The Plan to Attack America

On March 13, 1962, the most senior uniformed officer in the United States military put his signature to a memo and sent it up the chain. General Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, addressed it to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Its title was bland: "Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba." Its contents were not.

The document laid out a menu of pretexts the government could manufacture to build public support for invading Cuba — pretexts that would cost American lives, or appear to.

What Was On the Table

The proposals included faking attacks on the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo using CIA-recruited operatives dressed as Cuban forces; sinking boats of Cuban refugees, real or simulated; orchestrating a "communist Cuban terror campaign" in U.S. cities; and staging the shoot-down of a civilian airliner by swapping it midair for a remotely piloted drone, then mourning passengers who never actually died.

The goal was not war for its own sake. The goal was consent — to engineer the public outrage that would make an invasion look not just acceptable but necessary.

They didn't plan to defend Americans from an attack. They planned the attack.

Who Said No

The plan was approved by the Joint Chiefs but rejected by the civilian leadership. Secretary McNamara and President Kennedy declined it, and within months Lemnitzer was not reappointed as Chairman. The papers were filed away and stamped secret.

They stayed that way for thirty-five years. The documents were declassified in 1997 by the JFK Assassination Records Review Board and brought to wide public attention by journalist James Bamford. The plan was real. It was written, signed, and seriously considered at the highest level of the U.S. military.

What remains is a single, uncomfortable fact: a proposal to kill or endanger Americans to justify a war was not the work of a lone crank. It carried the signature of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.