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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40: The Rocky Report

When William E. Colby rose to CIA Director in late 1973, he inherited the 693-page “Family Jewels” compilation from the departing Agency head, James Schlesinger. The CIA links to the Watergate burglars had triggered Schlesinger’s demand for information. A year later Seymour Hersh brought the Jewels to public attention in The New York Times. This then gave rise to the launch of a number of investigations: the Rockefeller Commission;1 the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities under the chairmanship of Frank Church;2 and the House Select Intelligence Committee led by Congressman Otis Pike.3

Senator Schweiker was the only Senator permitted to see all of the classified Warren Commission’s documents in 1975, according to Robert Sam Anson in an interview with Arlene Francis on WOR-AM, December 3, 1975. However, he was guided by the CIA’s Counterintelligence head James Jesus Angleton and his assistant, Raymond Rocca, who after resigning a year earlier had returned to the CIA to help the assassination investigators and suggest Cuban and Soviet agents to question.4

Rocca, in 1944, was “Angleton’s executive aide” in Rome in the OSS X2 group involved in counterintelligence. In 1955, Rocca joined Angleton’s CIA Counterintelligence (CI) operation which previously “had been submerged in foreign intelligence.” He “was assigned to be the Chief of the Research and Analysis” where he remained “until 1969 when he became Angleton’s” Deputy Chief of the Counterintelligence which penetrated other agencies through identification of their agents or placing CIA agents within them. CI also developed double agents, handled defectors, intercepted and deciphered communications, and conducted research. Rocca left “the CIA on December 31, 1974.”5 

Rocca denied any knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald’s CIA 201 File prior to the JFK assassination pointing out that the file was opened erroneously in the name Lee Henry Oswald and further that Oswald would have been considered a military defector thus falling under the scrutiny of “the FBI and the responsible military arm” which “was the Navy.” The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) communications show that FBI Director Hoover, State Department Security Officer Otepka and others were aware of Oswald’s Russian and FPCC activities before the assassination.6 [Bold emphasis added by D.P. Cannon.]

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