Operation Northwoods: The Joint Chiefs' False-Flag Plan to Justify a Cuba Invasion

What Operation Northwoods was, in a paragraph.

Operation Northwoods was a memorandum, dated March 13, 1962, from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Secretary of Defense, proposing a package of "pretexts which would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba." The memorandum was signed by JCS Chairman Lyman L. Lemnitzer and represented the unanimous position of the chiefs. The proposals included staged attacks on the US Navy base at Guantanamo, the sinking of a (real or fake) US ship, the fabrication of a downed civilian airliner blamed on Cuban forces, plastic-explosive bombings in Miami and Washington with manufactured casualty reports, and the launching of a fake Cuban aircraft against a Dominican base. Some operations called for actual injury to US service members; others were to be fully fabricated through propaganda. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara forwarded the package to the White House. President John F. Kennedy rejected it. Lemnitzer was not reappointed as JCS Chairman when his term expired later that year. The memorandum was filed and remained classified until 1997, when it was released as part of the JFK Records Act. James Bamford, who first reproduced and contextualized the document in his 2001 book Body of Secrets, is the source most often cited for the case's public presentation.

The documented record.

The document itself

The Northwoods package is a one-page cover memorandum with a single enclosure, dated 13 March 1962 on the letterhead of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Washington 25, D.C. Verified It is headed “MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE” — Robert McNamara — with the subject line “Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba (TS)”, and it is signed “For the Joint Chiefs of Staff” by L. L. Lemnitzer, Chairman. The banners read TOP SECRET / SPECIAL HANDLING / NOFORN, struck through and overstamped UNCLASSIFIED at declassification. Page 1 is reproduced on our document page [1].

Who asked for it, and why it exists. Verified This was not an unprompted proposal. The cover memorandum's own first paragraph says the Chiefs “have considered the attached Memorandum for the Chief of Operations, Cuba Project, which responds to a request of that office for brief but precise description of pretexts which would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba.” The Chief of Operations of the Cuba Project was Brig. Gen. Edward Lansdale, running Operation Mongoose; the request is dated 5 March 1962 and the drafting ran through Brig. Gen. William H. Craig, Lemnitzer's covert-action officer and the JCS representative to the Caribbean Survey Group. Northwoods is the military's answer to a question the Kennedy administration's own Cuba operation had asked it eight days earlier — which is a materially different thing from the Pentagon volunteering the idea, and this file previously omitted it [8].

What the Chiefs actually recommended. Paragraph 2 of the cover memorandum reads: “The Joint Chiefs of Staff recommend that the proposed memorandum be forwarded as a preliminary submission suitable for planning purposes. It is assumed that there will be similar submissions from other agencies and that these inputs will be used as a basis for developing a time-phased plan. Individual projects can then be considered on a case-by-case basis.” Verified That hedge is in the document and belongs in any honest account of it. It does not soften what the enclosure proposes; it does establish that the Chiefs were forwarding a menu for staffing, not issuing an order.

A note on length. This file previously called Northwoods “a 16-page document” without qualification. Verified It is 15 pages. The scan we host is the complete memorandum, not an excerpt: three unnumbered pages of cover matter (the cover memorandum, the Note by the Secretaries, and the JCS Decision) followed by document pages numbered 1 through 12, with gap-free internal pagination. The “16” had no source we could reproduce.

The document opens with a clear statement of intent: "World opinion, and the United Nations forum should be favorably affected by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere... A series of well coordinated incidents will be planned to take place in and around Guantanamo to give genuine appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces" [1].

The specific proposals

The operative list sits in the Annex to Appendix to Enclosure A, headed “PRETEXTS TO JUSTIFY US MILITARY INTERVENTION IN CUBA”. Before any of it, the annex carries its own note, which is worth reading before the proposals themselves: “The courses of action which follow are a preliminary submission suitable only for planning purposes. They are arranged neither chronologically nor in ascending order. Together with similar inputs from other agencies, they are intended to provide a point of departure for the development of a single, integrated, time-phased plan.” Verified Nothing should be read into the sequence, and this file previously implied otherwise — while also, as it happens, listing the proposals out of order. They are given below in the order the annex actually uses:

• Staged Guantanamo incidents. the eleven numbered items are, verbatim: “Start rumors (many). Use clandestine radio,” “Land friendly Cubans in uniform ‘over-the-fence’ to stage attack on base,” “Capture Cuban (friendly) saboteurs inside the base,” “Start riots near the base main gate (friendly Cubans),” “Blow up ammunition inside the base; start fires,” “Burn aircraft on air base (sabotage),” “Lob mortar shells from outside of base into base. Some damage to installations,” “Capture assault teams approaching from the sea or vicinity of Guantanamo City,” “Capture militia group which storms the base,” “Sabotage ship in harbor; large fires — napthalene” (the misspelling is the original’s), and “Sink ship near harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock-victims.” Verified The parenthetical (friendly) matters and this file previously dropped it: the saboteurs and rioters to be “captured” were to be American-directed Cubans, not real ones.
• A “Remember the Maine” incident. The memorandum does invoke the 1898 sinking by name: “A ‘Remember the Maine’ incident could be arranged in several forms.” It then gives two, and they are not the same proposal. 3.a is one sentence: “We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba.” 3.b is a different plan — “We could blow up a drone (unmanned) vessel anywhere in the Cuban waters” near Havana or Santiago, followed by “an air/sea rescue operation covered by US fighters to ‘evacuate’ remaining members of the non-existent crew. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.” Verified [1]
• Terror campaign in US cities. “We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.” Verified
• Hijacking and casualty fabrication. "It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner... an aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area…” The duplicate would be “loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases,” then swapped for an unmanned drone whose destruction would be blamed on Cuba [1].
• Use of Soviet aircraft markings. "Hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft should appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the government of Cuba... it is possible to create an incident which will make it appear that Communist Cuban MIGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters." The plan called for painting US aircraft in MiG livery as Cuban substitutes: the annex notes that “an F-86 properly painted would convince air passengers that they saw a Cuban MIG.” Verified [1]

A correction, and it cuts against the way this case is usually told — including by us. Earlier versions of this file ran the two halves of the “Maine” proposal together into a single quotation and concluded that the reference to “casualty lists in US newspapers” made the intent unambiguous: “dead Americans, blamed on Cuba.” Disputed Read in the document, that sentence belongs to option 3.b, in which the vessel is a drone, the crew is non-existent, and the casualty lists would therefore be fabrications — the deception is the printing of names of people who were never aboard. Option 3.a, blowing up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay, does not specify whether it would be crewed. Neither passage states an intention to kill Americans, and we should not have said it did.

The document does contemplate real harm to real people, and the sentence that shows it is one this file had left out. Verified In the terror-campaign paragraph, immediately after the boatload of Cubans: “We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized.” There is no drone and no non-existent crew in that sentence. It proposes wounding actual refugees, on American soil, for publicity. That is the strongest thing in the memorandum, it needs no embellishment, and it had been omitted in favour of a claim the text does not support [1].

How it was rejected

The document was forwarded by McNamara to the Kennedy administration. The exact moment of rejection is not as crisply documented as the proposal itself, but the outcome is clear: the plan was not adopted, no Northwoods operations were executed, and Lemnitzer was reassigned. Verified Lemnitzer's term as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs ended on September 30, 1962. He was not reappointed, and in November 1962 he was appointed Supreme Allied Commander Europe [7]. Several historians, including James Bamford, have characterized the non-reappointment as a direct consequence of Kennedy's loss of confidence in the JCS leadership after Northwoods [2].

How it came to public knowledge

The Northwoods memorandum was declassified on 18 November 1997, released by the Assassination Records Review Board under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 [4]. Verified Page 1 of the hosted copy carries an earlier stamp reading “SYSTEMATICALLY REVIEWED BY JCS ON [May 84] — CLASSIFICATION CONTINUED”: the Joint Staff looked at this document in 1984 and decided to keep it secret for another thirteen years. Among the millions of pages reviewed for assassination-related material, the JCS memorandum was identified as eligible for release. Verified [3]

It first reached a broad public audience through the work of journalist and historian James Bamford. Bamford reproduced excerpts of the document and provided historical context in his 2001 book Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency. The National Security Archive at George Washington University also published the full document online with editorial annotation [3]. Both releases occurred within months of one another in 2001 and brought Northwoods from a footnote in declassification-records discussions into general historical awareness.

The corporate authorship

One frequently-missed fact: Northwoods was not the work of a single rogue officer. The document is the unanimous formal recommendation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — the heads of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, plus the Chairman — transmitted through their formal advisory channel to the Secretary of Defense. Verified This is the documented institutional position of the senior US military leadership in March 1962, not a memo from a fringe planner [1].

The institutional framing.

The Joint Chiefs' own framing of the memorandum, embedded in the document itself, is that the proposals were a menu of options for civilian leadership consideration, not a recommended course of action presented as a fait accompli. There is textual support for that reading, though not the support this file used to claim: an earlier version quoted the cover memorandum as using the formulation “the following actions could be undertaken”, and that phrase is not in the cover memorandum. What the cover memorandum actually says is that the package should go forward “as a preliminary submission suitable for planning purposes” whose “individual projects can then be considered on a case-by-case basis”, and the annex is written throughout in the conditional — “could be arranged”, “we could blow up”, “could be developed”. In this framing, the chiefs were doing their job — surfacing options for political masters — not freelancing. The strain between the Kennedy White House and the Joint Chiefs in this period is documented from the administration side in Schlesinger’s contemporary account [9].

Contemporary defenders of Lemnitzer (including some retired officers writing in military journals after the 1997 release) have emphasized this framing. They note that contingency planning, including for unpalatable scenarios, is part of the JCS function, and that the document was promptly rejected by the civilian chain of command exactly as the system is designed to work.

The countervailing view, articulated by Bamford and most subsequent historians, is that the document goes well beyond contingency planning into operational proposals with specific manufactured-casualty mechanics, and that proposing the deliberate killing of US civilians to manufacture a casus belli is not within any defensible reading of military advisory function. The JCS may have surfaced the options. The options themselves were the problem.

The unanswered questions.

The full working-group documentation

The Northwoods memorandum is a summary of a longer staff-work product produced by the "Caribbean Survey Group" working under the JCS Joint Staff. Drafts, working papers, alternative versions, and the deliberations that produced the final memo are partially extant in the Joint Staff records at NARA — Record Group 218 — but have not been comprehensively released [5]. Whether the working group considered additional options or rejected some during deliberation is incompletely documented.

Kennedy's own response

There is no formal written rejection memorandum from the White House in the released record. The rejection appears to have been delivered orally, possibly directly to Lemnitzer in a meeting in March 1962. Robert McNamara's later oral histories at the Kennedy and LBJ Libraries mention the package only in passing and do not provide a detailed account of how it was killed [6]. Disputed

Whether elements survived in modified form

Some Northwoods-adjacent activities — particularly the use of false-flag mechanisms in covert action — were subsequently considered or executed by the CIA's Operation Mongoose without the Northwoods memorandum's specific manufactured-casualty elements. The exact boundary between "Northwoods, rejected" and "Mongoose-era covert action, executed" is not fully clean in the public record. Whether any element of Northwoods made it into operational practice under a different name has been argued in both directions by historians.

The role of CIA-DoD coordination

The Northwoods package references the use of "a CIA proprietary organization" (a CIA-controlled front company) as the entity whose aircraft would be substituted with a drone. This indicates the JCS was contemplating CIA cooperation in the operation. The CIA's own knowledge of and reaction to the Northwoods package is not documented in any released CIA file from the period. Whether the agency was aware of the proposal in detail, and how it would have responded if asked to participate, remains open.

Why the document was declassified at all

The JFK Records Act mandated the release of documents that could illuminate the assassination and its context. Northwoods does not directly concern the assassination — it predates it by 20 months and was rejected. Why the document was nonetheless reviewed and released under the Act's terms, rather than withheld under one of the available national-security exemptions, is a procedural question with no public answer.

Primary material.

The Operation Northwoods documentary record is unusually accessible for a declassified case:

• The Northwoods memorandum itself, "Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba," March 13, 1962. Full text available at the National Security Archive at George Washington University and at NARA's John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection. The document is unredacted in the released version.
• The signature page bearing Lemnitzer's name and the date.
• Related Caribbean Survey Group memoranda from January through March 1962, held in Joint Staff records at NARA, providing context for the proposal's development.
• Lemnitzer's personnel and reassignment records from late 1962, documenting the end of his JCS tenure.
• Bamford's annotated reproduction in Body of Secrets (2001), which provides the historical framing most often cited in subsequent treatments.
• The National Security Archive's online edition at nsarchive2.gwu.edu — the most accessible published version with editorial context.

The sequence.

1. January 1961 Eisenhower administration ends; Kennedy inaugurated.
2. April 17, 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Failure. JCS and CIA-civilian-leadership relations strained.
3. November 30, 1961 Kennedy authorizes Operation Mongoose, an interagency program of covert action against the Castro regime.
4. January–February 1962 JCS Caribbean Survey Group develops options package.
5. February 2, 1962 Early draft of Caribbean Survey Group memo circulates.
6. March 13, 1962 Final Northwoods memorandum signed by Lemnitzer and forwarded to McNamara.
7. March 16, 1962 McNamara-Kennedy meeting reported in administration records (specific content of meeting not documented in released material).
8. Spring 1962 Northwoods package effectively dead. No operations authorized.
9. September 30, 1962 Lemnitzer's term as JCS Chairman expires. Maxwell Taylor succeeds him.
10. January 1963 Lemnitzer takes command of US European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR).
11. October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis — bringing the Cuba question to a different, ultimately diplomatic resolution.
12. 1965–1992 Northwoods memorandum sits in classified JCS files, unreviewed by any public process.
13. October 26, 1992 President George H.W. Bush signs the JFK Records Act, mandating systematic review and release of assassination-era documents.
14. November 1997 Northwoods memorandum declassified and added to the JFK Assassination Records Collection at NARA.
15. April 2001 Bamford's Body of Secrets published. National Security Archive publishes annotated edition online. Northwoods becomes broadly known.

Cases on this archive that connect.

Operation Mongoose — the CIA anti-Castro campaign Northwoods was drafted to support.

The Bay of Pigs (April 1961) — the failure that produced the pressure behind both.

The Gulf of Tonkin Incident (1964) — a real or alleged incident that did produce a war — the counterfactual Northwoods proposed.

Full bibliography.

1. Joint Chiefs of Staff, "Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba" (Operation Northwoods), memorandum to the Secretary of Defense, March 13, 1962. National Security Archive, George Washington University. Hosted in full on this site →
2. Bamford, James. Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency. Doubleday, 2001. Chapter 4 covers Northwoods in detail.
3. National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book, "Operation Northwoods: Pentagon Proposed Pretexts for Cuba Invasion in 1962," released April 30, 2001.
4. JFK Records Act (President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992), Public Law 102-526.
5. U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff records, Record Group 218, National Archives at College Park, MD.
6. McNamara, Robert S. Oral history interviews, John F. Kennedy Library and LBJ Library.
7. Lemnitzer official biography, Office of Joint Chiefs of Staff Historian.
8. FRUS 1961–1963, Volume X, Cuba, January 1961–September 1962. State Department Office of the Historian.
9. Schlesinger, Arthur M. A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. Houghton Mifflin, 1965. Provides contemporary administration perspective on JCS-civilian tensions.

Frequently asked questions.

What was Operation Northwoods?

A package of proposed pretexts for invading Cuba, sent by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on 13 March 1962 over the signature of Chairman L. L. Lemnitzer. It proposed staging incidents — attacks on Guantanamo by American-directed Cubans, a faked airliner shoot-down, a bombing campaign blamed on Havana — that would be attributed to Cuba to justify military intervention. It was not adopted, and no Northwoods operation was carried out.

Is Operation Northwoods real, or a conspiracy theory?

It is a real, declassified U.S. government document, released on 18 November 1997 by the Assassination Records Review Board under the JFK Records Act. You do not have to take anyone's characterisation of it: the 15-page scan is hosted on this site in full, with a page-by-page guide. It is one of the cases in this archive where the disputed question is not whether the document exists but what it means.

Did Operation Northwoods propose killing Americans?

Not in the passage usually quoted for it, and this is where most accounts — including earlier versions of this file — overreach. The line about “casualty lists in US newspapers” belongs to a proposal to blow up an unmanned drone vessel and stage a rescue for a “non-existent crew”: the casualties would be invented, not real. What the memorandum does propose, in a sentence far less often quoted, is fostering “attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized.” That contemplates real harm to real people.

Who wrote Operation Northwoods, and who asked for it?

It was signed by Lemnitzer for the Joint Chiefs, but it was written to order. The cover memorandum says it responds to a request from the Chief of Operations, Cuba Project — Brig. Gen. Edward Lansdale, who ran Operation Mongoose — dated 5 March 1962. The drafting ran through Brig. Gen. William H. Craig, the JCS representative to the Caribbean Survey Group. It is the military's answer to a question the administration's own Cuba operation had asked it.

Was Operation Northwoods approved?

No. The Chiefs forwarded it as “a preliminary submission suitable for planning purposes” whose “individual projects can then be considered on a case-by-case basis”. It was rejected. There is no formal written rejection in the released record — the refusal appears to have been delivered orally — but Lemnitzer was not reappointed when his term as Chairman ended on 30 September 1962, and in November 1962 he went to NATO as Supreme Allied Commander Europe.

Why was a 1962 Cuba document released under the JFK Records Act?

That is a genuinely open question. Northwoods predates the assassination by twenty months and was rejected, so it does not obviously fall within the Act's subject matter. Page 1 of the hosted copy carries a stamp showing the Joint Staff systematically reviewed the document in May 1984 and continued its classification; something changed between that decision and the 1997 release, and the public record does not say what.