Operation Northwoods

What the claim says

"Operation Northwoods" is the name now attached to a Top Secret memorandum that the US Joint Chiefs of Staff gave to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara on 13 March 1962. Its subject line was "Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba." The claim, as its proponents make it, is that the country's senior military officers formally proposed staging or faking incidents, some with real or simulated casualties, and blaming them on Fidel Castro's government so that the United States would have a pretext to invade Cuba.

That core is documented in the memorandum itself. The stronger versions are not: that any of it was carried out, that President Kennedy knowingly approved it, that its author was fired for writing it, or that it shows later attacks were staged by the state. The verdict applies to the documented proposal only, and the sections below say where the record stops.

Background: Cuba after the Bay of Pigs

The Bay of Pigs invasion, an attempt by Cuban exiles to overthrow Castro that the CIA had developed under President Eisenhower, began on the morning of 17 April 1961 and was in trouble almost from the beginning.

The Kennedy administration then reviewed its Cuba policy. On 3 November 1961 President Kennedy authorized a new program to undermine the Castro government, codenamed Operation Mongoose. It was overseen by the Special Group (Augmented), a slightly enlarged version of the committee that oversaw covert operations. Its members included General Lyman Lemnitzer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and it was augmented by Attorney General Robert Kennedy and General Taylor, whom the President made chairman. Air Force Brigadier General Edward Lansdale was appointed Chief of Operations to coordinate the effort across the CIA and the State and Defense Departments. The program's unresolved question was military: on 20 February 1962 Lansdale urged the Special Group to decide whether, if a revolt inside Cuba needed help, the United States would "respond promptly with military force." The State Department's historians call that "the fundamental question which confronted the Kennedy administration throughout the Mongoose exercise."

Guidelines for Mongoose dated 14 March 1962, drafted by Taylor, assumed that the United States would make maximum use of Cuban resources but "recognizes that final success will require decisive U.S. military intervention," and that those resources "will be used to prepare for and justify this intervention."

The request and the paper trail

The memorandum answers a specific request. It says that the Chief of Operations of the Cuba Project, which was Lansdale, wanted a "brief but precise description of pretexts which would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba." The request was a memorandum of 5 March 1962 headed "Operation MONGOOSE," and Lansdale's office asked for the Chiefs' views by 13 March.

A report to the Joint Chiefs dated 9 March 1962, prepared by the Defense Department and Joint Chiefs of Staff representative on the Caribbean Survey Group, attached the proposed answer. A Joint Secretariat decision note on it, captioned NORTHWOODS (S), records: "At their meeting on 13 March 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved the recommendations in paragraph 8 of JCS 1969/321." Paragraph 8a recommended that Enclosure A, with its attachments, "should be forwarded to the Secretary of Defense for approval and transmittal to the Chief of Operations, Cuba Project." The Chiefs thus approved forwarding the paper and asked McNamara to approve it; no such approval is documented.

On 13 March the memorandum for the Secretary of Defense went out "For the Joint Chiefs of Staff" over the name of Chairman L. L. Lemnitzer. It recommended that the attached draft for the Chief of Operations, Cuba Project, "be forwarded as a preliminary submission suitable for planning purposes," assumed there would be "similar submissions from other agencies," and expected individual projects to be considered case by case.

The draft addressed to Lansdale's office spelled out the purpose. A plan built from the listed projects, it said, "would enable a logical build-up of incidents to be combined with other seemingly unrelated events to camouflage the ultimate objective," and "the ultimate objective is overt military intervention." A supporting enclosure recalled the Chiefs' statement of 7 March 1962 that if a credible internal revolt proved impossible within nine to ten months, that would require a decision by the United States to develop a Cuban "provocation" as justification for positive US military action.

What the memorandum proposes

The annex is headed "Pretexts to Justify US Military Intervention in Cuba." A note at its head calls the courses of action "a preliminary submission suitable only for planning purposes." The first item says that, since it would seem desirable to use legitimate provocation as the basis for US military intervention in Cuba, a cover and deception plan could be executed as an initial effort "to provoke Cuban reactions." Most of the remaining items are manufactured incidents.

• Guantanamo. "A series of well coordinated incidents will be planned to take place in and around Guantanamo to give genuine appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces." The list includes starting rumors by clandestine radio, landing "friendly Cubans" in uniform to stage an attack on the base, riots near the main gate, blowing up ammunition inside the base, burning aircraft, lobbing mortar shells into the base, and either sabotaging a ship in the harbor with "large fires" or sinking one near the harbor entrance with funerals for "mock-victims." The United States would then respond with offensive operations and "large scale United States military operations."
• A "Remember the Maine" incident. "We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," or blow up an unmanned drone vessel in Cuban waters near Havana or Santiago, followed by a rescue operation to "evacuate" the remaining members of the "non-existent crew." The next sentence of the memorandum reads: "Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation."
• A terror campaign. "We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States." The same item says: "We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized." It adds that "Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots" would also be helpful.
• Other measures. A supposedly Cuban-based, Castro-supported "filibuster could be simulated against a neighboring Caribbean nation." "An F-86 properly painted would convince air passengers that they saw a Cuban MIG," and "Use of MIG type aircraft by US pilots could provide additional provocation," including "attacks on surface shipping." Item 7 says: "Hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft should appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the government of Cuba. Concurrently, genuine defections of Cuban civil and military air and surface craft should be encouraged."
• A shot-down airliner. An incident "which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner enroute from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela," with passengers who "could be a group of college students off on a holiday." An aircraft painted and numbered as a duplicate of a civil aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization would carry passengers "all boarded under carefully prepared aliases," while the real aircraft "would be converted to a drone." The passenger aircraft would land at an auxiliary field where "arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers," and over Cuba the drone would broadcast a "MAY DAY" message and be destroyed by radio signal.
• A lost military aircraft. An incident "which will make it appear that Communist Cuban MIGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack": a pre-briefed pilot would announce that MIGs had jumped him, then land secretly at an Eglin auxiliary field while a submarine or small surface craft scattered F-101 parts off the Cuban coast.

Reading the memorandum fairly

Three things the text shows are often lost in summaries. First, the annex is often unspecific about who would be hurt. Some victims are explicitly non-existent or mock: a drone vessel with a "non-existent crew," "funerals for mock-victims" after a ship sunk near the harbor entrance, a passenger aircraft that lands safely while a drone is destroyed, a pilot who is never really lost. "Real or simulated" appears only for the boatload of Cubans. Other items list real destruction without saying whether anyone would be harmed: blowing up ammunition inside the Guantanamo base, burning aircraft, mortar shells fired into the base with "Some damage to installations," a ship sabotaged in the harbor with "large fires," a US ship blown up in Guantanamo Bay, and attacks on surface shipping by MIG-type aircraft flown by US pilots. The terror campaign in Florida and Washington includes attempts on the lives of Cuban refugees "even to the extent of wounding" and plastic bombs "in carefully chosen spots." ABC News read the "casualty lists" sentence as the planners having "contemplated causing U.S. military casualties"; in the annex it closes the drone-vessel scenario, which has a "non-existent crew."

Second, the document was a staff submission responding to Lansdale's request, and it says so repeatedly: a "preliminary submission," one input among "similar submissions from other agencies." It also took account of a Navy suggestion on "generated instances in the Guantanamo area," a Chief of Naval Operations memorandum of 8 March 1962 titled "Instances to Provoke Military Actions in Cuba."

Third, it was not a stray paper from a junior officer. It went to the Secretary of Defense over the Chairman's name on behalf of the Chiefs, and ABC News reported in 2001 that "The plans had the written approval of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff." The memorandum also states its premise: US intervention would follow "a period of heightened US-Cuban tensions."

What happened next

The best contemporaneous record is not about Northwoods by name. On 16 March 1962, three days after the memorandum was sent, President Kennedy met at the White House with Taylor, Attorney General Kennedy, Lansdale, Lemnitzer and others to discuss the Mongoose guidelines. Johnson's handwritten note, preserved in State Department files, says the President "expressed general approval on the understanding there will be further examination of use of Americans for airdrops etc. during first phase when risk estimates are completed." It continues that he "expressed skepticism that in so far as can now be foreseen circumstances will arise that would justify and make desirable the use of American forces for overt military action," and that "It was clearly understood no decision was expressed or implied approving the use of such forces although contingency planning would proceed."

Lansdale's own memorandum of the meeting, which the National Security Archive released in March 2001, records Lemnitzer commenting that the military had contingency plans for intervention and "plans for creating plausible pretexts to use force, with the pretexts either attacks on U.S. aircraft or a Cuban action in Latin America for which we would retaliate." It then records: "The President said bluntly that we were not discussing the use of U.S. military force, that General Lemnitzer might find the U.S. so engaged in Berlin or elsewhere that he couldn't use the contemplated 4 divisions in Cuba." Lansdale's record continues, as a separate sentence: "So, we cannot say that we are able now to make a decision on the use of U.S. military force." That is the closest thing on the record to a presidential response, and it concerns the use of force in general rather than the annex. Neither Johnson's note nor the Archive's description of Lansdale's memorandum says that Kennedy had read the annex or names it.

No written reply from McNamara to the 13 March memorandum has surfaced in the published records. ABC News, reporting Bamford's account in 2001, wrote that "Whether the Joint Chiefs' plans were rejected by McNamara in the meeting is not clear," and also that the plans "apparently were rejected by the civilian leadership." None of the incidents in the annex is documented as having been staged.

The Chiefs did not stop planning. A staff report to them dated 9 April 1962 attached a draft memorandum for McNamara, revised at the Chiefs' direction on 10 April, which said the Joint Chiefs "recommend that a national policy of early military intervention in Cuba be adopted by the United States." The National Security Archive lists a Joint Chiefs memorandum to McNamara titled "Cuba," dated 10 April 1962. The 9 April papers began from a question Taylor had put to the Special Group on 5 April about what the United States would do if Castro executed about 100 of the Bay of Pigs prisoners, and listed "additional factors which support US intervention in Cuba, if 100 or more prisoners are executed." One was that justification for intervention "will probably be more convincing to the rest of the world if it can be related to a real and valid provocation rather than based entirely on manufactured pretexts which entail some risk of compromise"; the papers added that the United States could "bolster the justification for" intervention if a stronger case were needed. The staff report's Conclusion 5 went further, recommending that McNamara be advised at the 10 April meeting that such executions "should be exploited (with pretexts and an expanded propaganda campaign if necessary)" as justification for intervention, and its recommendation 8a asked that Conclusions 5 and 6 be reflected as the Chiefs' position at that meeting. These are the staff report's recommendations; the final text adopted on 10 April is not established.

Lemnitzer's tenure as Chairman ran from 1 October 1960 to 30 September 1962, according to a Defense Department list of Chairmen, followed by service as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. Sources differ on how the move came about. On 1 October 1962, swearing in Taylor as his successor, Kennedy spoke of the "responsibility borne with such distinction by General Lemnitzer" and described him as having "moved on to new responsibilities." ABC News, relaying Bamford's account, wrote that "Within months, Lemnitzer would be denied another term as chairman and transferred to another job." The Encyclopedia of World Biography says that he "was also President Kennedy's personal choice, although his appointment was delayed by the Cuban Missile Crisis." An entry from the Oxford Companion to American Military History on the same page says that "Despite harsh criticism of his tenure, the JCS's involvement in this debacle, and at one juncture his threatened removal, in July 1962 he was appointed as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe"; the "debacle" is the Bay of Pigs invasion. None of these accounts cites a document tying the end of his term to the Northwoods memorandum.

How it became public

The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 created the Assassination Records Review Board to re-examine for release records that federal agencies still regarded as too sensitive to open. The law was signed on 26 October 1992; the Board was sworn in on 11 April 1994 and finished its work on 30 September 1998.

The Northwoods case file is record 202-10002-10104 in the JFK Collection. Its identification form describes "JCS Papers related to JCS recommendation to invade Cuba and pretexts to justify US military intervention," lists 197 pages, and gives the status as "RELEASED WITH DELETIONS." The Board's determination notification records five postponements, all on pages of papers dated between 24 April and 25 July 1962 and none listed as part of the 13 March memorandum, and states "Board Review Completed: 10/14/97." A 2011 Gizmodo article describes the memorandum as one of the records the Board released in 1997. The Board also learned that the Joint Staff had destroyed minutes and transcripts of Joint Chiefs meetings from 1947 to 1978, which limits what can be known about how the Chiefs discussed the proposal.

In April 2001 James Bamford's book Body of Secrets, published by Doubleday, described the proposals; a KALW radio interview about his "new book" was posted on 23 April. On 30 April 2001 the National Security Archive posted the memorandum, listed as including cover memoranda, 15 pages. ABC News published a report by David Ruppe (page timestamp 30 April, dateline 1 May 2001). The Archive noted that Bamford "highlights a set of proposals on Cuba by the Joint Chiefs of Staff codenamed OPERATION NORTHWOODS." Bamford wrote that Northwoods "may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government," which is his judgment rather than a finding of the record. The Archive's documents page for CNN's Cold War episode on Cuba, headed "Cuba (Nov. 29, 1998)," also lists the appendix and annex, "Pretexts to Justify U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba," along with the Chiefs' memorandum of 10 April 1962; it does not say when the documents were first posted.

Key people

Lyman Lemnitzer is the officer whose name is on the memorandum. Edward Lansdale requested it and recorded the 16 March meeting. Robert McNamara was the addressee. John F. Kennedy is not shown approving or rejecting the annex by name. Maxwell Taylor drafted the Mongoose guidelines and became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs on 1 October 1962. James Bamford drew wide attention to the memorandum in 2001.

What remains disputed or unknown

• The civilian response. The surviving papers do not show how McNamara reacted or whether the annex reached the President. Statements that Kennedy rejected Northwoods personally rest on the 16 March meeting, which does not mention the annex by name.
• How seriously the Chiefs meant it. The memorandum calls itself a preliminary planning submission written to a request. Bamford, as quoted by ABC, wrote that the Chiefs "drew up and approved plans" for what "may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government". Both readings rest on the same text, and beyond the decision note the Chiefs' internal deliberations are not preserved in meeting minutes.

How Northwoods is used in later conspiracy talk

Northwoods is sometimes cited as a precedent for claims about later attacks: if officers once wrote down such ideas, the argument runs, later events could have been staged too. A 2011 Gizmodo article shows the pattern. It opens, "At the core of the 9/11 Truther movement is the idea that the government staged the attacks to drum up support for a war," then calls Northwoods "a chilling reminder" that the military was once "all-too-willing to deceive and attack its own citizens for political reasons." The memorandum cannot carry that weight: it is a 1962 planning paper about one war aim, and nothing in it speaks to any later event.

What is documented, and where the claim outruns it

A declassified Joint Chiefs memorandum dated 13 March 1962 proposed manufacturing pretexts, some involving simulated or real casualties, for a US military intervention in Cuba. No document shows that Kennedy or McNamara approved it, and none of the incidents it lists is recorded as having been staged.

Popular retellings go beyond that record when they say Kennedy personally rejected the plan on a named day, that Lemnitzer was removed because of it, that it was an authorized operation that was already under way, or that one unexecuted Cold War contingency memorandum proves unrelated modern attacks, shootings or disasters were orchestrated by the state.