28: Cuba Cacophony: Northwoods, Mongoose, JMWAVE and DRE

Nearly a year after the Bay of Pigs disaster, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara received a memo from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lyman Lemnitzer (pictured left of JFK next to General Curtis LeMay) on the topic of “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba (TS).”

The March 13, 1962 proposal appears to be heavily influenced by the “more ruthless than the enemy” attitude of the Doolittle Committee report. 

It suggested ways to justify to the American public an all-out war on Cuba. It brought Operation Mongoose to a new level of activity outside the borders of Cuba with recommendations that included assassinating anti-Castro Cuban refugees living in Miami or sinking a boatload of refugees escaping the island and blaming it on Castro by using false documents. The most horrific suggestion was faking a Cuban air force attack on a civilian jetliner or blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Castro-planned sabotage, similar to the “Remember the Maine” incident which justified the U.S. entry into the Spanish American War some six decades earlier.

The justification memo also noted that the project should be undertaken “in the event that current covert efforts to foster an Internal Cuban rebellion are unsuccessful” and “a credible internal revolt is impossible of attainment during the next 9-10 months ... It is understood that the Department of State also is preparing suggested courses of action to develop justification for U.S. military intervention in Cuba.”

The JCS members who put their names to it in addition to Lemnitzer were (to the right of JFK) General George Henry Decker (Chief of Staff, U.S. Army); Admiral George Whelan Anderson Jr. (Chief of Naval Operations); and General David Monroe Shoup (Commandant, U.S. Marine Corps). 

General Curtis Emerson LeMay (Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force) would become as vociferous a hawk on the issue of Cuba as Pawley, and in October President Kennedy would replace Lemnitzer with General Maxwell Taylor.1 

William Bamford, an expert on the National Security Agency who revealed the document in his 2001 book Body of Secrets, stated that Operation Northwoods “may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government.” What’s more amazing is that the proposal was made three weeks after Robert Kennedy had told Air Force General Edward G. Lansdale, the Pentagon’s Deputy Director of the Office of Special Operations (OSO), to focus on intelligence gathering instead of proposing wildly outrageous schemes for Operation Mongoose, which was originally developed by the JCS and Lansdale to foment a revolt within Cuba to overthrow Castro. 

On April 11, 1962, General Lansdale provided a report on the “Status of Operation Mongoose” at week four of the 19-week Phase 1. “Our Center in Miami processed 1,309 refugees last week ... McCone can provide details” of “debriefing visitors to Cuba, at a number of free world ports.” 

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50: Cold War Replay

In September 2022, General Michael Minihan, head of the Air Mobility Command, told a military conference that the U.S. Air Force was responsible for more enemy deaths than any of the other U.S. military organizations. Three months later he predicted that China would invade Taiwan where Pawley's friend Chiang Kai-Shek and thousands of nationalists made their home after communists had seized the mainland seven decades earlier. In anticipation, the U.S. Air Force increased its presence in the Philippines.

General Minihan also shared with conference attendees a personal orgasmic pleasure— with the killing of “‘your enemy, every part of your life is better. Your food tastes better. Your marriage is stronger.’”1 

I disagree. In the early 1970s, a decade after the Kennedy assassination, I wrote this song called "Inhumanity."

I am the madness

That makes men want to kill. 

I am the taste of blood

That gives them the thrill.

I am the feeling

That drives a mother wild, 

Until she beats to death

Her helpless baby child.

I am the fist

Raised in anger.

I am the cry

Let’s gang bang her!

I am the daggers

Seen in many eyes.

I am the voices

Of a thousand million lies.

I am the crowd 

Full of faces 

Chanting names 

At other races.

I am the soul of hypocrisy 

Making a shambles

Of this democracy.

I have razed civilizations,

Destroyed powerful men, 

Ruined the lives of many, 

And I’ll do it once again. 

For I am fear and trouble, 

Terror and death at my best, 

And if I get a hold of you

I will never, never ever let you rest.

For I am insanity.

And there’s a little bit of me,

To a moral-less degree,

In all humanity.

I am in humanity.

~ Inhumanity. Lyrics & Music: David Price Cannon (1973)

On January 30, 2023, Spencer Ackerman, a 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning national security journalist, wrote about General Minihan and concluded “anyone who's read Stanley Karnow's excellent book In Our Image will recognize as a retread of both Cold War and pre-Cold War imperial form ... Trump is Truman, Biden is Eisenhower, Mattis is Forrestal, McMaster is Acheson, Campbell is, I guess, John Foster Dulles, and this guy Minihan seems to think he’s Curtis LeMay.”2

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