Northwoods and November 22

A CIA story found in the JFK assassination files, due to be released (or not) on June 30.

President Kennedy with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (far right) and the chiefs of the U.S. armed forces, April 1963.

In a recent post, The Truth About Operation Northwoods, JFK author Fred Litwin reviews the shadowy history of one of the most notorious secret operations in the history of the American government.

Northwoods was a secret Pentagon plan for staging a violent incident on U.S. soil and blaming it on Cuba, so as to justify a U.S. invasion, the policy that America’s generals strongly favored in 1963. Intelligence historian James Bamford says Operation Northwoods “may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government,” sanctioning the use of CIA personnel to mount terror attacks in the United States [emphasis added] for the purpose of generating an invasion of Cuba.

Litwin argues a narrower case: that the secret planning around Northwoods had nothing to do with the assassination of President Kennedy. His argument echoes CIA historian David Robarge, who asserted on a pro-CIA blog in 2017 that Northwoods was “never implemented.”

Litwin’s account of Northwoods, however, is both erroneous and incomplete. As the target of Litwin’s criticism, I want to correct some his mistakes. I want to explain how and why Operation Northwoods and JFK’s assassination are indeed related, though official secrecy still obscures parts of the story.