Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
Speaker 2: my name is Nolan.
Speaker 3: They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our
Speaker 3: super producer Paul Mission Control Decat most importantly, you are you.
Speaker 3: You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't
Speaker 3: want you to know. An episode long time and coming. Gentlemen,
Speaker 3: this is a bit stuff they want you to know
Speaker 3: and a bit ridiculous history. I guess because any student
Speaker 3: of war can tell you a lot of stuff doesn't
Speaker 3: make it off the drawing board. Remember all those episodes
Speaker 3: we did on both shows about like wrapping bombs to
Speaker 3: bats and using cats as spies.
Speaker 4: Sure, I mean, no matter what weird stuff do you
Speaker 4: throw at them, Ben, war, war never changes, right.
Speaker 3: And that one time the US, absolutely in seriousness, said
Speaker 3: I don't know what if there's like a bomb that
Speaker 3: can make people gay, And they put money into this
Speaker 3: ideation until eventually a voice of reason said, that's kind
Speaker 3: of wild. I don't think it'll work.
Speaker 4: Can you imagine if it did, how much happier everyone
Speaker 4: would be, how much less conflict there would be. I mean, Jesus,
Speaker 4: what an idea.
Speaker 3: We see all these wild ideas, right, and the majority
Speaker 3: of them, the rate of attrition is very high. They
Speaker 3: don't make it off the drawing board. And so we
Speaker 3: can look back at a lot of those things, and
Speaker 3: with the benefit of retrospect, we can call them hilarious.
Speaker 3: But when they do make it into real world deployment,
Speaker 3: the result can be terrifying. And please, fellow conspiracy realist,
Speaker 3: keep that last new in mind. Toward the end of
Speaker 3: today's exploration.
Speaker 2: I don't want to be a weirdo here, guys, Bob,
Speaker 2: I'm coming to this episode way more serious, Like this
Speaker 2: is serious stuff we need to talk about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, That's what I'm saying. Like, keep in mind, like
Speaker 3: there's a reason we're talking about this, right.
Speaker 2: God, I got it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, man, Sometimes the serious stuff you got a temper
Speaker 4: with a little bit of lighthearted as lest we drive
Speaker 4: ourselves insane with worry. Here are the.
Speaker 3: Facts, you know, for most of its recent history, the
Speaker 3: United States has been in a really weird adversarial relationship
Speaker 3: with its nearby sovereign nation, Cuba. This wasn't always the case.
Speaker 3: The US used to have a huge crush on Cuba,
Speaker 3: and I would argue still sort of does, but it's
Speaker 3: like an in cell level love hate thing.
Speaker 2: Well back in the day, they loved the money. The
Speaker 2: United States loved the money they can make off of
Speaker 2: Cuba and Cubans.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Cuba is There's a reason Cuba is the largest
Speaker 3: island in the entirety of the Caribbean. It's perfect for
Speaker 3: cultivating historically profitable crops. One great quote to illustrate this founding,
Speaker 3: Father Thomas Jefferson once called Cuba the most interesting addition
Speaker 3: which could ever be made to our system of states.
Speaker 3: But they couldn't get it. The Spanish controlled Cuba since
Speaker 3: the days of Columbus geopolitical version of crushing on a
Speaker 3: person who's already in a terrible relationship.
Speaker 4: Wow. In eighteen ninety five, the United States joined forces
Speaker 4: with Cuba to drive out Spain, and taking advantage of
Speaker 4: this situation, the US transformed Cuba into essentially a vassal state,
Speaker 4: and for the next sixty years, American influence in Cuban
Speaker 4: politics and day to day life was massive. Yeah, obviously,
Speaker 4: we know things changed after a time, but there was
Speaker 4: a point where we essentially could kind of wheeld control
Speaker 4: over the way things went down in Cuba. Americans controlled
Speaker 4: more than forty percent of the sugar industry, fifty percent
Speaker 4: of the railways, and ninety percent of telecom and you utilities.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there was also a crap ton of black
Speaker 2: market gambling and all kinds of underground stuff that was
Speaker 2: run by let's say heavily American influenced mafia style groups.
Speaker 3: The way they do show up later in tonight's episode,
Speaker 3: and I think the way they're referred to is a
Speaker 3: certain demographic of aristocratic businessmen in Miami.
Speaker 2: We'll give me because it was a destination place for
Speaker 2: wealthy people to go spend some money and do some
Speaker 2: things they're not really supposed to do away from home.
Speaker 3: A lot of trafficking as well, sex trafficking, drug trafficking,
Speaker 3: et cetera. And most Cubans, most Cuban nationals in this
Speaker 3: time were landless, We're poor, were oppressed. From the US perspective,
Speaker 3: this is great in the US for a while, is
Speaker 3: saying we get on fantastically with Cuba and then kind
Speaker 3: of a one sided relationship.
Speaker 4: Though I would argue. Yeah, yeah, yeah, a.
Speaker 2: Lot of people in the upper echelons of.
Speaker 3: A certain demographic of aristocratic business been now relocated to
Speaker 3: Miami and points abroad. Yeah, things don't go well for
Speaker 3: the US because in nineteen fifty nine, reil up and
Speaker 3: comer named Fidel Castro sees his power and the powers
Speaker 3: that be previously, I guess we should say the powers
Speaker 3: that were hated this Castro guy. He ruined this abusive relationship.
Speaker 3: The US was making tons of money exploiting the Cuban
Speaker 3: public and practicing resource extraction, and worse come to worse
Speaker 3: for Uncle Sam. Along with Fidel Castro eventually comes the Soviets.
Speaker 4: So in nineteen fifty nine, kind of riding high off
Speaker 4: of the big win World War two, the Russians were
Speaker 4: the number one threat to the United States dream of
Speaker 4: kind of getting their arms around the entire globe edgemonically speaking.
Speaker 3: Yeah, peak cold war stuff.
Speaker 4: Sorry. By the way, the big win for World War
Speaker 4: two came from the United States, not from the Russians.
Speaker 4: Open right, the convolution.
Speaker 3: The Russians won. They paid a much higher toll, but
Speaker 3: they won.
Speaker 2: That's yeah, the Allies were victorious. I suppose in that
Speaker 2: but it is just we got to remember the atomic
Speaker 2: bomb happened, you know, in between these years. This is,
Speaker 2: as you said, been real Cold War stuff. The tensions
Speaker 2: were crazy high, and the ideological solidification it was like
Speaker 2: at its peak.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let's let's define ideology in a way we quite
Speaker 3: we haven't quite yet in the history of this show,
Speaker 3: and for our purposes, this is the best definition. The
Speaker 3: ideology of communism and the ideology of capitalism are conflicting
Speaker 3: frameworks to justify control over an extraction of resources.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I've always kind of wondered, like, what's the big
Speaker 4: deal with communism? You know, like it seems so harmless,
Speaker 4: you know, on the one handley as just a thing
Speaker 4: you study and maybe learn a little bit about, and
Speaker 4: then maybe you go to some meetings and the first
Speaker 4: it is treated that way. But then before you know it,
Speaker 4: it becomes this insidious threat that is in danger of
Speaker 4: toppling the prevailing you know, mode of thought, and that
Speaker 4: could essentially ruin everything. I don't know, like, do you
Speaker 4: think it was there was a real worry there or
Speaker 4: was it much to do much to do about nothing?
Speaker 2: Kind of yes, in offices, right, and maybe individuals contemplating
Speaker 2: alone like general's chiefs of staff of sitting alone on
Speaker 2: either side, they're imagining, Oh, what happens if our thing
Speaker 2: becomes not the thing? Because another way to think about
Speaker 2: these ideological basis bases basis for like reasoning to have
Speaker 2: a government. It makes me think about the individual reasoning
Speaker 2: of a person of why am I a cog in
Speaker 2: this specific economic machine? Why am I willingly a worker
Speaker 2: that goes in forty hours a week and does my thing?
Speaker 2: What is the greater good here that I'm a part of? Right?
Speaker 2: And they're very opposed to each other.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, because it depends upon who, like your cognitive position.
Speaker 3: The ideology depends upon what you see as gathering the
Speaker 3: most resource resource advantages for you on a microcosmic scale.
Speaker 2: Well is it for me?
Speaker 4: Dilemma?
Speaker 2: Is it for me? Or is it for the greater good?
Speaker 2: And how do you picture those two things in your
Speaker 2: own mind? Right?
Speaker 3: People, I would argue you have an historic problem or
Speaker 3: dilemma with that, which is, if this stuff is good
Speaker 3: for me, it must mean the thing is great for everything.
Speaker 3: That's right, That's how people are thinking.
Speaker 2: Or am I satisfied with not having a bunch because
Speaker 2: I feel like I'm doing it for the right reason,
Speaker 2: right if you if you go through all of these things,
Speaker 2: like if you're getting stamps to buy to get certain
Speaker 2: amounts of food because you're own rations for whatever through
Speaker 2: a state program, is that the same as getting more
Speaker 2: money because I got a promotion?
Speaker 4: I mean, but aren't people in communist societies also cogs
Speaker 4: in a machine. It's just a different flavor of machine
Speaker 4: that they sort of own a little bit, you know what.
Speaker 4: One could argue you own the machine by virtue of
Speaker 4: working for it. Like it's it's this ideological twist is
Speaker 4: so fascinating to me.
Speaker 3: If there were and I don't want to derail us
Speaker 3: too far, but if there were uh functioning communist society
Speaker 3: and modern history there never has been, the argument would
Speaker 3: be very different.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, they quickly descend into autocracy and kleptocracy, which are
Speaker 3: just fancy words for saying authoritarian governments and thieves.
Speaker 4: Yes, I didn't say it wasn't.
Speaker 2: Well, like, what's been the functioning democracy that really works?
Speaker 2: You know what I mean? I don't know, man, what is.
Speaker 3: The difference between the current US government and a monarchy
Speaker 3: or an aristocracy in all but name anyway? This is so,
Speaker 3: this is important discourse for these folks. When Castro takes
Speaker 3: power in fifty nine, they're freaking out. With the Cold War,
Speaker 3: the world is growing smaller that for people in twenty
Speaker 3: twenty four maybe difficult to imagine the calculus here. So
Speaker 3: think about like living in a small town. There's a
Speaker 3: guy on the other side of the city and you
Speaker 3: hate him. He's the worst, And all of a sudden,
Speaker 3: he's living part time in another house. It's your neighbor's house,
Speaker 3: and he's right over the fence. Castro vibed with the Soviets.
Speaker 3: Cuba went communists. The US did a lot of dumb
Speaker 3: stuff trying to oust the new Cuban government. They didn't
Speaker 3: recognize it at all. They treated it as a regime
Speaker 3: or an occupying force. And they, you know, they tried
Speaker 3: to like drug his cigars. They tried, didn't They try
Speaker 3: to like exploding.
Speaker 4: Wasn't the dynamite explosives, I believe, like a rigged scuba suit.
Speaker 3: They tried to assassinate his character, if not the man himself,
Speaker 3: by piping in hallucinogens at one point and.
Speaker 4: During a speech, so he like sounded like totally was
Speaker 4: the word incompetent.
Speaker 3: That was their idea. You know, they had the pigs
Speaker 3: invasion spoiler didn't work.
Speaker 2: From this was April seventeenth to the twentieth, nineteen sixty one,
Speaker 2: so like right around this time as we're recording this
Speaker 2: episode on the twenty second of April.
Speaker 3: History is way closer than it looks in the rear
Speaker 3: view mirror. I love that you're pointing that out. I
Speaker 3: mean from that point from nineteen well, actually from like
Speaker 3: nineteen forty eight to now, the US has always held
Speaker 3: Cuba in a particular species of disdain, so much so
Speaker 3: that various world powers in the international community have increasingly
Speaker 3: been saying, hey, come on, man, come on, what's your deal.
Speaker 2: Well, and nukes made that significantly more scary, right, just
Speaker 2: the concept of nukes.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, the US was asking itself, you know, if
Speaker 3: we're the world's most powerful country or company, good argument,
Speaker 3: why do our enemies hang out next door? What happens
Speaker 3: if they decide to lob some dangerous party favors over
Speaker 3: our backyard fence?
Speaker 4: This is Matt.
Speaker 3: I think you're also referring in specific to the Cuban
Speaker 3: missile crisis, when the US was convinced with serious validity
Speaker 3: that the USSR would deploy nuclear weapons stationed in Cuba.
Speaker 3: And at that point during the missile crisis, the US
Speaker 3: had no way to prevent disaster. They had nothing that
Speaker 3: could stop those missiles.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, And that is late October nineteen sixty two,
Speaker 2: by the way, And if we're looking at timelines as
Speaker 2: we get further, to keep that in mind, late in
Speaker 2: the year nineteen sixty two, Cuban missile crisis.
Speaker 3: And the Cuban Revolution did succeed. It's always struck me
Speaker 3: as somewhat hypocritical in the larger frame that the US
Speaker 3: itself was founded upon revolution and saw a revolution in
Speaker 3: its own backyard and then got pissed that other people
Speaker 3: were trying to do the same thing with just a
Speaker 3: different flavor of ideology. So the US sought to cripple
Speaker 3: this new government at the route. They failed, and with
Speaker 3: every single failure, the American regime took a step closer
Speaker 3: to extremism, and through that extremism, they reached conspiracy. And
Speaker 3: this is why we're recording tonight. We're asking what was
Speaker 3: Operation Northwoods, why should we remember it now, and what
Speaker 3: does it mean for the future. We'll tell you after
Speaker 3: a word from our sponsors. Let's all duck under our
Speaker 3: public school desk. Here's where it gets crazy, Operation Northwoods
Speaker 3: Soviet in its brutality. The question is would we sacrifice
Speaker 3: innocent people then lie to the public about how those
Speaker 3: people died all to launch a war that the US
Speaker 3: public would ordinarily never support. Long story short, yeah, given
Speaker 3: Fallout vibes, sorry, yes, without any spoilers.
Speaker 4: Watch this show. By the way, even if you played
Speaker 4: the game, it's such a it's excellent.
Speaker 2: Bring that back up towards the end here, because I
Speaker 2: want to have a discussion about fiduciary responsibility, which is
Speaker 2: something that's brought up by one of the characters in Fallout.
Speaker 3: Yep, agree, Okay, the US got and this is not
Speaker 3: video game, this is real. The US got very close
Speaker 3: to launching a comprehensive false flag campaign, sacrificing it so
Speaker 3: in citizens to create what war nerds would call causes belly,
Speaker 3: which is just a fancy term for an actor series
Speaker 3: of events justifying a conflict, a hot conflict. The best
Speaker 3: example of this probably the Gulf of Tonkin is a
Speaker 3: great example, right, and you'll see a lot of people
Speaker 3: arguing nine to eleven is another example. We do talk
Speaker 3: about the Gulf of Tonkin at length in our book.
Speaker 3: Check that out. The book about Northwoods is by a
Speaker 3: guy named James Bamford. It's called Body of Secrets, an
Speaker 3: intensely researched expos in the NSA, the National Security Agency,
Speaker 3: and uh, mister b published this in two thousand and one.
Speaker 4: Isn't it basically just like a manufactured pr moment that
Speaker 4: allows them to make the argument because it sways public
Speaker 4: support in such a way that there's no other choice
Speaker 4: other than to wage the war they want to wage.
Speaker 3: It can be that way. What they were talking about
Speaker 3: is actually killing innocent people.
Speaker 4: Right, but they're creative making it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the
Speaker 4: moment that the engenders the support.
Speaker 2: I think the great deal of the declassified memos that
Speaker 2: we've been through are more about falsifying killing or falsifying
Speaker 2: the deaths of American civilians or naval personnel or you know,
Speaker 2: civilians in an aircraft, or making it look as though
Speaker 2: Cuba has a attacked American citizens and military personnel, even
Speaker 2: though they did not, and even though there were no
Speaker 2: military or civilian personnel who died.
Speaker 3: Right, however that was it was still all up for grabs,
Speaker 3: this was a brainstorm thing. It was a memorandum. Uh.
Speaker 3: They also were totally fine with killing innocent Cuban people
Speaker 3: and not making them up. That's what I mean when
Speaker 3: I'm saying real people as.
Speaker 4: Collateral damage, right, I mean, it's not quite to the
Speaker 4: level of sci fi malevolence of like murdering your own
Speaker 4: people to create so saying the other guys did it
Speaker 4: so you could go in and have your way, But
Speaker 4: it's also not that far from that.
Speaker 3: They also said they would do.
Speaker 2: That, yeah, in their their plans in there for everything
Speaker 2: from like strategically deploying plastic explosives that may very well
Speaker 2: kill human beings to blowing up a drone aircraft that
Speaker 2: looks like an American plane that is not that nobody
Speaker 2: is actually on and then making up a list of
Speaker 2: human beings that would be published in papers that supposedly
Speaker 2: died in that aircraft.
Speaker 4: Am I a dumb dumb that I didn't really realize
Speaker 4: they had drone aircrafts in the sixties, So what did
Speaker 4: those look like?
Speaker 2: They did?
Speaker 4: This was just kind of radio controlled, I imagine, right exactly.
Speaker 3: They weren't as cool as the modern UAVs. But yeah,
Speaker 3: they were definitely they were around. Operation Northwoods is first
Speaker 3: ide eated in nineteen sixty two. You can read the
Speaker 3: initial document and all of the appendices and at the
Speaker 3: annex on this also for free online now in US
Speaker 3: government websites. The first title was Justification for US Military
Speaker 3: Intervention in Cuba parentheses, ts and parentheses, which means top secret.
Speaker 3: And this is under something we'll get to in a
Speaker 3: second called Mongoose, which was actually a little bit scarier,
Speaker 3: and they did a lot of this. They proposed a
Speaker 3: lot of the stuff that you're mentioning, Matt, you know,
Speaker 3: assass nation of Cuban immigrats or migrants, sinking boats of
Speaker 3: people from Cuba, trying to get to the US, hiji
Speaker 3: on Cuba, and blaming it all on Cuba. Obviously everything
Speaker 3: we're about to say, the US wanted their hand hidden,
Speaker 3: blowing up US naval ship or a civilian ship, orchestrating
Speaker 3: terrorism in US cities, on US soil, attacks, having riots
Speaker 3: in both countries, and.
Speaker 2: They specifically using Guantanamo Bay as a staging ground for
Speaker 2: a lot of the military action that the US would
Speaker 2: take under the false flag of Cuba.
Speaker 3: And the US has controversially controlled Guantanamo since the days
Speaker 3: of the Spanish War, right, so they already had a footho,
Speaker 3: a beachhead basically, and they did say some of these
Speaker 3: attacks can be staged, some can be real. Very much
Speaker 3: when you read it, it very much has the feel
Speaker 3: of people sitting around freestyling in a writer's room, like, well,
Speaker 3: what if we did this? But what if we did this? Well,
Speaker 3: they don't all have to die, Yeah, we could just
Speaker 3: meet people up, right, or we could kill some people.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3: Type it all, put it all in. There wasn't a
Speaker 3: lot of self editing.
Speaker 2: Yeah. But have we said who is actually coming up
Speaker 2: with these ideas yet?
Speaker 3: Well, this is largely the brainchild or under the guidance
Speaker 3: of General Lyman Luis Lemnitzer, who was the chairman of
Speaker 3: the Joint Chiefs.
Speaker 2: Yes, but he's at least proposing it, right, he's signed it.
Speaker 2: You can read his signature and scene in the documentation
Speaker 2: that we're.
Speaker 3: Talking to Landyerdale as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but then it's something that ends up in front
Speaker 2: of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who then have like
Speaker 2: a response to it, which is where a lot of
Speaker 2: the some of the main ideas are generated. If you
Speaker 2: imagine a group of people sitting around a large table
Speaker 2: in a war room discussing, well, what could we do here? Guys, Well,
Speaker 2: you got an idea, You got an idea, Johnson, and
Speaker 2: then they write it down. That's where this is coming from.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's like committee, that's what it is.
Speaker 2: Because it's movie level stuff. Some of the things.
Speaker 4: Is just that flabbergasted by how accurate that assessment is
Speaker 4: because it's just a remarkably banal.
Speaker 3: It's a little casually, right, it's a little bit casual.
Speaker 2: And it's insane. We talked about hijacking planes. This is
Speaker 2: April or March nineteen sixty two. This is early in
Speaker 2: the year nineteen sixty two. They're sitting around talking about
Speaker 2: hijacking planes and falsely showing that a plane got lost
Speaker 2: or shot down. A plane full of like college students,
Speaker 2: right that are going on vacation get shot down over Cuba.
Speaker 2: But it's not actually a plane full of college students.
Speaker 2: It's a again, one of these remote planes. But then
Speaker 2: in the papers there'd be a list of all these students,
Speaker 2: so that the American public would go, oh my god,
Speaker 2: Cuba shot down a bunch of call kids. We got
Speaker 2: to go to war.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. It's manufacturing the righteous indignation of the people
Speaker 4: that then allows you to make whatever to say. We
Speaker 4: see it all the time, weapons of mass destruction, all
Speaker 4: these moments that turn out to be bullsh you know.
Speaker 4: It's just to sway the public and get them to
Speaker 4: not complain because everyone's trying to defend their political base.
Speaker 4: It's the most casual caddy. Just cha canary, utter cha canary.
Speaker 2: If this is nineteen sixty two and we've been alive
Speaker 2: since the eighties, guys, just how many times has this
Speaker 2: kind of thing happened and we just were none the wiser.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's gonna be the ending question of tonight's exploration too.
Speaker 3: I mean, we got to remember at the time.
Speaker 4: To be fair.
Speaker 3: First off, Noel, to your point, I wanna name check
Speaker 3: a book. Would you say they were manufacturing consent Bernez, Oh, well.
Speaker 4: Yes, of course, because it's you know, people just buy
Speaker 4: into this whole scenario and then they're like, well, yes,
Speaker 4: of course, we would not be good Americans if we
Speaker 4: did not support this, because these evil people have now
Speaker 4: been identified as our true enemies, and we have to
Speaker 4: be on board, you know.
Speaker 3: And let's Remember, the US government is not a monolith,
Speaker 3: has never been really, and some factions of the state
Speaker 3: who are aware of these plans absolutely opposed them bluntly,
Speaker 3: so one president in particular.
Speaker 2: Well, the civilian side of the government right versus the
Speaker 2: military side of the government m h.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and for others for the military side of the government,
Speaker 3: this became a myopic focus. We could argue that the
Speaker 3: CIA and factions of the military had a sunk cost
Speaker 3: fallacy in many ways. They were like ahab and Cuba
Speaker 3: and Castro became their white whale that they wanted to pursue,
Speaker 3: and they were thinking, again, with some validity of the
Speaker 3: possibility of a nuclear first strike, America would once again
Speaker 3: be absolutely defenseless against armament like this deployed so close
Speaker 3: to home. The Eastern seaboard would be no more possibly,
Speaker 3: And then it becomes a greater good calculus. Like if
Speaker 3: you had the choice between losing an appendage or a
Speaker 3: limb or a finger or dying, You're not gonna choose
Speaker 3: to die. It just becomes a question of which limb
Speaker 3: would you prefer to lose. So if you sacrifice a
Speaker 3: finger to save your body, that's an easy choice, and Jaysok.
Speaker 3: The military complex saw this kind of in the same
Speaker 3: philosophical light, not my Apia went on to I would
Speaker 3: argue and form later aberrant actions in Southeast Asia. We
Speaker 3: know the Gulf of Tonkin was a false flag.
Speaker 2: I mean we're talking about the Vietnam War here, Yesody.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and the top brass over a the
Speaker 3: Uncle Sam's side. They did say we could cause US
Speaker 3: military casualties, would they you know, to them like the
Speaker 3: list of actual people or fake people. It didn't matter.
Speaker 3: They just said, we need a list. It'll cause a quote,
Speaker 3: it's a real quote casualty list in US newspapers. Would
Speaker 3: cause a helpful wave of national indignation.
Speaker 4: Here, it's the word indignation.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about that that as as defined by Miriam Webster,
Speaker 2: that is anger aroused by something unjust, unworthy, or mean, indignation, indignation.
Speaker 2: But if you go to righteous igdignation, which is something
Speaker 2: that is thrown around I think quite a bit in
Speaker 2: at least in American fiction. This is the belief in
Speaker 2: your right to be angry about something, even though the
Speaker 2: people around you perhaps don't agree with why you're angry.
Speaker 4: To it like there's a certain tunnel vision associated with it,
Speaker 4: and that's if you can get people to that place.
Speaker 4: You got them, you know what I mean. And it's
Speaker 4: rattling around your particular cause, you know.
Speaker 2: So it's to get the American people to feel that indignation,
Speaker 2: and then to make sure that you can strategically get
Speaker 2: the United Nations assemblies to feel the same way, because
Speaker 2: you need the support of other countries, not just your
Speaker 2: internal civilians to support, like full on hot war.
Speaker 4: What's that thing you say, Ben rabble, This something must change.
Speaker 4: This will not stay. Yeah, the the.
Speaker 3: United Nations, Thank you, the United Nations. At this point,
Speaker 3: they've still got that new car smell. Think of them
Speaker 3: a little bit like the world's most ineffective hoa oh
Speaker 3: yeah in the in the neighborhood metaphor from analogy from earlier.
Speaker 3: If Northwood, if Northwoods is deployed, if it works any
Speaker 3: aspect of it, the end result is full military invasion
Speaker 3: with the tacit support or approval of the majority of
Speaker 3: other nations on the planet. And then they would acquire
Speaker 3: full possession of Cuba, possibly annexing it or making a
Speaker 3: puppet government, remove the Soviets from that part of the
Speaker 3: board and at the same time, to be completely honest,
Speaker 3: repair some long standing relationships with a certain demographic of
Speaker 3: aristocratic businessmen in Miami.
Speaker 4: Oh right, and get them back to their villas and
Speaker 4: you know, in their homes, right, you know, taking them control?
Speaker 3: Yeah, retain control or take control, I guess, take possession
Speaker 3: of nationalized assets, many of which were like private company things.
Speaker 4: I know we're going to get to a disentergree, but
Speaker 4: I just can't help but take a beat to say, like,
Speaker 4: how is it that we can know this stuff happened
Speaker 4: this time, but that some people convince themselves that this
Speaker 4: doesn't happen all the time. I feel like it's the
Speaker 4: name of the game. It is this kind of back dealing,
Speaker 4: two facedness. This is it writ large. We can see
Speaker 4: it down to every detail. Who are we kidding when
Speaker 4: we try to convince ourselves there's still some shred of
Speaker 4: like truth telling and goodness and magnanimity in government. I
Speaker 4: just don't buy it, man, Or.
Speaker 3: Why did Taran and Tel Aviv have such a limited
Speaker 3: exchange of attacks quite recently, dude?
Speaker 2: And who fired first? And why? And or be sure
Speaker 2: it was them?
Speaker 4: Of course?
Speaker 2: Like it it makes you question everything guys, can I
Speaker 2: just quickly read just a little bit of a fuller
Speaker 2: quote from the indignation quote you gave there, Ben, just
Speaker 2: because it speaks a writer's room thing we're talking about,
Speaker 2: where you're just like, what you really thought? This this
Speaker 2: comes from page eleven. If you find the pdf online,
Speaker 2: you'll be able to find it. And so this is
Speaker 2: page eleven pdf, not page eleven in the actual memo.
Speaker 2: That makes sense here it is it's listed under B.
Speaker 2: We could blow up a drone or unmanned vessel anywhere
Speaker 2: in the Cuban waters. So they're talking about a boat,
Speaker 2: a ship we could arrange to cause such an incident
Speaker 2: in the vicinity of Havana or Santiago as a spectacular
Speaker 2: result of Cuban attack from the air or sea, or both.
Speaker 2: The presence of Cuban planes or ships merely investigating the
Speaker 2: intent of the vessel could be fairly compelling evidence that
Speaker 2: the ship was taken under attack. The nearness to Havana
Speaker 2: or Santiogo would add credibility, especially to those people that
Speaker 2: might have heard the blast, or have seen.
Speaker 4: The fires, or lost a family member.
Speaker 2: Well, well, again, this is an unmanned drone ship that
Speaker 2: they're talking about so nobody would be well, but that's
Speaker 2: what they're saying. That's this in this theoretical idea, it's
Speaker 2: just a ship that serves as the fire and the
Speaker 2: thing that then Cuban actual planes are like, what the
Speaker 2: hell's going on over here? And those planes are the
Speaker 2: evidence that Cuba was involved. That's what they're saying. It
Speaker 2: says the US could follow up with an air sea
Speaker 2: rescue operation again to save the fake people covered by
Speaker 2: US fighters to quote evacuate remaining members of the non
Speaker 2: existent crew casualty lists in US newspapers. That's where it
Speaker 2: goes to. Your quote would give that indignation. So it's
Speaker 2: fake people that would cause the American public to revolt.
Speaker 3: Again, they're not they they are considering fabricating a manifest right,
Speaker 3: fabricating the identities. But they're also, to be clear, super
Speaker 3: cool with killing Americans if.
Speaker 4: They have to.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, the first the first one, like the A
Speaker 2: that was b A is just we just blow up
Speaker 2: a ship.
Speaker 4: In Guanta writes they were just spitballing here, guys, you know.
Speaker 2: And just one more quick thing here from page eleven.
Speaker 2: This is title eleven or a heading eleven. It says
Speaker 2: one idea is to quote sink ship near harbor entrance,
Speaker 2: this is near Guantanamo Bay, conduct funerals four mock victims.
Speaker 2: That just is insane to me that there would they
Speaker 2: would have full funerals as again like a film production
Speaker 2: or something.
Speaker 4: Well, you got to follow through with the grift. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And also, let's know another word, since we're doing a
Speaker 3: little etymology today. In the b part that that you shared, Matt,
Speaker 3: they use the phrase spectacular. Spectacular is meant to be theatrical.
Speaker 3: That's what it means, right, So they want it to
Speaker 3: be seen. And it might surprise some of US American
Speaker 3: patriots in particular to learn this was the extension of
Speaker 3: a larger, ongoing older conspiracy something in the holes of
Speaker 3: Langley in DC that was referred to as the Cuban Project.
Speaker 3: It had another name, Operation Mongoose. And the etymology okay,
Speaker 3: Operation Mongoose very unclean thing. It comes from the historic
Speaker 3: rivalry and conflict between the mongoose and the cobra enemies,
Speaker 3: and the mongoose relies on a microcosmic version of asymmetrical
Speaker 3: warfare to kill the cobra. Because it can't bite like
Speaker 3: a cobra. It uses agility, speed, and unexpected vectors of
Speaker 3: attack to compromise the snake. But it doesn't just run
Speaker 3: full steam at its opponent. Its feints and its false
Speaker 3: moves and above all, its timing of these motions are
Speaker 3: all meant to drain the snake of energy and resources.
Speaker 3: So mongoose echoes the lessons of the natural world. One
Speaker 3: of the big things they want to do is remove
Speaker 3: or force the Cuban government to expend resources. They want
Speaker 3: to drain it of its ability to fight. They want
Speaker 3: to remove offensive capability and make it focus, you know,
Speaker 3: whatever armament or manpower it has on defensive capabilities. And
Speaker 3: they also want the boffit on the Cuban side and
Speaker 3: the Soviet side to spend most of their time thinking
Speaker 3: about how to correct the narrative.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it's It's like a really good boxer, right
Speaker 2: you in about you're teaching your opponent to respond to
Speaker 2: the way your shoulder moves. Your left shoulder moves at
Speaker 2: a certain angle right when you're preparing to throw a
Speaker 2: jab or a cross or something, and once your opponent
Speaker 2: is aware of that and is reacting to that shoulder movement,
Speaker 2: you do something different with your shoulder right but or
Speaker 2: you or you feign that move with your shoulder and
Speaker 2: you throw a different strike and it is so sorry, guys,
Speaker 2: I'm getting a little lost here, but it's so interesting
Speaker 2: the way this this played out then with the USSR,
Speaker 2: because it's they're not just going after Cuba, right, they're
Speaker 2: going after communists and putting that in quotes or the
Speaker 2: Soviets in general at as.
Speaker 4: Like as a concept, like you know, which we know
Speaker 4: it's really hard to kill a concept.
Speaker 2: Well, and I would say overall, I think this strategy
Speaker 2: is kind of what worked, right if we pull out
Speaker 2: a little bit, we look at the fall of the
Speaker 2: USSR and we look at what occurred there and expending
Speaker 2: resources in places like Afghanistan, like it kind of worked right.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And we also we've got to give an honorable mention
Speaker 3: or dishonorable mention to the University of Miami because they
Speaker 3: were they were deep with something called JM Wave, which
Speaker 3: is sort of the operation station or origin point for
Speaker 3: a lot of this stuff if it were to be enacted.
Speaker 3: This was under the ownership of USAF General Edward Lansdale
Speaker 3: and then a guy named William King Harvey out of
Speaker 3: the Agency of the CIA. They were the sunk cost
Speaker 3: fallacy dudes or some of them in this story because
Speaker 3: they lost the Bay of Pigs invasion. That was just
Speaker 3: poor Lee. From a production standpoint, it was not a
Speaker 3: not a good series of operations. They wanted blood, they
Speaker 3: wanted castro gone. They had made certain promises regarding the
Speaker 3: economic state of the Caribbean and Cuban particular. They wanted
Speaker 3: stuff to go back to the resource extraction of your
Speaker 3: You know, if we want to be cliche about it.
Speaker 4: They're omelet guys.
Speaker 3: They like omelets, which means they're on board with breaking eggs.
Speaker 2: Well, according to JM. Wave, it's the same people we
Speaker 2: keep talking about. We just brought up that same dude
Speaker 2: in the last episode in Herehan's episode, the guy who
Speaker 2: was at the Ambassador Hotel, George Joannides. These are the
Speaker 2: same people we talked about with Rob Rob Reiner when
Speaker 2: we did the Who Killed JFK. Episode. It's the same
Speaker 2: crew of Cuban exiles who were working directly with the
Speaker 2: United States government to carry out operations that carried out
Speaker 2: the Bay of Pigs and failed in nineteen sixty one.
Speaker 2: Then here in nineteen sixty two, we're talking about doing
Speaker 2: more stuff like that. Nineteen sixty three, JFK gets assassinated
Speaker 2: and allegedly, according to that show, who killed JFK? Jmwave,
Speaker 2: Joeanides and all these guys were directly involved in that
Speaker 2: assassination and.
Speaker 3: Jmwave not a person. Jabwave is the station. So Mongoose
Speaker 3: allows the CIA to conduct asymmetrical terrorist attacks against civilians,
Speaker 3: against members of the Cuban military and Russian military folks
Speaker 3: stationed in the area, and they wanted to rack up blood,
Speaker 3: they wanted to injure the public, compromise the military. Doing
Speaker 3: all this causes the legitimacy of the government to fall
Speaker 3: into question, and then force resource allocation right in a
Speaker 3: way that is advantageous to the US. North Woods is
Speaker 3: just a logical escalation of this strategy. And we have
Speaker 3: to remember the context, right, We're talking a lot about context.
Speaker 3: The US has kind of done this already in Guatemala
Speaker 3: in nineteen fifty four, you know what I mean. They
Speaker 3: had They had several successful test runs of this kind
Speaker 3: of stuff. And now the question is if the greater
Speaker 3: good of our ideology is this important, does it justify
Speaker 3: putting our own blood in the game to win the
Speaker 3: larger war, will we risk sacrificing our own.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they thought they were on a timeline. Guys.
Speaker 2: They were talking about how the USSR was not fully
Speaker 2: invested in Cuba at this time, Like they're talking about
Speaker 2: the Warsaw Pact. Cuba is not a member of that yet.
Speaker 2: They are not established full Soviet bases on Cuban land
Speaker 2: at this time. Yet, the same way the US has
Speaker 2: bases in Western Europe that are basically you know, they
Speaker 2: would be the same thing, right, they would be very similar.
Speaker 2: So at least the creators of this document, this Northwoods document,
Speaker 2: they're saying that in this time, in nineteen sixty two,
Speaker 2: we have to act within quote the next couple of months.
Speaker 4: All right, guys, why don't we take a quick pause
Speaker 4: here to digest what we've learned, hear a word from
Speaker 4: our sponsor, and then come back with the rest of
Speaker 4: this sordid tale.
Speaker 3: We've returned, and we will never know how north Woods
Speaker 3: would have played out, the specific Northwoods, the larger strategy,
Speaker 3: that's what we've been teasing. We'll get to at the end.
Speaker 3: Jaysok did approve this, They drafted it, they presented it
Speaker 3: to the Secretary of Defense, at the time Robert mcmaara
Speaker 3: on March thirteenth, nineteen sixty two, It was never officially
Speaker 3: accepted or implemented because largely because then President John Fitzgerald
Speaker 3: Kennedy bluntly rejected it, said it was a dumb idea,
Speaker 3: and maybe not for the reasons we might assume. An
Speaker 3: also spoiler this may have been factor in his untimely demise.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, that's exactly what I want to talk about,
Speaker 2: because again, going back to the discussion with Rob Reiner,
Speaker 2: according to him, and according to official documentation that's come out,
Speaker 2: JFK was talking directly to castro Via letters trying to
Speaker 2: calm everything down at this time, at this exact time
Speaker 2: he and he's also talking with members of like high
Speaker 2: ranked members of the Soviet Union at this time, trying
Speaker 2: to calm down tensions. And this doesn't seem like a
Speaker 2: calm down tensions kind of plan, right, This is a
Speaker 2: raise tensions as high as we can so that we
Speaker 2: can take full direct action.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 3: And the question becomes, how do we know about north
Speaker 3: Woods this evening? Why are we talking about it here
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty four, Well, it might surprise a lot
Speaker 3: of us, a lot of our younger folks in the
Speaker 3: audience tonight to learn that the American public was not
Speaker 3: aware of this in an open way until the late
Speaker 3: nineteen nineties because.
Speaker 4: Because of declassification, or was it because of a leak
Speaker 4: or what happened?
Speaker 3: In November of nineteen ninety seven, the John F. Kennedy
Speaker 3: Assassination Records Review Board said, oh yeah, they released like
Speaker 3: over fifteen hundred pages of classified stuff that some of
Speaker 3: which was directly related to the assassination, but all of
Speaker 3: which got collected over time because it was related to Kennedy.
Speaker 3: And what they found in this vast swath of documents
Speaker 3: was that, yeah, Northwoods, Uncle Sam thought of killing some
Speaker 3: of us because they were super pisted Cuba.
Speaker 4: They would argue likely, and I, by the way, the
Speaker 4: reason I think that they decided not to attempt this
Speaker 4: plan was they had a bigger fish to fry right
Speaker 4: in Berlin or in Germany, but they would just but
Speaker 4: we didn't do it. What's the problem, you know, like
Speaker 4: kind of yeah, we got to look at all the possibilities, guys.
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, it's a complex world out there.
Speaker 3: I'm really glad you said that, because we'll see. But
Speaker 3: you're you're absolutely right, because in a March sixteenth, nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty two memo by Lansdale, whom we've mentioned earlier, Kennedy
Speaker 3: rejects Northwoods out of hand entirely. And I love that
Speaker 3: you're pointing out Berlin because he said, look to the
Speaker 3: General Lemnitzer, who is kind of the point of the
Speaker 3: spear here. Ideologically, he says, the tensions growing in Berlin
Speaker 3: are such that we may not have those four divisions
Speaker 3: that you want to send a Cuba. They might have
Speaker 3: to go out to the European theater. Oh and also,
Speaker 3: General you're fired.
Speaker 4: Okay, goodbye. I'm sure I'll get a book dealer or something.
Speaker 3: Oh well, firing. See, that's the thing, you know, if
Speaker 3: you cut the point of a spear off, it's still
Speaker 3: a spear. It's just maybe less least still, it's still there.
Speaker 3: So Jasok continued to follow the ideology. They mapped false
Speaker 3: flag opportunities against Cuba until at least nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 3: the shadow of Mongoose loomed well.
Speaker 4: Ben to that point, I have often wondered, like, what
Speaker 4: does happen when a high up military official behind something
Speaker 4: like this gets let go? Did they not send a
Speaker 4: memo to the underlings to stop with that guy's plan, Like,
Speaker 4: how does that work?
Speaker 2: Well, these are just plans to be presented to get
Speaker 2: comments from the rest of the Joint chiefs of Staff,
Speaker 2: because I got it. What's his name, Limititzer was the
Speaker 2: chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time
Speaker 2: when this was written. So this is like giving it
Speaker 2: to everybody else to get their ideas, which then went
Speaker 2: all the way up to the president and the the
Speaker 2: who did you say?
Speaker 3: It was Secretary of Defense.
Speaker 2: Secretary of Defense to be like, all right, guys, this
Speaker 2: is our plan. What you think and they said no,
Speaker 2: that dude was out. Then Lemnitz are this.
Speaker 3: Is just it's a vibe check.
Speaker 2: It's that's exactly You're right. It was a huge vibe check.
Speaker 2: And they were like, nah, not vibes, not vibes.
Speaker 4: Too far, too far.
Speaker 3: Kennedy said, not vibes, and then he got one of
Speaker 3: the worst vibes a president could get.
Speaker 2: Sh yeah, magic bullet.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So in the wake of or I guess we should say,
Speaker 3: in the spirit of asymmetrical warfare, Jaysak continued to ask
Speaker 3: themselves post Lemnitzer about waging terrorism in their neighbor's yard,
Speaker 3: they said, And this is all proven. They said, well, okay,
Speaker 3: if an attack on our own, even a fake attack
Speaker 3: like a drone or a manifest of people who don't exist,
Speaker 3: even if that empty ship strategy is out of bounce,
Speaker 3: then what if we attack another member of the Organization
Speaker 3: of American States. What if we just hit another Caribbean
Speaker 3: country and blame it on Cuba, meaning we blame it
Speaker 3: on the Russians. And someone's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 3: know some countries in the Caribbean. What about you guys
Speaker 3: like Jamaica, And they said, put it on the list,
Speaker 3: And they said, oh, Trinidad and Tobago maybe, and they're like,
Speaker 3: never heard of it, put it on the list.
Speaker 2: They put the Dominican Republic and Haiti all on that
Speaker 2: list too, And it was all again to try and
Speaker 2: pretend that maybe we could even do small things with
Speaker 2: Cuban quote Cuban shipments that we've doctored to make it
Speaker 2: look like they're Cuban of specific arms or something that
Speaker 2: are found or intercepted that look like there's about to
Speaker 2: be an invasion. But even though there's not, like.
Speaker 3: It's just could we yellow cake this a little bit.
Speaker 3: Oh that's god, you know what I mean?
Speaker 2: Like, yes, yeah, Can I give you another one? This
Speaker 2: is this is from page twelve in this is the
Speaker 2: This is under a heading six the use of Meg
Speaker 2: type aircraft. Ben, you want to tell everybody what a
Speaker 2: MiG type aircraft is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, A big type aircraft is a fighter plane that
Speaker 3: is Russian.
Speaker 2: That's really all you need. Was Soviet at the time.
Speaker 2: It was the front one of their primary fighter jets.
Speaker 2: So use of a Meg type aircraft by US pilots
Speaker 2: could provide additional provocation, harassment of civil air attacks on
Speaker 2: surface shipping, and destruction of US military drone aircraft. Again,
Speaker 2: drone aircraft by Meg type planes would be useful as
Speaker 2: complementary actions to this concept of using false shipments in
Speaker 2: something like a place like Trinidad or in the Dominican Republic.
Speaker 2: And this is what really got me, guys, they said,
Speaker 2: an American made American military F eighty six that is
Speaker 2: quote properly painted would convince air passengers that they saw
Speaker 2: a Cuban MiG aircraft, especially if the pilot of the
Speaker 2: transport we're to announce such a fact. So like, imagine
Speaker 2: you're just on a delta flight, and the pilot says,
Speaker 2: h oh, that appears to be a Meg aircraft. What
Speaker 2: is that doing outside? And now you've got a false
Speaker 2: story that everybody on the aircraft gets to talk about.
Speaker 2: And it says, it says reasonable copies of the Meg
Speaker 2: could be produced from US resources in about three months.
Speaker 3: And that was probably a better idea than just trying
Speaker 3: to sort of tart up tart up a saber, because
Speaker 3: if you look at the picture of an F eighty
Speaker 3: six and you look at the picture of a Meg,
Speaker 3: they have very they're very different. You know, it's like
Speaker 3: a dog with a longer versus a shorter snout, and
Speaker 3: the wing shape is different. However, again, sy up style,
Speaker 3: the average passenger on a commercial airline is not going
Speaker 3: to know the difference. What they're going to be looking
Speaker 3: for is insignia yep.
Speaker 2: Colored.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And so there's one thing before we move on that
Speaker 3: I want to get back to. The Machavelian brilliance of
Speaker 3: attacking Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaican in particular, is that
Speaker 3: they're Commonwealth countries, which means that the United Kingdom would
Speaker 3: be by treaty bound to be drawn into the conflict.
Speaker 4: Wow I mean, thank god they didn't you do it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you got to get that coalition of the willing
Speaker 2: right guys. Cough cough nine to eleven cough cough, we
Speaker 2: shout out Pearl Harbor right cough.
Speaker 3: Oh oh man, a New American Century. What if there
Speaker 3: was a project for that? Wow, the last time we
Speaker 3: did something something spontaneous and fun, guys.
Speaker 4: Jeez man, I said the most literal name possible to
Speaker 4: an organization. Guys.
Speaker 2: I want to be a rational human being who is
Speaker 2: not this crazy conspiracy theorist or someone would call that.
Speaker 2: But I swear it feels like the are so strong
Speaker 2: and so direct, But there's no the smoking gun thing
Speaker 2: just doesn't exist, and I don't think we would ever
Speaker 2: see it because, as you said before, we didn't learn
Speaker 2: about this until the nineties, and all of these were
Speaker 2: marked top secret, special handling, and this thing that we've
Speaker 2: talked about in the past. No foreign guys, remember what
Speaker 2: that means.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, not for any foreign to zero nationals. Right, foreignationals.
Speaker 2: Not releasable to foreign nationals. And inside the recommendations here
Speaker 2: from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it's stuff like, guys,
Speaker 2: do not share this or forward it to any commanders
Speaker 2: of unified or specified commands. Don't let anybody see this
Speaker 2: that are US officers assigned to NATO activities whatsoever. Do
Speaker 2: not show this to anyone to the chairman US delegation
Speaker 2: United Nations, do not let that person see this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and certain folks in what we call academia got
Speaker 3: similar warnings because of the way research interacts.
Speaker 2: It's just not it was like, nobody can know that
Speaker 2: this is what we're doing. This is the secret plans,
Speaker 2: is the ausi mandiis stuff.
Speaker 3: This is totally right and ethical, by the way, and
Speaker 3: that's why we can't tell anybody nothing weird. Also, I
Speaker 3: would argue this is a parable there's a reason we're
Speaker 3: talking about this. I don't think it's crazy to note
Speaker 3: that this teaches us profoundly important lessons. They're surprising and uncomfortable.
Speaker 3: Nobody in this exploration at any point saw themselves as
Speaker 3: the bad guys. They conspire to create bad guys for
Speaker 3: a greater good. And honestly, like, I know this is
Speaker 3: a hot take, but the US was not necessarily unreasonable
Speaker 3: in its assumptions here. We have to remember that we're
Speaker 3: foreign nuclear weapons deployed this close to home again, there
Speaker 3: would be no countermeasure. There would be a second strike capability,
Speaker 3: but it wouldn't save places like DC or New York
Speaker 3: or Philadelphia or you know, Miami. I'm sure they would go. Well,
Speaker 3: Miami's kind of close. Maybe Atlanta. But the thing is
Speaker 3: to your earlier point, Nol, this is one thing the
Speaker 3: public knows about now. At some point many other sinister
Speaker 3: options equally, if not more, sinister options had to be considered.
Speaker 3: You have to think through it because you have to understand,
Speaker 3: you know, like you said, Matt, the shoulder dropping, what
Speaker 3: is your enemy trying to signal? What are you trying
Speaker 3: to signal to them? It becomes a double blind game
Speaker 3: in the worst way. And if they didn't consider this
Speaker 3: kind of stuff, somebody else was going to And maybe
Speaker 3: that was part of their rationale, but it doesn't make
Speaker 3: it right. It shows us. It shows us that any
Speaker 3: country or any power structure in general will actively consider
Speaker 3: these kind of things if they feel it is to
Speaker 3: the larger advantage.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's the kind of thing that makes at
Speaker 2: least me personally. I can't speak for everyone. I can't
Speaker 2: speak for you guys. It makes me doubt the anything
Speaker 2: that comes after this, anything that comes after nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: two as like, oh did was that real? Nore it?
Speaker 2: This is just them getting caught. Like I just feel
Speaker 2: like this this has just been the.
Speaker 4: Name of the game as long as governments have governmented,
Speaker 4: you know, these types of exploits and behind the scenes
Speaker 4: double deals, like back to the look at the Romans.
Speaker 2: I mean they were double.
Speaker 4: Crossing each other left, right, and center. I mean it's
Speaker 4: just when you get to a certain level of power
Speaker 4: and control, corruption just kind of sets in and like
Speaker 4: you just want I don't know, it's it's bizarre, but
Speaker 4: let's talk.
Speaker 2: About getting caught. This is thirty five years later that
Speaker 2: we learn about this, right and.
Speaker 4: Oh, which makes even more galling because they don't even
Speaker 4: look at it as getting caught barely. It's just like, you,
Speaker 4: guys are.
Speaker 2: Maybe the wrong people to ask, but when's the last
Speaker 2: time you had a casual conversation with somebody unrelated to
Speaker 2: this show about Operation Northwoods. When's the last time you
Speaker 2: heard about it?
Speaker 4: Guys, I didn't know about it. I mean, this is
Speaker 4: very new to me. I mean it doesn't surprise me, though,
Speaker 4: I'm just I.
Speaker 2: Guess what I'm saying is getting caught. It's they didn't
Speaker 2: really get caught. It then got discussed. You know, a
Speaker 2: couple of times.
Speaker 3: They got identified, which is not the same thing as
Speaker 3: being apprehended nor encountering consequences there, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3: And this is another thing too, like, yes, this is
Speaker 3: the this is the dirty business of state craft. It's
Speaker 3: kind of the reason why you might enjoy a stake
Speaker 3: and you don't want to watch a documentary about factory
Speaker 3: farms while you're eating that stake.
Speaker 4: Or even kill a cow, right right.
Speaker 3: You're never going to hear a politician running for election
Speaker 3: on the idea of staging a terrorist attack. It does
Speaker 3: not matter who the US president is. They're not going
Speaker 3: to come out and say, hey, guys, stuff with Ukraine
Speaker 3: Rush is getting kind of complicated. So we're thinking, you know,
Speaker 3: we could dress a bunch of people up, you know,
Speaker 3: in Balaklava's and have them run out at a theater
Speaker 3: or something. You're never gonna hear Putin saying yeah, bomb
Speaker 3: some apartments in the nineties, because you know, election season,
Speaker 3: you're never gonna hear that.
Speaker 4: There was a great line I can't remember. There's a
Speaker 4: lot of lines in this movie in Oppenheimer. But the
Speaker 4: character the Robert Downey Junior played has something very poignant
Speaker 4: to say about the nature of politics. He's like the
Speaker 4: ones that are out in the light governing openly, or
Speaker 4: like they're not the ones you have to worry about
Speaker 4: or that's not even how you do. He says something
Speaker 4: about like you have to do it from the shadows,
Speaker 4: and that's those are the ones that are that's when
Speaker 4: the job is really getting done. It is like the
Speaker 4: time spent in the shadows.
Speaker 2: Okay, and I don't want to spoil too much here, guys,
Speaker 2: but I do want to quickly talk about something that
Speaker 2: was stated in one of the episodes of the Fallout
Speaker 2: series that's on Amazon Prime right now. So without spoiling,
Speaker 2: let's if you know any thing about the Fallout series,
Speaker 2: then you know there's a company called vault Tech or Robeco,
Speaker 2: Roboco something like that.
Speaker 4: Vltech's vault Tech and rob Co's rob Co. But I
Speaker 4: think at some point they may be bought rob Co. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I think that's right.
Speaker 2: So there's a discussion about how vault Tech before the
Speaker 2: Great War, before the bombs fell, vault Tech has a
Speaker 2: quote fiduciary responsibility to ensure that there is a nuclear there,
Speaker 2: that there is uh a disaster and end of the
Speaker 2: world nuclear fallout situation, because if they don't, if that
Speaker 2: doesn't occur, then all of their investments. Investors, investors right
Speaker 2: the day have a fiduciary responsibility to their investors to
Speaker 2: ensure that the vaults are used right and that there's
Speaker 2: a there's a reason that these people have spent so
Speaker 2: much money and invested so much money in these vaults.
Speaker 4: We have that same fiduciary responsibility to all these war
Speaker 4: profiteers and companies that we're in business with making all
Speaker 4: of this stuff, that it gets used and there continues
Speaker 4: to be in need to be fed by these.
Speaker 2: Products, yes, which in my opinion, then goes directly to
Speaker 2: the lobbying groups that work directly for those companies. That
Speaker 2: then goes directly to the senators and lawmakers and people
Speaker 2: in the White House. So it really does feel like
Speaker 2: we're in this situation, in this weird situation where there
Speaker 2: is a fduciary responsibility to be at war as much
Speaker 2: as possible.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's all spelled out in nineteen eighty four, the documentary,
Speaker 4: and just really quickly then I'm done the quote was
Speaker 4: the character he plays is Lewis Strauss, and the quote
Speaker 4: is amateurs seek the sun and get burned. Power stays
Speaker 4: in the shadows.
Speaker 3: Love it and outside of Spentley Butler, maybe you will
Speaker 3: never hear a top level military official speak of the
Speaker 3: US and anything but glowing terms. Make no mistake, folks.
Speaker 3: There's a lot out there behind and beyond those bright,
Speaker 3: pretty phrases. So who is to say something like Northwoods
Speaker 3: couldn't happen this decade, this year, two thousand and one,
Speaker 3: this evening. That's the stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 3: We will return later this week with more deep dives
Speaker 3: into the shadows. In the meantime, we can't wait to
Speaker 3: hear from you, folks. Let us know your thoughts, let
Speaker 3: us know if you have firsthand experience with north Woods
Speaker 3: or something like it. We try to be easy to
Speaker 3: find online.
Speaker 4: Find us on the Internet at the handle Conspiracy Stuff,
Speaker 4: where we exist on Facebook, where you can join our
Speaker 4: Facebook group. Here's where it gets crazy. Ben sent Matt
Speaker 4: and I a lovely rap songw you guys familiar with
Speaker 4: the rap music? Now, sorry, I sound like good Grandpapa
Speaker 4: face two Lee from the Facebook group here's where it
Speaker 4: gets crazy for posting that about the three of us
Speaker 4: and various facets of our personalities. You too can be
Speaker 4: a part of that conversation. And here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 4: On Facebook. We are also conspiracy stuff. On x FKA,
Speaker 4: Twitter and on YouTube. Or we've got video content rolling
Speaker 4: out every single week on Instagram and TikTok. We're conspiracy stuff.
Speaker 2: Show A. Do you want to call us or use
Speaker 2: your voice to do something weird on your phone? Why
Speaker 2: not call one eight three three std WYTK when you
Speaker 2: call in, give yourself a cool nickname and let us
Speaker 2: know if we can use your name, voice and message
Speaker 2: on the air. If you don't want to do that,
Speaker 2: why not instead send us a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 3: We are the folks who read every single email we get.
Speaker 3: It's an amazing way to speak with us directly. Give
Speaker 3: us the links, give us the annotations, no character limit,
Speaker 3: love a good essay. By the way, all you have
Speaker 3: to help, pictures of cats, pets, limericks, haiku, any and
Speaker 3: all all are welcome. As the villain said, alter guys,
Speaker 3: be well aware, folks. Sometimes the void writes back, we
Speaker 3: are a conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2: Stuff they don't want you to know. Is a production
Speaker 2: of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.