its real contents are serious enough: America’s senior military leadership placed its institutional approval on a preliminary plan to manufacture apparent Cuban aggression, deceive the public and create the political conditions for an invasion that President Kennedy was unwilling to authorize.

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