Читать книгу Conspiracy! 49 Reasons to Doubt, 50 Reasons to Believe - Ian Shircore - Страница 12
ОглавлениеEVIL IN THE AIR, TERROR ON THE STREETS
The vicious, murderous plan was finally exposed, in all its gruesome detail, less than six months before the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center.
Airliners were to be hijacked and other aircraft blown up. Bombs were to be planted in public places. Gunmen would mount assassination attempts on key individuals. Ordinary citizens were to feel the dread and anxiety of a terror campaign targeting several major cities, including the capital.
The victims who would be exposed to the threat of terror and suffer the results of bombings and violence were the people of America, specifically those in Miami and Washington DC.
But the conspirators behind the plans for this despicable terror campaign were their own leaders, America’s top generals.
Operation Northwoods was an extraordinary ‘false flag’ operation aimed at justifying an American invasion of Fidel Castro’s Communist Cuba. And it was dreamed up, planned out and signed off as a serious proposal in 1962 by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, under the chairmanship of General Lyman L Lemnitzer.
This breathtakingly insane plan also included bright ideas like faking the downing of a chartered airliner over Cuba, using an empty, pilotless, radio-controlled aircraft.
Real passengers – ‘a group of college students’ was suggested – would board a plane for Jamaica or Venezuela, painted and numbered to look identical to an airliner owned by a CIA front company. The disguised plane and the real one, already being flown by remote control, would rendezvous over the ocean. The disguised plane, carrying the students, would quietly sneak back to a remote airfield, unload its passengers and be repainted to resume its normal identity, while the radio-controlled aircraft flew on into Cuban airspace.
Once there, it would send out Mayday distress calls saying it was being attacked by Cuban fighters, before being detonated in a spectacular explosion, with the apparent loss of dozens of innocent lives.
There was also a scheme to sink an unmanned, radio-controlled US ship off the coast of Cuba and pretend that many sailors on board had been killed.
‘Conduct funerals for mock victims,’ the provisional plan suggested. A further embellishment carried the note: ‘Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.’
Many more bloodcurdling ideas were listed.
‘We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated),’ the generals proposed.
Credibility would be important, though, and some people might have to pay a price for that.
‘We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States, even to the extent of wounding,’ the top brass continued.
Not one of the military leaders seems to have had qualms about the proposals, which were forwarded as ‘a preliminary submission suitable for planning purposes’, with the recognition that individual projects would be considered on a case-by-case basis.
The declared aim was to put the US in the position of ‘suffering justifiable grievances’ in order to get world and United Nations opinion firmly behind military action.
‘These suggestions provide a basis for development of a single, integrated, time-phased plan to focus all efforts on the objective of justification for US military intervention in Cuba,’ the planning memorandum concluded.
Within a couple of days of the meeting at which the generals gave their approval, the proposal document was put before President John F Kennedy by his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara.
JFK’s reaction to the Northwoods plan was less than sympathetic. Like McNamara, he was appalled by the generals’ gung-ho enthusiasm for provoking a war. He soon got rid of Lemnitzer as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, though the general’s career hardly skidded to a halt. He was moved to Europe and became NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander for the next six years. As late as 1975, long after his retirement, Lemnitzer was brought back by President Gerald Ford as a member of his Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
REASONS TO DOUBT
The key point about the plan for Operation Northwoods is that, despite the astonishing willingness of all the country’s top soldiers to set out on a campaign of state-sponsored terrorism on the American mainland, nothing actually happened.
This time, the checks and balances in the system worked. The executive dismissed the whole idea, and President Kennedy told Lemnitzer face to face that the US was not about to use military force against Cuba.
All this was only a few months after the disastrous CIA-backed assault on Cuba that ended in defeat for the anti-Castro Cubans at the Bay of Pigs, with hundreds of battlefield deaths and executions and the capture of 1,200 prisoners.
The dramatic and embarrassing failure had made a deep impression on the president. After the Bay of Pigs, JFK told a reporter, ‘The first advice I’m going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that because they are military men their opinions on military matters are worth a damn.’
Kennedy was disgusted with the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He sacked CIA Director Allen Dulles and famously said he wanted to ‘splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds’. He moved fast to take responsibility for paramilitary operations away from the spooks and give it to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the hope that they would plan and behave better. Operation Northwoods was the clearest possible proof that that strategy hadn’t worked.
Whether Kennedy’s objections to the idea of a staged terror campaign on US soil were partly moral or wholly practical, his scrapping of the Northwoods proposals made him bitter enemies among the generals, to go alongside his sworn foes in the CIA. Those who think there may have been a mega-conspiracy behind the JFK assassination point to the Bay of Pigs and Operation Northwoods as crucial moments when powerful forces in the US began to believe their president was becoming – in their terms – dangerously anti-American.
REASONS TO BELIEVE
Operation Northwoods was kept firmly out of sight for many years, and it was not until 1997 that the first declassified papers were released that pointed to the conspiracy’s existence.
In late April 2001, a single damning document was published. This was the complete Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, dated 13 March 1962 and originally marked ‘Top Secret – Special Handling – Noforn [no foreign nationals]’, with the full details of the thinking about Operation Northwoods.
General Lemnitzer was usually careful to make sure the documentation about anything he didn’t want to own up to was destroyed or ‘lost’. But even Lemnitzer couldn’t snatch back everything. The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had kept his copy of the memo, the only absolute proof that these detailed plans had been approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and reached the highest levels of government (see the original document at bit.ly/operationnorthwoods).
As well as unleashing terror on the streets of Florida and Washington, the Northwoods proposals included the idea of using Cuban dissidents or American forces in Cuban uniforms to sabotage or mortar the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay.
Disguised US aircraft could make night raids on the Dominican Republic, dropping Soviet-made incendiary bombs to implicate Cuba. Adapting American F-86 jets to create ‘reasonable copies’ of Russian-built MIG fighters would take ‘about three months’ and would offer scope for all kinds of airborne confusion and mayhem.
All the time, the idea was to build up a picture of the Cuban regime as ‘rash and irresponsible and an alarming threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere’, in order to provide a pretext for a large-scale US military intervention before the end of 1962.
In the event, these harebrained notions were never put into practice, as President Jack Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara threw them out.
But the fact that these highly specific and cynically ruthless plans were unanimously endorsed by America’s top generals, albeit 50 years ago, is a chilling reminder.
Bizarre, manipulative and bloodthirsty plots don’t just exist in the minds of paranoid and embittered conspiracy theorists. They can also exist in the minds of generals, politicians and others who may have the power and resources to turn them into reality.
Very often, there is less to an apparently suspicious chain of events or circumstances than meets the eye. Coincidence and cock-up are momentous, shaping forces in human affairs. But sometimes there truly is more going on than they ever want you to know.
