During the December 2022 Mary Ferrell Foundation press conference, Jefferson Morley claimed that Operation Northwoods was a "deception operation" that was "used" in 1963 by unnamed conspirators. What is the truth about Northwoods?
First, what was Operation Northwoods? Morley characterizes it as follows:
"Operation Northwoods was a Pentagon plan to provoke a U.S. invasion of Cuba in 1963 through the use of deception operations." Morley also thinks that the Northwoods plans "are among the most significant new JFK documents to emerge since Oliver Stone’s 'JFK' movie."
Northwoods proposed creating a pretext for invading Cuba through the use of spectacular acts that could be falsely blamed on Castro. These included the shooting down of a US airplane and fake communist terror campaigns in the US.
But the Northwoods documents should be viewed in context. First, the plans were created at the behest of General Edward Lansdale who was running the military arm of Operation Mongoose, JFK's program to rid the world of the Castro regime. Lansdale asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff for "brief but precise" pretexts that would justify "US military intervention in Cuba."
The authors of the Northwoods documents recognized both the limits of and the potential problems with their proposal. First, they wrote that any pretext action would lead to a "political decision" preceding military action. In other words, they knew that the ultimate decision whether to act on their plans or not was Kennedy's as commander-in-chief. Nowhere in the document does it suggest that the Northwoods plans represented a policy that was separate from that of the President as Morley claims.
The Northwoods planners knew that such pretext action had to be accomplished in a manner that would "not directly involve" the Soviet Union. This alone would necessarily limit what could be done. Finally the Northwoods authors stated that their "suggestions" should be considered a "preliminary submission suitable for planning purposes" to be used with "similar inputs from other agencies" to provide "a basis for development of a single, integrated, time-phased plan ..." The reality of the Northwoods "suggestions" are a long way from Morley's assertion that there were "two divergent Cuba policies" in the US government in 1963 as expressed in his book The Ghost.
CIA historian David Robarge probably put it best when he wrote:
...the United States did not have “two divergent Cuba policies” represented by the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s “engineered provocation” plan called NORTHWOODS and the White House’s “autonomous operations” using Cuban exiles, possibly in conjunction with the assassination of Castro. The administration’s policy was what it did, not what was said in meetings or written about in plans and memoranda. NORTHWOODS was never carried out, and the CIA’s integrated covert action program codenamed AM/WORLD became the focus for the rest of Kennedy’s presidency.
Robarge's quote above is from his review of Morley's book The Ghost. The review sparked a debate between the two with Robarge writing at Max Holland's Washington Decoded site and Morley replying at his old JFKFACTS page. During the debate, Morley demanded that Robarge provide documentation for his claim that Northwoods was never carried out. Of course, if something never existed there is no proof of it. But Morley evidently didn't really believe that Northwoods was carried out since he wrote in his eBook CIA & JFK: The Secret Assassination Files that Northwoods was "apparently never enacted."
How does Northwoods fit into Morley's conspiracy ideas? In his eBook Morley v. CIA he wrote that JFK's "enemies" killed him and made Oswald "a patsy for their crime" using "psychological warfare schemes, like the AMSPELL program, whose workings are still protected by state secrecy." From his various writings it is clear that Morley thinks JFK's enemies resided in the Pentagon and the CIA.
Morley also wrote that "The preponderance of evidence indicates to me that Joannides and his superiors used the DRE/AMSPELL network in a COINTELPRO-style operation to generate headlines linking Oswald to Castro, the better to blame JFK’s death on Cuba and justify a policy of 'regime change' that the CIA and Joint Chiefs of Staff thought was overdue."
So, as amazing as it seems, Morley evidently believes that there was a plot to kill JFK and blame it on Cuba using the Northwoods plans. But the absurdity of this idea is obvious. After devising and implementing this plan to kill JFK and setting up Oswald as a patsy, the plotters forgot that there would be no way to ensure that LBJ would follow through and invade Cuba and indeed, Castro died an old man in 2016 while still safely ensconced on the island nation. That's a lot of risk to expose yourself to without accomplishing the final goal. And as David Robarge noted, Morley's "attempt to link [Northwoods] with [the] post-assassination propaganda activity of a CIA-backed Cuban group by saying the latter 'resembled the template of the NORTHWOODS schemes' is tortured to say the least."
In conclusion, Operation Northwoods was a series of suggestions created at the request of JFK. There is not one scintilla of evidence that any of these plans were carried out. Nor is there any evidence that Northwoods was a real "deception operation" as Morley claims.
Researcher and author Fred Litwin has written in more detail about Northwoods. See The Truth About Operation Northwoods.
See also this article which discusses Northwoods and other Morley assertions:
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