# The US military drew up plans to fake terror attacks and blame Cuba

**Verdict: Proven.** Confirmed by the memo itself, declassified in 1997: the Joint Chiefs proposed it and Kennedy rejected it; it was never carried out.

Category: Government & Intelligence · Era: Cold War era · First circulated: 1997 (proposal dates to 1962)
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/operation-northwoods

## Summary
Long before 'false flag' entered everyday vocabulary, America's own Joint Chiefs of Staff put their names to a plan to stage fake terrorism against American citizens and pin it on Cuba. The proposal is real, signed, and declassified. It was also rejected, and it never happened.

## The claim
That in 1962 the US Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed staging false-flag attacks (fake terrorism in American cities, a faked assault on the US base at Guantanamo Bay, the sinking of boats carrying Cuban refugees, and hijacking scares) and blaming them on Fidel Castro's Cuba to manufacture public and international support for a US invasion.

## Origin and timeline
- Nov 1961: Weeks after the Bay of Pigs failure, President Kennedy authorizes Operation Mongoose, a covert program to remove Castro, run by Robert Kennedy with Brig. Gen. Edward Lansdale coordinating the military and CIA effort.
- 5 Mar 1962: Lansdale asks the Joint Chiefs of Staff for 'a brief but precise description of pretexts' that could justify direct US military intervention in Cuba.
- 13 Mar 1962: General Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, signs a memorandum titled 'Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba' and sends it to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
- Mar 1962: The plan is discussed at senior levels; accounts indicate President Kennedy and McNamara reject it outright, and it is not adopted as policy.
- Dec 1962: Lemnitzer is reassigned from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, a move some historians link to Kennedy's loss of confidence in the officers behind Northwoods.
- Nov 1997: The memo is declassified and released by the Assassination Records Review Board under the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, and later posted publicly by the National Security Archive.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: The military really proposed faking terrorism against Americans.
  Evidence: Confirmed by the document itself. The memo proposes 'a series of well coordinated incidents to take place in and around Guantanamo' and states that 'casualty lists in US newspapers [would] cause a helpful wave of indignation,' alongside plans for a 'Remember the Maine' incident and terrorism in Washington, Miami, and elsewhere blamed on Cuban agents.
- Claim: They planned to sink boats of refugees and stage hijackings.
  Evidence: Confirmed. The memo's own language states 'we could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated)' and proposes that 'hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft should appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the government of Cuba.'
- Claim: This was rubber-stamped and about to happen.
  Evidence: Not supported. The memo was a planning submission, not an executed order; it carries Lemnitzer's signature and JCS backing, but Secretary McNamara and President Kennedy declined to approve it, and no element of the plan was carried out.

## Why people believe it
- Because the core claim is true and documented in the plotters' own words, not inferred from circumstantial gaps, a rare case where 'the government planned to attack its own people' is not a metaphor.
- It surfaced only because an unrelated law (the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act) forced open Cold War military files that would otherwise likely still be sealed.
- It supplies the master template invoked whenever 'false flag' is alleged about a later event, even when no comparable document exists for those claims.

## Open questions
- The memo carried Lemnitzer's signature and was framed as Joint Chiefs backing, and it reached the Secretary of Defense through the ordinary chain of command rather than a leak, meaning some level of the military's planning apparatus was prepared to put its name to it. What the declassified record doesn't fully show is how it was debated inside the JCS before Lemnitzer signed it: how many officers reviewed or objected to specific proposals, how many drafts it went through, and whether any service chief pushed back before it reached McNamara's desk. The paper trail captures what was proposed and how quickly it was rejected once it left the Pentagon; the internal deliberation that produced it is thinner.
- Northwoods was not a one-off. The Joint Chiefs kept drafting Cuba-related pretext scenarios after Lemnitzer's departure, including a 1963 proposal to fabricate a Cuban attack on a fellow Organization of American States member to build hemispheric support against Castro, confirming the planning culture behind Northwoods survived the man most associated with it. What's unresolved is how far that culture extended beyond Cuba. Northwoods and its immediate successors surfaced only because they intersected with a declassification law aimed at the Kennedy assassination; contingency and pretext planning against other Cold War adversaries, with no such connection, was never subject to that forcing mechanism and has no equivalent release deadline.
- In March 2025, the US government released the last major tranche of records withheld under the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, closing out most of the redactions that had lingered in that collection since the 1990s, which makes the core Northwoods memorandum close to fully public. But that law only reached Northwoods because Lemnitzer and Lansdale's Mongoose-era work happened to intersect with material connected to the Kennedy case. Contingency planning with no such connection was never covered by it, has no comparable release deadline, and could still sit behind ordinary Pentagon classification with nothing forcing it into daylight.
- Northwoods' most unsettled question may not be about 1962 at all: what does it mean that a plan this extreme reached a Cabinet secretary's desk with a Joint Chiefs chairman's signature on it, rather than being stopped earlier inside the military's own planning process? Kennedy and McNamara's rejection is not in dispute, and the system worked in the sense that matters most: nothing in the plan was carried out. But whether comparable proposals in other administrations, on other issues, ever reached a president's desk at all, or instead died quietly inside the Pentagon, or advanced without leaving a paper trail, is not something the Northwoods record by itself can answer.

## Sources
- Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Memorandum to the Secretary of Defense, 'Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba,' TOP SECRET SPECIAL HANDLING NOFORN, 13 March 1962, National Security Archive, George Washington University (1962): https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/CMC-60/joint-chiefs-pretexts-to-invade-Cuba-1962
- Operation Northwoods memorandum (JFK Assassination Records Collection, declassified 18 November 1997), National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) (1997): https://catalog.archives.gov/id/305036
- President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (Public Law 102-526), U.S. Congress (1992): https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-106/pdf/STATUTE-106-Pg3443.pdf
- Final Report of the Assassination Records Review Board, Assassination Records Review Board (1998): https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/review-board/report/arrb-final-report.txt
- Additional JFK Collection release including Operation Northwoods-related record 202-10002-10104, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) (2018): https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2018/202-10002-10104.pdf
- Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, James Bamford (Doubleday) (2001)
- Operation Northwoods memorandum and cover documents (full declassified text, PDF), National Security Archive, George Washington University (2001): https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/news/20010430/northwoods.pdf
- Operation Northwoods, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
- JFK Assassination Records: 2025 Documents Release, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) (2025): https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/release-2025

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