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'.)
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
9-11: THE ATTACK ON
TRUTH
