THE TOP U.S. military brass, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wanted a war--but they didn’t have popular support for military action.

Their solution? Stage an attack on an American military base, followed by a series of bombings and shootings that could be blamed on terrorist opponents of the U.S.

If this was submitted as a Hollywood movie script, it would be rejected as too far-fetched. But it’s the truth.

In his new book on the National Security Agency, Body of Secrets, author James Bamford reports how, following the election of 1960, outgoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower expressed a desire for a U.S. military invasion of Cuba. If Cuban leader Fidel Castro failed to provide a pretext for war, the United States "could think of manufacturing something that would be generally acceptable"--an attack or act of sabotage.

A few months later, Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy, presided over the disastrous CIA-backed invasion by right-wing Cubans in the Bay of Pigs. When Kennedy gave up on the idea of overthrowing Castro by force, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lyman Lemnitzer proposed Operation Northwoods.

"We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanámo Bay and blame Cuba," a Joint Chiefs’ document proposed. "Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation." It continued: "We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington."

Other proposals including blowing up the space capsule carrying astronaut John Glenn, setting off plastic bombs to kill innocent Americans and staging the hijacking of planes and boats. Lemnitzer’s cronies even devised a plan for secret agents to charter a plane, substitute a drone, fly it over Cuba and declare that it was shot down by Cuban jet fighters.

The generals argued that the U.S. should not only invade Cuba, but occupy it militarily for the foreseeable future.

Today, the mainstream media dismiss Lemnitzer as a far-right nut carried away by the Cold War. "But Operation Northwoods also had the support of every single member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and even senior Pentagon official Paul Nitze [later a top Reagan administration official] argued in favor of provoking a phony war with Cuba," Bamford writes.

Of course lying, manipulation and provocation to start wars is nothing new. In the First World War, the French and British claimed to be defending freedom against the despotic German monarch, the Kaiser--so they made an alliance with Russia’s Tsar, a monarch that was even more repressive.