Operation Northwoods: Déjà vu or Coincidence?

by John W. Whitehead
3/3/2003

When John F. Kennedy took over the White House in 1961, the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff pressed the young president to unleash the invasion of Cuba they had plotted. Although Kennedy was unsure, he let himself be persuaded.

After only three days, the invasion of the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961, proved a total disaster. World opinion condemned the United States for what was considered a flagrant act of aggression.

But Kennedy learned his lesson. He vowed to take control of foreign policy himself and not let himself be pressed into any more misadventures. This would soon pit Kennedy against the American military leadership—in particular, General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon.

Lemnitzer had no respect for civilians he reported to and believed they interfered with the proper role of the military. "The problem," Lemnitzer noted, "was simply that the civilians would not accept military judgments." In Lemnitzer’s view, America would be far better off if the generals could take over the country.

Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs, however, had somehow slipped over the edge. This is reflected in secret and long-hidden documents obtained by award-winning author James Bamford and revealed in his insightful book, Body of Secrets (Anchor Books, 2002). The Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government. "In the name of anticommunism," writes Bamford, "they proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba."

Code-named Operation Northwoods, the plan had the written approval of the chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It 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." Moreover, as Bamford documents, people "would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked." And using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro. This was to give Lemnitzer and his staff the excuse, as well as the public and international backing from an outraged world they needed to launch a war against Castro’s Cuba.

Among the most elaborate schemes of Operation Northwoods was to "create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en route 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." Finally, Operation Northwoods also constituted a plan to "make it appear that Communist Cuban MiGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack."

When and if American troops invaded Cuba, there was no plan to free the Cuban people, who were largely in support of Castro. Instead, the plan was to imprison them in a controlled U.S. military police state. "Forces would assure rapid essential military control of Cuba," Lemnitzer wrote. "Continued police action would be required."

On March 13, 1962, General Lemnitzer presented his plan to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. Three days later, President Kennedy told Lemnitzer that there was virtually no possibility that the U.S. would ever use overt military force in Cuba.

Within months, Lemnitzer was denied a second term as JCS chairman and was transferred to Europe as chief of NATO. However, years later President Gerald Ford appointed Lemnitzer to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

Because of the secrecy and illegality of Operation Northwoods, all details remained hidden for forty years. In retrospect, the documents offer new insight into the thinking of the military mind and its leadership. "Although they never succeeded in launching America into a phony war with Cuba," notes James Bamford, "they may have done so with Vietnam. More than 50,000 Americans and more than 2 million Vietnamese were eventually killed in that war." Indeed, it has long been suspected that the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident—the spark that led to America’s long war in Vietnam—was largely staged or provoked by U.S. officials in order to build up congressional and public support for American involvement.

In light of the Operation Northwoods documents, it is clear that deceiving the public and trumping up wars Americans fight and die in was standard, approved policy at the highest levels of the Pentagon. But are Pentagon military leaders still capable of such deceit? Hopefully, we won’t have to wait another forty years to find out.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.