operation.northwoods

Operation Northwoods, or Northwoods, was a 1962 plan by the US Department of Defense to enact acts of terrorism and violence on US soil or against US interests, blamed on Cuba, in order to generate U.S. public support for military action against the Cuban government of Fidel Castro. As part of the U.S. government's Operation Mongoose anti-Castro initiative, the plan, which was not implemented, called for various false flag actions, including simulated or real state-sponsored acts of terrorism (such as hijacked planes) on U.S. and Cuban soil. The plan was proposed by senior U.S. Department of Defense leaders, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lyman Louis Lemnitzer.

The main proposal was presented in a document entitled "Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba (TS)," a collection of draft memoranda written by the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) representative to the Caribbean Survey Group.^[1] (The parenthetical "TS" in the title of the document is an initialism for "Top Secret.") The document was presented by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13 with one paragraph approved, as a preliminary submission for planning purposes.

The previously secret document was originally made public on November 18, 1997 by the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board,^[2] a U.S. federal agency overseeing the release of government records related to John F. Kennedy's assassination. A total of about 1500 pages of once-secret military records covering 1962 to 1964 were concomitantly declassified by said Review Board.

"Appendix to Enclosure A" and "Annex to Appendix to Enclosure A" of the Northwoods document were first published online by the National Security Archive on November 6, 1998 in a joint venture with CNN as part of CNN's 1998 Cold War television documentary series — specifically, as a documentation supplement to "Episode 10: Cuba," which aired on November 29, 1998. "Annex to Appendix to Enclosure A" is the section of the document which contains the proposals to stage terrorist attacks.

The Northwoods document was published online in a more complete form (i.e., including cover memoranda) by the National Security Archive on April 30, 2001.