U.S.A. MILITARY SECRET TERRORIST PLANS
Operation Northwoods
[APFN] Digest Number 1291 Date: 15 Sep 2001
From: CitizenPatriot Subject: Operation
Northwoods
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/apfn/message/16755
(2008 Note: This APFN group has closed. But you
can probably trace this article to its quoted source
of: 'Scott Shane and Tom Bowman, Sun Staff -
Originally published April 24, 2001'.) (2009 Note:
Looks like the group re-opened, but the original
articles have been deleted.)
We are living in perilous times.
It's time for the people to start paying attention.
By Scott Shane and Tom Bowman
Sun Staff - Originally published
April 24, 2001
WASHINGTON - U.S. military leaders proposed in 1962 a
secret plan to commit terrorist acts against Americans
and blame Cuba to create a pretext for invasion and
the ouster of Communist leader Fidel Castro, according
to a new book about the National Security Agency.
"We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in
the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in
Washington," said one document reportedly prepared by
the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "We could blow up a U.S.
ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," the document
says. "Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a
helpful wave of indignation."
The plan is laid out in documents signed by the five
Joint Chiefs but never carried out, according to
writer James Bamford in "Body of Secrets." The new
history of the Fort Meade-based eavesdropping agency
is being released today by Doubleday.
NSA regularly picks up the conversations of suspected
terrorist financier Osama bin Laden, says Bamford, and
has monitored Chinese and French companies trying to
sell missiles to Iran.
He provides new details about an Israeli attack on a
Navy eavesdropping ship in 1967, suggesting that the
sinking was deliberate. And he reveals the loss of an
"entire warehouse" full of secret cryptographic gear
to the North Vietnamese in 1975, at the end of the
Vietnam War.
Bamford, a former investigative reporter for ABC
News who wrote "The Puzzle Palace" about the NSA in
1982, said his new book is based mostly on documents
obtained through the Freedom of Information Act or
found in government archives. "NSA never handed me
any documents," he said. "It was a question of
digging."
He said he was most surprised by the anti-Cuba terror
plan, code-named Operation Northwoods. It "may be the
most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S.
government," he writes.
The Northwoods plan also proposed that if the 1962
launch of John Glenn into orbit were to fail,
resulting in the astronaut's death, the U.S.
government would publicize fabricated evidence that
Cuba had used electronic interference to sabotage the
flight, the book says.
A previously secret document obtained by Bamford
offers further suggestions for mayhem to be blamed on
Cuba.
"We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to
Florida (real or simulated). ... We could foster
attempts on lives of Cubans in the United States, even
to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely
publicized," the document says. Another idea was to
shoot down a CIA plane designed to replicate a
passenger flight and announce that Cuban forces shot
it down.
Citing a White House document, Bamford writes that
the idea of creating a pretext for the invasion of
Cuba might have started with President Dwight D.
Eisenhower in the last weeks of his administration,
when the plan for an invasion by Cuban exiles
trained in the United States was hatched. Carried
out in April 1961, soon after Kennedy became
president, the Bay of Pigs invasion proved a fiasco.
Castro's forces quickly killed or rounded up the
invaders.
Army Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint
Chiefs, presented the Operation Northwoods plan to
Kennedy early in 1962, but the president rejected it
that March because he wanted no overt U.S. military
action against Cuba. Lemnitzer then sought
unsuccessfully to destroy all evidence of the plan,
according to Bamford.
Lemnitzer and those who served with him in 1962 as
chiefs of the nation's military branches are dead. But
two former top Kennedy administration officials said
yesterday that they were unaware of Operation
Northwoods and questioned whether such a plan was ever
drafted.
"I've never heard of Operation Northwoods. Never heard
of it and don't believe it," said Theodore Sorenson,
Kennedy's White House special counsel. "Obviously, it
would be totally illegal as well as totally unwise."
Robert S. McNamara, Kennedy's defense secretary, said:
"I never heard of it. I can't believe the chiefs were
talking about or engaged in what I would call CIA-type
operations."
Bamford writes that besides the Joint Chiefs,
then-Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul H. Nitze also
favored "provoking a phony war with Cuba."
"There may be a piece of paper" on Northwoods, said
McNamara. "I just cannot conceive of [Nitze] approving
anything like that or doing it without talking to me."
The book contains many other revelations in its
detailed account of NSA, the biggest U.S.
intelligence agency and Maryland's largest employer,
with more than 25,000 personnel at Fort Meade, site
of its global eavesdropping efforts.
Among them:
In recent years, NSA has regularly listened to bin
Laden's unencrypted telephone calls. Agency officials
have sometimes played tapes of bin Laden talking to
his mother to impress members of Congress and select
visitors to the agency.
In the late 1990s, NSA tracked efforts by Chinese and
French companies to sell missile technology to Iran,
particularly the C-802 anti-ship missile. The
eavesdropping led to U.S. protests to the Chinese and
French governments.
When U.S. troops evacuated Vietnam in 1975, "an entire
warehouse overflowing with NSA's most important
cryptographic machines and other supersensitive code
and cipher materials" was left behind. It was the
largest compromise of such equipment in U.S. history,
Bamford writes, but the agency still has not
acknowledged it.
When Israeli fighter jets attacked the NSA
eavesdropping ship USS Liberty in the Mediterranean
in 1967, killing 34 Americans and wounding 171, an
NSA aircraft was listening in and heard Israeli
pilots referring to the American flag on the ship.
U.S. officials, including President Lyndon Baines
Johnson, decided to forget the matter, Bamford
writes, because they did not want to embarrass
Israel. To this day, Israeli officials say their
forces mistakenly attacked the U.S. ship. Bamford
says the reason for the strike was Israel's
desperate effort to cover up its attacks on the
Egyptian town of El Arish in the Sinai. The Liberty
was sitting offshore and the Israelis feared that
the ship would detect the operation, which included
the shooting of prisoners.
Yesterday, an NSA spokesperson questioned a point
made in the book about the USS Liberty.
"We do not comment on operational matters, alleged or
otherwise; however, Mr. Bamford's claim that the NSA
leadership was `virtually unanimous in their belief
that the attack was deliberate´ is simply not true,"
the spokesperson said.
When he wrote "The Puzzle Palace" in 1982, Bamford
was attacked by some NSA officials, who said his
revelations gave the Soviet Union and other U.S.
adversaries too much information on the secret
agency. One former director referred to him as "an
unconvicted felon." With the end of the Cold War,
the agency has been less guarded. NSA's current
director, Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, has
granted a number of interviews. Hayden "cracked the
door open a tiny bit," said Bamford, partly to
burnish NSA's public image and correct
misconceptions.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/apfn/message/16755
Note: This APFN group has subsequently closed.
But you can
probably trace this article back to its quoted source
of: 'Scott Shane
and Tom Bowman, Sun Staff - Originally published April
24, 2001'.
It's time for the people to start paying attention
THE 9-11 DECEPTION
