by Barry Krusch
The “dirty little secret” of government is that on occasion it will not only frame people for crimes they did not commit, it will on occasion create crimes out of thin air,as Samuel Gross and Barbara O’Brien reported in 2008 in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, summarizing data also contained in the Frontline documentary LAPD Blues: 6
We do know about a substantial number of exonerations of innocent defendants who pled guilty and received comparatively light sentences in one particularly disturbing factual context. In the past decade, several systematic programs of police perjury have been uncovered, which ultimately led to exonerations of at least 135 innocent defendants who had been framed for illegal possession of drugs or guns in Los Angeles, Dallas, and Tulia, Texas. These are not cases in which the wrong person was convicted for a real crime, but ones where the police lied about crimes that had never happened at all. Most of these innocent drug and gun defendants pled guilty and had been released by the time they were exonerated two to four years later. These cases do demonstrate that some innocent defendants who are not facing the death penalty or very long terms of imprisonment will plead guilty in return for greatly reduced sentences.
Notice the drop. We first started with examples of how a crime can be “pinned” on the innocent. This paragraph now shows us how a “non-crime” can be pinned on the innocent. Can it get any worse? Yes.
Manufacturing reality after the fact to put a person in jail for a crime not committed is one thing — but actually committing a crime and then attempting to “pin” it on an innocent party is quite another — and doubly sinister.
As you might gather, any evidence of government misconduct of this magnitude would normally be destined for the shredder, but a few accounts and documents detailing these disturbing schemes have miraculously survived.
Some of them have survived because they are not documenting manufactured crimes, only manufactured reality; however, once we realize that government can manufacture reality, it takes no great leap of the imagination to realize that government can manufacture the “reality” that a crime they committed was perpetrated by “X”.
So, let’s begin this journey of discovery by starting with two comparatively benign examples from World War II, Operation Mincemeat and Hitler’s Jig.
Operation Mincemeat was a plan devised by the British to deceive Hitler that the Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia instead of Sicily. The method of operation was to make sure that a body with “top secret” Allied war plans washed up on shore; when the Germans read the plans, they would think that they were viewing reality of the real variety, and act accordingly.
To create the illusion of reality, a body first had to be found. The team behind Operation Mincemeat charged with finding the body was headed by Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu, a Royal Navy intelligence officer: 7
With the help of the renowned pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury, Montagu and his team determined what kind of body they needed: a man who appeared to have died at sea by hypothermia and drowning, and then floated ashore after several days. However, finding a usable body seemed almost impossible, as indiscreet inquiries would cause talk, and it was impossible to tell a dead man’s next of kin what the body was wanted for. Under quiet pressure, Bentley Purchase, coroner of St. Pancras District in London, obtained the body of a 34-year old Welsh man named Glyndwr Michael, on the condition that the man’s real identity would never be revealed. The man had died after ingesting rat poison which contained phosphorus. After being ingested, the phosphide reacts with hydrochloric acid in the human stomach, generating phosphine, a highly toxic gas. Coroner Purchase explained, “This dose was not sufficient to kill him outright, and its only effect was so to impair the functioning of the liver that he died a little time afterwards”, leaving few clues to the cause of death. Montagu later claimed the man died from pneumonia, and that the family had been contacted and permission obtained, but none of this was true. The dead man’s parents had died and no known relatives were found.
Once the body had been found, the next step was to build up the story with layer upon layer of verisimilitude. The brilliance of Operation Mincemeat was in the level of details used to create the illusion of reality (Wikipedia, Operation Mincemeat):
The next step was creating a “legend”: a synthetic identity for the dead man. He became “Captain (Acting Major) William “Bill” Martin, Royal Marines”, born 1907, in Cardiff, Wales, and assigned to Headquarters, Combined Operations. . . . The rank of acting Major made him senior enough to be entrusted with sensitive documents, but not so prominent that anyone would expect to know him. The name “Martin” was chosen because there were several Martins of about that rank in the Royal Marines . . .
And numerous props were used to prop up the “legend” (Wikipedia, Operation Mincemeat):
In keeping with his rank, he was given some good quality underwear, at the time extremely difficult to obtain due to rationing.
He also had a pompous letter from his father, a letter from the family solicitor, and a letter from Ernest Whitley Jones, joint general manager of Lloyds Bank, demanding payment of an overdraft of £79 19s 2d (£79.96). There were a book of stamps, a silver cross and St Christopher’s medallion, a pencil stub, keys, a used twopenny bus ticket, ticket stubs from a London theatre, a bill for four nights’ lodging at the Naval and Military Club, and a receipt from Gieves & Hawkes for a new shirt (this last was an error: it was for cash, and officers never paid cash at Gieves; but the Germans did not catch it). All these documents were on authentic stationery or billheads.
To make the Major even more believable, Montagu and his team decided to suggest that he was a bit careless. His ID card was marked as a replacement for one that had been lost, and his pass to Combined Operations HQ had expired a few weeks before his departure and not been renewed.
While the cover identity was created by Montagu and his team, the false documents were also being created. Montagu and his team insisted that these must be at the very highest level, so that there would be no question of the supposed senders being misinformed. The main document was a personal letter from “Archie Nye” (Lt. General Sir Archibald Nye, Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff) to “My dear Alex” (General Sir Harold Alexander, commander of 18th Army Group in Algeria and Tunisia). The letter covered several “sensitive” subjects, such as the (unwanted) award of Purple Heart medals by U.S. forces to British servicemen serving with them, and the appointment of a new commander of the Guards Brigade. This explained its being hand-carried rather than sent through regular channels.
Operation Mincemeat was “swallowed whole” by the Germans, and resulted in reducing German combat strength against the Russians.
Now, while some of the British military had successfully manufactured fiction designed for consumption by a German audience, another division was manufacturing fiction for the people back home.
In a newsreel that was shown in movie theaters in 1940, Hitler was said to have danced a jig after descending from a railway car in which France had surrendered. But the “dance” was illusory. Using an optical printer, British film editors took an image of Hitler raising his leg and looped it over and over, making him appear to dance a ludicrous jig: 8
These two examples are fairly well-known, and few would argue that these were not justifiable deceptions. All’s fair in love and war, as the saying goes.
But when we get to the story of Pearl Harbor, we find a deception that makes you begin to question the saying: apparently, America was not surprised by the attack on the Hawaiian naval base (Towers Of Deception, p. 274):
The most painstakingly researched book on Pearl Harbor is Robert B. Stinnett’s Day Of Deceit: The Truth About FDR And Pearl Harbor. Based on 17 years’ research and tens of thousands of previously unreleased documents, US Navy veteran Stinnett proves that Roosevelt successfully arranged for Japan to strike US facilities at the cost of 2,460 US lives.
Roosevelt secretly assigned a top aide to draw up what beca
me an eightpoint plan to provoke Japan. Cutting down Japan’s oil supplies was part of the plan and was carried out, as were the other seven points. The keys to the plan were that “the US should not fire the first shot” and that US losses should be great enough to inflame public opinion. By August 6, 1941, Japanese forces were poised to attack the CS naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, where the Pacific fleet had been purposefully exposed to them. The Franklin Delano Roosevelt US high command had broken all the Japanese codes (although the Japanese did not know this) and could have prevented the attack, but Roosevelt made sure it was unopposed.
Here is the memo containing the eight-point plan designed to inflame Japan, authored by Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum, head of the Far East desk of Navy intelligence (Day Of Deceit, p. 275):
Justifiable? Considering that it brought America into a war it might well have entered too late, we have to say “yes.” At the same time, other books show a more disturbing side to that war, which if true may initiate yet another reassessment on our part.
Interested readers are urged to follow this thread off-line, starting with the books Wall Street And The Rise Of Hitler by Antony C. Sutton and IBM And The Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany And America’s Most Powerful Corporation by Edwin Black, as well as other books by those authors, and similar books on the same topic. If the thread truly leads in the direction these authors have pointed to, the following picture might emerge: one group of Americans finance Hitler, forcing another group of Americans to provoke an attack on Pearl Harbor, which means that these two groups of Americans, if it turned out they were coordinating their actions, were manufacturing a global war. A thesis this provocative, needless to say, requires an extraordinary amount of evidence for justification, but research this important must be gathered.
All that at a later time: as we return to the main point, it is clear the direction in which we are headed. Eventually we are going to be crossing the line of justifiability: is there ever a time when military deception cannot be justified?
I believe the answer must be “yes”: the line in the sand is the false-flag operation, where a government commits a crime posing as an enemy, then uses the crime to justify an attack on that same enemy (Towers Of Deception, p. 262):
The Gunpowder Plot was one example, and the Reichstag Fire created by Nazi Germany was another. And there is evidence that even America contemplated such an operation, in a memo written for a false-flag op known as Operation Northwoods. 9
This memo was sent to President Kennedy, having been authored by the Joint Chiefs of staff. This memo was ordered destroyed along with numerous other documents related to the “Bay of Pigs”, but was the “one that got away,” and with the mask ripped off provides a peek into how the federal government attempted to do a “Walt Disney” on Cuba.
The basic concept outlined in the March 13, 1962 Northwoods memo was to create a series of incidents that would falsely implicate Cuba in an attack on an American plane, thereby “justifying” an invasion of the United States on that country.
One of the main goals of this plan was to “camouflage the ultimate objective” of making a phony reality credible by enabling “a logical build-up of incidents to be combined with other seemingly unrelated events” to “develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace”:
The Joint Chiefs planned to achieve the desired “legitimate provocation” on the part of U.S. with “harassment plus deceptive actions”:
The slogan “Made in America” was given a new spin by the Northwoods memo: to give the “genuine appearance” that attacks on a U.S. base in Guantanamo were perpetrated by “hostile Cuban forces,” incidents should be manufactured to make the attack “credible”:
Then the Northwoods team contemplated a series of actions that that can only be described as treasonous, including blowing up a United States ship and creating terrorist actions on United States soil!!
The military would then exploit the national indignation resulting from their actions through “casualty lists” published in United States newspapers:
Pay close attention to this last paragraph! The Joint Chiefs claimed that they could “develop a communist Cuban terror campaign” in Miami and even Washington. But how, pray tell, could they do that? How could they be so confident that the aforementioned “Communists” would cooperate? Here’s one theory:
Maybe that was because the supposed “Communists” were actually Americans paid to pose as “Communists” by the United States government!
Wow. I need to catch my breath here. Is this really Walt Disney’s “America”?
After hinting in the broadest possible terms that they would mobilize Uncle Sam’s military might to murder Americans on a ship, the Joint Chiefs next indicated they had no problem executing innocent Cuban refugees, refugees who risked their lives to flee the gray and gloomy skies of Cuban dictatorship for the red white and blue opportunities of America — a country which neglected to tell them that the famous Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty had an asterisk:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me . . . *
* So we can use them as pawns in a Pentagon-created false-flag operation. It’s how we keep the shores of America safe for freedom and democracy.
After this, with absolutely no trace of irony, the Joint Chiefs of Staff indicated that the “terror campaign” they created to murder innocent Cubans and frame Cuba would project to the international community Cuba’s illegitimacy, with the Chiefs showing their deep regard for human life by stipulating that they would only be “wounding” Cuban refugees already in America (unlike their cousins in the boats), closing with what must be one of the least self-aware statements in the history of the universe:
As if this wasn’t enough, the Operation Northwoods memo indicated the pursuit of a more elaborate conspiracy, extremely deep and sophisticated, utilizing American college students:
Perhaps novices in this line of work (considering the fact that this memo was not folded, spindled, drawn, quartered, shredded, sliced, diced, dissected, chopped, mashed, pounded, puréed, burned, bulldozed, or otherwise mutilated), the Joint Chiefs of Staff indicated they would deploy the branch of “government” far more experienced in covert operations like these — the CIA — to create fake identities for the college students, who would be transported in a counterfeit plane (what, you didn’t know there were such things?) belonging to a CIA front organization (known as a “proprietary”):
Because killing American college students (unlike passengers on a U.S. ship and refugees from Cuba) would be going too far, the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided to disembark the college students at an Air Force Base, curiously exposing themselves to the risk that someone would expose the worst-laid plan of mice and men:
As I stated, this would have been an amazing risk for the Joint Chiefs. College students would have been duped into participating in an act of treason against the United States, and surely one of them would have gone to the press once they learned how they were used. Why were the Joint Chiefs so sure they could control this leak? You’ll see why soon.
In the meantime, with our college students safely disembarked at the base, the main plan would continue. The Chiefs would fly the plane into Cuban airspace, and to mitigate any risk that the Cuban government would not shoot down an airplane with American college students (completely defeating the purpose of showing the American people how dangerous and uncivilized was the Cuban government), the American military would remotely destroy the plane by radio signal:
To render implausible the inevitable claims of “conspiracy theorists” (i.e. people who can spot a lie a mile off) that this was a terrorist action “Made in the USA”, the Joint Chiefs would draw independent radio stations affiliated with the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) into the scheme to ad
d to its credibility:
Phew!
The Operation Northwoods memo: a devastating revelation, an official government document that confirms the worst fears we could have about “our” government.
The Joint Chiefs were well aware of the explosive nature of their memo, as indicated by their recommendations for transmittal:
The memo was then forwarded to the only authorized recipient, Secretary of Defense McNamara, who in all likelihood discussed the plan with President Kennedy. Needless to say, Kennedy and/or McNamara, at least one of whom did not have the ethics of a cobra (probably Kennedy), deep-sixed the outlined operations, which was distributed only one year and eight months before President Kennedy’s assassination . . .
The Northwoods memo offers a breathtaking view into the seamy underside of only one American covert operation; and there most likely have been hundreds. Power like this gives the green light to the “government” (or, perhaps, a rogue group which has hijacked the government) to manufacture “terrorist incidents” the same way McDonald’s manufactures Chicken McNuggets, with no fear of discovery.
We don’t often get a look at memos like this, so learn well!
But, given that we do have the memo, what have we learned? Many, many valuable things, most of which contribute to an understanding of the Kennedy assassination: