One thing’s lacking from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s accounts of “Operation Northwoods.” One thing that explains the origins of this menu of false flag operations – pretexts for conflict with Cuba – drafted via the Pentagon in March 1962.
One thing about his father.
Most of the people keep in mind Robert F. Kennedy as President John F. Kennedy’s closest confidant, marketing campaign supervisor and legal professional common, the harsh however idealistic more youthful brother who helped him in the course of the Cuban missile disaster and later waged an antiwar marketing campaign for president, sooner than turning into the second one Kennedy brother slain via an murderer.
Right through Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s political upward push to his present place as Secretary of Well being and Human Services and products, he capitalized at the tale of “Operation Northwoods,” giving his model of it in speeches, interviews, and two separate books.
Kennedy Jr. pinned the blame for the pretexts only on “the highest officials in the U.S. military,” accusing them of “lethal zealotry,” decrying “how badly the American military leadership had lost its moral bearings.”
As an example the purpose, he cited one pretext at duration: “A ‘Remember the Maine’ incident could be arranged in several forms: We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantánamo Bay and blame Cuba.”
In each and every of those accounts, Kennedy Jr. ignored a very powerful a part of the “Operation Northwoods” tale: his father’s position. I realized of that position from paperwork declassified via the JFK Assassination Data Assessment Board, within the Kennedy Library and in different archives whilst researching a ebook I’m writing, “Clandestine Camelot.”
Robert F. Kennedy aimed to make use of false flag operations as a pretext to visit conflict with Cuba and depose its communist chief, Fidel Castro, noticed right here in 1963.
Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone by way of Getty Photographs
Debacle with a chaser of deceit
Within the first international coverage memo he dictated, Legal professional Normal Kennedy broached the theory of fabricating an assault at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, one of the crucial spoils of the Spanish-American Struggle.
It used to be April 19, 1961, and the Bay of Pigs invasion used to be in mid-collapse. More or less 1,500 CIA-trained and -financed Cuban expatriates had been mounting a doomed try to overthrow Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary-turned-tyrant. Castro had the invaders pinned down at the seaside underneath fireplace from Moscow-furnished MiG fighter jets.
It used to be then that the legal professional common requested the president if they might get Central and South American countries “to take some action” to prevent the waft of Russian fingers to Cuba “if it was reported that one or two of Castro’s MiGs attacked Guantanamo Bay and the United States made noises like this was an act of war and that we might very well have to take armed action ourselves.”
Castro, in fact, had no longer attacked the U.S. naval base. That may have supposed conflict with The us and the top of his regime.
From subversion to army intervention
Right through the 1960 presidential marketing campaign, JFK known as Cuba a “Soviet satellite” and a “potential enemy missile or submarine base only 90 miles from our shores.” In November 1961, hoping to undo the Bay of Pigs failure, he created his personal covert operation “to help Cuba overthrow the communist regime.” He put his brother Robert answerable for the name of the game program of subversion, code-named “Operation Mongoose.”
Fomenting revolution in Cuba confronted an insurmountable impediment: Castro used to be already robust sufficient to overwhelm any purely inner rebellion.
CIA, State Division, and Protection Division officers agreed that the one strategy to overthrow Castro used to be a U.S. invasion.
Underneath Robert Kennedy’s management, the “Special Group (Augmented),” the interagency team JFK charged with overseeing Mongoose, proposed to modify the covert operation’s purpose from orchestrating subversion to justifying U.S. army intervention.
On March 5, 1962, the gang requested Deputy Underneath Secretary of State for Political Affairs U. Alexis Johnson “to have a list prepared of various situations which would serve as a plausible pretext for intervention.” Within the mins of that assembly, anyone crossed out “plausible pretext” and wrote “valid basis.”
The mins of a March 5, 1962, assembly display that Robert F. Kennedy’s team requested a State Division staffer to organize an inventory of quite a lot of eventualities ‘which would serve as a plausible pretext for intervention’ in Cuba.
Nationwide Archives
The starting place of ‘Operation Northwoods’
After the assembly, “in response to direction,” Mongoose operations leader Edward G. Lansdale requested the Joint Chiefs of Team of workers for “a brief but precise description of pretexts which the JCS believes desirable for direct military intervention.”
The Joint Chiefs of Team of workers replied via drafting the file now referred to as “Operation Northwoods.”
A laugh reality: Nobody known as it “Operation Northwoods” on the time.
“Northwoods” used to be only a code phrase the Joint Chiefs of Team of workers used on Mongoose paperwork. Within the twenty first century, alternatively, historians mistook the code phrase for a code title and gave the pretexts their unhistorical care for. There used to be no “Operation Northwoods,” however that didn’t prevent it from getting its personal Wikipedia web page.
The Particular Crew (Augmented) voted on March 13, 1962, to change the Mongoose tips to state “that final success will require decisive U.S. military intervention.”
3 days later, the gang briefed the president at the revised tips, together with secret “plans for creating plausible pretexts to use force, with the pretexts either attacks on U.S. aircraft or a Cuban action in Latin America for which we would retaliate.”
President Kennedy mentioned “bluntly” that they weren’t then in a position to decide on using army pressure.
However he did inform the gang to “go ahead on the guidelines.” Because the revised tips mentioned that Cubans “will be used to prepare for and justify this [U.S. military] intervention, and thereafter to facilitate and support it,” the revision remodeled Mongoose right into a secret program to furnish the president with a pretext to invade Cuba if he so selected.
Thankfully, he didn’t.
Apocalyptic recommendation
The ultimate recorded time Robert Kennedy suggested his brother to imagine a false flag operation used to be on Oct. 16, 1962, the primary day of the Cuban missile disaster.
The president’s secret White Space recording gadget captured Robert Kennedy advising him to imagine fabricating a pretext for U.S army intervention: “Can I say that one other thing is whether we should also think of whether there is some other way we can get involved in this, through Guantánamo Bay or something. Or whether there’s some ship that … you know, sink the Maine again or something.”
JFK overlooked the advice. Taking it might have, in all probability, began a nuclear conflict.
This yr marks the centennial of Robert Kennedy’s beginning, the very best instance to prevent scapegoating the army for his darkest deeds. In drafting pretexts for conflict, the Pentagon used to be complying with directions it gained in the course of the command construction the president established for Operation Mongoose. Generals have little selection however to agree to such directions until and till Congress outlaws false flag operations.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote that the “Operation Northwoods memo should serve as a warning [to] the American people about the dangers of allowing the military to set goals or standards for our country.”
Actually, it unearths the risks of letting anyone like Robert F. Kennedy use the ability of the U.S. govt to lie to American citizens about life-or-death issues.
