Operation Northwoods: The False-Flag Plans the Pentagon Actually Wrote

In March nineteen sixty-two, the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff sent Defense Secretary Robert McNamara a memorandum about pretexts for military intervention in Cuba. Its annex proposed a manufactured attack on a ship, a campaign of terror blamed on Cuba, and a simulated civilian-airliner shootdown. These were preliminary proposals, not operations carried out.

This episode follows the paper from Operation Mongoose to the Joint Chiefs and then to its public release decades later. It asks how a plan like this reached the top of the military, what the political leadership actually authorized, and what the surviving documents can and cannot prove.

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This episode includes AI-generated content.