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December, 2004
Couldn't Happen In America?
Operation Northwoods Almost Did
By Larry Kelley
"...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."
--from the "Project for a New American Century (PNAC) document, written by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other members of current Bush Administration in 1997.
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In March 1962, President John F. Kennedy was presented with a plan approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to overthrow Cuba's new Communist leader Fidel Castro. Code named "Operation Northwoods," the plan included the orchestration of violent terrorism in US. cities, the shooting down of US planes filled with American citizens, blowing up American ships and even the killing an American astronaut.
Some or all of these scenarios would by carried out covertly by the US government to create public support for a war against Cuba by blaming Castro. The Joint Chiefs claimed, "casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation."
The operation would have gone forward except for one small detail: it required the signature of President Kennedy. But JFK refused to approve the proposal which had gone undisclosed for almost 40 years until it was declassified by President Bill Clinton in 1999. Details of the plan are described in "Body of Secrets" (Doubleday). a recent book by investigative reporter James Bamford.
The Joint Chiefs at the time were headed by Eisenhower appointee Army Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer, who made his pitch on March 13, 1962, recommending that Operation Northwoods be run by the military. Three days later, President Kennedy rejected the plan and within months denied the general another term as Joint Chiefs chairman, transferring him to another job.
"The reason these (documents) were held secret for so long is the Joint Chiefs never wanted to give them up because they were so embarrassing," Bamford told ABC News. "The whole point of a democracy is to have leaders responding to the public will, and here this is the complete reverse, the military trying to trick the American people into a war that they (the military) want but that nobody else wants... the whole thing was so bizarre... the only way we would have succeeded is by doing exactly what the Russians were doing all over the world, by imposing a government by tyranny, basically what we were accusing Castro himself of doing."
America's top military brass even contemplated causing US military casualties, writing, "We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba." The document also proposed killing astronaut John Glenn during the first attempt to put an American into orbit as a false pretext for a war against Cuba. Should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, we would "provide irrevocable proof that the fault lies with the Communists," the Joint Chiefs wrote.
According to the Operation Northwoods Memo signed by Gen. Lemnitzer, the plans are "based on the premise that US military intervention will result from a period of heightened 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."
Sounding a bit like the 1997 PNAC document's reference to a "new Pearl Harbor," the Northwoods Memo continues, "A 'Remember the Maine' incident could be arranged in several forms. We could blow up a US ship and blame Cuba. We could develop a communist terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington.
"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 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."
President Kennedy was assassinated November 22, 1963, shortly after signing National Security Action Memo #263 which called for the removal of 1,000 US troops from Vietnam by Christmas of that year and the total removal of all US troops by the end of 1965.
One of President Lyndon Johnson's first actions upon succeeding JFK was to rescind Kennedy's directive and create a new one increasing the number of US servicemen in Vietnam.