A ship explodes. A passenger aircraft appears to be shot down. A country demands a response. Now imagine that the outrage was part of the proposal from the start. In March 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent forward ideas for manufacturing pretexts to intervene in Cuba. You can read the memorandum yourself. Its ordinary bureaucratic tone makes the contents harder to dismiss.
Source: original memorandum, 13 March 1962, PDF page 1.
A Memo on the Secretary’s Desk
Known as Operation Northwoods, the proposals belonged to the wider anti-Castro planning environment of Operation Mongoose. General Lyman Lemnitzer sent the memorandum to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Decades later, the Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board helped bring the document into public view; the National Security Archive published it online in 2001 after receiving a copy from author James Bamford.
Source: National Security Archive, document history and context.
The Headlines They Wanted You to Believe
The suggested scenarios included staging incidents around Guantanamo and blaming Cuba for a ship’s destruction. Another envisioned a false civilian-airliner shootdown: passengers would land safely while an unmanned duplicate continued the flight and was destroyed. The intended audience would encounter what appeared to be evidence of Cuban aggression.
Source: original document, PDF pages 10–14.
The Signature at the Bottom
The cover memo calls the submission “preliminary” and says individual projects would require later consideration. The file documents proposals; it does not establish that these incidents were carried out.
At the bottom is Lemnitzer’s signature. Above it, the Joint Chiefs recommend that responsibility for developing the military aspects of the plan be assigned to them. The same office proposing the pretexts was asking to direct the military planning. That request is there on the first page, beneath the date and the classification stamps.
