Among the Truthers (14 page)

Amid the swirling tangents, it's easy to lose the thread and drift off. But if you want to understand the Truth movement, it pays to listen closely.

Operation Northwoods and Its Legacy

In March of 1962 Operation Mongoose—the plan to depose Fidel Castro—was dead in the water. The previous year, on the heels of the CIA's disastrous Bay of Pigs adventure, John F. Kennedy had authorized a campaign of aggressive covert operations to destabilize Cuba's communist government. But none had borne fruit, and time was slipping away: Operation Mongoose was viable “only as long as there can be reasonable certainty that U.S. military intervention in Cuba would not directly involve the Soviet Union,” wrote the Joint Chiefs of Staff in an infamous “Top Secret” March 13, 1962, memorandum to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. “All projects are suggested within the time frame of the next few months.”

But while the Kennedy administration was desperate to be rid of Castro, it couldn't afford to be seen as a naked aggressor. What was needed, the Joint Chiefs concluded, was a pretext for war that put “the United States in the position of suffering justifiable grievances. World opinion and the United Nations forum should be favorably affected by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western hemisphere.”

In other words, the Joint Chiefs were urging a “false flag” attack—a shocking U.S.-staged incident that would be falsely blamed on Fidel Castro, and thereby offer Washington a pretext for “defensive” action. (The term originates in an earlier age of military history, when fighting ships on the high seas identified one another by the flags on their masts.)

The plan contained in the March 13, 1962, memorandum—codenamed “Northwoods” and set out on six typed pages—delivered to McNamara a long menu of false-flag options. Some were vague and set out in single lines of point-form notation, such as: “Start rumors (many). Use clandestine radio. Land friendly Cubans in uniform ‘over-the-fence' to stage attack on [the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base]. Capture Cuban (friendly) saboteurs inside the base. Start riots near the base main gate (friendly Cubans). Blow up ammunition inside the base; start fires. Burn aircraft on air base (sabotage). Lob mortar shells from outside of base into base. Some damage to installations.” But others seemed like elevator pitches for Hollywood action films—such as a plan to “Sink ship near harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock-victims.” An even stranger plan, contained in a separate memorandum, suggested something called Operation Dirty Trick: “The objective is to provide irrevocable proof that, should the Mercury manned orbital flight fail, the fault lies with the Communists et al.”

Operation Northwoods never materialized: Days after the Northwoods memo was drafted, Kennedy rejected the plan, signaling to the Pentagon that he had no appetite for new military adventures in Cuba. Though the CIA would continue to engage in covert operations against Castro's regime following the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the Northwoods memo would become a mere footnote to the larger sweep of Cold War history—albeit one that offers a fascinating glimpse into the hawkish mindset of military leaders at the height of the Cold War.

But to conspiracy theorists, Northwoods is anything but a footnote. The Vietnam War often is held up as a definitive event that, along with Watergate, caused Americans to break faith with their government. But in conspiracist lore, the JFK era actually has proven to be an equally dominant influence. As Truthers see it, the 1962 Northwoods memo—references to which are sprinkled casually throughout Truther speeches and articles, like biblical citations at a prayer meeting—is essentially an early blueprint
⁵
for the even more diabolical plot that would unfold thirty-nine years after the memo was written.

What makes Northwoods particularly tantalizing to modern conspiracists is that several of the more ambitious schemes contained in the 1962 memo share key elements of the Truther narrative: (1) the intentional destruction of airplanes; (2) fake terrorism stage-managed by Washington; and (3) the wanton killing of innocent civilians; (4) all with the goal of furthering America's geostrategic interests. While most strategies got only vague mention in the Northwoods memo, these more elaborate plots were described in minute detail:

• We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated) . . .
  
• Harassment of civil air, attacks on surface shipping and destruction of U.S. military drone aircraft by MIG type planes would be useful as complementary actions. An F–86 properly painted would convince air passengers that they saw a Cuban MIG, especially if the pilot of the transport were to announce such fact . . .
  
• It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight. An aircraft at Eglin [Air Force Base] would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone.
  ⁶
  

During the course of my interviews with Jenkins and others, Northwoods consistently served as Exhibit A in the Truther argument that American leaders would be willing to lie to their own citizens, and even kill innocent people, as a means toward sparking a military conflict. Many described the 1962 memorandum as the crucial piece of evidence that originally tipped them into the Truther camp.

That includes Robert Balsamo, a middle-aged commercial pilot who now helps lead a group called Pilots For 9/11 Truth.

By Balsamo's description, he was a loyal, even jingoistic, American patriot until he found out about the Joint Chiefs' plans for Castro. “Being a New Yorker and a pilot, 9/11 was like a double-whammy for me,” he told me during a phone interview from his new home office in Tennessee. “And I wanted to go get the big bad terrorists. I called every military branch to offer my services—but they told me they were all set with pilots in the military, and I would be better serving my country as a civilian pilot to get Americans back in the air.”

His attitude changed in 2006 when he turned on CNN and saw Glenn Beck interviewing David von Kleist, a Missouri-based Truther who attacks the notion that American Airlines Flight 77 ever hit the Pentagon.

“The Department of Defense had just released a video of the Pentagon getting hit, and Beck showed it on his program,” Balsamo tells me. “Then Beck said that this should put all those ‘conspiracy theories' to rest. And I was thinking, ‘Oh, that's great. This'll clear everything up.' But then the video rolls, and I'm sitting there, and I'm looking at the footage, and I'm thinking—wait a minute—I can't
see
any 757.

“And as a professional pilot, I know what I'm looking for,” he adds. “The 757 is a very sexy airplane to pilots. Excuse my language, but pilots call it ‘big tits, long legs, and a tight ass,' because that's what it looks like. It's got two huge engines, long landing gear and a tight rear. It's very distinctive.”

So Balsamo started poking around on the Internet, seeing if he could find a clearer version of the video. Instead, what he found were Truther sites—and a copy of the famous Northwoods memo. From then on, there was no turning back.

“[The 9/11 commission] came out and said that our biggest failure regarding 9/11 was our lack of imagination—imagining that some people could get some planes and fly them into buildings, and terrorists hijacking airliners and what not,” Balsamo told me. “But just forty years prior—this was exactly what people in our own government, the people trying to invade Cuba, were proposing. It blew me away when I read that. It blew me away that these elements could get that high within our government, could get to that level of power.”

But the history lessons don't end at Northwoods. In the Truther worldview, false-flag conspiracies can be read into most modern wars—all the way back to World War I. Or even further: Webster Tarpley—a prominent Washington, D.C.–based 9/11 conspiracy theorist—traces the false-flag roots of 9/11 to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which a group of English Catholics sought to blow up the Houses of Parliament with a massive bomb, and thereby slaughter King James I of England and VI of Scotland, and much of the Protestant ruling class besides. (Tarpley believes the event was staged as an excuse to persecute papists.) In their presentations to 9/11 Truth conferences, Canadian conspiracy theorists Ian Woods and Terry Burrows go back even farther: to the Greeks' use of a Trojan Horse three thousand years ago, and Nero's move to pin the Great Fire of Rome on the Christians.

In some historical cases, the Truthers have a point—or, at least, an arguable debating position. Almost as frequently cited as Northwoods in Truther literature, for instance, is the 1933 Reichstag fire, which gave the Nazis a pretext to purge Germany's communists from public life—notwithstanding suspicions that the mentally disturbed communist convicted of the crime was a Nazi pawn. Two years after the Reichstag fire, Stalin seized on the death of popular Politburo moderate Sergey Kirov and the machinations of the invented “Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center” to usher in his Great Purge. Five years after that, Stalin executed another bona fide false-flag operation: As Finnish Truther Vesa Raiskila noted to me in an interview, the Soviet Union's 1939 invasion of Finland was justified by Finland's alleged shelling of the Russian village of Mainila—despite the fact that not a single Finnish artillery unit was in range.

The 1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which gave Lyndon B. Johnson authorization to use military force in Southeast Asia without a formal congressional declaration of war, was secured in the aftermath of a pair of naval engagements that many legitimate historians believe were the result of American provocations and blunders. And then there's the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which was justified in large part by Saddam Hussein's possession of (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction. Many Truthers I spoke with told me that their latent suspicions about 9/11 didn't mature into full-blown Trutherdom until the spring and summer of 2003, when the search for Iraqi WMD turned up nothing of significance.

Other examples of historical false-flag conspiracies cited by Truthers are more dubious. As part of the historical analysis she embeds in her speeches at Truther events, for instance, former MI5 Intelligence Officer Annie Machon, who now lives in Germany, alleges false-flag connivance between the British government and IRA bombers. She also suggests that the July 26, 1994, bombing of the Israeli embassy in London was a false-flag Mossad operation; and, far more plausibly, that Alexander Litvinenko's 2006 assassination by polonium in London resulted from his blowing the whistle on what Machon alleges to be the Kremlin-orchestrated 1999 bombing of Russian apartment blocks as a pretext for full-scale war in Chechnya.

Like Ken Jenkins, many American conspiracists have lapped up Robert Stinnett's controversial 1999 blockbuster
Day of Deceit
:
The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor—
which is itself based on a Northwoods-type 1940 document known as “The McCollum memo”—suggesting that FDR engaged in a deliberate campaign aimed at provoking Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor so that he would have an excuse to drag a reluctant America into the war against the Axis powers.
⁷
Others allege NATO was complicit in a whole range of false-flag terrorist plots on European soil during the Cold War (allegations inevitably sourced to a single eccentric 2004 book written by Daniele Ganser,
NATO's Secret Armies
:
Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe
).

Radio host Alex Jones likewise claims the 1915 sinking of the RMS
Lusitania
was a false-flag operation designed to get the United States into World War I. (Jones admits that the ship was sunk by a German torpedo, but adds that “[the
Lusitania
's commander] sailed it back and forth in front of submarines to get a false-flag attack.”) Other alleged false-flag attacks that have become Truther talking points are the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City; and Israel's attack on an American intelligence-gathering ship called the USS
Liberty
during the Six Day War of 1967. (The plan, according to one typical theorist, “was for Israel to attack and sink an American ship, kill the crew and the U.S. would blame Egypt, invade and oust Soviets from the Middle East, and control the world's oil supply.”) According to this view of history, there is no such thing as an honest
casus belli
: Just about every conflict in the history of human civilization has been caused by a warmongering conspirator killing his own kind and blaming it on an innocent enemy.

Many conspiracy theorists who embrace this radical understanding of history readily draw on their own bloodlines and personal histories to justify their claims. Some, like former football player Lubo Zizakovic, are Slavs who believe NATO hatched a plot to humiliate Serbia in the 1990s.
⁸
A conspiracy-minded Canadian civil-rights lawyer I've crossed paths with, Rocco Galati, sees current events through the lens of his Italian ancestors—whom he believes were stereotyped as Mafia members in the postwar decades. Daniel Estulin, whose elaborate conspiracy theories about the Bilderberg Group already have been discussed, was raised in the USSR, and claims his father was jailed and tortured by the KGB. Luke Rudkowski, the twentysomething firebrand who's emerged as New York City's noisiest, most aggressive Truther in recent years, is the son of Polish immigrants who imparted to their son an evident hatred—and fear—of totalitarianism. Both of these men follow faithfully in the tradition of Ayn Rand, whose radicalized fear of government seems to have taken root when the Soviets took over her father's pharmacy in St. Petersburg.