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Anyone who
let the thought cross his or her mind on September 11 that someone(s)
within the Bush administration was as likely to be responsible
as someone from a foreign land could have been basing such suspicions
on past observations. Be careful, though. They're now talking
about brain
fingerprinting
to ferret out people with unpatriotic thoughts . . .See 9/11
Smoking Gun
Operation Northwoods
Book: U.S. Military Drafted
Plans to Terrorize U.S. Cities to Provoke War With Cuba
By David Ruppe, abc
news.com
NEW YORK, May 1, 2001 - In
the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted
plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in
U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.
Code named Operation Northwoods,
the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban
émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the
high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even
orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.
The plans were developed as
ways to trick the American public and the international community
into supporting a war to oust Cuba's then new leader, communist
Fidel Castro.
America's top military brass
even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing:
"We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame
Cuba," and, "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would
cause a helpful wave of national indignation."
Details of the plans are described
in Body of Secrets (Doubleday), a new book by investigative reporter
James Bamford about the history of America's largest spy agency,
the National Security Agency. However, the plans were not connected
to the agency, he notes.
The plans had the written approval
of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and were presented to President
Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, in March 1962.
But they apparently were rejected by the civilian leadership
and have gone undisclosed for nearly 40 years.
"These were Joint Chiefs
of Staff documents. The reason these were held secret for so
long is the Joint Chiefs never wanted to give these up because
they were so embarrassing," Bamford told ABCNEWS.com.
"The whole point of a
democracy is to have leaders responding to the public will, and
here this is the complete reverse, the military trying to trick
the American people into a war that they want but that nobody
else wants."
Gunning
for War
The documents show "the
Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may
be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government,"
writes Bamford.
The Joint Chiefs even proposed
using the potential death of astronaut John Glenn during the
first attempt to put an American into orbit as a false pretext
for war with Cuba, the documents show.
Should the rocket explode and
kill Glenn, they wrote, "the objective is to provide irrevocable
proof that the fault lies with the Communists et all Cuba [sic]."
The plans were motivated by
an intense desire among senior military leaders to depose Castro,
who seized power in 1959 to become the first communist leader
in the Western Hemisphere - only 90 miles from U.S. shores.
The earlier CIA-backed Bay
of Pigs invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles had been a disastrous
failure, in which the military was not allowed to provide firepower.
The military leaders now wanted a shot at it.
"The whole thing was so
bizarre," says Bamford, noting public and international
support would be needed for an invasion, but apparently neither
the American public, nor the Cuban public, wanted to see U.S.
troops deployed to drive out Castro.
Reflecting this, the U.S. plan
called for establishing prolonged military - not democratic -
control over the island nation after the invasion.
"That's what we're supposed
to be freeing them from," Bamford says. "The only way
we would have succeeded is by doing exactly what the Russians
were doing all over the world, by imposing a government by tyranny,
basically what we were accusing Castro himself of doing."
'Over the
Edge'
The Joint Chiefs at the time
were headed by Eisenhower appointee Army Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer,
who, with the signed plans in hand made a pitch to McNamara on
March 13, 1962, recommending Operation Northwoods be run by the
military.
Whether the Joint Chiefs' plans
were rejected by McNamara in the meeting is not clear. But three
days later, President Kennedy told Lemnitzer directly there was
virtually no possibility of ever using overt force to take Cuba,
Bamford reports. Within months, Lemnitzer would be denied another
term as chairman and transferred to another job.
The secret plans came at a
time when there was distrust in the military leadership about
their civilian leadership, with leaders in the Kennedy administration
viewed as too liberal, insufficiently experienced and soft on
communism. At the same time, however, there real were concerns
in American society about their military overstepping its bounds.
There were reports U.S. military
leaders had encouraged their subordinates to vote conservative
during the election.
And at least two popular books
were published focusing on a right-wing military leadership pushing
the limits against government policy of the day. The Senate Foreign
Relations Committee published its own report on right-wing extremism
in the military, warning a "considerable danger" in
the "education and propaganda activities of military personnel"
had been uncovered. The committee even called for an examination
of any ties between Lemnitzer and right-wing groups. But Congress
didn't get wind of Northwoods, says Bamford.
"Although no one in Congress
could have known at the time," he writes, "Lemnitzer
and the Joint Chiefs had quietly slipped over the edge."
Even after Lemnitzer was gone,
he writes, the Joint Chiefs continued to plan "pretext"
operations at least through 1963.
One idea was to create a war
between Cuba and another Latin American country so that the United
States could intervene. Another was to pay someone in the Castro
government to attack U.S. forces at the Guantanamo naval base
- an act, which Bamford notes, would have amounted to treason.
And another was to fly low level U-2 flights over Cuba, with
the intention of having one shot down as a pretext for a war.
"There really was a worry
at the time about the military going off crazy and they did,
but they never succeeded, but it wasn't for lack of trying,"
he says.
After 40
Years
Ironically, the documents came
to light, says Bamford, in part because of the 1992 Oliver Stone
film JFK, which examined the possibility of a conspiracy behind
the assassination of President Kennedy.
As public interest in the assassination
swelled after JFK's release, Congress passed a law designed to
increase the public's access to government records related to
the assassination.
The author says a friend on
the board tipped him off to the documents.
Afraid of a congressional investigation,
Lemnitzer had ordered all Joint Chiefs documents related to the
Bay of Pigs destroyed, says Bamford. But somehow, these remained.
"The scary thing is none
of this stuff comes out until 40 years after," says Bamford.
"Body of Secrets"
by James Bamford
The author of a pioneering
work on the NSA delivers a new book of revelations about the
mysterious agency's coverups, eavesdropping and secret missions.
By Bruce Schneier
April 25, 2001 | In 1982,
James Bamford published "The Puzzle Palace," his first
exposé on the National Security Agency. His new exposé
on the NSA is called "Body of Secrets." Twenty years
makes a lot of difference in the intelligence biz.
During those 20 years, the
Reagan military buildup came and went, the Soviet Union fell
and the Cold War ended, and a bevy of new military enemies emerged.
Electronic communications exploded through faxes, cellphones,
the Internet, etc. Cryptography came out of the shadows to become
an essential technology of the networked world. And computing
power increased ten thousand-fold.
Also during those 20 years,
the NSA gradually opened its doors to the outside world. Its
mission -- to eavesdrop on all foreign communications of interest
to the United States -- remained constant throughout, but the
agency that used to call itself "No Such Agency" and
"Never Say Anything" started appearing in public, talking
to the press and making itself known. And probably more than
anyone else, James Bamford helped pry those doors open.
"Body of Secrets"
is one fascinating book. It's a secret history of U.S. foreign
policy from the perspective of signals intelligence, beginning
with the Cold War and continuing through the year 2000. And it's
chock-full of juicy stuff: secret Cold War missions over the
Soviet Union, government coverups of military debacles, eavesdropping
on our friends and enemies. Stuff you have trouble imagining
a civilian being able to research and publish.
Bamford has two weapons: the
tenacity needed to exploit the Freedom of Information Act and
the patience to wade through mounds of public papers in archives
around the country. They have both served him well.
In 1979, while researching
"The Puzzle Palace," Bamford wanted information on
an NSA operation called Shamrock: an illegal program to read
all international telegrams sent out of the U.S. The NSA would
not respond to any queries, but he heard of a 1975 investigation
by the Department of Justice. One FOIA request and nine months
later, he received an impressive (and incriminating) 300-page
document summarizing the program. On his next visit to the unhelpful
public relations offices at the NSA, he showed people there the
document. They freaked, and tried desperately to get it back.
The NSA waited for 1981 and
a new president, and started applying pressure on Bamford. The
Department of Justice claimed that the document was "accidentally"
declassified and should be returned. (At the time, the law specifically
stated that once something was declassified, it could not be
reclassified, which the Reagan administration later changed.)
A few tense meetings and threatening letters followed, but Bamford
held firm. Shamrock was described fully in "The Puzzle Palace."
William Friedman founded America's
first peacetime code-breaking agency -- the Black Chamber --
shortly before World War II and is considered the father of the
NSA. After he retired he had a falling out with the NSA. He stopped
trusting the agency, and it started regarding him as a security
risk. At his death, he left his papers to the Virginia Military
Institute and not with the NSA. Even so, NSA officials drove
down to VMI, examined everything and persuaded the archivist
to lock up a bunch of the documents in a vault at the institute.
Also during his "Puzzle Palace" research, Bamford went
to VMI to read Friedman's papers, noticed the omissions and convinced
the archivist to release those papers. He also found former NSA
director Marshall Carter's papers there; the NSA didn't even
know about them. When the NSA tried to have Bamford prosecuted
after the publication of "The Puzzle Palace," these
papers were what the NSA considered to be government secrets.
"The Puzzle Palace"
was a landmark book, and widely read in circles that knew something
of the NSA. Inside the NSA itself, where the agency's secrecy
prevents its employees from knowing much about their own history,
it was a bestseller. The book was a history of American intelligence
from 1917 and was both shocking and pedestrian. Operations like
Shamrock were exposed for the first time, but Bamford also spent
a lot of pages simply explaining how the NSA was organized. Nobody
knew anything, so it was all interesting.
Twenty years later, it is not
enough to simply explain how the NSA is organized or the history
of its creation. For "Body of Secrets," Bamford issued
dozens of FOIA requests and would badger the NSA every few days
about them. He waded through the papers at the National Archives,
the Naval War College, the National Defense University -- even
at the NSA's own museum. And with the Cold War over, he found
that many of the actual intercept operators -- the people staffing
the eavesdropping stations on ships, planes and remote corners
of the planet -- were willing to talk.
Among the more shocking things
Bamford learned is that in 1962, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff
approved something called Operation Northwoods. Fortunately never
implemented, it involved committing random acts of terror on
Americans in the United States and then blaming them on Cuba.
Most of the documents detailing this Bamford found in the National
Archives, among the thousands of papers the Joint Chiefs of Staff
released about the Cuban missile crisis.
In 1967, the Israeli military
attacked and destroyed the USS Liberty, a spy ship that had eavesdropped
on an Israeli massacre of surrendered Egyptian soldiers in the
Sinai. The ship's intercepts were destroyed, but the NSA also
had spy planes eavesdropping. The details, including President
Johnson's coverup to save the Jewish vote in the next election,
were in a box in the back of the NSA Museum. They were in a public
place, but no one had bothered to look at them before.
In 1975, the NSA tapped the
undersea cable connecting Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula with the
headquarters of the Soviet Pacific fleet. Operation Ivy Bells
was the agency's most secret operation at the time, but Bamford
found the man in charge of it to be very open and cooperative.
Even the NSA was more forthcoming
this time around. Bamford started asking for interviews in 1998.
First it performed its usual stonewalling routine, but gradually
it relented. Bamford believes that the NSA finally got the message
that the book was going to be written and that it would be better
off telling its side of the story. Bamford started receiving
documents, getting interviews, being taken on tours. He also
credits the movie "Enemy of the State" with helping
to turn things around. The movie depicts employees of the NSA
as black-wearing, assassinating, privacy-violating villains.
Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, the current NSA director,
believes that if agency officials don't come out and say what
the agency is and what it does, then Hollywood will do it for
them. Given that choice, Bamford is clearly the lesser of two
evils.
The result is a book that casts
the NSA in a pretty good light. It's good at collecting intelligence,
but is regularly thwarted by a government with bad intentions.
In 1964, the USS Maddox was spying in the Gulf of Tonkin, off
the coast of Vietnam. Believing the ship to be directing commando
raids, Vietnamese patrol boats fired on the ship. Bamford produces
credible evidence that this incident was deliberately provoked
by the U.S. military, which wanted something that would persuade
Congress to declare war. "Body of Secrets" is filled
with stories like this. The book is interesting to read, well-written
and scrupulously documented. Eighty-one pages of references list
reports, interviews, articles. I just wish I could get my hands
on Bamford's files.
I was reading "Body of
Secrets" as the current Chinese spy-plane crisis unfolded.
An American EP-3 spy plane, flying a routine intelligence-gathering
mission off the Chinese coast, was forced to land in China after
colliding with a Chinese fighter jet that flew to intercept it.
Both the Bush administration and the Jiang Zemin government postured
over the incident. The Chinese demanded an official apology.
The United States demanded its plane back, untouched and unboarded.
Each side blamed the other. But the more you know about the history
of electronic eavesdropping, the less any of it makes sense.
I don't believe that the U.S.
plane was in international waters. I don't believe that the U.S.
expects the Chinese to honor demands to return the plane untouched.
(In 1976, when a defecting Russian pilot flew his MIG-25 to Japan,
the Soviet Union demanded its plane back. We eventually returned
it, in parts.) And I know this kind of thing is business as usual.
The United States has flown
spy missions over other countries since the 1950s: the Soviet
Union, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Iraq. The Soviet Union used
to fly them over the United States. The target country would
routinely launch fighters to harass the spy planes. This was
where the Cold War would get warm, as the pilots buzzed each
other, called each other names over the radio and made obscene
gestures out their windows. Not all of these flights ended well.
In 1956, the Chinese shot down an American spy plane in the East
China Sea, killing 16. In 1968, the North Koreans shot down another
spy plane, killing 31. And in 1960, the Russians downed Francis
Gary Powers' U-2 spy plane as it passed over their country. Inside
the NSA's B2 Operations Building, there is a monument of black
granite with the words "They Served in Silence" and
the names of the 152 military and civilian eavesdroppers who
have died, most of them on ships and planes, peeking up the electronic
skirts of our adversaries.
Bamford's closing chapters
are cautionary ones. Today the NSA is being flooded by a fire
hose of communications, while at the same time it is being denied
other communications through never-ending improvements in communications
technologies. Satellites are trivial to eavesdrop on; fiber-optic
cables are very difficult. The Internet has its own challenges.
But most of all, the NSA's problems lie in the difficulty of
interpreting intelligence, not in the difficulty of collecting
it. I have long believed that the NSA's future lies not in intercepting
communications but in targeting static databases: data at rest
as opposed to data in motion. Bamford agrees.
All this makes the China incident
even more confusing. I don't understand why, in a world where
intelligence satellites can eavesdrop on anything anywhere, where
ground stations in Japan and South Korea have China well covered
and where massive intercept programs like Echelon vacuum up almost
all foreign telecommunications, we need to launch aggressive
and provocative spy missions against countries like China. I
can't think of another midair collision that didn't end up in
two crashed planes; it's a miracle that the American EP-3 survived.
If the 24 Americans had died as a result of this incident, how
would Congress have reacted? Would we have believed China's claims
that it was an accident, not an attack? Would we have so easily
turned our warships around after the Chinese government refused
our offers to assist in recovering the wreckage? How much more
aggressive would the rhetoric have been on both sides? I don't
mean to imply that the U.S. deliberately set out to cause an
international incident, but it seems to me that it was ignoring
some pretty obvious risks for some pretty dubious rewards.
Fortunately, the plane's crew
members weren't killed, and we didn't have to face the kind of
crisis their deaths would have triggered. But Bamford's book
explains the secret history of times when the rhetoric was more
aggressive, when enemies would shoot each other down and when
what the world's leaders said in public did not match what they
did in private. It's a sobering history, and one we should take
pains not to repeat.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer: Bruce Schneier
writes, speaks and consults on computer security. His latest
book is "Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked
World."
|
Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
