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In 1962 the US proposed Operation Northwoods to combat the communist threat 100 miles off their coast. Did they really think about bombing their own civilians?

0 FacebookTwitterPinterestRedditEmail Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Picture this: you are the leader of the free world, elected to office last year and things are looking promising. However, there is one fly in your capitalist ointment: Cuba. This was the situation John F Kennedy faced in 1962. Elected by the thinnest of margins but riding a wave of photogenic popularity, the major foreign policy concern of his first year was the strengthening ties between Castro’s communist regime 100 miles from Florida, and the other great superpower of this age: the USSR. This was a serious problem. The Soviets, increasingly bellicose over the last decade, had seized on this opportunity to establish a presence so close to the United States mainland. A communist Cuba was a destabilizing influence for world peace, and Kennedy clearly thought something had to be done. But a direct attack on Cuba would risk destabilizing the situation further, and Kennedy risked both domestic and Western censure, and retaliation from the unpredictable and powerful Soviet forces, if he chose to invade Cuba directly. He needed the US to appear as the wronged party. He needed a casus belli. They Started It! Castro, having seized power only three years earlier in 1959, was still an unknown quantity on the world stage. The US Military, seizing on this unpredictability, came up with a simple concept: to attack Cuba, they needed to make it seem that Cuba had attacked them first. And so, the top military leaders of America and the CIA drafted plans to stage and carry out acts of terrorism against the citizens of the United States of America. By killing innocent people and blaming Cuba they hoped the world would support a “retaliatory” strike. Operation Northwoods was born. The plan consisted of several proposals. First, the US would target Cuban émigrés and even sink the boats of Cuban refugees travelling to Florida, in the hope that this would provoke a real Cuban response. Fidel Castro, right, with Che Guevara (Alberto Korda / Public Domain) Further, various false flag operations were suggested by the military advisors. Plans were floated to hijack US planes and even blow up a US ship, to gain public sympathy and support when the attacks were blamed on Cuba. Operation Pastorius: Hitler’s Attempt to Blow Up AmericaThe Philadelphia Experiment – What’s the Real Story? Plans were made to create the impression of a violent, Cuban-funded terrorist campaign in the mainland United States, involving real or simulated attacks on both civilian and military targets. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff even suggested a US attack on their own base in Cuba, at Guantanamo Bay. In the face of such destructive attacks, apparently by a new and unstable communist regime, the US would appear as the injured party. The world would see a US invasion of Cuba as a justified retaliatory strike against a terrorist state. The Dangers of Cuba These suggestions seem extreme, if not completely unhinged, but it was important to remember the situation the US faced at that time. In 1962 the Cold War and the deadly nuclear arms race was at its height, and many in the US felt they were falling behind the Soviets. Castro’s Cuba was seen as a knock-out blow against the US, a position from which the Soviets could attack the US with impunity: Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier, now held all the cards. Against such a threat, all options were considered. And the US had already attempted to remove Castro through other means. The year before in 1961, America had funded a landing operation by Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs on Cuba’s southern shore, hoping to remove Castro and topple his communist regime. They had failed spectacularly and invited censure against the US from across the globe. Other suggestions were floated at this time to destabilize Castro. From assassinating him with an exploding cigar, to blaming failures of the US space program on Cuban sabotage, a wide variety of approaches were considered. The Path Not Taken Operation Northwoods was therefore considered the lesser of two evils, and justified in that killing some US citizens would save many more. Thankfully, this proposal was never officially given the green light and no such terrorist attacks were undertaken. In any case, events were about to overtake the Kennedy administration. The situation came to a head with the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, where the Soviet introduction of ballistic nuclear missiles into Cuba created a direct threat to the US mainland. The missiles introduced during the Cuban Missile Crisis could target almost all of the continental United States (CIA / Public Domain) The crisis was ultimately resolved peacefully and the threat from Cuba seemed to have been contained. The war in Vietnam also drew increasing US focus. And Kennedy himself was assassinated a year later, in November 1963. The Kennedy Family CurseOperation Wandering Soul: Ghosts in the Vietnam War? Much of the documentation rel...

Operation Northwoods: A US Terror Campaign Against Itself? - Historic Mysteries