WASHINGTON — In March 1962, the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff formally proposed a plan to deceive the American public, stage acts of violence, and fabricate pretexts for war in order to justify a U.S. military invasion of Cuba.
The plan was real. It was written. It was signed. And it was submitted to the Secretary of Defense.
Known as Operation Northwoods, the proposal emerged from the highest levels of the Pentagon and was explicitly designed to manufacture justification for U.S. military intervention by orchestrating or simulating hostile acts that could be blamed on the Cuban government of Fidel Castro.
The documents, declassified decades later, dismantle the enduring claim that allegations of U.S. false-flag planning during the Cold War were paranoid fantasies. They confirm instead that senior military leadership actively contemplated terror as a policy tool.
A Written Plan to Create a Casus Belli
On 13 March 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff transmitted a memorandum titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba”. The document states plainly that its purpose was to outline “brief but precise descriptions of pretexts which would provide justification for U.S. military intervention in Cuba.”
The language is bureaucratic. The intent is unmistakable.
The memorandum assumes that public and international opinion could be shaped by engineered incidents and stresses that any action leading to intervention would first require a political decision — one that the plan itself sought to provoke.
Among the concepts explored were scenarios involving manufactured crises, provocations, and actions designed to portray Cuba as reckless, aggressive, and dangerous to hemispheric peace.
The proposal was not the work of rogue operatives. It was authored within the Pentagon, endorsed by the Joint Chiefs, and signed by General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Northwoods Was Not an Anomaly — It Was Part of a Pattern
Operation Northwoods did not arise in isolation. It was a component of a broader campaign known as Operation Mongoose, authorized by President John F. Kennedy in late 1961 following the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion.
Mongoose was a sweeping covert program aimed at destabilizing Cuba through sabotage, infiltration, psychological warfare, and the encouragement of internal revolt. It involved the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, the National Security Council, the White House staff, and the Attorney General’s office.
But as historian Tracy C. Davis documents in Operation Northwoods: The Pentagon’s Scripts for Overthrowing Castro, the driving force behind Northwoods and Mongoose was not civilian diplomacy — it was the military establishment.
The Joint Chiefs viewed time as a strategic constraint. They feared Castro’s influence spreading across Latin America and regarded escalation as not only acceptable, but urgent.
Northwoods represented the most explicit articulation of that mindset: if Cuba would not provide a justification for war, one could be created.
False Flags Were Considered Policy Tools
The declassified Northwoods documents make clear that Pentagon planners believed international opinion — including deliberations at the United Nations — could be manipulated by staged events that framed Cuba as an imminent threat.
The premise was that a series of provocations would place the United States in the “position of suffering justifiable grievances,” thereby legitimizing military action.
This was not defensive planning. It was preemptive narrative construction.
As historian James G. Hershberg later concluded, the idea that the United States might deliberately provoke incidents to justify intervention was “frequently invoked” within a small circle of high-level civilian and military officials — not dismissed as unthinkable.
JFK Rejected the Plan — The Pentagon Did Not Forget It
President Kennedy ultimately rejected Operation Northwoods. No evidence shows it was ever implemented.
But rejection does not erase authorship.
The fact that such a plan was drafted, approved internally, and formally submitted exposes the willingness of senior U.S. military leadership to contemplate deception at a massive scale — including against their own population — in service of geopolitical objectives.
Kennedy himself warned against such methods. In November 1961, he stated that the United States could not compete with its adversaries through “tactics of terror, assassination, false promises, counterfeit mobs and crises.”
The Pentagon nonetheless drafted a plan built precisely on those tactics.
Historical Consequences and Modern Relevance
Evidence of Operation Mongoose and related planning later surfaced during the 1975 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Senator Frank Church. That investigation revealed a broader pattern of covert actions, assassination plots, and deception targeting Cuba throughout the early 1960s.
Ironically, as Church observed, the only period in which Castro allowed Soviet nuclear missiles on Cuban soil — the Cuban Missile Crisis — coincided with a temporary stand-down of U.S. assassination efforts against him.
The record suggests that aggressive U.S. covert operations contributed directly to Soviet defensive escalation, not the reverse.
The Record Is No Longer Disputed
Operation Northwoods is no longer classified. Its authenticity is uncontested. Its implications are profound.
It demonstrates that:
Senior U.S. military officials proposed staging or fabricating incidents to justify war.
These proposals were documented, reviewed, and transmitted through official channels.
The barrier preventing their execution was presidential rejection — not institutional restraint.
The plan failed. The fact it existed did not.
And the historical record now leaves no room for denial.
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