By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on January 30, 2025
JFK
The danger of trusting the CIA, said Brazilian politician Leonel Brizola, is that as the years go by, the agency opens its files and “everything rotten comes to light”. The prediction that new skeletons will come out of the closet of US politics has been on the rise since Donald Trump decided to publish the still classified documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (JFK).
With the news in the air, some media have rescued from oblivion Operation Northwoods, a 1962 plan that came to light in the first major opening of the mysterious archives of the Dallas assassination, almost 40 years after the event, in 1997. A mountain of documents was published then, when the JFK Assassination Records Review Board released 1,521 pages of declassified military files from 1962 to 1964. The 12 folios of Operation Northwoods were part of this group, but went unnoticed among the “rot”. Until now.
This operation describes how, in the early 1960s, during the Kennedy administration, the CIA drew up plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in US cities in order to create public support for invading Cuba. Code named Northwoods, the covert actions would include the assassination of Cubans in Florida, the sinking of ships with emigrants on the high seas, the hijacking of planes, the blowing up of a US ship and even the organization of acts of terrorism with fatalities in several US cities, including the capital, Washington.
The plans explicitly detail a scheme to deceive the American public and the international community to justify the war that would overthrow the young government of Fidel Castro. The US military high command contemplated the possibility of causing US military casualties, as they wrote in the memorandum dated March 13, 1962: “We could blow up a ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,” and “the casualty lists in the newspapers would cause a wave of national outrage.” It also proposed staging fake funerals to mobilize public opinion in favor of military intervention.
The plans had the written approval of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and were presented to President Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. They were part of a broader effort to overthrow the revolutionary government, known as Operation Mongoose, a CIA campaign that included espionage, sabotage, and support for Cuban-born mercenaries.
But Operation Northwoods was rejected by Kennedy, who was concerned about the ethical and political implications of a plan that made use of deliberate deception and relied on the sacrifice of American lives to manipulate public opinion.
Kennedy’s refusal exacerbated tensions between the president and the military high command, who were already questioning his leadership after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. The president was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963, a year and a half after this plan was drawn up, and Operation Northwoods became the focus of attention in the investigations into the assassination.
Now, President Donald Trump has promised to release all classified documents related to the deaths of JFK, his brother Senator Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, the latter two assassinated in 1968. No one doubts, not even Trump himself, that even more controversial government activities in the 1960s will be revealed, because “the most interesting part of those files was not released,” in the words of the Republican president.
The great paradox of this Trumpian moment is that, while it allows us to take a look at chilling state terrorism projects against Cuba that coldly calculated the death of innocents on US territory, the new White House tenant has once again included the island on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Few things are more cynical than this. Trump sweeps away the image scruples of the old conservatives, and feeling, now for sure, unbeatable from here until eternity, he shamelessly exhibits his hatred and shame, and his particular revenge against the “deep state”. But what Operation Northwoods proves is that he is nothing new, nor did he arrive at the White House out of nowhere.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English