Recently US president Donald J. Trump’s sign of an executive order to declassify the files related to the murders of former President John F. Kennedy (JFK), former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. may brings to mind other plans and actions previously secret of the Central Information Agency (CIA) and other agencies, like the Nothwoods plan.

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Operation Northwoods was a plan developed by the US Army in 1962, designed to create pretexts that would justify military intervention in Cuba. This plan included a series of covert actions, such as terrorist attack simulations, to generate popular support in the US. and facilitate intervention.

Physical documentation on Operation Northwoods was declassified through the John F. Kennedy Murder Record Collection Act of 1992, which allowed access to four million documents in the National Archives in Maryland. However, public awareness of Operation Northwoods was not achieved until 2001 when author James Bamford published the book “Body of Secrets”.

According to declassified documentation, the operation aimed to “provide a point of departure for the development of a single, integrated, time-phased plan. Such a plan would permit the evaluation of individual projects within the context of cumulative, correlated actions designed to lead inexorably to the objective of adequate justification for US military intervention in Cuba.”

The text detailed that covert plan to justify a US military intervention in Cuba, will focus on legitimate provocation as an essential tool. It is proposed to carry out a series of coordinated incidents in Guantánamo that simulate hostile actions by the Cuban forces, including rumours, the introduction of friendly Cubans into the base and the creation of riots. These acts are intended to manipulate Cuban perception of an imminent invasion, allowing the US to respond quickly if deemed necessary.

Northwoods operation also included 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, sink ship near harbor entrance and conduct funerals for mock-victims.

The declassified documents also revealed that the US government was trying to “Remember the Maine,” when an American battleship used as an excuse for the US government to intervene in the Spanish-Cuban war, “The incident could be organized in various ways a. We could blow up an American ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba. b. We could fly a drone (unmanned) ship anywhere in the Cuban waters. We could organize a similar incident in the vicinity of Havana or Santiago as the spectacular result of a Cuban attack from the air or sea, or both.”

This document, previously classified as secret, was originally released on November 18, 1997 by the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board, a federal agency of the United States. U.S. Department of Public Information oversees the publication of government documents related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. A total of 1500 pages of military documents, formerly classified, were declassified by the Federal Agency.

The “Appendix to Attachment A” and the “Appendix to Appendix to Attachment A” of the Northwoods document were first published online by the National Security Archive on November 6, 1998 in a joint operation with the American news channel CNN, as part of a series of documentaries on the Cold War and, specifically, as documentation for an episode about Cuba that aired on November 29, 1998.

The full document was published online in a more complete form by the National Security Archive on 30 April 2001.

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