October 3, 2026 • 42 mins
It's no secret that the US and Cuba have a long history of tense relations, often teetering on the brink of war. But just how far would Uncle Sam go to begin a genuine war with Cuba? The answer can be found in the declassified proposals for Operation Northwoods, a secret plan to wage false flag attacks on US citizens, soldiers, planes and ships, all with the goal of blaming these attacks on Cuba.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow ridiculous historians, we're back with a classic episode. You
may have heard about Cuba and the United States in
the news recently or in the news for, you know,
decades past.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
It's been, it's hot. Yeah. I remember like there was
a brief period where we, you could go. Yeah. My,
my ex and my, my kid said, were able to
go for that very, very brief period of time. If
I'm not mistaken, it was under Obama, or maybe it
was early Biden. But they said it was awesome, and
(00:35):
then they closed it on back up because we got
some issues with the Cuban government, some failure to see
eye to eye, let's just say.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Yeah, very much so. It's a very long tale. And
back in 2019, we did an episode about one of
the stinkier things Uncle Sam tried to do in their
fraught relationship with Cuba. The proper term is a false
flag attack.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
That's right. And that is about what it sounds like.
It's flying a flag that ain't accurate. Dirty pool. Dirty pool.
This involves attacks on U.S. citizens, soldiers, planes, and ships,
all with the goal of blaming these attacks on Cuba.
This is quite a stuff they don't want you to
know crossover. Why don't we roll the tape? Tut, tut, tut.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(01:54):
the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you for tuning in. We
are coming to you with fresh hot coffee and some
fresh hot takes on this Monday morning as we record this.
Who knows when you'll hear it. I'm kidding. It's either
a Tuesday or a Thursday.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
It's true, Ben. The takes that we plan to bring
today are of the hottest variety. So be careful.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
And you're Noel.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
No, I'm not.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
You're not Noel.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
No, not today.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
That was a false flag.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
That was a false identity of yours?
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Well, I guess so. I mean, a false flag would
be if I said I was China and then attacked
the United States, but I was actually an agent of
a different country trying to put the blame on China.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
A good example of a false flag would be if
super producer Casey Pegram hacked his own bank account and
then blamed it on a different person or country. And
then use that as an excuse to go to war.
But you're a peaceful dude, Casey. I don't see you
(02:58):
waging a one-man war against an entire country. No.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
No false flags here.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
No siree. Ben, are you saying that I would not
be a believable China as an individual? People would not
buy that I was, in fact, the country of China?
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Well, maybe if you did it online in like a
chat room. and you wrote in, you either, you spoke
in Mandarin and you sounded like 1.3-ish billion people, or
you wrote out the ideograms. I feel like you could
pull it off. Maybe not in person, but online, definitely.
(03:34):
You got this.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
You got this. I really was hoping to be able
to do it in person, Ben, but I guess if
online's all I can manage, then that's what I'll do.
So today, yeah, it's true. We're talking about a false
flag attack. Specifically... against Cuba. It's true.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
So we have defined false flag with a bit of
a cavalier approach, but our two comparisons hit the mark.
A false flag attack is a term that describes a
country purporting to be attacked by a foreign entity of
(04:12):
some sort when in fact they are attacking themselves, right?
So there are so many alleged false flags throughout modern history.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident is one famous alleged false
flag because according to the official narrative, Uncle Sam still
(04:33):
says that was 100% legit. The rest is fake news.
We often relegate the concept of false flags, the concept
of this deceitful action to the realm of fringe theory,
revisionist history, conspiracies and whatnot. However, today we are examining
(04:56):
a case of a genuine would-be false flag proposed by
good old folks here at the US of A.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
And just a little background, this might be super obvious
to most people, especially folks who listen to our other show,
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know. we cover things
like this all the time. A false flag attack refers to,
I guess, the idea of in an engagement in warfare,
you're supposed to identify yourself, right? Like using a flag
or some sort of markings on your uniform.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Great.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Good point. And with a false flag attack, you are
misidentifying yourself on purpose to create a diversion or draw
the attention to a country that you are trying to
kind of malign, essentially, or create a false conflict between
these countries, unbeknownst to the party that you are impersonating.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Right, right. Nail on the head there, man. And today's
episode takes us to the Cold War, takes us to
the 1950s, 1960s, and to Cuba. So the United States
was terrified by the threat of communism, right? And Cuba,
(06:08):
the country and island of Cuba, was at the time
seen as a proxy for the USSR, a communist nation
right on the doorstep. The Reds, they called them. And
the people in charge of the US military and the
US political machine at the time were absolutely certain that
(06:33):
there would be some for lack of a better phrase,
there would be some sort of domino effect that first
Caribbean countries would fall to communism and then that it
would spread like some sort of ideological disease throughout South America.
And the next thing you know, there's an uprising in
(06:54):
Mexico and maybe even Canada. This was alarmist, alarmist thinking,
and it was taken seriously. So The U.S. spent a
lot of time, as we learned later through declassified documents,
trying to figure out ways to overthrow the government of
(07:14):
Cuba or assassinate the leader of that government, a man
that is probably familiar to many of us called Fidel Castro.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
And here's the thing, this scheme that was cooked up,
it wasn't just some kind of like harebrained idea. It
was very much a product of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff And its Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, who's kind
of a big deal, looms large in international politics.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
So we know that there were numerous failed attempts, some
that never made it out of the pitch room, right?
And there was the Bay of Pigs invasion, which was
a failure by all accounts. And the attempts to depose
or assassinate Fidel Castro were collected under a CIA program
(08:03):
that was called Operation Mongoose, or its street name was
the Cuban Project. So if you were a member of
the agency and you were talking in, you know, semi-mixed company,
you might just refer to it as the Cuban Project,
led by General Edward Lansdale of the U.S. Air Force.
(08:23):
We're not 100% sure. Even now in 2019, where the
idea for what would be called Operation Northwoods germinated. It
may have originated with President Eisenhower toward the end of
his administration. But past McNamara, we can't nail down a
(08:48):
specific time and date. All we know is that Eisenhower
did tell the head of the Joint Chiefs and other
aides in his cabinet that he wanted to move against
Castro before the inauguration of the new president. And all
he was waiting for, basically, was for the Cuban government
(09:10):
to give him some sort of excuse.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Any excuse.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Any excuse. And then the time grows short, right?
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Eisenhower floats this idea. He says, you know, if This
Castro fella doesn't provide an excuse to invade. Well, perhaps
the U.S. could think of manufacturing something that would be
generally acceptable. Generally acceptable means he was suggesting some sort
(09:46):
of pretext for war, right? A bombing, perhaps, an attack,
an act of sabotage. carried out against the U.S., and
we would tell everyone that it was was the communist
forces doing this, right? We're not talking about necessarily a
huge catastrophic loss of life. We're talking about maybe a
(10:10):
Coast Guard boat, right, that got sank or something that
makes an ironclad case for us to tell the public,
the U.S. public, that these are acts of Cuban aggression
and we must act to save American lives. The problem
(10:31):
with that is that Cuba wasn't going to do that,
so we were going to attack our own stuff. That
was the idea, right?
Speaker 2 (10:38):
No, totally. But they were not able to pull this
off at the time. Kennedy would not approve any of
this kind of action. And the general that was in
charge of all this stuff, General Limnitzer, was really irritated
at the fact that Kennedy would not play ball. And
he was also irritated, equally irritated, at the fact that
(10:59):
Castro seemed to be kind of like cooling his heels
a little bit. You know, he wasn't going to be
the one that was going to light the match that
set the fire, you know.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Exactly, exactly. So fast forward to February 26th, 1962. We
mentioned two generals so far. Let's remember the earlier one,
General Lansdale. This is the guy who was cooking with
gas in Operation Mongoose. And Operation Mongoose, again, is this
sort of mixtape of increasingly cartoonish ideas about how to
(11:34):
overthrow or assassinate Fidel Castro. Robert Kennedy hates this stuff.
It's like this is more and more ridiculous. We're talking
about poisoned or exploding cigars. There was a plan at
one point to try to make Castro lose his beard,
which wouldn't kill him.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
It would just, like, shame him. You know, his people
would be like, Castro without a beard is like a
bird without a song, you know? I can no longer
follow you.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
Which is weird and tells us how condescending these folks were.
They thought very little of the intelligence of the Cuban people.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Yeah, clearly.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
So Robert Kennedy goes to General Lansdale and says, look,
just drop this mongoose thing. Drop all these efforts to
antagonize or assassinate Fidel Castro. Instead, just concentrate on learning
more about Cuba. Just concentrate on learning stuff before you
(12:33):
try this regime change. And Lansdale hated this. He felt very,
very sidelined. He thought that the Kennedy brothers... had gone
soft on Castro. And this is where the other general
that you just mentioned, Limnitzer, comes into play.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Yeah, because like we said before, he was very annoyed
that he couldn't get the support of Kennedy, the president,
or his brothers, you know, who were also powerful men.
And there was this sense that his window for this
invasion that he saw as being so crucial was, you know,
kind of slipping through his fingers, right? And he... felt
(13:14):
like these efforts, the two, so Ben, let's talk a
little bit about what were some of the things they
were doing to provoke the public, you know, the Cuban
citizenry to maybe revolt against Castro. We did have some
efforts to make that happen. Isn't that right?
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Oh, it goes way back. It goes way, way, way, way,
way back. As part of the Spanish-American War, the U.S.
invaded and occupied Cuba when it was ruled by Spain
in 1898 and occupied the country until 1902. And then
there was a brief period of insolvence or independence, however
(13:52):
you want to call it, and the U.S. occupied it
again from 1906 to 1909, and then briefly 1912, and
then from 1917 to 1922. The United States has a very,
very long history of interfering with Cuba. For some, this
(14:12):
was seen as a necessary step to prevent the encroachment
of foreign powers. You know what I mean? First, the
Spanish Empire, later the USSR, and for others, This was
seen as a bellicose act of an outside country trying
to interfere with another country or nation's internal affairs. So
(14:37):
there are a couple ways to look at it, but
it's true. The CIA has a long history of fomenting
revolution or attempting to do so through proxy protest groups.
So students spontaneously protest. You know what I mean? Tale
(14:57):
as old as time, unfortunately. So there were some activities
like that, most likely.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
Well, and unfortunately, again, that stuff wasn't working. No. It
was very toothless, it seemed like. If it had ever
worked at all, it certainly wasn't working anymore. And there
just seemed to be no inclination on the part of
the Cuban government to launch the attack that we very
weirdly so desperately wanted, right?
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Absolutely. So- Lemnitzer and the other Joint Chiefs get together,
no doubt, in a smoky back.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Room and say— Yeah, they are the Joint Chiefs, after all.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
They're the chiefs of the Joint's back room, you know?
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Who knows?
Speaker 1 (15:37):
I imagine that they would see marijuana as hippie stuff.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
You think so?
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Yeah, they were probably more hard drinkers.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
You don't think it made them more creative? Look, hey, man,
some of these ideas in Operation Mongoose sound like the
product of a bunch of stoners in a back room.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
Stoners? I don't know. That seems kind of aggro for stoners.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Yeah, maybe more like amphetamine poppers.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
Amphetamines were very popular in that time, right? Also, you know,
maybe this was like a pill thing. I don't even know.
What pills did they have back then? Did they have Quaaludes?
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Spennies? Quaaludes.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Poppers? Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
Is that what? Quaaludes are my go-to drug joke because
I don't know really what they are.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
Well, have you seen Wolf of Wall Street? Yes. Remember
that scene where he takes the Quaaludes and falls down
the stairs repeatedly in like amazing comical form?
Speaker 1 (16:27):
And tries to get in the car. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Yeah, it makes you like a noodle person. That's what
Quaaludes does.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
I just like saying lewds.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Yeah. Remember that game Drug Wars that you'd play on
the graphing calculator back in the day? No. No. No,
it was like, do you remember this, Casey?
Speaker 3 (16:41):
I totally remember this.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Yeah. So the TI-83 graphic calculators have these little apps
you could load into them, I guess. I don't remember
how you even did it, but one of them was
Drug Wars and you'd play it with alphanumeric key entries
to kind of like generate responses. And I remember one
of the drugs you could buy was Ludes. And I
was like, what is this Ludes? That sounds decadent.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
It's a brand name. It's sold as, I think the
drug is still around in different countries, but Don't do drugs, kids.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Definitely not.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
You'll end up like the Joint Chiefs. And who knows, maybe,
you know, ideology is a drug, and that's definitely, whatever
they were doing, that's the drug that they got the
highest on the most often. So they say, we're going
to trick the American public. We need to get the U.S.
(17:29):
behind us, and because this is an international operation... we
would hopefully, ideally, also fool the rest of the world,
or at least get a nod and a wink from
our friendly countries who are also fighting communism. So they said,
if we can get everybody to turn against Cuba, then
(17:54):
they'll allow us to make war on this nation, but
we'll know we did a super top-notch job if everyone
agrees in the world outside of Cuba, insist that we
launch this war against Castro. There was a secret document
from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which is declassified now,
(18:15):
in which they say blatantly, explicitly, let me try a
villainous voice out.
Speaker 4 (18:22):
Here, 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. At
(18:44):
the end of that, everybody's like.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Yeah, of course.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
And wringing their hands and all that stuff. That was
a very Lord of the Rings villain kind of sound
that you had there, Ben.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Yeah, Lord of the Rings is loosely based on the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, at least the Ringwraiths.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
That's what I heard. So here's the thing that happens next.
Operation Northwood, which had been approved by the chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, every member of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, it actually, this is what the plan contained.
several quite horrendous acts of faux terrorism, but yet actual
(19:19):
terrorism on American soil. The idea of folks being shot
in the streets, refugee boats that were leaving Cuba to
be sunk, and also launching a wave of violent acts,
terrorist acts in Washington, D.C. and Miami and other places
across the country. It would involve framing people for bombings.
(19:40):
Hijacking planes, planting evidence, and all of it would be
blamed on Castro and Limnitzer and his crew would have
everything they needed. to gain public support and international support
for backing them in this war effort.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Another quote from the memo, we could develop a communist
Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities,
and even in Washington. They were planning this. This is
absolutely right. And remember earlier we said that false flags,
when they work, tend to be stuff like Gulf of Tonkin, right?
(20:19):
Not like a huge loss of thousands of lives. This, however,
still feels like a cavalcade of catastrophes. The list that
you read off for us, what was that? Innocent people
shot in the street. Yikes. Boats being sunk on the
high seas, right? violent terrorism in the capital of the U.S.
(20:39):
and Miami and other places, framing people for bombings, hijacking planes,
tracing it all back to Castro and some kind of
this goes to the very top sort of idea. This
feels like they were looking for whatever would have been
most effective. And it would be nice to think that
(21:01):
it would have immediately stopped the Once that call to
war actually happened and they got the support of the
West and they got the support of the domestic public.
But this is not what the joint chiefs or the U.S.
military are supposed to be doing. Northwoods suggested that U.S.
(21:21):
personnel would disguise themselves as Cuban agents and then they
could burn ammunition, sink ships at Guantanamo. And they even said, look,
let's just blow up a U.S.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
Ship.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
We can take the loss. We'll blame it on Cuba.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Blame it on Cuba. I mean, this thing was like,
you know, the whole idea to a false flag attack
or the idea of like crisis actors. That's a big
term that gets thrown around like the conspiracy community. It's terrible.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
I don't like it.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
No, I don't like it either. But it's used by
a horrible cancerous media personalities like Alex Jones to justify,
you know, their position on things like the Sandy Hook
school shooting where they say, oh, These weren't real shooters.
They were, quote-unquote, crisis actors. And, you know, this was
all staged for the purposes of creating uproar against gun
violence or whatever. Absolutely absurd. In this case, absolutely provable
(22:10):
and confirmed. They even were planning to do things like
conduct fake funerals for these supposed victims, right? And I
don't know if we've talked about this, Ben, but a
lot of this comes from a declassified document from the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, subject memorandum for the Secretary of
Defense's Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba. And it
(22:31):
goes through and describes a lot of the things that
we're talking about here. The author of this report, being
General Limnitzer himself, goes on to talk about the Remember
the Maine incident, which I was not familiar with up
until this point. That was the explosion and sinking of
the USS Maine that began the Spanish-American War that we
(22:52):
mentioned earlier, where the casualties were listed in U.S. newspapers.
And that caused this kind of wave of national anger
and contempt and, again, fomented that support of the war effort,
which is important, right? Like we never– it's easy to
forget or to think that like the government can just
wave a wand and make war happen. But they do
(23:12):
kind of depend on the support of the public, of constituents,
because it's all– kind of a political game in the end, right?
Speaker 1 (23:19):
Right. So one of the first lessons learned by the U.S.
government about the public and war, especially war in other countries,
came about in the Vietnam War. This was the first
time that many domestic residents were able to see the unvarnished,
(23:40):
unpropagandized results of invading a foreign country. They were able
to see men, women, and children dying, many of whom
were civilians. They were able to see war crimes in
real time. This is before the Vietnam War. This, again,
is a plan that exists in secret in a smoky
(24:01):
back room. And they still pitched other ideas, too. They said, well,
what if we refit an American jet to resemble a
Cuban jet, and then we use it to harass civil air,
which means private industry air or even just some poor
(24:23):
schmuck with a little plane in Miami. I don't know.
That's hilarious to me. It's hilarious because everyone's okay. They
also want to do a fake attack on U.S. military jets.
They wanted to have submarines involved. They wanted a pilot
(24:44):
to fly under assumed identity. And they had steps to
this plan, which feel a little bit like a spaghetti
at the wall kind of attempt at solving the problem.
What if we did this? What if we did that?
It's a very Dr. Seussian approach to terrible, terrible actions.
(25:05):
They say we could. They also acknowledge, this is very interesting,
they also acknowledge, more or less, tacitly at least, they
acknowledge that, remember, the main incident was indeed a false flag.
And this was during a time when no one admitted
that publicly, at least no one associated with the government. Also,
(25:27):
they said, why don't we have an, get this, an
incident which will demonstrate that a Cuban aircraft has attacked
and shot down A charter civil airline. So what's a
charter civil airline? That's like Delta Southwest, something like that.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
A commercial passenger plane. They were going to do that?
They were actually going to shoot down a plane?
Speaker 1 (25:47):
No. Well, they were going to fake it. They were
not actually going to kill the people.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Got it. Okay, so that's when the crisis actors thing
comes in. I know you hate that term, but this
does apply because this is literally folks that are posing
as victims. Who would write? Like even they're talking about
shooting people in the streets. Were they really going to
shoot people in the streets or was it going to
be people like pretending to be shot in the streets
and then they were going to have fake funerals?
Speaker 1 (26:11):
That's the tough part because at this time too, we
have to remember social media doesn't exist. So you could,
if you had people playing ball with you in the broadcast, radio, television,
and the media of the time, the printed papers, then
you could just, you could just make up some names.
You could be like, well, It turns out that Casey,
(26:34):
real name Pegram from any town, Illinois, was tragically a victim.
He leaves behind two children, a schnauzer, and a collection
of vintage records.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Yeah, and also tiny spoons.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
He's also a spoonist, yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Yeah, and thimbles.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
So what our point is here is that there's no
way for Pegram the average newspaper reader or the average
TV radio listener to go through and do due diligence
to me a couple of times.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
I said, do, do stuff. Yeah, that's funny too. My
12 year old self applauds you.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
Well, I'm emotionally nine, so I'm glad I'm impressing an
older person. So, so this, this thing though, we're, we're
being a bit glib, but this is, this is evil.
This is actually an evil thing to do because.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
Why would they declassify this ever? Right? We've had this
conversation on the other show, and so they want you
to know about, like, what leads to things being declassified.
Is it literally just a clock time thing where enough
time has passed that this stuff doesn't matter anymore? We
want to give the public a little bit of juicy stuff? Or,
I don't know, is it just literally a storage thing,
or we need to move some documents out of the
(27:48):
secret vaults into this other vault so we can, you know,
make more room for more classified stuff? Right.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
Mistakes were made, huh?
Speaker 3 (27:54):
So.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
All details of this plan of Operation Northwoods were hidden
for almost 50 years, more like 40 years, but for
decades and decades were hidden. And that general that we
mentioned earlier, Lemnitzer, he probably thought that this very dark
brainstorming exercise was over and done with, that all copies
(28:19):
of the paperwork, all copies of this memo were preserved.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Destroyed.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
And he had an established practice of regularly destroying things
if they would compromise him or his associates later. However,
I do want to mention you can find this at
the NSA archives. It is online now. You can Google it. Noel,
you earlier read the name of the memo. We want
(28:47):
you to find it, read it for yourself. I will
say that it's written in very, to the point, simplistic language.
They're not trying to cloak this in some sort of legalese.
Oddly enough, we know exactly how the Operation Northwoods documents
came to light. At first, it turned out that not
(29:08):
everything was destroyed, obviously. A lot of it was so
much so that we don't know who knew what and when,
but these came into the public eye In 1992, that's
when they hit the mainstream, because of a film by
one Oliver Stone. Casey, can you guess which one it is?
Speaker 3 (29:31):
JFK.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Nailed it. Nailed it. Yeah, because of the Oliver Stone
film JFK, which examined the idea of a conspiracy behind
the internet. assassination of President JFK, President Kennedy. This conspiratorial
film ultimately led to the discovery of Northwoods because Congress
passed a law due to overwhelming public outcry. They passed
(29:56):
a law to increase public access to government records. at
least as far as they're related to JFK. And this
is something that came out in the wash.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Very interesting. Speaking of assassination attempts, talk about dodging bullets.
Fidel Castro was certainly a very popular target for assassination attempts.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Oh, he's the bell of the bloody ball.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
That's right. Yeah. According to a gentleman who protected him
during his regime, He survived over 600 assassination attempts, everything
from snipers to some of the crazy methods the CIA
were plotting against him.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
Poisoned wetsuit.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Poisoned wetsuit. Go on, Ben.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
Well, OK. So in 1975, the Senate Intelligence Committee said
it had concrete evidence of this plan to offer Fidel
Castro through proxy, of course, a wetsuit lined with spores
and bacteria that that would give him a skin disease.
This apparently involved the guy who would be their point
(31:02):
man for this was a U.S. lawyer named James B. Donovan,
and he was going to give Castro the wetsuit when
he went to negotiate the release of prisoners from the
failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Eventually, they abandoned the plan
because the lawyer gave Castro a different diving suit And
(31:24):
they said, on his own initiative. But that's, yeah, just
like you said, there are so many weird ways that
the U.S. government planned to antagonize or kill Fidel Castro.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
If you want to check out a list of those,
you can go to Mental Flaw straight away for 10
ways the CIA tried to kill Castro by Stacey Conrad.
We mentioned exploding cigar earlier. That kind of makes me
think of the episode we did about the Nazis' attempts to,
or like plans, plots to kill Castro. Winston Churchill, and
that was with an exploding chocolate bar and also an
(31:58):
exploding cigar. Several cigar-based murder attempts here, including poisoning his cigar.
We even have one that involved an exploding conch shell,
ballpoint hypodermic syringe.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
You know, the closest one, the closest they ever got
by most sources was a poisoned milkshake in 1963. Castro
may well have died, but the waiter at the Havana
Hilton was trying to retrieve the pill that he was
supposed to stick in the milkshake, but it stuck to
(32:33):
the freezer. And then when he was trying to grab
it and rip it loose, the capsule itself tore apart. Shame. Well,
I mean, you know, don't ruin a good milkshake.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
So this is literally all just about eradicating communism, huh?
Speaker 1 (32:52):
You know, I think it's more than that. It's easy
to say, yeah, they were targeting communism, but there are
a lot of economic incentives at play. There are a
lot of questions about regional hegemons. You know, you want
to control other nations on your border.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
They're close.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
They're too close for.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Comfort, right? And, you know, it's crazy too. My daughter
and her mom and stepdad, they briefly, there was this
window that opened up for tourists to be able to
visit Cuba. And they did that and had a lovely time.
My daughter, it was a super amazing adventure for her.
And then like very shortly after they got back, the
Trump administration closed that window. And it's all about kind
(33:37):
of putting pressure on them for trade and tariffs. And
there's like that embargo that's been going on for so long.
It's part of the reason that in Cuba, they don't
have any modern cars. It's all like older cars that
they've been able to work on because they've been kind
of in this trade bubble for so long, right? Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
And my buddy Scott and I have an excellent episode
on our show Car Stuff about the amazing ingenuity of
Cuban nationals when it comes to those vehicles. You can
see cars from the 50s and 60s that are maintained
in this, this amazing fashion. By the way, car stuff
(34:12):
is coming back and you can, you can hear more
about everything that floats, flies, swims, or drives very, very soon.
So check it out. If you get a chance to
tell my buddy, Scott, you heard about it here. You
can say Ben sent me and Ben told me that
you would give me a free t-shirt. If I write
to you, it's true. It's true.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
It's true.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
It's not a false flag. So Ben, That is the story.
The good news is that Operation Northwoods never occurred. As
far as we know, there was no false flag that
actually took U.S. lives or Cuban lives and used those
deaths as a pretext to go to a hot war
(34:55):
with Cuba. However, we might never have found out about
this if it weren't for the public outcry of and
public interest following Oliver Stone's film, JFK. And this is
important for us to remember because it's often said that
history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme. And yeah, maybe
(35:16):
that's a cliche, but here's a pro tip about cliches.
They're usually called cliches because they're true. So now we
have to, not as members of individual countries or nations
or communities, but as a species, We must exercise critical
thinking when we hear about these sorts of attacks, these
(35:40):
sorts of things that could be Malcolm Gladwell-esque tipping points.
One of the most recent that's occurred as we record
this is the rising tension in the Strait of Hormuz,
which is largely controlled by the Republic of Iran. And recently, again,
(36:02):
this is 2019, there have been alleged attacks on tankers.
The U.S. says that Iran did it. Iran says they
didn't do it. And Iran has also made other claims
about its own tankers being taken. And there are some people,
policy wonks, journalists, et cetera, who are keeping an eye
(36:24):
on the situation and already claiming that a false flag
is afoot. This has not been proven yet. And the
weird thing about false flags is if Operation Northwoods is
in the indicator, we learn about them about 40 years
after they happen. But it makes for some fun podcast fodder.
(36:45):
It's okay because no one actually died.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
So we hope that you will write to us and
tell us whether you have visited Cuba. A couple of
our close friends have. Our research pal, Ryan. Barish has
visited Cuba recently. He was there for quite a while.
I think he has dual citizenship, so he's able to go. Right,
(37:08):
because he has German citizenship.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
Yep, yep. And I do want to, before we end
today's episode, I want to get your opinion, Casey, on
the 1992 Oliver Stone film JFK. Did you watch it?
Did you like it? What's your take?
Speaker 2 (37:25):
One?
Speaker 1 (37:25):
Ten? I don't know.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
I think it's great.
Speaker 3 (37:29):
I think a lot of people have pointed out there's
a lot of conjecture and stuff that's probably been disproven
since that film came out. But just as a piece
of filmmaking itself and as something that kind of goes
to the wider skepticism, suspicion, whatever you want to call it,
lingering doubts in the American psyche about that whole event,
(37:51):
I think it's great.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
Casey on the case. What do you think, Noel? Do
you remember that one?
Speaker 2 (37:56):
I have not seen JFK.
Speaker 1 (37:58):
That's Kevin Costner, I believe.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
Kevin Costner. I did see Nixon. I remember liking it
just fine. I really liked Platoon.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
Platoon was always a.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Favorite war movie of mine. But now in my older years,
I realize that Full Metal Jacket is the superior film.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
You're not in Apocalypse Now, man?
Speaker 2 (38:17):
No, I think Full Metal Jacket is my favorite. Apocalypse
Now would be second. Platoon would be third.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
You know, I.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
In terms of NOM movies.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
I think because I did a stage play of Apocalypse Now.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
Wait, what? Like in Rushmore?
Speaker 1 (38:35):
No. Kind of. Yeah, true story.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
That's amazing.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
Yeah. Yeah. It was definitely a thing that happened. I
think that's maybe that's why I love Apocalypse Now. I
even love the documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
I do too.
Speaker 3 (38:50):
That's Hearts of Darkness.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
Great. I'm such a fanboy for that. Full Metal Jacket
is great. Don't get me wrong. Just for my money,
I love the brutal chaos.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
Oh, yeah. And the madness of it too. It's a
very Shakespearean almost tragedy. You know, you're right, Ben. Maybe
if I held them side by side. I just have
a real fondness in my heart for Full Metal Jacket.
I haven't seen Apocalypse Now in some time. I think
if I watched it today, I might flip.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
We get a chance to see a new version of
it soon because he's doing yet another director's cut.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Speaker 1 (39:23):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
I'm kind of tired of seeing different versions of that movie,
but I guess there's one more.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
It might be a diminishing return.
Speaker 2 (39:30):
At some point.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
Well, yeah, a lot of people have pointed out that
the extended cut, the redux cut, is kind of boring.
There's about 40 minutes in there where they're just at
that weird plantation. Yeah, the old French colonial. Rubber plantation, yeah.
Which is kind of just... Drags for a long time.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
There's a weird sex scene in there that just, it
just occurs as it feels as if that, that scene,
and I know this is not your other show movie crush,
but that scene, that entire segment of the Redux film,
it seems like backstage, they, they just in production had
(40:08):
access to this place and they said, all right, let's just,
let's do some stuff. You know, let's do a dinner scene.
They should talk about how they feel in very vague terms.
And then let's do a, you know, let's do a
sex scene because we still have the room. We still
have the location. And they were like, all right, we
got to get back.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
To the story. Speaking of getting back to the story,
our story's over.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
And so is our episode. But if you want to
do any of the things we were talking about, write us,
let us know. Your favorite false flag attack, something you
think maybe was a false flag attack. Anything. Your favorite
part of Apocalypse Now. How did you feel about the redux?
Speaker 1 (40:44):
Too long? Did it lag a little bit?
Speaker 2 (40:46):
How did you feel about that weird sex scene? Let
us know. Write to us at ridiculous at iheartradio.com or
hit us up on our Facebook group, which is the
Ridiculous Historians.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
You can also find us individually on Instagram. See me
get kicked into and out of various places and countries.
Spoiler alert, I've got a couple big trips coming up
in summer, so stay tuned to that. I am at
Ben Bolin.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
You can find me at HowNowNoelBrown. It's mainly just me
getting kicked in the shins by small children.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
Yeah, I don't know why they hate your shins so much.
It's a thing now.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
Yeah, it really is.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
And as always, thank you to our super producer, Casey Pegram.
Thank you to our research associates, Gabe Luzier and Ryan Barish.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
Big thanks to Alex Williams, who composed our theme. Thanks
to Jonathan, the quizster Strickland for, you know, occupying that
space of pure evil that allows the universe to exist
in some weird form of harmony.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
That's so nice that you give me a shout out
because you guys get kind of antagonistic.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
A little bit.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
And of course, thanks to Eve's Jeff coat, who will
be appearing on the show sometime soon. We hope as
well as Christopher Hossie Otis. Thank you for listening. And Noel,
thank you for taking this strange journey with me. May
we never be the victims of a false flag attack.
They should just be real flats.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
Agreed. See you next time, folks. For more podcasts from
iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Fellow ridiculous historians, we're back with a classic episode. You
may have heard about Cuba and the United States in
the news recently or in the news for, you know,
decades past.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
It's been, it's hot. Yeah. I remember like there was
a brief period where we, you could go. Yeah. My,
my ex and my, my kid said, were able to
go for that very, very brief period of time. If
I'm not mistaken, it was under Obama, or maybe it
was early Biden. But they said it was awesome, and
(00:35):
then they closed it on back up because we got
some issues with the Cuban government, some failure to see
eye to eye, let's just say.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Yeah, very much so. It's a very long tale. And
back in 2019, we did an episode about one of
the stinkier things Uncle Sam tried to do in their
fraught relationship with Cuba. The proper term is a false
flag attack.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
That's right. And that is about what it sounds like.
It's flying a flag that ain't accurate. Dirty pool. Dirty pool.
This involves attacks on U.S. citizens, soldiers, planes, and ships,
all with the goal of blaming these attacks on Cuba.
This is quite a stuff they don't want you to
know crossover. Why don't we roll the tape? Tut, tut, tut.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(01:54):
the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you for tuning in. We
are coming to you with fresh hot coffee and some
fresh hot takes on this Monday morning as we record this.
Who knows when you'll hear it. I'm kidding. It's either
a Tuesday or a Thursday.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
It's true, Ben. The takes that we plan to bring
today are of the hottest variety. So be careful.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
And you're Noel.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
No, I'm not.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
You're not Noel.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
No, not today.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
That was a false flag.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
That was a false identity of yours?
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Well, I guess so. I mean, a false flag would
be if I said I was China and then attacked
the United States, but I was actually an agent of
a different country trying to put the blame on China.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
A good example of a false flag would be if
super producer Casey Pegram hacked his own bank account and
then blamed it on a different person or country. And
then use that as an excuse to go to war.
But you're a peaceful dude, Casey. I don't see you
(02:58):
waging a one-man war against an entire country. No.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
No false flags here.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
No siree. Ben, are you saying that I would not
be a believable China as an individual? People would not
buy that I was, in fact, the country of China?
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Well, maybe if you did it online in like a
chat room. and you wrote in, you either, you spoke
in Mandarin and you sounded like 1.3-ish billion people, or
you wrote out the ideograms. I feel like you could
pull it off. Maybe not in person, but online, definitely.
(03:34):
You got this.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
You got this. I really was hoping to be able
to do it in person, Ben, but I guess if
online's all I can manage, then that's what I'll do.
So today, yeah, it's true. We're talking about a false
flag attack. Specifically... against Cuba. It's true.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
So we have defined false flag with a bit of
a cavalier approach, but our two comparisons hit the mark.
A false flag attack is a term that describes a
country purporting to be attacked by a foreign entity of
(04:12):
some sort when in fact they are attacking themselves, right?
So there are so many alleged false flags throughout modern history.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident is one famous alleged false
flag because according to the official narrative, Uncle Sam still
(04:33):
says that was 100% legit. The rest is fake news.
We often relegate the concept of false flags, the concept
of this deceitful action to the realm of fringe theory,
revisionist history, conspiracies and whatnot. However, today we are examining
(04:56):
a case of a genuine would-be false flag proposed by
good old folks here at the US of A.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
And just a little background, this might be super obvious
to most people, especially folks who listen to our other show,
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know. we cover things
like this all the time. A false flag attack refers to,
I guess, the idea of in an engagement in warfare,
you're supposed to identify yourself, right? Like using a flag
or some sort of markings on your uniform.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Great.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Good point. And with a false flag attack, you are
misidentifying yourself on purpose to create a diversion or draw
the attention to a country that you are trying to
kind of malign, essentially, or create a false conflict between
these countries, unbeknownst to the party that you are impersonating.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Right, right. Nail on the head there, man. And today's
episode takes us to the Cold War, takes us to
the 1950s, 1960s, and to Cuba. So the United States
was terrified by the threat of communism, right? And Cuba,
(06:08):
the country and island of Cuba, was at the time
seen as a proxy for the USSR, a communist nation
right on the doorstep. The Reds, they called them. And
the people in charge of the US military and the
US political machine at the time were absolutely certain that
(06:33):
there would be some for lack of a better phrase,
there would be some sort of domino effect that first
Caribbean countries would fall to communism and then that it
would spread like some sort of ideological disease throughout South America.
And the next thing you know, there's an uprising in
(06:54):
Mexico and maybe even Canada. This was alarmist, alarmist thinking,
and it was taken seriously. So The U.S. spent a
lot of time, as we learned later through declassified documents,
trying to figure out ways to overthrow the government of
(07:14):
Cuba or assassinate the leader of that government, a man
that is probably familiar to many of us called Fidel Castro.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
And here's the thing, this scheme that was cooked up,
it wasn't just some kind of like harebrained idea. It
was very much a product of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff And its Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, who's kind
of a big deal, looms large in international politics.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
So we know that there were numerous failed attempts, some
that never made it out of the pitch room, right?
And there was the Bay of Pigs invasion, which was
a failure by all accounts. And the attempts to depose
or assassinate Fidel Castro were collected under a CIA program
(08:03):
that was called Operation Mongoose, or its street name was
the Cuban Project. So if you were a member of
the agency and you were talking in, you know, semi-mixed company,
you might just refer to it as the Cuban Project,
led by General Edward Lansdale of the U.S. Air Force.
(08:23):
We're not 100% sure. Even now in 2019, where the
idea for what would be called Operation Northwoods germinated. It
may have originated with President Eisenhower toward the end of
his administration. But past McNamara, we can't nail down a
(08:48):
specific time and date. All we know is that Eisenhower
did tell the head of the Joint Chiefs and other
aides in his cabinet that he wanted to move against
Castro before the inauguration of the new president. And all
he was waiting for, basically, was for the Cuban government
(09:10):
to give him some sort of excuse.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Any excuse.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Any excuse. And then the time grows short, right?
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Eisenhower floats this idea. He says, you know, if This
Castro fella doesn't provide an excuse to invade. Well, perhaps
the U.S. could think of manufacturing something that would be
generally acceptable. Generally acceptable means he was suggesting some sort
(09:46):
of pretext for war, right? A bombing, perhaps, an attack,
an act of sabotage. carried out against the U.S., and
we would tell everyone that it was was the communist
forces doing this, right? We're not talking about necessarily a
huge catastrophic loss of life. We're talking about maybe a
(10:10):
Coast Guard boat, right, that got sank or something that
makes an ironclad case for us to tell the public,
the U.S. public, that these are acts of Cuban aggression
and we must act to save American lives. The problem
(10:31):
with that is that Cuba wasn't going to do that,
so we were going to attack our own stuff. That
was the idea, right?
Speaker 2 (10:38):
No, totally. But they were not able to pull this
off at the time. Kennedy would not approve any of
this kind of action. And the general that was in
charge of all this stuff, General Limnitzer, was really irritated
at the fact that Kennedy would not play ball. And
he was also irritated, equally irritated, at the fact that
(10:59):
Castro seemed to be kind of like cooling his heels
a little bit. You know, he wasn't going to be
the one that was going to light the match that
set the fire, you know.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Exactly, exactly. So fast forward to February 26th, 1962. We
mentioned two generals so far. Let's remember the earlier one,
General Lansdale. This is the guy who was cooking with
gas in Operation Mongoose. And Operation Mongoose, again, is this
sort of mixtape of increasingly cartoonish ideas about how to
(11:34):
overthrow or assassinate Fidel Castro. Robert Kennedy hates this stuff.
It's like this is more and more ridiculous. We're talking
about poisoned or exploding cigars. There was a plan at
one point to try to make Castro lose his beard,
which wouldn't kill him.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
It would just, like, shame him. You know, his people
would be like, Castro without a beard is like a
bird without a song, you know? I can no longer
follow you.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
Which is weird and tells us how condescending these folks were.
They thought very little of the intelligence of the Cuban people.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Yeah, clearly.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
So Robert Kennedy goes to General Lansdale and says, look,
just drop this mongoose thing. Drop all these efforts to
antagonize or assassinate Fidel Castro. Instead, just concentrate on learning
more about Cuba. Just concentrate on learning stuff before you
(12:33):
try this regime change. And Lansdale hated this. He felt very,
very sidelined. He thought that the Kennedy brothers... had gone
soft on Castro. And this is where the other general
that you just mentioned, Limnitzer, comes into play.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Yeah, because like we said before, he was very annoyed
that he couldn't get the support of Kennedy, the president,
or his brothers, you know, who were also powerful men.
And there was this sense that his window for this
invasion that he saw as being so crucial was, you know,
kind of slipping through his fingers, right? And he... felt
(13:14):
like these efforts, the two, so Ben, let's talk a
little bit about what were some of the things they
were doing to provoke the public, you know, the Cuban
citizenry to maybe revolt against Castro. We did have some
efforts to make that happen. Isn't that right?
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Oh, it goes way back. It goes way, way, way, way,
way back. As part of the Spanish-American War, the U.S.
invaded and occupied Cuba when it was ruled by Spain
in 1898 and occupied the country until 1902. And then
there was a brief period of insolvence or independence, however
(13:52):
you want to call it, and the U.S. occupied it
again from 1906 to 1909, and then briefly 1912, and
then from 1917 to 1922. The United States has a very,
very long history of interfering with Cuba. For some, this
(14:12):
was seen as a necessary step to prevent the encroachment
of foreign powers. You know what I mean? First, the
Spanish Empire, later the USSR, and for others, This was
seen as a bellicose act of an outside country trying
to interfere with another country or nation's internal affairs. So
(14:37):
there are a couple ways to look at it, but
it's true. The CIA has a long history of fomenting
revolution or attempting to do so through proxy protest groups.
So students spontaneously protest. You know what I mean? Tale
(14:57):
as old as time, unfortunately. So there were some activities
like that, most likely.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
Well, and unfortunately, again, that stuff wasn't working. No. It
was very toothless, it seemed like. If it had ever
worked at all, it certainly wasn't working anymore. And there
just seemed to be no inclination on the part of
the Cuban government to launch the attack that we very
weirdly so desperately wanted, right?
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Absolutely. So- Lemnitzer and the other Joint Chiefs get together,
no doubt, in a smoky back.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Room and say— Yeah, they are the Joint Chiefs, after all.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
They're the chiefs of the Joint's back room, you know?
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Who knows?
Speaker 1 (15:37):
I imagine that they would see marijuana as hippie stuff.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
You think so?
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Yeah, they were probably more hard drinkers.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
You don't think it made them more creative? Look, hey, man,
some of these ideas in Operation Mongoose sound like the
product of a bunch of stoners in a back room.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
Stoners? I don't know. That seems kind of aggro for stoners.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Yeah, maybe more like amphetamine poppers.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
Amphetamines were very popular in that time, right? Also, you know,
maybe this was like a pill thing. I don't even know.
What pills did they have back then? Did they have Quaaludes?
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Spennies? Quaaludes.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Poppers? Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
Is that what? Quaaludes are my go-to drug joke because
I don't know really what they are.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
Well, have you seen Wolf of Wall Street? Yes. Remember
that scene where he takes the Quaaludes and falls down
the stairs repeatedly in like amazing comical form?
Speaker 1 (16:27):
And tries to get in the car. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Yeah, it makes you like a noodle person. That's what
Quaaludes does.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
I just like saying lewds.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Yeah. Remember that game Drug Wars that you'd play on
the graphing calculator back in the day? No. No. No,
it was like, do you remember this, Casey?
Speaker 3 (16:41):
I totally remember this.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Yeah. So the TI-83 graphic calculators have these little apps
you could load into them, I guess. I don't remember
how you even did it, but one of them was
Drug Wars and you'd play it with alphanumeric key entries
to kind of like generate responses. And I remember one
of the drugs you could buy was Ludes. And I
was like, what is this Ludes? That sounds decadent.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
It's a brand name. It's sold as, I think the
drug is still around in different countries, but Don't do drugs, kids.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Definitely not.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
You'll end up like the Joint Chiefs. And who knows, maybe,
you know, ideology is a drug, and that's definitely, whatever
they were doing, that's the drug that they got the
highest on the most often. So they say, we're going
to trick the American public. We need to get the U.S.
(17:29):
behind us, and because this is an international operation... we
would hopefully, ideally, also fool the rest of the world,
or at least get a nod and a wink from
our friendly countries who are also fighting communism. So they said,
if we can get everybody to turn against Cuba, then
(17:54):
they'll allow us to make war on this nation, but
we'll know we did a super top-notch job if everyone
agrees in the world outside of Cuba, insist that we
launch this war against Castro. There was a secret document
from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which is declassified now,
(18:15):
in which they say blatantly, explicitly, let me try a
villainous voice out.
Speaker 4 (18:22):
Here, 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. At
(18:44):
the end of that, everybody's like.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Yeah, of course.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
And wringing their hands and all that stuff. That was
a very Lord of the Rings villain kind of sound
that you had there, Ben.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Yeah, Lord of the Rings is loosely based on the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, at least the Ringwraiths.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
That's what I heard. So here's the thing that happens next.
Operation Northwood, which had been approved by the chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, every member of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, it actually, this is what the plan contained.
several quite horrendous acts of faux terrorism, but yet actual
(19:19):
terrorism on American soil. The idea of folks being shot
in the streets, refugee boats that were leaving Cuba to
be sunk, and also launching a wave of violent acts,
terrorist acts in Washington, D.C. and Miami and other places
across the country. It would involve framing people for bombings.
(19:40):
Hijacking planes, planting evidence, and all of it would be
blamed on Castro and Limnitzer and his crew would have
everything they needed. to gain public support and international support
for backing them in this war effort.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Another quote from the memo, we could develop a communist
Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities,
and even in Washington. They were planning this. This is
absolutely right. And remember earlier we said that false flags,
when they work, tend to be stuff like Gulf of Tonkin, right?
(20:19):
Not like a huge loss of thousands of lives. This, however,
still feels like a cavalcade of catastrophes. The list that
you read off for us, what was that? Innocent people
shot in the street. Yikes. Boats being sunk on the
high seas, right? violent terrorism in the capital of the U.S.
(20:39):
and Miami and other places, framing people for bombings, hijacking planes,
tracing it all back to Castro and some kind of
this goes to the very top sort of idea. This
feels like they were looking for whatever would have been
most effective. And it would be nice to think that
(21:01):
it would have immediately stopped the Once that call to
war actually happened and they got the support of the
West and they got the support of the domestic public.
But this is not what the joint chiefs or the U.S.
military are supposed to be doing. Northwoods suggested that U.S.
(21:21):
personnel would disguise themselves as Cuban agents and then they
could burn ammunition, sink ships at Guantanamo. And they even said, look,
let's just blow up a U.S.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
Ship.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
We can take the loss. We'll blame it on Cuba.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Blame it on Cuba. I mean, this thing was like,
you know, the whole idea to a false flag attack
or the idea of like crisis actors. That's a big
term that gets thrown around like the conspiracy community. It's terrible.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
I don't like it.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
No, I don't like it either. But it's used by
a horrible cancerous media personalities like Alex Jones to justify,
you know, their position on things like the Sandy Hook
school shooting where they say, oh, These weren't real shooters.
They were, quote-unquote, crisis actors. And, you know, this was
all staged for the purposes of creating uproar against gun
violence or whatever. Absolutely absurd. In this case, absolutely provable
(22:10):
and confirmed. They even were planning to do things like
conduct fake funerals for these supposed victims, right? And I
don't know if we've talked about this, Ben, but a
lot of this comes from a declassified document from the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, subject memorandum for the Secretary of
Defense's Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba. And it
(22:31):
goes through and describes a lot of the things that
we're talking about here. The author of this report, being
General Limnitzer himself, goes on to talk about the Remember
the Maine incident, which I was not familiar with up
until this point. That was the explosion and sinking of
the USS Maine that began the Spanish-American War that we
(22:52):
mentioned earlier, where the casualties were listed in U.S. newspapers.
And that caused this kind of wave of national anger
and contempt and, again, fomented that support of the war effort,
which is important, right? Like we never– it's easy to
forget or to think that like the government can just
wave a wand and make war happen. But they do
(23:12):
kind of depend on the support of the public, of constituents,
because it's all– kind of a political game in the end, right?
Speaker 1 (23:19):
Right. So one of the first lessons learned by the U.S.
government about the public and war, especially war in other countries,
came about in the Vietnam War. This was the first
time that many domestic residents were able to see the unvarnished,
(23:40):
unpropagandized results of invading a foreign country. They were able
to see men, women, and children dying, many of whom
were civilians. They were able to see war crimes in
real time. This is before the Vietnam War. This, again,
is a plan that exists in secret in a smoky
(24:01):
back room. And they still pitched other ideas, too. They said, well,
what if we refit an American jet to resemble a
Cuban jet, and then we use it to harass civil air,
which means private industry air or even just some poor
(24:23):
schmuck with a little plane in Miami. I don't know.
That's hilarious to me. It's hilarious because everyone's okay. They
also want to do a fake attack on U.S. military jets.
They wanted to have submarines involved. They wanted a pilot
(24:44):
to fly under assumed identity. And they had steps to
this plan, which feel a little bit like a spaghetti
at the wall kind of attempt at solving the problem.
What if we did this? What if we did that?
It's a very Dr. Seussian approach to terrible, terrible actions.
(25:05):
They say we could. They also acknowledge, this is very interesting,
they also acknowledge, more or less, tacitly at least, they
acknowledge that, remember, the main incident was indeed a false flag.
And this was during a time when no one admitted
that publicly, at least no one associated with the government. Also,
(25:27):
they said, why don't we have an, get this, an
incident which will demonstrate that a Cuban aircraft has attacked
and shot down A charter civil airline. So what's a
charter civil airline? That's like Delta Southwest, something like that.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
A commercial passenger plane. They were going to do that?
They were actually going to shoot down a plane?
Speaker 1 (25:47):
No. Well, they were going to fake it. They were
not actually going to kill the people.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Got it. Okay, so that's when the crisis actors thing
comes in. I know you hate that term, but this
does apply because this is literally folks that are posing
as victims. Who would write? Like even they're talking about
shooting people in the streets. Were they really going to
shoot people in the streets or was it going to
be people like pretending to be shot in the streets
and then they were going to have fake funerals?
Speaker 1 (26:11):
That's the tough part because at this time too, we
have to remember social media doesn't exist. So you could,
if you had people playing ball with you in the broadcast, radio, television,
and the media of the time, the printed papers, then
you could just, you could just make up some names.
You could be like, well, It turns out that Casey,
(26:34):
real name Pegram from any town, Illinois, was tragically a victim.
He leaves behind two children, a schnauzer, and a collection
of vintage records.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Yeah, and also tiny spoons.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
He's also a spoonist, yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Yeah, and thimbles.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
So what our point is here is that there's no
way for Pegram the average newspaper reader or the average
TV radio listener to go through and do due diligence
to me a couple of times.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
I said, do, do stuff. Yeah, that's funny too. My
12 year old self applauds you.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
Well, I'm emotionally nine, so I'm glad I'm impressing an
older person. So, so this, this thing though, we're, we're
being a bit glib, but this is, this is evil.
This is actually an evil thing to do because.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
Why would they declassify this ever? Right? We've had this
conversation on the other show, and so they want you
to know about, like, what leads to things being declassified.
Is it literally just a clock time thing where enough
time has passed that this stuff doesn't matter anymore? We
want to give the public a little bit of juicy stuff? Or,
I don't know, is it just literally a storage thing,
or we need to move some documents out of the
(27:48):
secret vaults into this other vault so we can, you know,
make more room for more classified stuff? Right.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
Mistakes were made, huh?
Speaker 3 (27:54):
So.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
All details of this plan of Operation Northwoods were hidden
for almost 50 years, more like 40 years, but for
decades and decades were hidden. And that general that we
mentioned earlier, Lemnitzer, he probably thought that this very dark
brainstorming exercise was over and done with, that all copies
(28:19):
of the paperwork, all copies of this memo were preserved.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Destroyed.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
And he had an established practice of regularly destroying things
if they would compromise him or his associates later. However,
I do want to mention you can find this at
the NSA archives. It is online now. You can Google it. Noel,
you earlier read the name of the memo. We want
(28:47):
you to find it, read it for yourself. I will
say that it's written in very, to the point, simplistic language.
They're not trying to cloak this in some sort of legalese.
Oddly enough, we know exactly how the Operation Northwoods documents
came to light. At first, it turned out that not
(29:08):
everything was destroyed, obviously. A lot of it was so
much so that we don't know who knew what and when,
but these came into the public eye In 1992, that's
when they hit the mainstream, because of a film by
one Oliver Stone. Casey, can you guess which one it is?
Speaker 3 (29:31):
JFK.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Nailed it. Nailed it. Yeah, because of the Oliver Stone
film JFK, which examined the idea of a conspiracy behind
the internet. assassination of President JFK, President Kennedy. This conspiratorial
film ultimately led to the discovery of Northwoods because Congress
passed a law due to overwhelming public outcry. They passed
(29:56):
a law to increase public access to government records. at
least as far as they're related to JFK. And this
is something that came out in the wash.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Very interesting. Speaking of assassination attempts, talk about dodging bullets.
Fidel Castro was certainly a very popular target for assassination attempts.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Oh, he's the bell of the bloody ball.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
That's right. Yeah. According to a gentleman who protected him
during his regime, He survived over 600 assassination attempts, everything
from snipers to some of the crazy methods the CIA
were plotting against him.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
Poisoned wetsuit.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Poisoned wetsuit. Go on, Ben.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
Well, OK. So in 1975, the Senate Intelligence Committee said
it had concrete evidence of this plan to offer Fidel
Castro through proxy, of course, a wetsuit lined with spores
and bacteria that that would give him a skin disease.
This apparently involved the guy who would be their point
(31:02):
man for this was a U.S. lawyer named James B. Donovan,
and he was going to give Castro the wetsuit when
he went to negotiate the release of prisoners from the
failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Eventually, they abandoned the plan
because the lawyer gave Castro a different diving suit And
(31:24):
they said, on his own initiative. But that's, yeah, just
like you said, there are so many weird ways that
the U.S. government planned to antagonize or kill Fidel Castro.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
If you want to check out a list of those,
you can go to Mental Flaw straight away for 10
ways the CIA tried to kill Castro by Stacey Conrad.
We mentioned exploding cigar earlier. That kind of makes me
think of the episode we did about the Nazis' attempts to,
or like plans, plots to kill Castro. Winston Churchill, and
that was with an exploding chocolate bar and also an
(31:58):
exploding cigar. Several cigar-based murder attempts here, including poisoning his cigar.
We even have one that involved an exploding conch shell,
ballpoint hypodermic syringe.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
You know, the closest one, the closest they ever got
by most sources was a poisoned milkshake in 1963. Castro
may well have died, but the waiter at the Havana
Hilton was trying to retrieve the pill that he was
supposed to stick in the milkshake, but it stuck to
(32:33):
the freezer. And then when he was trying to grab
it and rip it loose, the capsule itself tore apart. Shame. Well,
I mean, you know, don't ruin a good milkshake.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
So this is literally all just about eradicating communism, huh?
Speaker 1 (32:52):
You know, I think it's more than that. It's easy
to say, yeah, they were targeting communism, but there are
a lot of economic incentives at play. There are a
lot of questions about regional hegemons. You know, you want
to control other nations on your border.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
They're close.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
They're too close for.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Comfort, right? And, you know, it's crazy too. My daughter
and her mom and stepdad, they briefly, there was this
window that opened up for tourists to be able to
visit Cuba. And they did that and had a lovely time.
My daughter, it was a super amazing adventure for her.
And then like very shortly after they got back, the
Trump administration closed that window. And it's all about kind
(33:37):
of putting pressure on them for trade and tariffs. And
there's like that embargo that's been going on for so long.
It's part of the reason that in Cuba, they don't
have any modern cars. It's all like older cars that
they've been able to work on because they've been kind
of in this trade bubble for so long, right? Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
And my buddy Scott and I have an excellent episode
on our show Car Stuff about the amazing ingenuity of
Cuban nationals when it comes to those vehicles. You can
see cars from the 50s and 60s that are maintained
in this, this amazing fashion. By the way, car stuff
(34:12):
is coming back and you can, you can hear more
about everything that floats, flies, swims, or drives very, very soon.
So check it out. If you get a chance to
tell my buddy, Scott, you heard about it here. You
can say Ben sent me and Ben told me that
you would give me a free t-shirt. If I write
to you, it's true. It's true.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
It's true.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
It's not a false flag. So Ben, That is the story.
The good news is that Operation Northwoods never occurred. As
far as we know, there was no false flag that
actually took U.S. lives or Cuban lives and used those
deaths as a pretext to go to a hot war
(34:55):
with Cuba. However, we might never have found out about
this if it weren't for the public outcry of and
public interest following Oliver Stone's film, JFK. And this is
important for us to remember because it's often said that
history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme. And yeah, maybe
(35:16):
that's a cliche, but here's a pro tip about cliches.
They're usually called cliches because they're true. So now we
have to, not as members of individual countries or nations
or communities, but as a species, We must exercise critical
thinking when we hear about these sorts of attacks, these
(35:40):
sorts of things that could be Malcolm Gladwell-esque tipping points.
One of the most recent that's occurred as we record
this is the rising tension in the Strait of Hormuz,
which is largely controlled by the Republic of Iran. And recently, again,
(36:02):
this is 2019, there have been alleged attacks on tankers.
The U.S. says that Iran did it. Iran says they
didn't do it. And Iran has also made other claims
about its own tankers being taken. And there are some people,
policy wonks, journalists, et cetera, who are keeping an eye
(36:24):
on the situation and already claiming that a false flag
is afoot. This has not been proven yet. And the
weird thing about false flags is if Operation Northwoods is
in the indicator, we learn about them about 40 years
after they happen. But it makes for some fun podcast fodder.
(36:45):
It's okay because no one actually died.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
So we hope that you will write to us and
tell us whether you have visited Cuba. A couple of
our close friends have. Our research pal, Ryan. Barish has
visited Cuba recently. He was there for quite a while.
I think he has dual citizenship, so he's able to go. Right,
(37:08):
because he has German citizenship.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
Yep, yep. And I do want to, before we end
today's episode, I want to get your opinion, Casey, on
the 1992 Oliver Stone film JFK. Did you watch it?
Did you like it? What's your take?
Speaker 2 (37:25):
One?
Speaker 1 (37:25):
Ten? I don't know.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
I think it's great.
Speaker 3 (37:29):
I think a lot of people have pointed out there's
a lot of conjecture and stuff that's probably been disproven
since that film came out. But just as a piece
of filmmaking itself and as something that kind of goes
to the wider skepticism, suspicion, whatever you want to call it,
lingering doubts in the American psyche about that whole event,
(37:51):
I think it's great.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
Casey on the case. What do you think, Noel? Do
you remember that one?
Speaker 2 (37:56):
I have not seen JFK.
Speaker 1 (37:58):
That's Kevin Costner, I believe.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
Kevin Costner. I did see Nixon. I remember liking it
just fine. I really liked Platoon.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
Platoon was always a.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Favorite war movie of mine. But now in my older years,
I realize that Full Metal Jacket is the superior film.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
You're not in Apocalypse Now, man?
Speaker 2 (38:17):
No, I think Full Metal Jacket is my favorite. Apocalypse
Now would be second. Platoon would be third.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
You know, I.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
In terms of NOM movies.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
I think because I did a stage play of Apocalypse Now.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
Wait, what? Like in Rushmore?
Speaker 1 (38:35):
No. Kind of. Yeah, true story.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
That's amazing.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
Yeah. Yeah. It was definitely a thing that happened. I
think that's maybe that's why I love Apocalypse Now. I
even love the documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
I do too.
Speaker 3 (38:50):
That's Hearts of Darkness.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
Great. I'm such a fanboy for that. Full Metal Jacket
is great. Don't get me wrong. Just for my money,
I love the brutal chaos.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
Oh, yeah. And the madness of it too. It's a
very Shakespearean almost tragedy. You know, you're right, Ben. Maybe
if I held them side by side. I just have
a real fondness in my heart for Full Metal Jacket.
I haven't seen Apocalypse Now in some time. I think
if I watched it today, I might flip.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
We get a chance to see a new version of
it soon because he's doing yet another director's cut.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Speaker 1 (39:23):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
I'm kind of tired of seeing different versions of that movie,
but I guess there's one more.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
It might be a diminishing return.
Speaker 2 (39:30):
At some point.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
Well, yeah, a lot of people have pointed out that
the extended cut, the redux cut, is kind of boring.
There's about 40 minutes in there where they're just at
that weird plantation. Yeah, the old French colonial. Rubber plantation, yeah.
Which is kind of just... Drags for a long time.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
There's a weird sex scene in there that just, it
just occurs as it feels as if that, that scene,
and I know this is not your other show movie crush,
but that scene, that entire segment of the Redux film,
it seems like backstage, they, they just in production had
(40:08):
access to this place and they said, all right, let's just,
let's do some stuff. You know, let's do a dinner scene.
They should talk about how they feel in very vague terms.
And then let's do a, you know, let's do a
sex scene because we still have the room. We still
have the location. And they were like, all right, we
got to get back.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
To the story. Speaking of getting back to the story,
our story's over.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
And so is our episode. But if you want to
do any of the things we were talking about, write us,
let us know. Your favorite false flag attack, something you
think maybe was a false flag attack. Anything. Your favorite
part of Apocalypse Now. How did you feel about the redux?
Speaker 1 (40:44):
Too long? Did it lag a little bit?
Speaker 2 (40:46):
How did you feel about that weird sex scene? Let
us know. Write to us at ridiculous at iheartradio.com or
hit us up on our Facebook group, which is the
Ridiculous Historians.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
You can also find us individually on Instagram. See me
get kicked into and out of various places and countries.
Spoiler alert, I've got a couple big trips coming up
in summer, so stay tuned to that. I am at
Ben Bolin.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
You can find me at HowNowNoelBrown. It's mainly just me
getting kicked in the shins by small children.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
Yeah, I don't know why they hate your shins so much.
It's a thing now.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
Yeah, it really is.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
And as always, thank you to our super producer, Casey Pegram.
Thank you to our research associates, Gabe Luzier and Ryan Barish.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
Big thanks to Alex Williams, who composed our theme. Thanks
to Jonathan, the quizster Strickland for, you know, occupying that
space of pure evil that allows the universe to exist
in some weird form of harmony.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
That's so nice that you give me a shout out
because you guys get kind of antagonistic.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
A little bit.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
And of course, thanks to Eve's Jeff coat, who will
be appearing on the show sometime soon. We hope as
well as Christopher Hossie Otis. Thank you for listening. And Noel,
thank you for taking this strange journey with me. May
we never be the victims of a false flag attack.
They should just be real flats.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
Agreed. See you next time, folks. For more podcasts from
iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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