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Health & Fitness

Civilian Control of the U.S. Military, 1961-1962: Part III

The Joint Chiefs of Staff lose it.

Thirty-first Chapter in a Series Chronicling the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962

Operation NORTHWOODS

By early March 1962, U.S. officials secretly planning an uprising of Cubans against Castro realized that their efforts were doomed. On March 6, the planners asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff for “a brief but precise description of pretext[s]” which the U.S. could use as an excuse for “direct military intervention” in Cuba.

In plain language, the planners were asking the Pentagon to invent lies to justify an invasion of Cuba.

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On 13 March 1962 the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent Defense Secretary McNamara a TOP SECRET plan called Operation NORTHWOODS, containing the following mind-boggling pretexts.

Faked Attacks on Guantanamo Naval Station

The Joint Chiefs suggested mounting “A series of well-coordinated incidents… by hostile Cuban forces” including the staged “capture [of a Cuban] militia group which storms the base” and sinking a U.S. “ship near harbor entrance” followed by “funerals for mock victims.”

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The U.S “would respond” with “large scale United States military operations.”

Killing Cuban Refugees

The U.S. would stage a Communist Cuban Terror Campaign…in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington…pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States.”

  • “We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute [sic] to Florida (real or simulated).” (Did “real or simulated” refer to the people or the sinking? Did it matter?)
  • “We could foster attempts on the 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” to suggest “the idea of an irresponsible government.”

Faked Cuban Subversion in Caribbean Nations

“We know that Castro is backing subversive efforts…against Haiti, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Nicaragua…These efforts can be magnified and additional ones contrived for exposure.”

  • “ ‘Cuban’ B-26 or C-46 type aircraft could make cane-burning raids at night.”
  • “Soviet Bloc incendiaries could be bought.”
  • “ ‘Cuban’ messages” could be sent to the Communist underground “in the Dominican Republic and ‘Cuban’ shipments of arms [could] be found, or intercepted, on the beach.”

Staged Air Incidents

  • MiG aircraft flown by U.S. pilots, ostensibly out of Cuban airfields, would stage “harassment of civil air” and “attacks on surface shipping.” The fake MiGs would take about three months to manufacture.
  • Hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft.
  • Staging a Cuban shoot-down of a civilian aircraft flying toward the Caribbean from the United States.

The End Justifies the Means

The nation’s top military leaders were asking the Secretary of Defense to approve murdering innocent people—or staging their murders—not to mention attacking sovereign nations, all of which could be blamed on Cuba.

James Bamford writes, “the Joint Chiefs had quietly slipped over the edge.…” The bizarre NORTHWOODS memo was evidence of their growing frustration that the Kennedy administration’s clandestine efforts to overthrow or assassinate Castro were going nowhere. At least the Joint Chiefs were consistent. They had maintained all along that an invasion would be the only way to get rid of Fidel.

The NORTHWOODS plan itself went nowhere. By March 1962, according to Bamford, “McNamara had virtually no confidence” in Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer “and was rejecting nearly every proposal the general sent him."

While Lemnitzer was soon gone, the Joint Chiefs’ viral hatred of Castro remained intact.  That hatred became a hugely important factor in the Cuban Missile Crisis then brewing.

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Sources and Notes

The request to JCS for pretexts to justify invading Cuba appears in document #310 of Volume X of Foreign Relations of the United States. (http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/frusX/301_315.html )

Faking events to justify war is nothing new. At the end of August 1939 the Nazis forced some prisoners dressed in Polish uniforms to stage an attack on Germany and then shot them to death. The Nazis’ invasion of Poland could thus be justified to the world as a defense of the Fatherland.

The NORTHWOODS memorandum can be downloaded from the National Security Archive: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/northwoods.pdf .

James Bamford’s quotes are taken from his 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, 2001, 82.

The Joint Chiefs would naturally have favored military action to get rid of Castro. Military action is their business. On 10 April they again wrote McNamara:

“In view of the increasing military and subversive threat to the United States and the nations of the Western Hemisphere posed by the communist regime in Cuba, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommend that a national policy of early military intervention in Cuba be adopted by the United States.”

This letter can be downloaded from the National Security Archive: http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/coldwar/documents/episode-10/01-01.htm)

The three chapters in this mini-series illustrate why it is vital that military action serve the policies set by the civilian government of the United States—not the other way round.

The C-46 was a Curtiss-Wright aircraft in roughly the same class as the Douglas C-47, the workhorse of World War II.

The NORTHWOODS memo ironically labels blowing up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay a “Remember the Maine” incident. The Maine was the USS battleship which blew up in Havana Harbor on February 15th, 1898. The U.S. public immediately assumed that Maine had been sunk by the Spanish. Maine immediately became a rallying cry for the very short war that followed. Ironically, modern day exploration of the wreck has shown that Maine was sunk by an internal explosion. The Joint Chiefs’ allusion to Maine sounds very like a tacit admission that she was deliberately sabotaged to gin up just the outcry that the American public, egged on by the Hearst papers, provided. The explosion was probably a dreadful accident, however.

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