Operation Northwoods: The History of the Controversial Government Plan to Stage False Flag Attacks on Americans and Blame Cuba

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Chris Floyd, "Head Cases," Moscow Times, 21 December 2001, pg. VIII; also appeared in St. Petersburg Times, Issue 733 (100), 25 December 2001. 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..."

We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington.

Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense. Subject: Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba (TS)" (PDF). The George Washington University. 13 March 1962. p.11. Colonel Oleg Penkovskiy's passport, issued in 1960 for a trip to London, identifying him as a reserve officer. (Image credit: Central Intelligence Agency) Secret armies also existed in the United States during the Cold War. In 2014, declassified documents from the U.S. Air Force and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) revealed a plan dreamed up in 1950 for a "covert intelligence and evasion and escape operation in Alaska."

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. [15] Davis, Tracy C. “Operation Northwoods: The Pentagon's Scripts for Overthrowing Castro.” TDR, vol. 50, no. 1, 2006, pp. 134–148. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4492663. Accessed 4 Mar. 2021. In addition to Operation Northwoods, under the Operation Mongoose program the U.S. Department of Defense had a number of similar proposals for actions to be taken against the Cuban regime of Fidel Castro.Media Advisory: National Archives Releases Additional Materials Reviewed by the Assassination Records Review Board, archives.gov, 11/17/97 [cached] In March 1968, American soldiers murdered hundreds of unarmed civilians in the South Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai, according to accounts of the massacre that describe harrowing killings of at least 300 women, children and elderly people. Following presentation of the Northwoods plan, Kennedy removed Lemnitzer as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, although he became Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in January 1963. U.S. military leaders began to perceive Kennedy as going soft on Cuba, and the President became increasingly unpopular with the military. A rift had already developed during Kennedy's disagreements with the service chiefs over the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and flared up again with his June 10, 1963 announcement of a unilateral U.S. Test Ban Treaty.

Before the civilian space organization NASA put the first astronaut on the moon in 1969, at least two U.S. military organizations drew up plans for establishing strategic lunar military outposts. In 1959, the U.S. Army drew up a proposal for a "manned military" base on the moon. That proposal, which was submitted by the Army's chief of research and development, was dubbed Project Horizon and would "develop and protect potential United States interest on the moon," according to declassified documents. The first nuclear bomb was detonated at 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, during the so-called Trinity test at the Alamogordo Air Base, 120 miles (193 km) south of Albuquerque, N.M. The explosion created a mushroom cloud that stretched 40,000 feet (12,200 m), and the bomb's explosive power was equivalent to more than 15,000 tons of TNT.The U.S. could “blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba.” Or, they could blow up an unmanned vessel, then conduct a fake rescue operation. “Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation,” the report noted.