Conspiracy! 49 Reasons to Doubt, 50 Reasons to Believe. Ian Shircore
Chiefs of Staff, though the general’s career hardly skidded to a halt. He was moved to Europe and became NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander for the next six years. As late as 1975, long after his retirement, Lemnitzer was brought back by President Gerald Ford as a member of his Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
REASONS TO DOUBT
The key point about the plan for Operation Northwoods is that, despite the astonishing willingness of all the country’s top soldiers to set out on a campaign of state-sponsored terrorism on the American mainland, nothing actually happened.
This time, the checks and balances in the system worked. The executive dismissed the whole idea, and President Kennedy told Lemnitzer face to face that the US was not about to use military force against Cuba.
All this was only a few months after the disastrous CIA-backed assault on Cuba that ended in defeat for the anti-Castro Cubans at the Bay of Pigs, with hundreds of battlefield deaths and executions and the capture of 1,200 prisoners.
The dramatic and embarrassing failure had made a deep impression on the president. After the Bay of Pigs, JFK told a reporter, ‘The first advice I’m going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that because they are military men their opinions on military matters are worth a damn.’
Kennedy was disgusted with the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He sacked CIA Director Allen Dulles and famously said he wanted to ‘splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds’. He moved fast to take responsibility for paramilitary operations away from the spooks and give it to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the hope that they would plan and behave better. Operation Northwoods was the clearest possible proof that that strategy hadn’t worked.
Whether Kennedy’s objections to the idea of a staged terror campaign on US soil were partly moral or wholly practical, his scrapping of the Northwoods proposals made him bitter enemies among the generals, to go alongside his sworn foes in the CIA. Those who think there may have been a mega-conspiracy behind the JFK assassination point to the Bay of Pigs and Operation Northwoods as crucial moments when powerful forces in the US began to believe their president was becoming – in their terms – dangerously anti-American.
REASONS TO BELIEVE
Operation Northwoods was kept firmly out of sight for many years, and it was not until 1997 that the first declassified papers were released that pointed to the conspiracy’s existence.
In late April 2001, a single damning document was published. This was the complete Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, dated 13 March 1962 and originally marked ‘Top Secret – Special Handling – Noforn [no foreign nationals]’, with the full details of the thinking about Operation Northwoods.
General Lemnitzer was usually careful to make sure the documentation about anything he didn’t want to own up to was destroyed or ‘lost’. But even Lemnitzer couldn’t snatch back everything. The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had kept his copy of the memo, the only absolute proof that these detailed plans had been approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and reached the highest levels of government (see the original document at bit.ly/operationnorthwoods).
As well as unleashing terror on the streets of Florida and Washington, the Northwoods proposals included the idea of using Cuban dissidents or American forces in Cuban uniforms to sabotage or mortar the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay.
Disguised US aircraft could make night raids on the Dominican Republic, dropping Soviet-made incendiary bombs to implicate Cuba. Adapting American F-86 jets to create ‘reasonable copies’ of Russian-built MIG fighters would take ‘about three months’ and would offer scope for all kinds of airborne confusion and mayhem.
All the time, the idea was to build up a picture of the Cuban regime as ‘rash and irresponsible and an alarming threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere’, in order to provide a pretext for a large-scale US military intervention before the end of 1962.
In the event, these harebrained notions were never put into practice, as President Jack Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara threw them out.
But the fact that these highly specific and cynically ruthless plans were unanimously endorsed by America’s top generals, albeit 50 years ago, is a chilling reminder.
Bizarre, manipulative and bloodthirsty plots don’t just exist in the minds of paranoid and embittered conspiracy theorists. They can also exist in the minds of generals, politicians and others who may have the power and resources to turn them into reality.
Very often, there is less to an apparently suspicious chain of events or circumstances than meets the eye. Coincidence and cock-up are momentous, shaping forces in human affairs. But sometimes there truly is more going on than they ever want you to know.
WAS THIS REALLY A LONE ASSASSIN?
Senator Robert F Kennedy, younger brother of America’s greatest martyr since Abraham Lincoln, was shot on 5 June 1968. It was five years after the assassination of President Jack Kennedy and a year to the day after the start of the Israeli/Arab Six Day War. It was also just two months after the murder of Dr Martin Luther King.
Younger, taller, more handsome and with fewer compromises on his political record than JFK, Bobby Kennedy was popular and in tune with the times. He had once been an active supporter of McCarthyism’s anti-Communist witch-hunts, but by 1968 he was strongly for black civil rights and against the war in Vietnam. He had already shown, as Attorney General in JFK’s ‘Camelot’ administration, that he was determined to take on organised crime and the mafia.
At the age of just 42, he looked to many people like America’s next president.
RFK was gunned down in a kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles as he and his team went from the party celebrating his victory in the California Democratic primary to a press conference in another part of the hotel. The route through the building had been changed at the very last moment on the orders of Kennedy’s security chief, Bill Barry.
His attacker, Sirhan Sirhan, was a Palestinian refugee who saw Bobby Kennedy as pro-Jewish and objected to his promise to sell 50 Phantom fighters to Israel.
‘RFK must die,’ Sirhan had written in his diary. ‘Robert F Kennedy must be assassinated before 5 June ’68.’ The date planned for the shooting was no accident, as this was the anniversary of the Six Day War.
Sirhan was tried, convicted of murder and sent to prison for life. A politically motivated fanatic, people assumed, or a lone nut. But there was enough that didn’t ring true to launch dozens of alternative explanations and conspiracy theories over the years. Could it have been the mafia, the CIA, white racists or red spies? Sirhan claims to recall nothing about the shooting and pleaded insanity in court, which led to the idea that he might have been a ‘Manchurian Candidate’ assassin, hypnotised by others to attack and kill without fear or remorse.
REASONS TO DOUBT
Bobby Kennedy was shot at by Sirhan Sirhan in front of a crowd of witnesses, including a young British journalist from the Daily Mirror, John Pilger.
Pilger was just feet away, so close that the woman who was standing right next to him suffered a bullet wound in the head. There were 77 people in the pantry area at the time. Bullets taken from Kennedy’s body were later identified by their rifling marks as almost certainly being from Sirhan’s gun, an Iver Johnson .22 Cadet 55-A.
It seemed an open and shut case. Sirhan was caught red-handed, pinned down by bodyguards and arrested on the spot. In his pocket was a newspaper clipping about Kennedy’s support for Israel. He was a strange, distracted, obsessive man,