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

As someone born in Washington, DC, who was raised in Miami, and now lives back in Washington, item number four on the Northwoods plan is especially irritating to me. It begins, “We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington.” The terror campaign (and it’s extraordinary to me that they even use the words “terror campaign” here with seemingly no thought as to how wrong that is) would be primarily targeted at Cuban exiles in Miami or refugees seeking asylum in the United States. “We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated).” Let that fester a bit. Real or simulated. Had enough? Too bad, there’s more. It continues, “We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees” in the United States “ even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized” (emphasis mine). So how do we carry out this terrorism? By “exploding a few plastic bombs” in specific locations around the Miami area. My parents were dating each other as undergraduates at the University of Miami around this time. I don’t need to have seen Back to the Future as many times as I have to understand how problematic this could have been for me. It’s not like the U.S. military has a sterling historical record of limiting collateral damage.

On March 16, 1962, President Kennedy met with his top national security advisers to discuss Northwoods. All of the top brass were there: Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, Military Representative to the President General Maxwell Taylor, Deputy Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs U. Alexis Johnson, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, CIA director John McCone, and finally, General Lansdale. Future CIA director Richard Helms and CIA legend and covert action specialist William Harvey were asked to wait outside. Lemnitzer briefed the president on the basics of the plan, explaining that the United States now had an operation that could create “plausible pretexts to use force.”

The president said no.

According to the documentary record of the meeting, President Kennedy “said bluntly that we were not discussing the use of U.S. military force.” Bluntly . That’s about as close to a “hell no” as you are going to get in a transcript of an official White House meeting. Kennedy wanted nothing to do with Northwoods.

Historians have their own theories as to why President Kennedy so quickly dismissed the ideas contained in Operation Northwoods. Perhaps he was showing his true grit, standing up to the generals when they dumped this abhorrent plan in his lap. Perhaps he was afraid of yet another public relations (and political) disaster so soon after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. The official document states that Kennedy told the assembled group that the United States couldn’t spare the four Army divisions the plan required, for fear that they would be needed in Berlin in case of a Soviet provocation. None of this really matters to me. My key takeaway from the story of Operation Northwoods is this: The system worked. A little over 240 years ago some very wise men decided to give a civilian, the president, control over the military. I’d like to think it was to prevent something like Operation Northwoods from happening. If so, nicely done, gents.

AND THEN WHAT?

The debate over how to justify an invasion of Cuba was made moot after the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. As part of the diplomatic agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union that ended the standoff (in which the Cubans were essentially a bystander), the United States agreed to a noninvasion pledge of Cuba if the Soviets would agree to remove their intermediate- and long-range ballistic missiles. This effectively ended any talk of regime change through military action (covert action, on the other hand…).

Yet the underlying issues that surround Operation Northwoods continue to this day. How much should civilian politicians defer to military leaders on national security policy? In our hyperpartisan country, it can be comforting to think that an institution—the U.S. military—is somehow above the fray. We sometimes act as though soldiers aren’t people (with biases, political leanings, prejudices, and personal motivations), and afford them a veneration that assumes an apolitical mindset that is, frankly, completely unattainable for most everyone. Don’t get me wrong, I greatly admire and respect the dedication and service these soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen have given to our country. I used to be one of them. Their training, self-sacrifice, experience, and patriotism likely mean they have fewer stupid ideas than the rest of us.

But they still can have stupid ideas.

According to Fabian Escalante, the former chief of Cuba’s counterintelligence branch, the U.S. government (read: the CIA) tried to assassinate Fidel Castro 638 times.

If 638 seems like an impossibly outsized number, that’s because it probably is. This is likely grossly inflated. But in Escalante’s defense, who can really keep up? The CIA tried to kill Castro a lot. So much so that Fidel reportedly quipped, “If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal.”

The U.S. government was obsessed with El Comandante . Perhaps “terrified” is the appropriate word. This is partly due to Cuba’s proximity to the United States, partly due to Castro’s leftist politics and coziness with the Soviet Union, and partly due to American politics and the need to win Florida, with all its Cuban exile voters.

For our purposes here, the reasons don’t particularly matter—nor does the exact number of times we tried to take Fidel out. What matters is that the Americans wanted Castro gone, and tried just about every means to get the job done. Bombs, bullets, chemical weapons, biological weapons, femmes fatales, poisons, exploding seashells, laced cigars, exploding cigars, hair removers, gangsters, and hallucinogenics. You name it, we tried it.

Or at least we thought about trying it.

Some of these schemes never made it past the idea phase. Some were developed further and perhaps even tested. Some became executed operations.

Of course, none of them worked.

Unless the final plan, attempt number 639, was a secret operation called “Project Wait for the Guy to Get Really, Really Old, Smoke a Ton of Cigars, and Eventually Die of Natural Causes”—in that case, Mission Accomplished!

But caught up in all of the crazy, and lost in the shuffle of the myriad of overcomplicated plans, seemingly stolen from the pages of a James Bond novel, is one of the most extraordinarily simple concepts for eliminating Castro.

One man. One rifle. One bullet.

Felix Rodriguez wasjust a teenager when he lost his country. In fact, he wasn’t even there to see it happen. Fidel took Cuba while Felix was abroad, attending high school in Pennsburg, Pennsylvania. In the 1950s, upper-middle-class Cuban families could send their kids to school in the United States, so when Felix’s uncle offered him the chance to go study in the United States, he chose to attend the Perkiomen boarding school, just north of Philadelphia. With a diploma from this prestigious institution, he would have the opportunity to attend a good college and get a well-paying job in the United States. His future was bright.

But Felix wasn’t going to just sit back and let Castro and the communists destroy what generations of his family had built. He was ready to fight.