Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

This was some serious training, and very similar in scope (if not in duration) to what many in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations or paramilitary officers would receive. Basically a crash course in clandestine operations. But unlike CIA officers, who would operate in dangerous areas overseas, the members of Project Washtub were training to spy, fight, and subvert here at home. Instead of secret signals on lampposts in Berlin, dead drops in the woods outside of Prague, or middle-of-the-night rendezvous in an alleyway in Istanbul, Washtub agents would work their way though the Alaskan wilderness, living off prepositioned caches of food and supplies, transmitting word of enemy movement on portable radios as they traversed the countryside by dogsled.

The majority of the men who were willing to sign up for this mission were never acknowledged during their lifetimes, as the project was highly classified and tightly compartmentalized. The only thanks they got was a modest salary, $3,000 a year ($30,000 in today’s dollars), which would be doubled in the event of an invasion. Nothing in the documents indicates (at least to my satisfaction) how the project’s managers expected to pay the agents once an invasion began, but since the life expectancy of one of these stay-behinds was quite short, the government was probably not expecting to have to dish out all that much cash.

Washtub was canceled in 1959, when it became clear that (a) despite Cold War porn like Red Dawn (Wolverines!), the Soviet Union was not in a favorable tactical, operational, or strategic position to invade the United States, and (b) because of the growing reliance on nuclear weapons (for all sides in the Cold War), World War III would be decided less by secret agents on dogsleds and more by multiple independently targeted ballistic missiles, long-range bombers, and stealthy submarines.

AND THEN WHAT?

I was a bit misleading when I wrote that Washtub was a joint FBI–Air Force Office of Special Investigations project. Sure, it was started jointly, and the premise of the operation, candidate selection, and agent training was developed jointly, but it was really the Air Force OSI that did the vast majority of the heavy lifting. They deserve the lion’s share of the credit for Washtub.

Which means that Joseph Carroll, the man who organized and directed OSI from its inception, is a key element to this story. He also happens to be an extraordinarily influential person in the history of American intelligence. We should know his name. Most of us don’t. Let’s fix that.

After receiving his law degree from Loyola University in Chicago in 1940, Carroll joined the FBI as a special agent in field offices at Memphis, Knoxville, and Chicago. In May 1944, he was transferred to FBI headquarters in DC, where he led the bank robbery and kidnapping unit before becoming the chief of the Criminal Section. A meteoric rise for someone who had joined the Bureau only four years earlier.

At the end of World War II, Carroll worked with the War Assets Administration investigating the disposal of surplus war property throughout the world. In 1947, he came back to the FBI as an administrative assistant to the director, J. Edgar Hoover.

When the Air Force became its own service after the passage of the National Security Act of 1947, Carroll was loaned to the new service branch to set up an agency for investigative and counterintelligence functions—the Office of Special Investigations. For the job, he was commissioned as a colonel in the Air Force Reserve. Five months later, he was ordered to active duty as a brigadier general (one star). Two years after that, he was promoted to major general (two stars). Another meteoric rise.

Carroll ran OSI until 1958 (so almost the entirety of the Washtub program), when he was sent to Europe as the deputy commander of all U.S. air forces in Europe. Two years later, he returned to Washington as a lieutenant general (three stars), and as the inspector general of the U.S. Air Force.

It was in the following year, 1961, that Carroll became more than a footnote in U.S. intelligence history. At the time, it was clear that the separate intelligence activities of the Army, Navy, and Air Force were not serving the Department of Defense, or the country, very well. Military intelligence was in disarray. Something needed to be done to consolidate the collection, analysis, and dissemination of military intelligence into one agency, that would provide support to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the military services themselves, and the warfighters on the ground, in the sea (or under the sea), and in the air.

The solution was the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and LTG Carroll was its first director.

Carroll’s DIA proved its worth just a year later when its overhead photographic interpreters detected Soviet medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs and IRBMs) in Cuba. The CIA tends to get most (if not all) of the credit for subverting disaster during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but left out of the traditional histories of those fateful thirteen days is the instrumental role of Carroll’s DIA. I refuse to pick winners (I love all my three-letter secret government agencies the same), but it’s impossible to deny that DIA analysts provided key intelligence on capabilities and deployment of Soviet missiles, support equipment, and deployment sites. This intelligence helped inform the decisions made by President Kennedy and his administration.

This intelligence helped us to prevent nuclear war.

Ialmost didn’t include this story.

Not because it isn’t historically important. It is.

And not because the story is so well known that it would be seen as tiresome, stale, or boring. It isn’t.

It’s because Operation Northwoods has been (and will probably continue to be) a lightning rod for conspiracy theorists—the go-to case study for the evils of the American government.

This story is just as appealing to the mild-mannered “second shooter on the grassy knoll” kind of conspiracy theorist as it is to the tinfoil-hat-wearing “the lizard people are going to drain our precious bodily fluids” kind of wacko. It’s an equal opportunity offender: It can bring out a natural, innate distrust of government in just about anyone.

As much as we might like to, it’s hard to blame conspiracy theorists for latching on to this story. I certainly don’t. Because in the end, Operation Northwoods may be one of the most shameful plans in the history of the U.S. military.

And that’s why it’s here. As much as we’d like to, we can’t ignore the ugly side of our history. Good and bad, right and wrong, our history is what makes us who we are. And maybe, just maybe, we can learn something from it.

On April 17, 1961,more than fourteen hundred Cuban exiles forming the Brigada de Asalto 2506 landed on the beaches of Cuba at Playa Girón in the Bahía de Cochinos—the Bay of Pigs. Their mission was to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro, Cuba’s increasingly communist leader, who had himself overthrown the regime of American ally Fulgencio Batista just over two years before. A communist leader just ninety miles from Key West was a rather painful thorn in the side of the newly inaugurated President John F. Kennedy, and his ouster was considered a high national security priority, as it had been for Kennedy’s predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower. The invasion was backed by the U.S. government and the CIA.

We can argue why the Bay of Pigs invasion failed until we are blue in the face (and many people still do). For many in the Cuban exile community, the mission failed because JFK refused to give American naval and air support, elements called for in the original plan developed by the Eisenhower administration.