OPERATION NORTHWOODS
asile.org
My feeble attempt at translation follows.
This is similar to US reports, but with less "coincidence theory", and inclusion of more recent comment on General Lemnitzer, Bush Senior, Wolfowitz, and William H. Craig.
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When the American military planned terrorist attempts against their own population, is the enemy of the American democracy internal? In 1962, to legitimize a war against Cuba, the chairman of the JCS of the United States had envisaged terrorist attempts against his own population. The declassified document that we present here reveals the plan of the operation Northwoods: a series of attempts killing civil and military Americans to mobilize the public opinion against Fidel Castro. The JCS chairman notably had planned an attempt against a carrier and an passenger airliner. The project of the generals was prevented by president Kennedy a year before his assassination. Among the conspirators were the Secretary of the Army of the united States.
Operation MONGOOSE
In 1958 to Cuba, rebel actions by Fidel and Raul Castro, Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos reverse the system of Batista. The new government puts an end to the business activities by a group of multinational corporations (Standard Oil, General Motors, ITT, General Electric, Sheraton, Hilton, United Fruit, Is Indian Co) and the family that ran Bacardi. In return, these businesses convinced president Eisenhower to overthrow Castro.
March 17 1960, president Eisenhower approves a "Program of clandestine actions against Castro". His goal is of "to replace the system of Castro by another, more faithful to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable for the united States, by means avoiding all visibility of the intervention US" [1].
April 17 1961, a brigade of Cuban exiles and mercenaries, more or less discreetly provided by the CIA, embarked to the Bay of the Pigs. The operation turns into a fiasco. President John Kennedy, who had just arrived at the White House, refuses to send the US Air Forces to support the mercenaries. 1,500 men are imprisoned by Cuban authorities. Kennedy disavows the operation and fires the director of the CIA (Allen Dulles), the assistant director (Charles Cabell) and the director of the stay-behind agents (a wealthy individal named Bissell). He entrusts an internal investigation to his military counselor, general Maxwell Taylor, but it is not followed up and does not produce any concrete report. Kennedy questions himself on the attitude of the JCS, that had validated the operation while it knew it would result in failure [2]. By all appearances it was as if the generals had attempted to imply the united States was in an open war against Cuba.
If president Kennedy punished the methods and the failures of the CIA, he did not question the politics of hostility in Washington with regard to Havana. He set up a "special Group" to conceive and drive the anti-Castro fight. This group is composed of his brother, Robert Kennedy (general attorney), military counselor (general Maxwell Taylor), national security counselor (Mc George Bundy), secretary of state (Dean Rusk), Alexis Johnson, secretary of Defense (Robert McNamara), Roswell Gilpatric, new director of the CIA (John McCone), and chairman of JCS (Lemnitzer).
This special widened Group conceives of a series of secret actions under the generic title of operation "Mongoose". To realize these, the operational coordination between the state department, the department of the Defense and the CIA is confided in the general Edward Lansdale (attending secretary to the Defense, in charge of the special operations, and to this title director of the NSA). While at the heart CIA, a unity ad hoc is constituted, the "Group W", directed by William Harvey.
THE CRISIS AT THE HEART OF THE MILITARY
General Leyyman L. Leymnintzer in April 1961, the army of the united States is enmeshed in a crisis: general officer Edwin Walker, had been given to racist clashes in Little Rock before taking the command of the infantry in Germany, and is fired by president Kennedy [3]. He is accused of developing a clandestine group of the extreme right in the armies. He himself would belong to the John Birch Society and to the Authentic Knights of the Klu Klux Klan.
The commission of the foreign Affairs of the Senate investigation on the extreme military right hearing are driven by the senator Albert Gore (d-tennessee), father of the future vice president. The senators suspect that general Lyman L. Lemnitzer participated in the plot with Walker. Gore knows that Lemnitzer is a specialist of the secret action: in 1943, he personally directed the negotiations aiming to return Italy against the Reich, then, in 1944, he conducted with Allen Dulles the secret negotiations with the nazis to Ascona (Swiss) preparing the capitulation (operation Sunrise) [4]. He participated in the creation of the network of stay-behind agents of the alliance, returning Nazi agents to fight against USSR, and to the exfiltration of war criminals to Latin america. But Gore did not make the connection to responsibility in the contemporary events.
A secret correspondence of the general Lemnitzer, recently published, shows that he plotted with the commander of the American forces in Europe (the general Lauris Norstad) and of other officers of very high rank to sabotage politics of John Kennedy.
The military extremists denounced the refusal of Kennedy to intervene militarily to Cuba. They consider the civilians of the CIA as responsible of the bad planning of the incursion of the Bay of the Pigs, and president Kennedy as a coward to have refused the support of the us Air Forces. To unblock the position, they decided to furnish a political pretext to Kennedy to intervene militarily. This plan, called operation "Northwoods", is formalized by the general corporal William H. Craig. It is presented to the special Group by the general Lemnitzer himself, March 13 1962 (our document). The meeting is anxiously held in the Pentagon, in the office of the secretary of the Defense, of 14 h 30 to 17 h 30. The presentation fared poorly: Robert McNamara rejects the plan, while general Lemnitzer threatens to proceed. Following the meeting were six months of permanent hostility between the Kennedy administration and the CJCS, and the remoteness of Lemnitzer and his nomination as boss of the forces US in Europe. Before leaving, the general gives the order to destroy all the tracks of the project Northwoods, but Robert McNamara preserves the copy of the mémo that had been put back for him [5].
TERRORIST ATTEMPTS
The operation Northwoods aims to convince the international community that Fidel Castro was irresponsible to the point of representing a danger to the peace of the west. For this fact, it is foreseen to orchestrate, then to ascribe to Cuba of serious damages undergone by the united States. Here someone of the projected provocations:
Attack bases in American Guantanamo. The operation would have been driven by mercenary cubans under uniform of the forces of Fidel Castro, and would have included various sabotages and the explosion of the deposit of munitions, which necessarily would have produced material damages and considerable human casualties.
Board an American vessel in territorial waters by Cubans to revive the memory of the destruction of the Maine, in 1898 (266 deaths), that provoked the American intervention against Spain [6]. The ship would have been in reality empty and operated by remote control. The explosion would have been visible from Havana or Santiago to provide witnesses. Relief operations would have been driven to provide credibility of the losses. The list of the victims would have been published in the press and of false obituaries would have been organized to give rise to indignation. The operation would have been released when vessels and had Cubans would have been located in the zone to be able to claim an attack.
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