Bruce’s History Lessons: One crazy U.S. plan to invade Cuba
This week (March 13) in 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented Defense Secretary Robert McNamara with a preliminary plan, code-named Operation Northwoods, to conduct covert operations with the goal of invading Cuba and eliminating its dictator, Fidel Castro, who had allied Cuba with the Soviet Union. A Soviet client state 90 miles from America’s southern border was a real security concern because the Soviets could install nuclear-armed missiles that could easily strike America’s east coast cities, including Washington, D.C. Thus, President Kennedy ordered an earlier clandestine operation involving an invasion of Cuba by CIA-trained anti-Castro Cuban exiles. The “Bay of Pigs” invasion was a total failure.
And Operation Northwoods was total insanity. The key was finding a legitimate excuse to invade, so one proposal was to clandestinely attack American targets, including random bombings of American cities, and blame the attacks on Cuba. For the above-mentioned security reasons, the Joint Chiefs believed the resulting death of American citizens was an acceptable price to pay.
Another proposal was attacking a boat full of Cuban refugees seeking haven in America – such haven-seeking was a common occurrence at the time – and frame Castro for it, painting him as a heartless monster willing to kill his own people.
A third proposal was to shoot down an unmanned drone over Cuba, claim it was a U.S. commercial passenger plane, blame it on Castro, and stage a “rescue” of planted military personnel masquerading as civilian survivors of the downed flight, then claiming Castro had murdered those who didn’t survive. There was even a proposal to bribe a member of the Castro government to launch an attack on the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, prompting a justified U.S. response to an invasion of American territory.
And neither last nor least, astronaut John Glenn would soon be launched into space to attempt the first orbit of Earth by an American, a trip rife with dangers and far from certain. Therefore, as part of Operation Northwoods, should Glenn’s rocket explode, “the objective is to provide irrevocable proof … that the fault lies with the Communists [in particular] Cuba.” Apparently, the plausibility of a backwater country such as Cuba having the technological capability to destroy a rocket hundreds of miles above Earth was never considered, but in any event, Glenn’s voyage was successful, so that proposal was moot.
Thankfully, Kennedy was appalled at a plan whose success necessitated the death of innocent Americans and he ordered it shut down.
Still, the Joint Chiefs got one thing right. In October of 1962, it was discovered that the Soviets had installed short-range, nuclear-armed missiles on Cuban soil capable of hitting American soil, resulting in the infamous Cuban Missile Crisis.
Bruce G. Kauffmann’s e-mail address is bruce@historylessons.net @BruceKauffmann/.