Operation Northwoods — Joint Chiefs false flag proposals
This page contains the first full searchable HTML transcription of the declassified Joint Chiefs of Staff memorandum codenamed NORTHWOODS, dated 13 March 1962. The document proposes that the United States government stage attacks against its own military personnel and civilian aircraft to manufacture justification for invading Cuba. It was signed by Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer and rejected by President Kennedy.
Read full transcription →On 13 March 1962, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff forwarded a memorandum to the Secretary of Defense proposing a set of pretexts that would justify a U.S. military invasion of Cuba. The document bore the code name NORTHWOODS. It was classified Top Secret Special Handling NOFORN. It was not declassified until decades after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The proposals are specific. They include blowing up a U.S. Navy vessel in Guantanamo Bay and blaming Cuba. Staging a fake terror campaign in Miami. Sinking a boatload of Cuban refugees at sea. Building a drone aircraft as an exact duplicate of a civilian airliner, loading it with passengers traveling under false aliases, substituting the drone for the real aircraft, and then broadcasting a distress call claiming attack by Cuban MIGs before destroying the drone over Cuban waters. Using U.S. Air Force F-86 fighters repainted to look like Cuban MIG aircraft to harass civilian aviation. Conducting fake funerals for mock-victims to provoke public outrage.
The document was produced in response to a request from Brigadier General Edward Lansdale, the Chief of Operations for the Cuba Project, who was running Operation MONGOOSE, the CIA and military covert program aimed at overthrowing Castro after the Bay of Pigs failure. The Joint Chiefs submitted it as a preliminary planning document. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara rejected it. President Kennedy rejected it. Chairman Lemnitzer was reassigned to NATO command within months.
The document remained secret until journalist James Bamford described it in 2001 in "Body of Secrets," his history of the National Security Agency. The National Security Archive subsequently obtained and posted the declassified document. It sits in the National Archives under Record Group 218, Records of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The proposals were never carried out. The significance is that they were formally proposed, signed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and submitted to the civilian leadership of the Defense Department as an operational planning document. The highest military command in the United States put in writing a plan to kill Americans, fabricate evidence, and use the deaths to start a war.
Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff. Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, "Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba." TOP SECRET SPECIAL HANDLING NOFORN. 13 March 1962. JCS 1969/321. National Archives, Record Group 218, Records of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Declassified and posted by the National Security Archive.
National Security Archive: document page →
NOTE: This is a public domain document produced by the U.S. government and held at the National Archives. The full transcription on this site is word-for-word from the source document.
The Colonial Authority in The Interference does not invent pretexts. It inherits them. Operation Northwoods is the documented proof that the highest military command in the United States once put in writing a plan to kill Americans, fabricate evidence of a foreign attack, and use the manufactured deaths to start a war. The document was signed. It was submitted. It was rejected by one administration and classified for decades by the next. The Interference series takes the institutional logic of Northwoods and asks what it looks like when that logic operates without a civilian leadership willing to say no.
The Interference begins with a patent. US3951134, filed in 1974, describes a device for remotely monitoring and altering human brain waves without physical contact. The patent is real. The USPTO granted it.
What precedes that patent is a documented institutional record. In 1960, the CIA funded MKUltra Subproject 119 at Texas Christian University. The stated objective included techniques of activation of the human organism by remote electronic means. The contractor was unwitting. The budget was $6,370. Sidney Gottlieb signed off. In 1952, an ARTICHOKE field team produced total amnesia in two overseas subjects held in a guarded safehouse with eyes taped shut in transit. Their dispositions after the operation were outside the team's responsibility. In 1963, the CIA Inspector General recommended termination of unwitting testing on American citizens. The program ran for another decade. In 1983, a U.S. Army Intelligence report filed in the CIA's STARGATE collection treated the brain as an electromagnetic organ that could be entrained to external frequencies. Not as theory. As established fact.
The Colonial Authority in The Interference is what that timeline produces if you follow it forward rather than stop at the declassified record. The mesh program James Harlan carries inside his skull is built on the physics in these documents. The fiction begins exactly where the public record stops answering questions.