From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Nolan.
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Paul Mission Control Decat most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. An episode long time and coming. Gentlemen, this is a bit stuff they want you to know and a bit ridiculous history. I guess because any student of war can tell you a lot of stuff doesn't
make it off the drawing board. Remember all those episodes we did on both shows about like wrapping bombs to bats and using cats as spies.
Sure, I mean, no matter what weird stuff do you throw at them, Ben, war, war never changes, right.
And that one time the US, absolutely in seriousness, said I don't know what if there's like a bomb that can make people gay, And they put money into this ideation until eventually a voice of reason said, that's kind of wild. I don't think it'll work.
Can you imagine if it did, how much happier everyone would be, how much less conflict there would be. I mean, Jesus, what an idea.
We see all these wild ideas, right, and the majority of them, the rate of attrition is very high. They don't make it off the drawing board. And so we can look back at a lot of those things, and with the benefit of retrospect, we can call them hilarious. But when they do make it into real world deployment, the result can be terrifying. And please, fellow conspiracy realist, keep that last new in mind. Toward the end of today's exploration.
I don't want to be a weirdo here, guys, Bob, I'm coming to this episode way more serious, Like this is serious stuff we need to talk about.
Yeah, That's what I'm saying. Like, keep in mind, like there's a reason we're talking about this, right.
God, I got it.
Yeah, man, Sometimes the serious stuff you got a temper with a little bit of lighthearted as lest we drive ourselves insane with worry. Here are the.
Facts, you know, for most of its recent history, the United States has been in a really weird adversarial relationship with its nearby sovereign nation, Cuba. This wasn't always the case. The US used to have a huge crush on Cuba, and I would argue still sort of does, but it's like an in cell level love hate thing.
Well back in the day, they loved the money. The United States loved the money they can make off of Cuba and Cubans.
Yeah, Cuba is There's a reason Cuba is the largest island in the entirety of the Caribbean. It's perfect for cultivating historically profitable crops. One great quote to illustrate this founding, Father Thomas Jefferson once called Cuba the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of states. But they couldn't get it. The Spanish controlled Cuba since the days of Columbus geopolitical version of crushing on a person who's already in a terrible relationship.
Wow. In eighteen ninety five, the United States joined forces with Cuba to drive out Spain, and taking advantage of this situation, the US transformed Cuba into essentially a vassal state, and for the next sixty years, American influence in Cuban politics and day to day life was massive. Yeah, obviously, we know things changed after a time, but there was a point where we essentially could kind of wheeld control
over the way things went down in Cuba. Americans controlled more than forty percent of the sugar industry, fifty percent of the railways, and ninety percent of telecom and you utilities.
Yeah, and there was also a crap ton of black market gambling and all kinds of underground stuff that was run by let's say heavily American influenced mafia style groups.
The way they do show up later in tonight's episode, and I think the way they're referred to is a certain demographic of aristocratic businessmen in Miami.
We'll give me because it was a destination place for wealthy people to go spend some money and do some things they're not really supposed to do away from home.
A lot of trafficking as well, sex trafficking, drug trafficking, et cetera. And most Cubans, most Cuban nationals in this time were landless, We're poor, were oppressed. From the US perspective, this is great in the US for a while, is saying we get on fantastically with Cuba and then kind of a one sided relationship.
Though I would argue. Yeah, yeah, yeah, a.
Lot of people in the upper echelons of.
A certain demographic of aristocratic business been now relocated to Miami and points abroad. Yeah, things don't go well for the US because in nineteen fifty nine, reil up and comer named Fidel Castro sees his power and the powers that be previously, I guess we should say the powers that were hated this Castro guy. He ruined this abusive relationship. The US was making tons of money exploiting the Cuban public and practicing resource extraction, and worse come to worse
for Uncle Sam. Along with Fidel Castro eventually comes the Soviets.
So in nineteen fifty nine, kind of riding high off of the big win World War two, the Russians were the number one threat to the United States dream of kind of getting their arms around the entire globe edgemonically speaking.
Yeah, peak cold war stuff.
Sorry. By the way, the big win for World War two came from the United States, not from the Russians. Open right, the convolution.
The Russians won. They paid a much higher toll, but they won.
That's yeah, the Allies were victorious. I suppose in that but it is just we got to remember the atomic bomb happened, you know, in between these years. This is, as you said, been real Cold War stuff. The tensions were crazy high, and the ideological solidification it was like at its peak.
Yeah, let's let's define ideology in a way we quite we haven't quite yet in the history of this show, and for our purposes, this is the best definition. The ideology of communism and the ideology of capitalism are conflicting frameworks to justify control over an extraction of resources.
Yeah, I've always kind of wondered, like, what's the big deal with communism? You know, like it seems so harmless, you know, on the one handley as just a thing you study and maybe learn a little bit about, and then maybe you go to some meetings and the first it is treated that way. But then before you know it, it becomes this insidious threat that is in danger of toppling the prevailing you know, mode of thought, and that
could essentially ruin everything. I don't know, like, do you think it was there was a real worry there or was it much to do much to do about nothing?
Kind of yes, in offices, right, and maybe individuals contemplating alone like general's chiefs of staff of sitting alone on either side, they're imagining, Oh, what happens if our thing becomes not the thing? Because another way to think about these ideological basis bases basis for like reasoning to have a government. It makes me think about the individual reasoning of a person of why am I a cog in
this specific economic machine? Why am I willingly a worker that goes in forty hours a week and does my thing? What is the greater good here that I'm a part of? Right? And they're very opposed to each other.
Well, yeah, because it depends upon who, like your cognitive position. The ideology depends upon what you see as gathering the most resource resource advantages for you on a microcosmic scale.
Well is it for me?
Dilemma?
Is it for me? Or is it for the greater good? And how do you picture those two things in your own mind? Right?
People, I would argue you have an historic problem or dilemma with that, which is, if this stuff is good for me, it must mean the thing is great for everything. That's right, That's how people are thinking.
Or am I satisfied with not having a bunch because I feel like I'm doing it for the right reason, right if you if you go through all of these things, like if you're getting stamps to buy to get certain amounts of food because you're own rations for whatever through a state program, is that the same as getting more money because I got a promotion?
I mean, but aren't people in communist societies also cogs in a machine. It's just a different flavor of machine that they sort of own a little bit, you know what. One could argue you own the machine by virtue of working for it. Like it's it's this ideological twist is so fascinating to me.
If there were and I don't want to derail us too far, but if there were uh functioning communist society and modern history there never has been, the argument would be very different.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, they quickly descend into autocracy and kleptocracy, which are just fancy words for saying authoritarian governments and thieves.
Yes, I didn't say it wasn't.
Well, like, what's been the functioning democracy that really works? You know what I mean? I don't know, man, what is.
The difference between the current US government and a monarchy or an aristocracy in all but name anyway? This is so, this is important discourse for these folks. When Castro takes power in fifty nine, they're freaking out. With the Cold War, the world is growing smaller that for people in twenty twenty four maybe difficult to imagine the calculus here. So think about like living in a small town. There's a guy on the other side of the city and you hate him. He's the worst, And all of a sudden,
he's living part time in another house. It's your neighbor's house, and he's right over the fence. Castro vibed with the Soviets. Cuba went communists. The US did a lot of dumb stuff trying to oust the new Cuban government. They didn't recognize it at all. They treated it as a regime or an occupying force. And they, you know, they tried to like drug his cigars. They tried, didn't They try to like exploding.
Wasn't the dynamite explosives, I believe, like a rigged scuba suit.
They tried to assassinate his character, if not the man himself, by piping in hallucinogens at one point and.
During a speech, so he like sounded like totally was the word incompetent.
That was their idea. You know, they had the pigs invasion spoiler didn't work.
From this was April seventeenth to the twentieth, nineteen sixty one, so like right around this time as we're recording this episode on the twenty second of April.
History is way closer than it looks in the rear view mirror. I love that you're pointing that out. I mean from that point from nineteen well, actually from like nineteen forty eight to now, the US has always held Cuba in a particular species of disdain, so much so that various world powers in the international community have increasingly been saying, hey, come on, man, come on, what's your deal.
Well, and nukes made that significantly more scary, right, just the concept of nukes.
Right, Yeah, the US was asking itself, you know, if we're the world's most powerful country or company, good argument, why do our enemies hang out next door? What happens if they decide to lob some dangerous party favors over our backyard fence?
This is Matt.
I think you're also referring in specific to the Cuban missile crisis, when the US was convinced with serious validity that the USSR would deploy nuclear weapons stationed in Cuba. And at that point during the missile crisis, the US had no way to prevent disaster. They had nothing that could stop those missiles.
Uh yeah, And that is late October nineteen sixty two, by the way, And if we're looking at timelines as we get further, to keep that in mind, late in the year nineteen sixty two, Cuban missile crisis.
And the Cuban Revolution did succeed. It's always struck me as somewhat hypocritical in the larger frame that the US itself was founded upon revolution and saw a revolution in its own backyard and then got pissed that other people were trying to do the same thing with just a different flavor of ideology. So the US sought to cripple this new government at the route. They failed, and with every single failure, the American regime took a step closer
to extremism, and through that extremism, they reached conspiracy. And this is why we're recording tonight. We're asking what was Operation Northwoods, why should we remember it now, and what does it mean for the future. We'll tell you after a word from our sponsors. Let's all duck under our public school desk. Here's where it gets crazy, Operation Northwoods
Soviet in its brutality. The question is would we sacrifice innocent people then lie to the public about how those people died all to launch a war that the US public would ordinarily never support. Long story short, yeah, given Fallout vibes, sorry, yes, without any spoilers.
Watch this show. By the way, even if you played the game, it's such a it's excellent.
Bring that back up towards the end here, because I want to have a discussion about fiduciary responsibility, which is something that's brought up by one of the characters in Fallout.
Yep, agree, Okay, the US got and this is not video game, this is real. The US got very close to launching a comprehensive false flag campaign, sacrificing it so in citizens to create what war nerds would call causes belly, which is just a fancy term for an actor series of events justifying a conflict, a hot conflict. The best example of this probably the Gulf of Tonkin is a great example, right, and you'll see a lot of people
arguing nine to eleven is another example. We do talk about the Gulf of Tonkin at length in our book. Check that out. The book about Northwoods is by a guy named James Bamford. It's called Body of Secrets, an intensely researched expos in the NSA, the National Security Agency, and uh, mister b published this in two thousand and one.
Isn't it basically just like a manufactured pr moment that allows them to make the argument because it sways public support in such a way that there's no other choice other than to wage the war they want to wage.
It can be that way. What they were talking about is actually killing innocent people.
Right, but they're creative making it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the moment that the engenders the support.
I think the great deal of the declassified memos that we've been through are more about falsifying killing or falsifying the deaths of American civilians or naval personnel or you know, civilians in an aircraft, or making it look as though Cuba has a attacked American citizens and military personnel, even though they did not, and even though there were no military or civilian personnel who died.
Right, however that was it was still all up for grabs, this was a brainstorm thing. It was a memorandum. Uh. They also were totally fine with killing innocent Cuban people and not making them up. That's what I mean when I'm saying real people as.
Collateral damage, right, I mean, it's not quite to the level of sci fi malevolence of like murdering your own people to create so saying the other guys did it so you could go in and have your way, But it's also not that far from that.
They also said they would do.
That, yeah, in their their plans in there for everything from like strategically deploying plastic explosives that may very well kill human beings to blowing up a drone aircraft that looks like an American plane that is not that nobody is actually on and then making up a list of human beings that would be published in papers that supposedly died in that aircraft.
Am I a dumb dumb that I didn't really realize they had drone aircrafts in the sixties, So what did those look like?
They did?
This was just kind of radio controlled, I imagine, right exactly.
They weren't as cool as the modern UAVs. But yeah, they were definitely they were around. Operation Northwoods is first ide eated in nineteen sixty two. You can read the initial document and all of the appendices and at the annex on this also for free online now in US government websites. The first title was Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba parentheses, ts and parentheses, which means top secret.
And this is under something we'll get to in a second called Mongoose, which was actually a little bit scarier, and they did a lot of this. They proposed a lot of the stuff that you're mentioning, Matt, you know, assass nation of Cuban immigrats or migrants, sinking boats of people from Cuba, trying to get to the US, hiji
on Cuba, and blaming it all on Cuba. Obviously everything we're about to say, the US wanted their hand hidden, blowing up US naval ship or a civilian ship, orchestrating terrorism in US cities, on US soil, attacks, having riots in both countries, and.
They specifically using Guantanamo Bay as a staging ground for a lot of the military action that the US would take under the false flag of Cuba.
And the US has controversially controlled Guantanamo since the days of the Spanish War, right, so they already had a footho, a beachhead basically, and they did say some of these attacks can be staged, some can be real. Very much when you read it, it very much has the feel of people sitting around freestyling in a writer's room, like, well, what if we did this? But what if we did this? Well, they don't all have to die, Yeah, we could just meet people up, right, or we could kill some people.
Yeah, I don't know.
Type it all, put it all in. There wasn't a lot of self editing.
Yeah. But have we said who is actually coming up with these ideas yet?
Well, this is largely the brainchild or under the guidance of General Lyman Luis Lemnitzer, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Yes, but he's at least proposing it, right, he's signed it. You can read his signature and scene in the documentation that we're.
Talking to Landyerdale as well.
Yeah, but then it's something that ends up in front of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who then have like a response to it, which is where a lot of the some of the main ideas are generated. If you imagine a group of people sitting around a large table in a war room discussing, well, what could we do here? Guys, Well, you got an idea, You got an idea, Johnson, and then they write it down. That's where this is coming from.
Yeah, that's like committee, that's what it is.
Because it's movie level stuff. Some of the things.
Is just that flabbergasted by how accurate that assessment is because it's just a remarkably banal.
It's a little casually, right, it's a little bit casual.
And it's insane. We talked about hijacking planes. This is April or March nineteen sixty two. This is early in the year nineteen sixty two. They're sitting around talking about hijacking planes and falsely showing that a plane got lost or shot down. A plane full of like college students, right that are going on vacation get shot down over Cuba. But it's not actually a plane full of college students.
It's a again, one of these remote planes. But then in the papers there'd be a list of all these students, so that the American public would go, oh my god, Cuba shot down a bunch of call kids. We got to go to war.
Yeah, exactly. It's manufacturing the righteous indignation of the people that then allows you to make whatever to say. We see it all the time, weapons of mass destruction, all these moments that turn out to be bullsh you know. It's just to sway the public and get them to not complain because everyone's trying to defend their political base. It's the most casual caddy. Just cha canary, utter cha canary.
If this is nineteen sixty two and we've been alive since the eighties, guys, just how many times has this kind of thing happened and we just were none the wiser.
Yeah, that's gonna be the ending question of tonight's exploration too. I mean, we got to remember at the time.
To be fair.
First off, Noel, to your point, I wanna name check a book. Would you say they were manufacturing consent Bernez, Oh, well.
Yes, of course, because it's you know, people just buy into this whole scenario and then they're like, well, yes, of course, we would not be good Americans if we did not support this, because these evil people have now been identified as our true enemies, and we have to be on board, you know.
And let's Remember, the US government is not a monolith, has never been really, and some factions of the state who are aware of these plans absolutely opposed them bluntly, so one president in particular.
Well, the civilian side of the government right versus the military side of the government m h.
Yeah, and for others for the military side of the government, this became a myopic focus. We could argue that the CIA and factions of the military had a sunk cost fallacy in many ways. They were like ahab and Cuba and Castro became their white whale that they wanted to pursue, and they were thinking, again, with some validity of the possibility of a nuclear first strike, America would once again be absolutely defenseless against armament like this deployed so close
to home. The Eastern seaboard would be no more possibly, And then it becomes a greater good calculus. Like if you had the choice between losing an appendage or a limb or a finger or dying, You're not gonna choose to die. It just becomes a question of which limb would you prefer to lose. So if you sacrifice a finger to save your body, that's an easy choice, and Jaysok. The military complex saw this kind of in the same philosophical light, not my Apia went on to I would
argue and form later aberrant actions in Southeast Asia. We know the Gulf of Tonkin was a false flag.
I mean we're talking about the Vietnam War here, Yesody.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and the top brass over a the Uncle Sam's side. They did say we could cause US military casualties, would they you know, to them like the list of actual people or fake people. It didn't matter. They just said, we need a list. It'll cause a quote, it's a real quote casualty list in US newspapers. Would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.
Here, it's the word indignation.
Let's talk about that that as as defined by Miriam Webster, that is anger aroused by something unjust, unworthy, or mean, indignation, indignation. But if you go to righteous igdignation, which is something that is thrown around I think quite a bit in at least in American fiction. This is the belief in your right to be angry about something, even though the people around you perhaps don't agree with why you're angry.
To it like there's a certain tunnel vision associated with it, and that's if you can get people to that place. You got them, you know what I mean. And it's rattling around your particular cause, you know.
So it's to get the American people to feel that indignation, and then to make sure that you can strategically get the United Nations assemblies to feel the same way, because you need the support of other countries, not just your internal civilians to support, like full on hot war.
What's that thing you say, Ben rabble, This something must change. This will not stay. Yeah, the the.
United Nations, Thank you, the United Nations. At this point, they've still got that new car smell. Think of them a little bit like the world's most ineffective hoa oh yeah in the in the neighborhood metaphor from analogy from earlier. If Northwood, if Northwoods is deployed, if it works any aspect of it, the end result is full military invasion with the tacit support or approval of the majority of
other nations on the planet. And then they would acquire full possession of Cuba, possibly annexing it or making a puppet government, remove the Soviets from that part of the board and at the same time, to be completely honest, repair some long standing relationships with a certain demographic of aristocratic businessmen in Miami.
Oh right, and get them back to their villas and you know, in their homes, right, you know, taking them control?
Yeah, retain control or take control, I guess, take possession of nationalized assets, many of which were like private company things.
I know we're going to get to a disentergree, but I just can't help but take a beat to say, like, how is it that we can know this stuff happened this time, but that some people convince themselves that this doesn't happen all the time. I feel like it's the name of the game. It is this kind of back dealing, two facedness. This is it writ large. We can see it down to every detail. Who are we kidding when we try to convince ourselves there's still some shred of
like truth telling and goodness and magnanimity in government. I just don't buy it, man, Or.
Why did Taran and Tel Aviv have such a limited exchange of attacks quite recently, dude?
And who fired first? And why? And or be sure it was them?
Of course?
Like it it makes you question everything guys, can I just quickly read just a little bit of a fuller quote from the indignation quote you gave there, Ben, just because it speaks a writer's room thing we're talking about, where you're just like, what you really thought? This this comes from page eleven. If you find the pdf online, you'll be able to find it. And so this is page eleven pdf, not page eleven in the actual memo.
That makes sense here it is it's listed under B. We could blow up a drone or unmanned vessel anywhere in the Cuban waters. So they're talking about a boat, a ship we could arrange to cause such an incident in the vicinity of Havana or Santiago as a spectacular result of Cuban attack from the air or sea, or both. The presence of Cuban planes or ships merely investigating the intent of the vessel could be fairly compelling evidence that
the ship was taken under attack. The nearness to Havana or Santiogo would add credibility, especially to those people that might have heard the blast, or have seen.
The fires, or lost a family member.
Well, well, again, this is an unmanned drone ship that they're talking about so nobody would be well, but that's what they're saying. That's this in this theoretical idea, it's just a ship that serves as the fire and the thing that then Cuban actual planes are like, what the hell's going on over here? And those planes are the
evidence that Cuba was involved. That's what they're saying. It says the US could follow up with an air sea rescue operation again to save the fake people covered by US fighters to quote evacuate remaining members of the non existent crew casualty lists in US newspapers. That's where it goes to. Your quote would give that indignation. So it's fake people that would cause the American public to revolt.
Again, they're not they they are considering fabricating a manifest right, fabricating the identities. But they're also, to be clear, super cool with killing Americans if.
They have to.
Oh yeah, the first the first one, like the A that was b A is just we just blow up a ship.
In Guanta writes they were just spitballing here, guys, you know.
And just one more quick thing here from page eleven. This is title eleven or a heading eleven. It says one idea is to quote sink ship near harbor entrance, this is near Guantanamo Bay, conduct funerals four mock victims. That just is insane to me that there would they would have full funerals as again like a film production or something.
Well, you got to follow through with the grift. Yeah.
And also, let's know another word, since we're doing a little etymology today. In the b part that that you shared, Matt, they use the phrase spectacular. Spectacular is meant to be theatrical. That's what it means, right, So they want it to be seen. And it might surprise some of US American patriots in particular to learn this was the extension of a larger, ongoing older conspiracy something in the holes of Langley in DC that was referred to as the Cuban Project.
It had another name, Operation Mongoose. And the etymology okay, Operation Mongoose very unclean thing. It comes from the historic rivalry and conflict between the mongoose and the cobra enemies, and the mongoose relies on a microcosmic version of asymmetrical warfare to kill the cobra. Because it can't bite like a cobra. It uses agility, speed, and unexpected vectors of attack to compromise the snake. But it doesn't just run
full steam at its opponent. Its feints and its false moves and above all, its timing of these motions are all meant to drain the snake of energy and resources. So mongoose echoes the lessons of the natural world. One of the big things they want to do is remove or force the Cuban government to expend resources. They want to drain it of its ability to fight. They want to remove offensive capability and make it focus, you know,
whatever armament or manpower it has on defensive capabilities. And they also want the boffit on the Cuban side and the Soviet side to spend most of their time thinking about how to correct the narrative.
Oh yeah, it's It's like a really good boxer, right you in about you're teaching your opponent to respond to
the way your shoulder moves. Your left shoulder moves at a certain angle right when you're preparing to throw a jab or a cross or something, and once your opponent is aware of that and is reacting to that shoulder movement, you do something different with your shoulder right but or you or you feign that move with your shoulder and you throw a different strike and it is so sorry, guys, I'm getting a little lost here, but it's so interesting the way this this played out then with the USSR,
because it's they're not just going after Cuba, right, they're going after communists and putting that in quotes or the Soviets in general at as.
Like as a concept, like you know, which we know it's really hard to kill a concept.
Well, and I would say overall, I think this strategy is kind of what worked, right if we pull out a little bit, we look at the fall of the USSR and we look at what occurred there and expending resources in places like Afghanistan, like it kind of worked right.
Yeah.
And we also we've got to give an honorable mention or dishonorable mention to the University of Miami because they were they were deep with something called JM Wave, which is sort of the operation station or origin point for a lot of this stuff if it were to be enacted. This was under the ownership of USAF General Edward Lansdale and then a guy named William King Harvey out of the Agency of the CIA. They were the sunk cost fallacy dudes or some of them in this story because
they lost the Bay of Pigs invasion. That was just poor Lee. From a production standpoint, it was not a not a good series of operations. They wanted blood, they wanted castro gone. They had made certain promises regarding the economic state of the Caribbean and Cuban particular. They wanted stuff to go back to the resource extraction of your You know, if we want to be cliche about it.
They're omelet guys.
They like omelets, which means they're on board with breaking eggs.
Well, according to JM. Wave, it's the same people we keep talking about. We just brought up that same dude in the last episode in Herehan's episode, the guy who was at the Ambassador Hotel, George Joannides. These are the same people we talked about with Rob Rob Reiner when we did the Who Killed JFK. Episode. It's the same crew of Cuban exiles who were working directly with the United States government to carry out operations that carried out the Bay of Pigs and failed in nineteen sixty one.
Then here in nineteen sixty two, we're talking about doing more stuff like that. Nineteen sixty three, JFK gets assassinated and allegedly, according to that show, who killed JFK? Jmwave, Joeanides and all these guys were directly involved in that assassination and.
Jmwave not a person. Jabwave is the station. So Mongoose allows the CIA to conduct asymmetrical terrorist attacks against civilians, against members of the Cuban military and Russian military folks stationed in the area, and they wanted to rack up blood, they wanted to injure the public, compromise the military. Doing all this causes the legitimacy of the government to fall into question, and then force resource allocation right in a way that is advantageous to the US. North Woods is
just a logical escalation of this strategy. And we have to remember the context, right, We're talking a lot about context. The US has kind of done this already in Guatemala in nineteen fifty four, you know what I mean. They had They had several successful test runs of this kind of stuff. And now the question is if the greater good of our ideology is this important, does it justify putting our own blood in the game to win the larger war, will we risk sacrificing our own.
Yeah, and they thought they were on a timeline. Guys. They were talking about how the USSR was not fully invested in Cuba at this time, Like they're talking about the Warsaw Pact. Cuba is not a member of that yet. They are not established full Soviet bases on Cuban land at this time. Yet, the same way the US has bases in Western Europe that are basically you know, they would be the same thing, right, they would be very similar.
So at least the creators of this document, this Northwoods document, they're saying that in this time, in nineteen sixty two, we have to act within quote the next couple of months.
All right, guys, why don't we take a quick pause here to digest what we've learned, hear a word from our sponsor, and then come back with the rest of this sordid tale.
We've returned, and we will never know how north Woods would have played out, the specific Northwoods, the larger strategy, that's what we've been teasing. We'll get to at the end. Jaysok did approve this, They drafted it, they presented it to the Secretary of Defense, at the time Robert mcmaara on March thirteenth, nineteen sixty two, It was never officially accepted or implemented because largely because then President John Fitzgerald Kennedy bluntly rejected it, said it was a dumb idea,
and maybe not for the reasons we might assume. An also spoiler this may have been factor in his untimely demise.
Well, yeah, that's exactly what I want to talk about, because again, going back to the discussion with Rob Reiner, according to him, and according to official documentation that's come out, JFK was talking directly to castro Via letters trying to calm everything down at this time, at this exact time he and he's also talking with members of like high ranked members of the Soviet Union at this time, trying
to calm down tensions. And this doesn't seem like a calm down tensions kind of plan, right, This is a raise tensions as high as we can so that we can take full direct action.
Yep.
And the question becomes, how do we know about north Woods this evening? Why are we talking about it here in twenty twenty four, Well, it might surprise a lot of us, a lot of our younger folks in the audience tonight to learn that the American public was not aware of this in an open way until the late nineteen nineties because.
Because of declassification, or was it because of a leak or what happened?
In November of nineteen ninety seven, the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board said, oh yeah, they released like over fifteen hundred pages of classified stuff that some of which was directly related to the assassination, but all of which got collected over time because it was related to Kennedy. And what they found in this vast swath of documents was that, yeah, Northwoods, Uncle Sam thought of killing some of us because they were super pisted Cuba.
They would argue likely, and I, by the way, the reason I think that they decided not to attempt this plan was they had a bigger fish to fry right in Berlin or in Germany, but they would just but we didn't do it. What's the problem, you know, like kind of yeah, we got to look at all the possibilities, guys. I mean, you know, it's a complex world out there.
I'm really glad you said that, because we'll see. But you're you're absolutely right, because in a March sixteenth, nineteen sixty two memo by Lansdale, whom we've mentioned earlier, Kennedy rejects Northwoods out of hand entirely. And I love that you're pointing out Berlin because he said, look to the General Lemnitzer, who is kind of the point of the spear here. Ideologically, he says, the tensions growing in Berlin are such that we may not have those four divisions
that you want to send a Cuba. They might have to go out to the European theater. Oh and also, General you're fired.
Okay, goodbye. I'm sure I'll get a book dealer or something.
Oh well, firing. See, that's the thing, you know, if you cut the point of a spear off, it's still a spear. It's just maybe less least still, it's still there. So Jasok continued to follow the ideology. They mapped false flag opportunities against Cuba until at least nineteen sixty three, the shadow of Mongoose loomed well.
Ben to that point, I have often wondered, like, what does happen when a high up military official behind something like this gets let go? Did they not send a memo to the underlings to stop with that guy's plan, Like, how does that work?
Well, these are just plans to be presented to get comments from the rest of the Joint chiefs of Staff, because I got it. What's his name, Limititzer was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time when this was written. So this is like giving it to everybody else to get their ideas, which then went all the way up to the president and the the who did you say?
It was Secretary of Defense.
Secretary of Defense to be like, all right, guys, this is our plan. What you think and they said no, that dude was out. Then Lemnitz are this.
Is just it's a vibe check.
It's that's exactly You're right. It was a huge vibe check. And they were like, nah, not vibes, not vibes.
Too far, too far.
Kennedy said, not vibes, and then he got one of the worst vibes a president could get.
Sh yeah, magic bullet.
Yeah.
So in the wake of or I guess we should say, in the spirit of asymmetrical warfare, Jaysak continued to ask themselves post Lemnitzer about waging terrorism in their neighbor's yard, they said, And this is all proven. They said, well, okay, if an attack on our own, even a fake attack like a drone or a manifest of people who don't exist, even if that empty ship strategy is out of bounce, then what if we attack another member of the Organization
of American States. What if we just hit another Caribbean country and blame it on Cuba, meaning we blame it on the Russians. And someone's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I know some countries in the Caribbean. What about you guys like Jamaica, And they said, put it on the list, And they said, oh, Trinidad and Tobago maybe, and they're like, never heard of it, put it on the list.
They put the Dominican Republic and Haiti all on that list too, And it was all again to try and pretend that maybe we could even do small things with Cuban quote Cuban shipments that we've doctored to make it look like they're Cuban of specific arms or something that are found or intercepted that look like there's about to be an invasion. But even though there's not, like.
It's just could we yellow cake this a little bit. Oh that's god, you know what I mean?
Like, yes, yeah, Can I give you another one? This is this is from page twelve in this is the This is under a heading six the use of Meg type aircraft. Ben, you want to tell everybody what a MiG type aircraft is.
Yeah, A big type aircraft is a fighter plane that is Russian.
That's really all you need. Was Soviet at the time. It was the front one of their primary fighter jets. So use of a Meg type aircraft by US pilots could provide additional provocation, harassment of civil air attacks on surface shipping, and destruction of US military drone aircraft. Again, drone aircraft by Meg type planes would be useful as complementary actions to this concept of using false shipments in something like a place like Trinidad or in the Dominican Republic.
And this is what really got me, guys, they said, an American made American military F eighty six that is quote properly painted would convince air passengers that they saw a Cuban MiG aircraft, especially if the pilot of the transport we're to announce such a fact. So like, imagine you're just on a delta flight, and the pilot says, h oh, that appears to be a Meg aircraft. What is that doing outside? And now you've got a false story that everybody on the aircraft gets to talk about.
And it says, it says reasonable copies of the Meg could be produced from US resources in about three months.
And that was probably a better idea than just trying to sort of tart up tart up a saber, because if you look at the picture of an F eighty six and you look at the picture of a Meg, they have very they're very different. You know, it's like a dog with a longer versus a shorter snout, and the wing shape is different. However, again, sy up style, the average passenger on a commercial airline is not going to know the difference. What they're going to be looking for is insignia yep.
Colored.
Yeah.
And so there's one thing before we move on that I want to get back to. The Machavelian brilliance of attacking Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaican in particular, is that they're Commonwealth countries, which means that the United Kingdom would be by treaty bound to be drawn into the conflict.
Wow I mean, thank god they didn't you do it?
Yeah, you got to get that coalition of the willing right guys. Cough cough nine to eleven cough cough, we shout out Pearl Harbor right cough.
Oh oh man, a New American Century. What if there was a project for that? Wow, the last time we did something something spontaneous and fun, guys.
Jeez man, I said the most literal name possible to an organization. Guys.
I want to be a rational human being who is not this crazy conspiracy theorist or someone would call that. But I swear it feels like the are so strong and so direct, But there's no the smoking gun thing just doesn't exist, and I don't think we would ever see it because, as you said before, we didn't learn about this until the nineties, and all of these were marked top secret, special handling, and this thing that we've talked about in the past. No foreign guys, remember what that means.
Yeah, no, not for any foreign to zero nationals. Right, foreignationals.
Not releasable to foreign nationals. And inside the recommendations here from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it's stuff like, guys, do not share this or forward it to any commanders of unified or specified commands. Don't let anybody see this that are US officers assigned to NATO activities whatsoever. Do not show this to anyone to the chairman US delegation United Nations, do not let that person see this.
Yeah, and certain folks in what we call academia got similar warnings because of the way research interacts.
It's just not it was like, nobody can know that this is what we're doing. This is the secret plans, is the ausi mandiis stuff.
This is totally right and ethical, by the way, and that's why we can't tell anybody nothing weird. Also, I would argue this is a parable there's a reason we're talking about this. I don't think it's crazy to note that this teaches us profoundly important lessons. They're surprising and uncomfortable. Nobody in this exploration at any point saw themselves as the bad guys. They conspire to create bad guys for
a greater good. And honestly, like, I know this is a hot take, but the US was not necessarily unreasonable in its assumptions here. We have to remember that we're foreign nuclear weapons deployed this close to home again, there would be no countermeasure. There would be a second strike capability, but it wouldn't save places like DC or New York or Philadelphia or you know, Miami. I'm sure they would go. Well,
Miami's kind of close. Maybe Atlanta. But the thing is to your earlier point, Nol, this is one thing the public knows about now. At some point many other sinister options equally, if not more, sinister options had to be considered. You have to think through it because you have to understand, you know, like you said, Matt, the shoulder dropping, what is your enemy trying to signal? What are you trying to signal to them? It becomes a double blind game
in the worst way. And if they didn't consider this kind of stuff, somebody else was going to And maybe that was part of their rationale, but it doesn't make it right. It shows us. It shows us that any country or any power structure in general will actively consider these kind of things if they feel it is to the larger advantage.
Yeah, but it's the kind of thing that makes at least me personally. I can't speak for everyone. I can't speak for you guys. It makes me doubt the anything that comes after this, anything that comes after nineteen sixty two as like, oh did was that real? Nore it? This is just them getting caught. Like I just feel like this this has just been the.
Name of the game as long as governments have governmented, you know, these types of exploits and behind the scenes double deals, like back to the look at the Romans.
I mean they were double.
Crossing each other left, right, and center. I mean it's just when you get to a certain level of power and control, corruption just kind of sets in and like you just want I don't know, it's it's bizarre, but let's talk.
About getting caught. This is thirty five years later that we learn about this, right and.
Oh, which makes even more galling because they don't even look at it as getting caught barely. It's just like, you, guys are.
Maybe the wrong people to ask, but when's the last time you had a casual conversation with somebody unrelated to this show about Operation Northwoods. When's the last time you heard about it?
Guys, I didn't know about it. I mean, this is very new to me. I mean it doesn't surprise me, though, I'm just I.
Guess what I'm saying is getting caught. It's they didn't really get caught. It then got discussed. You know, a couple of times.
They got identified, which is not the same thing as being apprehended nor encountering consequences there, you know what I mean. And this is another thing too, like, yes, this is the this is the dirty business of state craft. It's kind of the reason why you might enjoy a stake and you don't want to watch a documentary about factory farms while you're eating that stake.
Or even kill a cow, right right.
You're never going to hear a politician running for election on the idea of staging a terrorist attack. It does not matter who the US president is. They're not going to come out and say, hey, guys, stuff with Ukraine Rush is getting kind of complicated. So we're thinking, you know, we could dress a bunch of people up, you know, in Balaklava's and have them run out at a theater
or something. You're never gonna hear Putin saying yeah, bomb some apartments in the nineties, because you know, election season, you're never gonna hear that.
There was a great line I can't remember. There's a lot of lines in this movie in Oppenheimer. But the character the Robert Downey Junior played has something very poignant to say about the nature of politics. He's like the ones that are out in the light governing openly, or like they're not the ones you have to worry about or that's not even how you do. He says something about like you have to do it from the shadows, and that's those are the ones that are that's when
the job is really getting done. It is like the time spent in the shadows.
Okay, and I don't want to spoil too much here, guys, but I do want to quickly talk about something that was stated in one of the episodes of the Fallout series that's on Amazon Prime right now. So without spoiling, let's if you know any thing about the Fallout series, then you know there's a company called vault Tech or Robeco, Roboco something like that.
Vltech's vault Tech and rob Co's rob Co. But I think at some point they may be bought rob Co. Yeah, I think that's right.
So there's a discussion about how vault Tech before the Great War, before the bombs fell, vault Tech has a quote fiduciary responsibility to ensure that there is a nuclear there, that there is uh a disaster and end of the world nuclear fallout situation, because if they don't, if that
doesn't occur, then all of their investments. Investors, investors right the day have a fiduciary responsibility to their investors to ensure that the vaults are used right and that there's a there's a reason that these people have spent so much money and invested so much money in these vaults.
We have that same fiduciary responsibility to all these war profiteers and companies that we're in business with making all of this stuff, that it gets used and there continues to be in need to be fed by these.
Products, yes, which in my opinion, then goes directly to the lobbying groups that work directly for those companies. That then goes directly to the senators and lawmakers and people in the White House. So it really does feel like we're in this situation, in this weird situation where there is a fduciary responsibility to be at war as much as possible.
Yeah, it's all spelled out in nineteen eighty four, the documentary, and just really quickly then I'm done the quote was the character he plays is Lewis Strauss, and the quote is amateurs seek the sun and get burned. Power stays in the shadows.
Love it and outside of Spentley Butler, maybe you will never hear a top level military official speak of the US and anything but glowing terms. Make no mistake, folks. There's a lot out there behind and beyond those bright, pretty phrases. So who is to say something like Northwoods couldn't happen this decade, this year, two thousand and one, this evening. That's the stuff they don't want you to know. We will return later this week with more deep dives
into the shadows. In the meantime, we can't wait to hear from you, folks. Let us know your thoughts, let us know if you have firsthand experience with north Woods or something like it. We try to be easy to find online.
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