To the people running the show (and as you can see, in this case it literally was a “show”), “War is hell”: murdering and wounding innocent people is part of the game, and “collateral damage” is the price others pay when the military decides to flex its muscles.
To some of the people running the show (the ones at the top, unfortunately), framing an innocent government with a crime it did not commit was A-OK and SOP.
The military had the ability to create this deception.
The military was immoral enough to create this deception.
The military had media assets they knew would publicize their plan.
The military believed that innocent college students would not reveal their plan, or, if they would, that their comments could be somehow bottled up.
As mentioned, this final point was the potential Achilles heel of the entire enterprise. Recall that college students have been recruited. One of the arguments against conspiracy “theories” is that “someone would have talked” (and that therefore since no one talked, there was no conspiracy), yet obviously this was no concern for the Northwood authors. What did they know that we don’t?
Perhaps they knew they had control of media, and therefore the ability to control leaks. Perhaps they were aware that agencies such as FBI and CBI had “counterintelligence” programs with the ability and experience to manufacture news in the same way the Joint Chiefs could manufacture a geopolitical crisis!
Recall that the Military and the CIA are working hand-in-hand. If the Military and the CIA had control of the media, then their scheme was safe from prying eyes.
Control of this nature would, by its nature, involve a good deal of coordination from network to network, from magazine to magazine, from newspaper to newspaper. Hugh Wilford wrote a book on this very topic. The title says it all:
The genesis of the term, according to Wilford, was as follows (Mighty Wurlitzer, p. 7; footnote omitted):
The CIA constructed an array of front organizations that Frank Wisner, the Agency’s first chief of political warfare, liked to compare to a “Mighty Wurlitzer” organ, capable of playing any propaganda tune he desired.
If you don’t have time to read the Wilford book, but still want to know how the pipes of the organ work in concert, all you need to do is read the following excerpts from a report created by the Church Committee in 1975 and 1976 to investigate the intelligence agencies, a committee which, apart from including Frank Church, included political luminaries from both sides of the political spectrum such as Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, Howard Baker, Barry Goldwater, and Richard Schweiker.
Data describing the operation of the Wurlitzer was found in Book 1 of their report, titled Foreign And Military Intelligence, in particular Chapter 10 titled “The Domestic Impact Of Foreign Clandestine Operations: The CIA And Academic Institutions, The Media, And Religious Institutions,” to be cited hereinafter as 1 CCR.
The basic concept of the Wurlitzer (or matrix, to use another, related term), is to control the flow of information through a network of academics, foundations, publishers, and mass media in general, information flowing downhill and eventually resulting in a “hall of mirrors”, echo chamber effect where people only report what other people are reporting. As we learned from the Asch effect, if multiple sources report the same false information, people see that false information as reality. If reality is defined as what people report, defining what people report is all you need to do.
Here is how the Wurlitzer might look today:
Unfortunately, that metaphor is linear, when the actual information path would most likely be hierarchical (bottom-up or top-down, depending on your orientation). The best way to control the flow of information is to first control the source of information, academics located at universities, the fountainhead from which our knowledge well bubbles, and the role of these academics is to not only report the information which is “approved”, but also to lend prestige to that information, to legitimize it: information which is not discussed appears illegitimate because it seems to be a minority, “fringe” view not worthy of discussion by the best and the brightest (1 CCR 189-90):
While academics generally knew of CIA involvement (and most likely signed “nondisclosure” agreements to not disclose the source of their funds), on other occasions academics could receive grants to do “approved” work without knowing that the CIA was the source (1 CCR 181):
The grants designed to steer the academics in the “right” direction were provided by numerous foundations: as the Committee reported, of 700 large grants, at least 108 involved “partial or complete CIA funding” (1 CCR 182):
With the source of information controlled, the next step would be to control the output of that source, which could be op-ed pieces in newspapers, articles in journals or magazines, or simply books (1 CCR 192-93):
This was no Mickey Mouse operation: well over 1000 books were produced by the CIA’s “knowledge” factory (1 CCR 193):
These books could be authored on nearly any topic, depending on the need of the day.
Say some renegade JFK assassination author finds evidence implicating your organization, the CIA, in the assassination of President Kennedy. Because the author has evidence, you cannot implicate him directly as a “nut job”, but what you can do is lump him in the same category as an author with an identical thesis on that point, as well as an additional discredited “nut job ready” thesis.
So, let’s say you want to discredit this line of JFK research; all you have to do is find an author who postulates viable thesis X and ridiculous thesis Y, and then give that author a book contract (not the other guy). There is no need to work with author NJ directly, because you know what he or she is going to say in advance. For example, you might even publish a book like this:
Now, was this book published in 2011 sponsored by the CIA in some way, shape or form for the purpose I described? We have no idea. However, what we do know is numerous books authored in the 1960s and 70s were sponsored by the CIA, without the knowledge of the Americans reading them. One such book was supposedly written by a “Chinese defector” (1 CCR 199):
Now, with a ready, willing, and able team of certain eager beaver academics salivating for the chance to get a grant to publish approved writings, and well over 1000 books consequently published with your “ready for prime-time” content, how do you make sure that the content of those books makes it to prime time? Well, if you control the media, you can make sure that those books are reviewed, and that the topics of those books also become newsworthy items. In this regard, it would be important to have a slew of media contacts, and with a secret program in place called Operation Mockingbird, the CIA had no shortage there (1 CCR 195):
The largest category of the above was “stringers” and “employees”, the vast majority of whom were well aware of their CIA relationships. That article by Tom Wicker, that story by James Reston, an Op-Ed piece in the Times by Errol Morris: a genuine piece, or was this a story planted and/or commissioned and/or approved by the CIA? I have no idea; do you? (1 CCR 196)
Of course, with all that false “information” floating around out there, you might think that this would have a negative impact on the ability of United States to construct an intelligent domestic and foreign policy. After all, for our policymakers, this false information would be as dangerous as false alarms on the screen of an air traffic controller. No need to worry though, the senior officials in charge were well aware of the subterfuge — well, at least some of the subterfuge (1 CCR 201):
Now, this may strike you as bizarre, but there are some people out there who don’t see a problem with actions of this nature, perhaps due to some dubious “national security” rationale that functions like a white blood cell of the mind to diffuse the implications of facts like these.
My advice to these people is to take a look at how far out that chain-link fence is from the center of your camp; the farther away from the center, the more you can call it “security”; the closer
to the center, the more you should call it “prison wire.”
The Church Committee, like anyone else whose EEG had not flat-lined, was well aware of implication of the facts we have seen (1 CCR 179):
The bad news, as the Church Report noted, is that what we think has occurred is different from what can possibly occur, and as Murphy’s law tells us, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, so the question is, if there was a military coup d’état in America (unlikely though we wish that possibility to be), could any such coup possibly be stopped if the military would have control over how that coup was perceived? And if the CIA (or more precisely, one or more handfuls of highly placed officials in the CIA) was also behind a coup d’état, that would not be very good news, due to their control of the media.
That is why the following prediction in the Times that any coup d’état in the United States would be CIA-driven was particularly unwelcome, particularly since it appeared in an article in The New York Times on October 3, 1963, just six weeks before President Kennedy’s assassination! 10
Now, folks, that is some wake-up call. Note that the source is a “very high official” in the federal government. What official would leak something as provocative as that to the Times without approval from President Kennedy himself?
Connect the dots: coup . . . CIA . . . media.
We need to follow this line a little further. Edward Luttwak, a professor at Georgetown University, told us in 1969 that Presidents could be put into power without the benefit of a general election (Coup D’Etat, p. ix):
Luttwak stated later in his book that an excellent public relations team would be just as effective in maintaining the public order as a legion of black-helmeted SWAT infantry equipped with pepper spray, rubber bullets, and tasers (Coup D’Etat, p. 173):
Seizing the control over the flow of information would be an absolutely critical tool to maintain power (Coup D’Etat, p. 117):
The media that would be best suited in this regard would be mass communications, particularly radio and television, which allows you to control the uncritical masses, who would rather watch Blind Date than read Luttwak’s Coup D’Etat; Blind Date, admittedly, is probably a lot more entertaining, but Coup D’état tells you where the cancer is, and thus gives you a means to fight it (Coup D’Etat, p. 174):
Not a touchy-feely guy, this Luttwak. Can’t believe what you’re reading? Well, since I can’t believe what I’m writing, I guess we’re on the same page. That, however, is the beauty of evidence; it gives you permission to think any thought naturally flowing from the evidence, including the formerly unthinkable ones.
Now, do we know, based on the information that has so far been presented, that the CIA (or, far more likely, a group of insiders who hijacked the CIA) was behind the assassination of President Kennedy? No, we do not.
We do know this though: if Oswald was the assassin of Kennedy, we don’t need to worry about that possibility. Conversely, if the evidence shows that Oswald was not the assassin of Kennedy, we do.
That being the case, don’t you wish this book was called Improbable: The Case Against Lee Harvey Oswald?
Well, it’s not, so let’s continue to unwind this intriguing thread.
We know there is a Wurlitzer mechanism, but how does the player of the organ coordinate the pipes? Through memos distributed to “media assets” under contract. As luck would have it, we not only have the Northwoods memo that tells us by implication there is some mechanism of media control, and the Church Report that in fact there was in place a mechanism of media control, we also happen to have one of the memos distributed to CIA station chiefs as direct evidence of media control, in a memo related to, of all things, the Kennedy assassination!
This memo was inspired by the Jim Garrison investigation of Clay Shaw, an investigation which could have led directly to the CIA had that investigation not been sabotaged, and an investigation which provided the perfect opportunity to produce a “damage control” memo. On April 1, 1967, the CIA produced a memo that we desperately wish was an April Fool’s joke on America, but no luck there.
Eventually declassified in 1998, the memo began as follows: 11
In the case of the Kennedy assassination, one of the nasty rumors that the Central Intelligence Agency had to squash was the legitimacy of any ideas that then-President Johnson was involved in the assassination, and/or that Oswald worked for the CIA, and/or that the CIA was otherwise involved:
The memorandum requested that “friendly elite contacts” (the ones mentioned in the Church report) be informed that the charges of the critics “are without serious foundation”, and that certain conspiracy discussions would “appear to be deliberately generated by communist propagandists” (even though there was absolutely no evidence to support either of these allegations):
The memo suggested employing “propaganda assets” (i.e., journalists and editors with a previous affiliation with the CIA paid to write or publish articles on demand) to launch unsubstantiated counter-framing memos into the media ether:
Notice how just these two memos, the Northwoods memo of March 13, 1962, and the CIA memo of April 1967, along with the revelations of the Church Committee, reveal the amazing power of government, which not only had the will and the way to launch a military operation with a self-created pretext, but also had the power to bury these plans as “classified” documents somehow involved in “protecting” America’s “national security,” even though in fact they did just the opposite! They also had the power to enlist the media to tout the cover story and bury the back-story as well. So, along with the power to manipulate reality, and the power to disguise their manipulation of reality, they also had the power to use their “propaganda assets” to discredit anyone who dared to rip off their mask, dipping into the defamation well and pulling out as many phrases as needed.
Now, in the case of Operation Northwoods, it could be argued that we should all relax. After all, the plan was presumably vetoed by McNamara and Kennedy. Can we relax? No!
While the Northwoods plan was never put into effect, the COINTELPRO operation was. That plan was executed by a different branch of government, the FBI. This massive operation, with roots in the earliest part of the 20th century, became especially prominent in the 60s. Memos taken from FBI offices in Media, Pennsylvania in March 1971 were published in the book The Cointelpro Papers for all the world to see. And what we see in these memos is Northwood-style activity actually carried out.
Take, for example, the well-named “Operation Hoodwink”, which was designed to promote a dispute between the Communist Party and the Mafia (The Cointelpro Papers, p. 42):
The FBI would provoke the dispute between these groups by anonymously forwarding a counterfeit leaflet supposedly attacking Mafia “labor practices” (The Cointelpro Papers, p. 42):
Hoodwink was used against the Communist Party and the Mafia, two organizations not generally held in high esteem. Because of this, some would erroneously conclude a Hoodwink-type operation was justified (as confined to these groups). But history shows that when the Pandora’s box is opened, the virus inside spreads wide. Yes, alas, it wasn’t just the Communist Party and the Mafia hoodwinked. The web of deceit would eventually spread beyond these groups, and other Americans not nearly as deserving would soon find themselves caught in that web. For example, a fake leafleting attack was used, later, to cause disruption in the peace movement against the Vietnam War (The Cointelpro Papers, p. 58):
A similar approach was used to attack a Puerto Rican pro-independence movement, this time to be distributed through FBI propaganda assets at a newspaper (The Cointelpro Papers, p. 70):
The net began to cast wider; eventually the COINTELPRO net was used not just against the Vietnam Antiwar Movement and the Puerto Rican Pro-independence Movement, but even against the winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize for peace, Dr. Martin Luther King! The FBI decided to celebrate Dr. King’s prestigious win in a memo (issued six weeks later) which looked for ways to address the “problem” of rem
oving Dr. King “from the national scene” (The Cointelpro Papers, p. 98):
You thought that the “I” in “FBI” stood for “investigation” and not “infiltration” or “intimidation” or “instigation”? Think again!
One way the memo proposed to remove King from the national scene was to send Dr. King an anonymous letter that would induce him to commit suicide (!), the suggested content of which follows (The Cointelpro Papers, p. 99):
What, you weren’t aware that “giving peace a chance” to the extent that you won a Nobel Peace prize was a federal crime deserving of a self-inflicted death penalty? Since the FBI is only authorized to investigate violations of federal law, they obviously thought so. Unless there is some sort of subterranean law we haven’t been permitted to examine, you might want to go back to the statute books on that one, guys.
King wasn’t the only antiwar activist targeted. Another memo, issued in 1968, was used to create potential violence against comedian Dick Gregory (who was outspoken against the Vietnam war), using the Mafia as its involuntary intermediary (The Cointelpro Papers, p. 104):
Impossible: The Case Against Lee Harvey Oswald Page 15