Lyman Lemnitzer

Uh, and so big questions started getting raised, uh, for me, and then that kind of led me to think, "Well, what is Northwoods? Who's this L.O.

Lemnitzer guy? Why does he, uh, why is he suggesting this operation to the Kennedys?" Well, it turns out he's, like, this former NATO guy.

You know, head of NATO.

And, well, okay, well, what's NATO? Right? So I gotta go read about that.

But the document itself is real.

The signature at the front belongs to General Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

How did the country's highest uniformed officers arrive at a proposal to counterfeit a civilian disaster? And how can a listener tell the difference between a horrifying plan and an event that actually happened?

This is Tom McKenzie, and you are listening to Unexplained History.

Northwoods appeared within that larger machinery, though its proposed pretexts were not the same thing as the Operation's Mongoose actually approved.

The distinction becomes visible if we follow the paperwork backward.

A few days before Lemnitzer signed the memorandum, a request arrived from the officer coordinating the Cuba project.

That request asked the Joint Chiefs for a specific kind of answer.

If you haven't seen the 1964 film, it's based on all real people.

It's a dark comedy from the master director of all time, and that of course is a film everybody should watch and see from Stanley Kubrick, and it, it's all based on L.L. Lemnitzer and Curtis LeMay's plan brought to Eisenhower in '61.

Before he left office, he fired them, and then the generals under him, including their adjunct, it was not a general, but it was Donald Rumsfeld.

That's why he became the Secretary of Defense twice later, the youngest ever at the time, then came back later under W Bush, said, "We want to stage terror attacks in America, Operation Northwoods, blame it on Russia, go to full war.

Kennedy would not approve any of this kind of action.

And the general that was in charge of all this stuff, General Lemnitzer, um, was really irritated at the fact that Kennedy would not play ball, and he, he was also irritated, equally irritated, at the fact that Castro seemed to be kind of, like, cooling his heels a little bit, you know? He wasn't, uh, he wasn't gonna be the one that was gonna light the match that, that set the fire, you know?

Exactly, exactly.

So fast-forward to February 26th, 1962.

Just concentrate on learning stuff before you try this regime change." And Lansdale hated this.

He felt very, very sidelined.

He thought that the Kennedy brothers had gone soft on Castro, and this is where the other general that you just mentioned, Lemnitzer, comes into play.

Yeah, 'cause he... 'Cause like we said before, he was very annoyed that he couldn't get the support of Kennedy, the president, or his brothers, you know, who were also powerful men.

The Frank Church Senate Committee hearings even put this on record, that the OPC was originated largely to interfere in the elections of Europe so that after World War II, they would not tolerate a democratic decision to support anything left-leaning and that they were instrumenting these kinds of terrorist attacks Blaming it on the communists in order to justify far-right support.

And you have Operation Northwood as well that was brought forward by General Lemnitzer in the United States.

Kennedy rejected it.

But people can look it up.