Terreur om aanval tegen Cuba te rechtvaardigen

Ik weet het, mijn titel is een beetje heel sensationeel, maar zo doet de Morgen het toch ook. In onderstaande tekst lees je meer over een plan uit 1962 uitgedacht door toplui van het Amerikaanse leger om met een terreurcampagne in Miami en Washington een aanval op Cuba te rechtvaardigen.
Alvast weer een hele kluif voor de liefhebbers van complottheorieën. Het artikel maakt in ieder geval één iets duidelijk: met dit soort mensen weet je nooit.
Ook interessant is het stukje over bin Laden. De NSA (National Security Agency) pochte tegenover bezoekers met bandjes met gesprekken tussen bin Laden en zijn moeder. De gesprekken over de aanvallen zullen ze dan waarschijnlijk net gemist hebben.
Let op de datum van het artikel: het is in onverdachte tijden geschreven.

THE BALTIMORE SUN (Maryland, USA)
http://www.sunspot.net
Originally published April 24, 2001
http://www.baltimoresun.com/bal-te.md.nsa24apr24.story

New Book on NSA Sheds Light on Secrets
U.S. terror plan called Cuba invasion pretext

By Scott Shane and Tom Bowman (Sun Staff)

WASHINGTON - U.S. military leaders proposed in 1962 a secret
plan to commit terrorist acts against Americans and blame Cuba
to create a pretext for invasion and the ouster of Communist
leader Fidel Castro, according to a new book about the National
Security Agency.

"We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami
area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington," said one
document reportedly prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "We
could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," the
document says. "Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a
helpful wave of indignation."

The plan is laid out in documents signed by the five Joint
Chiefs but never carried out, according to writer James Bamford
in "Body of Secrets." The new history of the Fort Meade-based
eavesdropping agency is being released today by Doubleday.

NSA regularly picks up the conversations of suspected terrorist
financier Osama bin Laden, says Bamford, and has monitored
Chinese and French companies trying to sell missiles to Iran. He
provides new details about an Israeli attack on a Navy
eavesdropping ship in 1967, suggesting that the sinking was
deliberate. And he reveals the loss of an "entire warehouse"
full of secret cryptographic gear to the North Vietnamese in
1975, at the end of the Vietnam War.

Bamford, a former investigative reporter for ABC News who wrote
"The Puzzle Palace" about the NSA in 1982, said his new book is
based mostly on documents obtained through the Freedom of
Information Act or found in government archives. "NSA never
handed me any documents," he said. "It was a question of
digging."

He said he was most surprised by the anti-Cuba terror plan,
code-named Operation Northwoods. It "may be the most corrupt
plan ever created by the U.S. government," he writes.

The Northwoods plan also proposed that if the 1962 launch of
John Glenn into orbit were to fail, resulting in the astronaut's
death, the U.S. government would publicize fabricated evidence
that Cuba had used electronic interference to sabotage the
flight, the book says.

A previously secret document obtained by Bamford offers further
suggestions for mayhem to be blamed on Cuba.

"We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or
simulated). ... We could foster attempts on lives of Cubans in
the United States, even to the extent of wounding in instances
to be widely publicized," the document says. Another idea was to
shoot down a CIA plane designed to replicate a passenger flight
and announce that Cuban forces shot it down.

Citing a White House document, Bamford writes that the idea of
creating a pretext for the invasion of Cuba might have started
with President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the last weeks of his
administration, when the plan for an invasion by Cuban exiles
trained in the United States was hatched. Carried out in April
1961, soon after Kennedy became president, the Bay of Pigs
invasion proved a fiasco. Castro's forces quickly killed or
rounded up the invaders.

Army Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs,
presented the Operation Northwoods plan to Kennedy early in
1962, but the president rejected it that March because he wanted
no overt U.S. military action against Cuba. Lemnitzer then
sought unsuccessfully to destroy all evidence of the plan,
according to Bamford.

Lemnitzer and those who served with him in 1962 as chiefs of the
nation's military branches are dead. But two former top Kennedy
administration officials said yesterday that they were unaware
of Operation Northwoods and questioned whether such a plan was
ever drafted.

"I've never heard of Operation Northwoods. Never heard of it and
don't believe it," said Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy's White House
special counsel. "Obviously, it would be totally illegal as well
as totally unwise."

Robert S. McNamara, Kennedy's defense secretary, said: "I never
heard of it. I can't believe the chiefs were talking about or
engaged in what I would call CIA-type operations."

Bamford writes that besides the Joint Chiefs, then-Assistant
Secretary of Defense Paul H. Nitze also favored "provoking a
phony war with Cuba."

"There may be a piece of paper" on Northwoods, said McNamara. "I
just cannot conceive of [Nitze] approving anything like that or
doing it without talking to me."

The book contains many other revelations in its detailed account
of NSA, the biggest U.S. intelligence agency and Maryland's
largest employer, with more than 25,000 personnel at Fort Meade,
site of its global eavesdropping efforts.

In recent years, NSA has regularly listened to bin Laden's
unencrypted telephone calls. Agency officials have sometimes
played tapes of bin Laden talking to his mother to impress
members of Congress and select visitors to the agency.

In the late 1990s, NSA tracked efforts by Chinese and French
companies to sell missile technology to Iran, particularly the
C-802 anti-ship missile. The eavesdropping led to U.S. protests
to the Chinese and French governments.

When U.S. troops evacuated Vietnam in 1975, "an entire warehouse
overflowing with NSA's most important cryptographic machines and
other supersensitive code and cipher materials" was left behind.
It was the largest compromise of such equipment in U.S. history,
Bamford writes, but the agency still has not acknowledged it.

When Israeli fighter jets attacked the NSA eavesdropping ship
USS Liberty in the Mediterranean in 1967, killing 34 Americans
and wounding 171, an NSA aircraft was listening in and heard
Israeli pilots referring to the American flag on the ship. U.S.
officials, including President Lyndon Baines Johnson, decided to
forget the matter, Bamford writes, because they did not want to
embarrass Israel. To this day, Israeli officials say their
forces mistakenly attacked the U.S. ship.

Bamford says the reason for the strike was Israel's desperate
effort to cover up its attacks on the Egyptian town of El Arish
in the Sinai. The Liberty was sitting offshore and the Israelis
feared that the ship would detect the operation, which included
the shooting of prisoners.

Yesterday, an NSA spokesperson questioned a point made in the
book about the USS Liberty.

"We do not comment on operational matters, alleged or otherwise;
however, Mr. Bamford's claim that the NSA leadership was
`virtually unanimous in their belief that the attack was
deliberate' is simply not true," the spokesperson said.

When he wrote "The Puzzle Palace" in 1982, Bamford was attacked
by some NSA officials, who said his revelations gave the Soviet
Union and other U.S. adversaries too much information on the
secret agency. One former director referred to him as "an
unconvicted felon."

With the end of the Cold War, the agency has been less guarded.
NSA's current director, Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden,
has granted a number of interviews. Hayden "cracked the door
open a tiny bit," said Bamford, partly to burnish NSA's public
image and correct misconceptions.

arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)