Operation Northwoods: When the U.S. Planned Terror on Its Own People

By Joe Marzo

It sounds like the premise of a political thriller: a secret plan, drawn up at the highest levels of the U.S. military, proposing terrorist attacks on American soil to justify war with Cuba. But this isn’t fiction. In 2001, declassified documents revealed that in 1962, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a proposal known as Operation Northwoods — a blueprint for false-flag operations designed to manipulate the American public into supporting a military invasion of Cuba.

The plan called for real or staged acts of terror, including bombings in U.S. cities, hijackings, and even the sinking of boats full of Cuban refugees — all to be blamed on Fidel Castro.

It was never carried out. But the fact that it was seriously considered — and approved by the military’s top brass — has shaken trust in American institutions ever since.

A Country Obsessed with Cuba

By 1962, the U.S. government was growing increasingly desperate to topple Fidel Castro, whose communist regime in Cuba represented a direct affront to American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. Just a year earlier, the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion had ended in disaster, humiliating the Kennedy administration and emboldening Castro.

The failure sparked renewed urgency inside the Pentagon and CIA. What could justify another military intervention in Cuba — one that the American public and the international community would support?

That’s when General Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his colleagues devised Operation Northwoods: a plan to fabricate justification for war by carrying out or simulating acts of terrorism, then blaming them on Cuba.

Inside the Documents

The proposal, dated March 13, 1962, was labeled “TOP SECRET” and submitted to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. It outlined a series of suggested provocations, each more chilling than the last:

• Stage the hijacking of a civilian airliner, possibly involving a drone aircraft to simulate an explosion, with a fake passenger list of Americans.

• Explode bombs in Miami, Washington, and other cities, potentially targeting Cuban exile groups to make the attacks seem more personal.

• Sink a boatload of Cuban refugees, perhaps in real or staged fashion, to generate outrage at Castro’s cruelty.

• Falsify casualty lists and create mourning among “U.S. citizens” whose identities were fabricated.

• Use fake radio broadcasts, intercepted messages, and planted evidence to strengthen the illusion that Cuba was behind it all.

The goal was simple: to manufacture consent.

The document even stated explicitly: “The desired resultant from the execution of this plan would be to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba.”

The Kennedy Factor

When the plan reached the desk of President John F. Kennedy, it was reportedly met with outrage. Kennedy had grown distrustful of his military leadership after the Bay of Pigs debacle, and Operation Northwoods may have reinforced his belief that the Pentagon was too eager for war.

The proposal was never approved. Within months, General Lemnitzer was reassigned to NATO and removed as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Operation Northwoods was buried in a sea of classified memos — unknown to the public for nearly four decades.

But the mindset behind it didn’t disappear. The U.S. continued to explore covert operations against Cuba, including Operation Mongoose, which involved sabotage, assassination attempts on Castro, and other clandestine activities throughout the 1960s.

Declassified in the 21st Century

In 2001, the National Security Archive at George Washington University obtained and released the Northwoods documents as part of a broader effort to declassify Cold War files. Their authenticity was never in doubt; they were written, reviewed, and signed by the highest levels of the U.S. military.

Suddenly, conspiracy theories about "false flag operations" weren’t so easily dismissed. Operation Northwoods provided irrefutable proof that the U.S. government was not only capable of deceiving its citizens — it had actively planned to do so.

A Dangerous Precedent

Though Operation Northwoods was never implemented, it raises haunting questions. How close did America come to orchestrating terrorism against itself? How many other plans were drawn up — perhaps less extreme, perhaps more — that we’ll never know about?

The legacy of Northwoods has echoed through modern debates about national security and government transparency. Skeptics of later events — from the Gulf of Tonkin incident to the justification for the Iraq War — often cite Northwoods as evidence that the U.S. government has, in fact, contemplated manufacturing crises.

It also demonstrates the perverse logic of Cold War thinking, in which moral boundaries were blurred by the overriding desire to defeat communism at all costs. If a few innocent lives had to be sacrificed to save the hemisphere from Castro, so be it — or so the planners seemed to believe.

Final Thoughts

Operation Northwoods forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: democracy, even in a nation that claims to be the global guardian of freedom, can be manipulated from within.

The architects of this plan were not rogue actors — they were the top generals in the U.S. military. Their plan wasn't dismissed as insane or treasonous — it was typed up, approved, and passed along to civilian leadership.

And if President Kennedy hadn’t said no, we might be reading about it not in declassified documents — but in history books as a chapter in a war we were tricked into starting.

Sources:

• “Pentagon Proposed Pretexts for Cuba Invasion in 1962” – National Security Archive (George Washington University)

• Operation Northwoods Declassified Documents – U.S. National Archives

• James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency

• U.S. Department of Defense, Memorandum to the Secretary of Defense, March 13, 1962

• “JFK and the Unspeakable” – James W. Douglass