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Devised by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962, Operation Northwoods called for CIA agents to attack U.S. military personnel and civilians so they could blame it on Cuba's communist regime.

In the early 1960s, Americas leaders turned an increasingly nervous eye south, where communist leader Fidel Castro had risen to power in Cuba. Determined to end his reign, the U.S. government came up with several false flag attacks under the banner of Operation Northwoods.

The classified plan, organized under the umbrella of the anti-Castro Cuba Project, or Operation Mongoose, proposed a number of ways that the U.S. could fake a Cuban attack against America as a way to justify U.S. military intervention in Cuba. Military leaders suggested staging attacks at Guantanamo Bay, sinking ships full of Cuban refugees, and even staging the shooting down of a civilian aircraft.

And Operation Northwoods was more than just idle scheming. It was a concrete plan co-signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and presented to the office of President John F. Kennedy. This is the story of Operation Northwoods.

By 1959, Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States were nearing a fever pitch, and it was at this moment that Fidel Castro came on the scene.

In 1959, the communist revolutionary Castro overthrew the U.S.-backed Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista and established Cuba as the first communist state in the Western Hemisphere. Americans, accustomed to worrying about the distant threat of the U.S.S.R., suddenly had a communist country just 90 miles off the coast of Florida. The Cold War, it seemed, could get hot.

One should not forget, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev said in July 1960, driving the point home, that now the United States is no longer at an unreachable distance from the Soviet Union as it was before.

U.S. policymakers got the message. And as they publicly declared they would not tolerate international communism in the Western Hemisphere, intelligence organizations got to work behind the scenes.

American intelligence first set out to neutralize the Castro threat with the CIA-led Bay of Pigs attack in 1961, developed under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. When that plan failed, according to ABC, U.S. military leadership decided it was their turn.

In 1962, General Edward Lansdale, the chief of operations for the anti-Castro Cuba Project, or Operation Mongoose, asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a brief but precise description of pretexts which would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba.

In response, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer, produced Operation Northwoods.

On March 13, 1962, Lemnitzer presented Operation Northwoods to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the document outlined a number of ways that the U.S. could incite a war with Cuba.

One plan suggested inventing well-coordinated incidents in and around Guantanamo to make it seem like the U.S. base was under attack. To make the attack seem credible, Operation Northwoods suggested using rumors, friendly Cubans, starting fires, and conducting mock funerals for victims.

Another proposed a Remember the Maine incident, referring to the U.S.S. Maine, which blew up under mysterious circumstances in Havana harbor in 1898 and gave the U.S. justification to go to war with Spain. The 1962 version of this plan, Operation Northwoods proposed, could be arranged in several forms.

The U.S. could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba. Or, they could blow up an unmanned vessel, then conduct a fake rescue operation. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation, the report noted.

Other suggestions in Operation Northwoods involved developing a Communist Cuban terror campaign in Florida or perhaps Washington D.C., sinking a boat of Cuban refugees (real or simulated), plotting public attacks on Cuban refugees, exploding bombs, and planting evidence that suggested that Cuba was plotting an attack in South America.

But perhaps the most ambitious plot in Operation Northwoods involved a civilian airliner. This plan proposed creating an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner.

The airline in question could be charted by fake college students or any groupings of persons with a common interest and convincingly painted to make it seem real.

In the end, however, Operation Northwoods never got further than a memo. According to ABC, President John F. Kennedy told Lemnitzer directly on March 16, 1962, that he had no plans to use any sort of force to take Cuba.

Operation Northwoods, all the crazy schemes they devised to invade Cuba, shocked him, horrified him, Oliver Stone, who directed the 1991 movie JFK and produced the documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, which suggested that the government killed the president, told Jacobin. Thats what he was dealing with a war-state mentality that came out of the 1950s.

For decades, according to James Bamford, who brought Operation Northwoods to light in his 2001 book Body of Secrets, the set of anti-Castro plots was stuffed into a drawer.

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 ABC, calling Operation Northwoods one of the most corrupt [plans] ever created by the U.S. government.

He added, 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.

Though most of the leading players in Operation Northwoods have since died Kennedy, of course, was assassinated in November 1963 those close to the president have flatly denied any knowledge of the anti-Castro plot.

Ive never heard of Operation Northwoods. Never heard of it and dont believe it, Theodore Sorenson, Kennedys White House special counsel, told The Baltimore Sun in 2001. Obviously, it would be totally illegal as well as totally unwise.

And Robert McNamara, who allegedly saw the plan before the president, also denied knowing about it. I never heard of it, he told The Baltimore Sun that same year. I cant believe the chiefs were talking about or engaged in what I would call CIA-type operations.

As such, the legacy of Operations Northwoods is an appropriately mysterious one. Though it reflects Cold War tensions and fears about Cuba, it also reveals what methods American military brass were willing to consider. Had the operation succeeded, Bamford noted, the U.S. would have imposed military rule over Cubans.

Thats what were supposed to be freeing them from, he told ABC.

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.

After reading about Operation Northwoods, see how British intelligence hoodwinked the Nazis with an ambitious plot dubbed Operation Mincemeat. Or, look through these false flag conspiracy theories that are totally false.

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Operation Northwoods, The US False Flag Plot To Incite A War With Cuba - All That's Interesting

By Nikos Mottas.

The same old fairytale of left-progressive governments is back in the news following the electoral victory of social democrat Gustavo Petro in Colombia, as well as the performance of leftist Jean-Luc Mlenchon in French parliamentary elections.

As it happened last December with Gabriel Boric' victory in Chile, a number of left-wing, opportunist forces in Greece and abroad celebrate the recent results, presenting them as a triumph of the left which can allegedly bring positive developments for the working people.

Historical experience, both in Europe and Latin America, demonstrate that the so-called left governments cultivate and spread illusions about the humanization of capitalism. Nonetheless, the painful reality is that humane capitalism is like Santa Claus; it does not exist. The case of PSUV in Venezuela is an emblematic example of the failure of the opportunist theory of 21st Century Socialism. The examples of Lula-Rousseff in Brazil and Lopez Obrador in Mexico confirmed that no left or progressive government, no matter its intentions, can provide actual and radical solutions to the people's problems as long as the means of production remain in the hands of the capital. In the best of cases, these governments adopted some policies against extreme poverty, but even these measures were subsequently retracted as long as they were incompatible with capitalist economy. After all, the prosperity of the working class is by definition incompatible with the profitability of the monopolies.

Such political forces overlook or underestimate the laws governing capitalist economy, as well as the de facto reactionary character of the bourgeois state. The tragic outcome of Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government in Chile must be a constant reminder that socialism is impossible to come through peaceful ways and parliamentary illusions, but only through the overthrow of the capitalist system and the eradication of monopolies' power.

Is there any particular reason for the working class in Colombia and France to celebrate the electoral achievements of Petro and Melenchon? For us, the answer is pretty clear. The working people must have no illusions. The real way out for the people's interests does not lie in the old and faded fairytales about left governments, but only in the intensification of the organized class struggle against the system of exploitation, capitalism.

* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.

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Gustavo Petro, Jean-Luc Mlenchon and the fairytale of left governments - In Defense of Communism

The government and all the other bourgeois parties, with insignificant individual differences, propose as a solution the strengthening of the market rules in the health system. In other words, they refer to all those tools that on the one hand shaped this miserable public health system and on the other hand formed a robust private business health sector. The only thing they demonstrate is the magnitude of the decay of the capitalist path of development (...)

In our opinion, on the occasion of this publication, the healthcare workers first and foremost but also the people who are concerned about their health and life should take a step further in their thinking, stance, and daily activity.

The KKE wages a daily struggle for staff recruitment, the expansion of benefits to the people, and the increase of the funding from the state budget. It is also charting a path of development that will treat public health as a universal and free right safeguarded by a workerspeoples government and its state. It calls upon the people to rally with the KKE, for the protection of health; for a system without any business activity, where the people will be able to meet their basic and urgent needs with all available means. (...) In the final analysis, science can defeat all this irrationality and obscurantism overwhelming us and its source, that is, capitalist exploitation and barbarism.

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The pandemic revealed the bankruptcy of capitalism - In Defense of Communism

The mythology surrounding the so-called Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, is exposed in a concise 78-pages book edited by Nikos Mottas and published in Greek language by Atexnos Publishing House.

For many decades, the issue of the Ukrainian famine in 1932-33, the famous Holodomor, occupies a prominent place in the arsenal of anti-communism. Especially after the counter-revolutionary overthrows in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, the Holodomor is at the forefront of a systematic and persistent attempt to vilify socialism of the 20th century and present it as an evil, inhumane system which is supposedly responsible for millions of deaths.

The book by Nikos Mottas attempts to present, in a simple and comprehensive way, the factors that led to the 1932-33 famine and to reveal lies, distortions, unscientific approaches and propaganda mechanisms that contributed to the formulation of the anti-communist theory of premeditated genocide instructed by the Soviet leadership.

What was the collectivization? What was the role of the Kulaks? What environmental factors contributed to the famine? From the fake reports of Thomas Walker and pro-Nazi media mogul William Randolph Hearst to British intelligence agent and professional anti-communist Robert Conquest and from Dr Goebbels to Harvard's professors, the Holodomor fallacy is exposed. Was the famine a premeditated crime of Stalin? Within a few pages, the book Truth & Lies about the Famine in Ukraine unfolds, with names and facts, the thread of mythology that has been developed around the 1932-33 Famine, in an effort to shed light on those aspects of history that the dominant, bourgeois historiography has managed to remain in darkness.

Publisher's contact details: Atexnos Publishing House, 11 Fidiou Str, 10678 Athens, Greece, http://ekdoseis-atexnos.gr, ekdoseisatexnos@gmail.com.

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Book: Truth and Lies about the famine in Ukraine, by Nikos Mottas - In Defense of Communism

On Tuesday 14/6, the MPs of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE)demanded the withdrawal of the despicable legislative amendment concerning the sell-off of the large nickel processing enterprise of LARCO. During the debate in the Plenary Session of the Parliament, the KKE MPs conveyed the demands of the workers of LARCO, who, together with thousands of other workers, demonstrated outside the Parliament chanting Hands off LARCO.

The KKE requested a roll-call vote on the amendment. This initiative aimed on the one hand to upset the plans of the government to pass it on the sly and on the other hand to expose those who will vote for this shameful amendment to the people.

During the debate, the government attempted to present LARCO, this industrial giant that could contribute to the development of the productive potential for the benefit of the country, as a millstone around the countrys neck and this amendment, which clearly provides for the workers dismissal and eviction from their homes, as their salvation and protection!

At the same time, SYRIZA and KINAL/PASOK pretended that they were not aware of this crime, even though they had put their stamp on every negative development when in government, since their driving force was the same strategic plan as the one that is currently being promoted by the ND.

The KKE MPs denounced the amendment, provided concrete facts about the huge potential of LARCO, and highlighted the heavy responsibilities of all governments over time. They called upon the workers to continue their heroic struggle, of which the communists will continue being at the forefront, for the continuation of the operation of LARCO, its modernization and development, the safeguarding of all the rights of the workers and all job posts, and health and life protection measures.

Addressing the Parliament, the GS of the CC of the KKE noted that LARCO is not a millstone around our neck but a treasure and demanded that this monstrous amendment be withdrawn.

D. Koutsoumbas referred to the anti-labour policy pursued by all governments and their machinations for the depreciation and privatization of the enterprise. He called upon the workers to continue their heroic struggle for work, progress, and better living conditions.

The GS of the CC of the KKE underscored among other things that in the direction of utilizing the potential of LARCO and the mineral resources overall, all the rights of the workers, as well as humane and decent work conditions, can be safeguarded.

This orientation in the operation of LARCO and the utilization of the mineral resources is, as we know, in conflict with the profits of the few to the detriment of the many, that is, with the capitalist profit and the relations of production serving it.

That is why today it is more than mature in our opinion for LARCO and all the mineral wealth, all those concentrated means, to become social ownership. That is the only way, combined with the central scientific planning, the workerspeoples control, and the participation by the producers of the wealth themselves that provides a prospect of true prosperity for our peoples, the LARCO workers, and their children.

The fact that we have such a comprehensive proposal enables us to consistently stand against your criminal plans, demanding the funding and modernization of the enterprise under the responsibility, planning, and control of the state as well as its further development according to its potential, which is truly great.

We support the great struggle of the workers with all our might. We continue to demand the continuation of LARCOs operation and the safeguarding of all job posts.

inter.kke.gr

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The KKE stands by the side of the workers of LARCO mining industry - In Defense of Communism