Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (15 page)

•   "Hijacking
attempts against civil air and surface craft could appear to continue as
harassing measures condoned by the Government of Cuba."

Among the
most elaborate schemes 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 Right."

Lemnitzer
and the Joint Chiefs worked out a complex deception:

An
aircraft at Elgin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a
civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the
Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the
actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all
boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would
be converted to a drone [a remotely controlled unmanned aircraft]. Take off
times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow
a rendezvous south of Florida.

From the
rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum
altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Elgin AFB where
arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the
aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to
fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will be transmitting on the
international distress frequency a "May Day" message stating he is
under attack by Cuban MiG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by
destruction of the aircraft, which will be triggered by radio signal. This will
allow ICAO [International Civil Aviation Organization] radio stations in the
Western Hemisphere to tell the U.S. what has happened to the aircraft instead
of the U.S. trying to "sell" the incident.

Finally,
there was a plan to "make it appear that Communist Cuban MiGs have
destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked
attack." It was a particularly believable operation given the decade of
shootdowns that had just taken place.

In the
final sentence of his letter to Secretary McNamara recommending the operations,
Lemnitzer made a grab for even more power, asking that the Joint Chiefs be
placed in charge of carrying out Operation Northwoods and the invasion.
"It is recommended," he wrote, "that this responsibility for
both overt and covert military operations be assigned to the Joint Chiefs of
Staff."

At 2:30 on
the afternoon of Tuesday, March 13, 1962, Lemnitzer went over last-minute
details of Operation Northwoods with his covert action chief, Brigadier General
William H. Craig, and signed the document. He then went to a "special
meeting" in McNamara's office. An hour later he met with Kennedy's
military representative, General Maxwell Taylor. What happened during those
meetings is unknown. But 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.

Undeterred,
Lemnitzer and the Chiefs persisted, virtually to the point of demanding that
they be given authority to invade and take over Cuba. About a month after
submitting Operation Northwoods, they met in the "tank," as the JCS
conference room was called, and agreed on the wording of a tough memorandum to
McNamara. "The Joint Chiefs of Staff believe that the Cuban problem must
be solved in the near future," they wrote. "Further, they see no
prospect of early success in overthrowing the present communist regime either
as a result of internal uprising or external political, economic or
psychological pressures. Accordingly they believe that military intervention by
the United States will be required to overthrow the present communist
regime."

Lemnitzer
was virtually rabid in his hatred of communism in general and Castro in
particular. "The Joint Chiefs of Staff believe that the United States can
undertake military intervention in Cuba without risk of general war," he
continued. "They also believe that the intervention can be accomplished
rapidly enough to minimize communist opportunities for solicitation of UN
action." However, what Lemnitzer was suggesting was not freeing the Cuban
people, who were largely in support of Castro, but imprisoning them in a U.S.
military—controlled police state. "Forces would assure rapid essential
military control of Cuba," he wrote. "Continued police action would
be required."

Concluding,
Lemnitzer did not mince words: "[T]he Joint Chiefs of Staff recommend that
a national policy of early military intervention in Cuba be adopted by the
United States. They also recommend that such intervention be undertaken as soon
as possible and preferably before the release of National Guard and Reserve
forces presently on active duty."

By then
McNamara had virtually no confidence in his military chief and was rejecting
nearly every proposal the general sent to him. The rejections became so
routine, said one of Lemnitzer's former staff officers, that the staffer told
the general that the situation was putting the military in an "embarrassing
rut." But Lemnitzer replied, "I am the senior military officer—it's
my job to state what I believe and it's his [McNamara's] job to approve or
disapprove." "McNamara's arrogance was astonishing," said
Lemnitzer's aide, who knew nothing of Operation North woods. "He gave
General Lemnitzer very short shrift and treated him like a schoolboy. The
general almost stood at attention when he came into the room. Everything was
'Yes, sir' and 'No, sir.' "

Within
months, Lemnitzer was denied a second term as JCS chairman and transferred to
Europe as chief of NATO. Years later President Gerald Ford appointed Lemnitzer,
a darling of the Republican right, to the President's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board. Lemnitzer's Cuba chief, Brigadier General Craig, was also transferred.
Promoted to major general, he spent three years as chief of the Army Security
Agency, NSA's military arm.

Because of
the secrecy and illegality of Operation Northwoods, all details remained hidden
for forty years. Lemnitzer may have thought that all copies of the relevant
documents had been destroyed; he was not one to leave compromising material
lying around. Following the Bay of Pigs debacle, for example, he ordered
Brigadier General David W. Gray, Craig's predecessor as chief of the Cuba project
within the JCS, to destroy all his notes concerning Joint Chiefs actions and
discussions during that period. Gray's meticulous notes were the only detailed
official records of what happened within the JCS during that time. According to
Gray, Lemnitzer feared a congressional investigation and therefore wanted any
incriminating evidence destroyed.

With the
evidence destroyed, Lemnitzer felt free to lie to Congress. When asked, during
secret hearings before a Senate committee, if he knew of any Pentagon plans for
a direct invasion of Cuba he said he did not. Yet detailed JCS invasion plans
had been drawn up even before Kennedy was inaugurated. And additional plans had
been developed since. The consummate planner and man of details also became
evasive, suddenly encountering great difficulty in recalling key aspects of the
operation, as if he had been out of the country during the period. It was a
sorry spectacle. Senator Gore called for Lemnitzer to be fired. "We need a
shakeup of the Joint Chiefs of Staff," he said. "We direly need a new
chairman, as well as new members." No one had any idea of Operation
Northwoods.

Because so
many documents were destroyed, it is difficult to determine how many senior
officials were aware of Operation Northwoods.
 
As has been
described, the document was signed and fully approved by Lemnitzer and the rest
of the Joint Chiefs and addressed to the Secretary of Defense for his
signature. Whether it went beyond McNamara to the president and the attorney
general is not known.

Even after
Lemnitzer lost his job, the Joint Chiefs kept planning "pretext"
operations at least into 1963. Among their proposals was a plan to deliberately
create a war between Cuba and any of a number of its Latin American neighbors.
This would give the United States military an excuse to come in on the side of
Cuba's adversary and get rid of Castro. "A contrived 'Cuban' attack on an
OAS [Organization of American States] member could be set up," said one
proposal, "and the attacked state could be urged to 'take measures of
self-defense and request assistance from the U.S. and OAS; the U.S. could
almost certainly obtain the necessary two-thirds support among OAS members for
collective action against Cuba."

Among the
nations they suggested that the United States secretly attack were Jamaica and
Trinidad-Tobago. Both were members of the British Commonwealth; thus, by
secretly attacking them and then falsely blaming Cuba, the United States could
lure England into the war against Castro. The report noted, "Any of the
contrived situations described above are inherently, extremely risky in our
democratic system in which security can be maintained, after the fact, with
very great difficulty. If the decision should be made to set up a contrived
situation it should be one in which participation by U.S. personnel is limited
only to the most highly trusted covert personnel. This suggests the
infeasibility of the use of military units for any aspect of the contrived
situation."

The report
even suggested secretly paying someone in the Castro government to attack the
United States: "The only area remaining for consideration then would be to
bribe one of Castro's subordinate commanders to initiate an attack on [the U.S.
naval base at] Guantanamo." The act suggested—bribing a foreign nation to
launch a violent attack on an American military installation—was treason.

In May
1963, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul H. Nitze sent a plan to the White
House proposing "a possible scenario whereby an attack on a United States
reconnaissance aircraft could be exploited toward the end of effecting the
removal of the Castro regime." In the event Cuba attacked a U-2, the plan
proposed sending in additional American pilots, this time on dangerous,
unnecessary low-level reconnaissance missions with the expectation that they
would also be shot down, thus provoking a war. "[T]he U.S. could undertake
various measures designed to stimulate the Cubans to provoke a new
incident," said the plan. Nitze, however, did not volunteer to be one of
the pilots.

One idea
involved sending fighters across the island on "harassing
reconnaissance" and "show-off" missions "flaunting our
freedom of action, hoping to stir the Cuban military to action."
"Thus," said the plan, "depending above all on whether the
Cubans were or could be made to be trigger-happy, the development of the
initial downing of a reconnaissance plane could lead at best to the elimination
of Castro, perhaps to the removal of Soviet troops and the installation of
ground inspection in Cuba, or at the least to our demonstration of firmness on
reconnaissance." About a month later, a low-level flight was made across
Cuba, but unfortunately for the Pentagon, instead of bullets it produced only a
protest.

Lemnitzer
was a dangerous—perhaps even unbalanced—right-wing extremist in an
extraordinarily sensitive position during a critical period. But Operation
Northwoods also had the support of every single member of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, and even senior Pentagon official Paul Nitze argued in favor of
provoking a phony war with Cuba. The fact that the most senior members of all
the services and the Pentagon could be so out of touch with reality and the
meaning of democracy would be hidden for four decades.

In
retrospect, the documents offer new insight into the thinking of the military's
star-studded leadership. Although they never succeeded in launching America
into a phony war with Cuba, they may have done so with Vietnam. More than
50,000 Americans and more than 2 million Vietnamese were eventually killed in
that war.

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.
Over the years, serious questions have been raised about the alleged attack by
North Vietnamese patrol boats on two American destroyers in the Gulf. But
defenders of the Pentagon have always denied such charges, arguing that senior
officials would never engage in such deceit.

Now,
however, in light of the Operation Northwoods documents, it is clear that
deceiving the public and trumping up wars for Americans to fight and die in was
standard, approved policy at the highest levels of the Pentagon. In fact, the
Gulf of Tonkin seems right out of the Operation Northwoods playbook: "We
could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba . . . casualty lists
in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of indignation." One need
only replace "Guantanamo Bay" with "Tonkin Gulf," and
"Cuba" with "North Vietnam." The Gulf of Tonkin incident
may or may not have been stage-managed, but the senior Pentagon leadership at
the time was clearly capable of such deceit.