Stuff You Should Know - Operation Northwoods: The False Flag Op That Never Was

Episode Date: March 15, 2022

There is presumably some very dark, very depressing stuff in the annals of America’s secret history. But perhaps the darkest classified document to see the light of day was the memo that called for faked attacks on the US to justify invading Cuba.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry and this is Stuff You Should Know. Okay. Deal with it. Yeah. Up your nose, etc.

You remember hose? Yeah. I just suddenly, you know I stopped saying that quote mid quote because I suddenly felt like an old dinosaur, Chuck, and that probably nobody knew what I was talking about and I'm tired of feeling old, Chuck. Are you feeling old? I feel young. I'm glad. To answer your question, yes. Okay. So hey, before we get started, this is going to be a really good episode and I want to enhance it by saying I finally saw, I got to see my niece's movie that I've been talking nonstop about, No Exit. How was it? It's amazing. It's such a great, I would call it a popcorn thriller. Okay. Like, you know, it's not like high art, it's not trying to be high art, but it's like really well done. The script doesn't have a bunch of

like holes in it. It doesn't, like they've trimmed off all the fat. It moves along really nicely. And once it gets going, it keeps like getting going again and like these lurches forward and just, it doesn't go off the rails, but it's just like, oh my God, I can't believe this is going on right now. And then to be able to see my niece, Mila, act as like the kid in this, to see her like do this stuff, it's just, it's amazing. First of all, and I'm like removing, I've done everything I can to remove any subjectivity as a proud uncle and like actually watch her acting and like the performance she gives. And it is great. It's amazing. She does an amazing job. She has to do a bunch of different stuff. She gets like tortured and harassed and

beat up on and everything. It's actually really graphic movie in a lot of ways, but like delightfully, if you ask me. And she did, she did a great job. And I thought the whole cast did a really good job too. It sounds great. It is good, including Havana Rose Lou, by the way. But yes, it is, it is a great movie. And I recommend anybody who watches our movies to watch the movie. And it's on, it's on Hulu right now streaming. It's called No Exit. Awesome. Can't wait to watch it. I was, I've been traveling. I went on the road for a bit. Once again, see more Bonnie Prince Billy and Matt Sweeney Super Wolves shows. Matt Sweeney, is that the girlfriend guy? What? The guy who had that hit in the 90s called girlfriend?

No. He's local. That was a great album. I can't think of his name. No, Matt Sweeney is a genuine stuff you should know listener and super smart, awesome guy. And we're kind of pals now. So he's always kind of enough to hang out. And he always sends me really good ideas for the show. But that's not my ninth Bonnie Prince Billy show in the past like year and a half. I'm going to where he goes. That's really cool. He didn't come to Atlanta. So I just, I'm hitting the road. And along with our good friend Joey Sierra, he came on this one. Oh yeah, that's right. I saw that post on Instagram. That's awesome to see Joey. He's looking good. Yeah. He says hello. And if you want to see pictures of this and of my travels and travails, you can follow me.

And chuck the podcaster on Instagram. I'm sorry you had travails. Would I say travails? Did I not say travels? You said travels and travails. Oh no, no travails. Only travails. Oh good, good. It was only good times. I'm sure I've told you before, but I always love rubbing it in. Did I ever tell you that I saw Bonnie Prince Billy doing karaoke at our friend Toby's wedding years back? I don't know that you told me that. Do you know what song that was? It was some like sweet old country song he did a duet with I think maybe his wife. Oh my God. I mean, he's my favorite vocalist. He's to me the best singer that literally in

music history. And a cool dude. I can tell you because I've been in the same room with him plenty of times. Me too. I was four feet from him the other night. That's really cool. Anyway, shout out to Sweeney. Shout out to no exit. And now let's talk about a time when the U.S. government was not above planning false flag operations that were crazy in ludicrous and planning potentially to assassinate the leaders of other countries hundreds of years ago. Oh actually no, this was way back in the 1960s. Yeah. Planning, that's the operative word here is planning. Doesn't mean that like any false flag operation was ever carried out. At least by the United States government,

there've been plenty of false flag operations carried out. Most recently, apparently by Russia who was trying to accuse Ukraine of doing like sabotage and bombing across the border as a pretext for invasion. And that's generally the point of a false flag operation, which we should probably define it. But it's basically where you dress up as the somebody from the country that you want to invade, have them or you assault your own border crossing, your own military installation, your own railroad, and then you publicize to the world how that country attacked you and now you're going to have to go in and invade for your own welfare and the welfare of your own country. That's a false flag operation.

That's right. Staging any kind of a fake operation. It originally came about the term a false flag from pirates would fly a flag of a friendly country to lower ships closer than they would attack them. But since then, and Russia is big on it. I mean, Japan has done this, Germany has done this, but the Soviets and Russia, like you said, they're still gangbusters for this kind of thing. Yes. I also think it's just a PSA. If you are currently feeling sympathetic or absorbing information that makes you see things through Putin's view, you're probably being manipulated online, just FYI. You may want to look a little deeper into that and pull your head out of that particular rabbit hole. All right. So let's go back in time

and talk about Operation Northwoods. But to talk about Operation Northwoods, we have to first talk about, who did this one for us, by the way? Who put this together? This was the Libya joint. Libya Gershon. Great work. We need to talk about Cuba and what the threat that that country started to pose or the seeming threat that country started to pose to the United States in the late 1950s, early 1960s. Yeah, because Castro came to power in 1959. And in doing so, he established the first communist regime in the Western Hemisphere, in America's backyard, as it would later be put. That's right. And this does not settle well with the Americans, because at the time, we were, I guess, our military brass, our intelligence community. Basically, everybody in charge with

security for America was of the ilk that we should be invading other countries that are communist and toppling those regimes and fighting communism wherever it pops up. No country's too small. No country's too large. We need to invade them and fight them and remove those communists and probably install like a democratic government from that point on, which is kind of ironic. That's right. By the way, that was Matthew Sweet. That's what I said. What did you say? Oh, Matt Sweeney. Matt Sweeney, but it came to me when I was, when you were talking about Cuba, I went Matthew Sweet, because that's a great record. Yeah, I can't remember the song, how it goes, but I know it was a good song. I don't think I've ever heard the record. It had a cool video

too. Yeah. Want me to sing it? Yeah. Remember that? That's it? Yeah, okay. And then the chorus is, you need to get back in the arms of a girlfriend. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's a pretty good song. It's not as good as I remember. Just by the Super Wolves record. It's better. All right, so good setup on Cuba. If you want to go back, well, I don't even know how much we need to go over it, but if you want to go back and listen to our, I think, pretty great episode from November 10th, 2020, called the Bay of Pigs Disaster. Yeah. This was sort of one of the first things that happened in the 1960s when Eisenhower approved this boondoggle of an operation known as the Bay of Pigs invasion that just went just about as wrong as it could go on every level.

Yeah. And so we were setting up fake invasions of Cuba, supporting exiles invasions of Cuba. RFK and JFK were obsessed with Cuba, and in particular, removing Castro from power. Cuba was a big deal for a number of reasons, we should say. And one of the leading reasons that Cuba was a problem for the United States is because they were worried Castro was going to serve as an inspiration for other countries in Latin America, especially the economically depressed ones, where they're like, yeah, all of this capitalism running around where Americans own most of our national operations and exports, and we're getting very little in return, communism might seem pretty appealing to them. So Castro might serve as an inspiration.

And if there's like that domino effect, like they were worried about in Southeast Asia, that happens in Latin America, thanks to Cuba. All of a sudden, American businesses are going to be out a lot of money. Americans are going to be out a lot of the bananas that they've come to love thanks to Edward Bernays. Yeah. And we would also lose access to things like the Panama Canal and other things we need. So it wasn't just like an ideological problem. It was a practical problem too. But the biggest problem, the biggest problem that a communist Cuba post to the United States is that it was now an ally with the USSR, America's sworn enemy, the other polar power of the Cold War would now had a country that would be willing to let them

set up nuclear missile bases 100 miles from Florida. That was truly the big problem with Cuba and Castro. That's right. And because of that, kind of from the very beginning, the US very quietly started thinking about like, Hey, should we assassinate this guy? Should we depose this guy? And there were all kinds of crazy like poison cigars, like mafia hitmen, that kind of stuff was being talked about behind closed doors, including Florida Senator George Smathers, great name. He proposed assassinating Castro. He was a good buddy of Kennedy's and brought it up during the 1960 presidential campaign, which included the plan included a false flag attack at Guantanamo Bay, Naval Base. And he claims that Kennedy basically was like, put something down on paper, and I'll

take a look. And so Kennedy wasn't, you know, if you believe this, he wasn't initially adverse or averse, excuse me, to the idea of taking care of the problem, if you know what I'm saying. Yeah, that's how obsessed he was with removing Castro. The problem was this, after the Bay of Pigs, that was what 1961, I believe. Yeah, it was April 1961. One of the huge problems was, aside from America having an enormous amount of egg on its face for being outed for supporting a failed coup of Castro, was that Kennedy had been led to believe by his military and intelligence advisors that there was going to be an uprising, that like these exiles showing up, making a couple of winds against the Castro regime was going to like awaken the Cuban people who would want to go back to,

you know, the way things were before the communists came along and took over the country, and there'd be an uprising that toppled Castro. That was the thing. They weren't necessarily trying to take over the country. They're trying to incite a revolution. Yeah. And that did not happen. It was supposed to work. Yeah, even though Kennedy had been told up and down by these advisors, he was a brand new president at the time, and he had been told up and down by these advisors that that was going to happen, and it didn't happen. It never materialized. And so he lost full faith in any military or intelligence advisor around him at the time from that point on. So he found he needed to surround himself with new people to take on this Castro-Cuba problem. And the

point man he put on the whole thing, he basically said, I want you to be in charge of getting rid of Castro, you know, figuring out how to do it without sending in military people, was his brother, Bobby. That's right. Like you said, Kennedy still had that new president's smell, and Bobby still had that new attorney general smell. You were very, very patient and waiting for your chance to use that, and I think it paid off in ACEs. Okay, good. I mean, I tried to get in there, but, you know. That's good. So Bobby was attorney general, like I said, and that isn't, you know, attorney general or attorney's general, or would it be attorney's generals? They usually don't get involved in stuff like this, but he was his brother,

and so he trusted him, and he ended up overseeing something called Operation Mankus, which was kind of this crazy idea that they could disrupt life in Cuba such that with, you know, sabotage, with disorder, with espionage, and it would all be just in the name of stirring things up with the Cubans themselves. Again, not like putting in Americans dressed as Cubans and stuff like that. They thought they could get this done. The CIA was going to be involved, the State Department was going to be involved, the Defense Department, what we had at the time, the U.S. Information Agency, and basically they were going to get together and get this done, and it was going to be headed up by a general from the Air Force named Edward Lansdale,

who was, interestingly, a former ad exec and a CIA operative, and he was sort of in charge, along with Kennedy, of getting this thing planned, and this was Operation Mankus again. Yeah, so Operation Mankus is that operation that, like all the wacky stuff that you have ever heard about getting rid of Castro, like a poisoned skin suit for him to scuba dive in, or exploding cigars, all that is Operation Mankus, and like you're saying, the point was to... I think it was a poisoned cigar, I don't think. It was an exploding cigar, that's like a novelty, I think. Right, well, that was the level they were at. Somebody brought up Joy Buzzer once. Right, they were like, Exploding Cigar won't kill him, like, yeah, but it'll humiliate him.

Right, and we'll finish him off with the Joy Buzzer. That's right. So, that's all of that fell under Operation Mankus, and like you said, they're trying to basically make life for the average Cuban so weird and disjointed and uncomfortable. Without anybody realizing the Americans were actually behind all these seemingly unrelated things, that they would just get rid of Castro themselves. And that was the reason why they weren't just like, well, we can't just go in and kill Castro is because, again, they were friends of the Soviets, and there was a chance that JFK believed if they did invade Cuba, they would set off World War III. Like, that was a very real fear. Sure. On the other hand, there was also this ticking clock

going at all moments. And among some people, some advisors to the White House, some security advisors, it was like deafening the sound of this clock ticking that the longer we waited, the more chance there was going to be that the Cubans were going to say, hey, Soviets, come build the missile base here. They hadn't yet, but it was on the table and everybody knew it. So the Americans needed to do something about Castro and fast. So the idea that the Americans could come up with these plots to get the Cubans to overthrow Castro themselves, that takes a lot of time. It might not pay off. And then looming in the background, getting ever closer, are these Soviet missile bases arriving in Cuba. Any day now, they just knew it.

All right, that's a great, suspenseful lead up to our first break. We're going to come back and find out what happened with Operation Mongoose right after this. Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation. If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so,

tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses,

major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So you set the stage very well, my friend. Thanks. General Lansdale is running the show. It was a pretty impossible situation to try and do this with the Cuban people without any real power, basically. Like he didn't have any real teeth in this. No. He was overseeing a bunch of

different agencies. And in February of 62, he basically put forward a plan that was supposed to get Castro out of office by October, even though he said that was pretty optimistic. And some of these ideas were pretty crazy. One of them was there are these things called star shells, which is kind of how you light up the night sky during wartime. Yeah, with phosphorescence, I think. Yeah. It's like you shoot it as it were mortar round, but it's not mortar round. It just lights things up for the night vision goggles. Or back then, I guess. Well, I don't know if they had them back then. But it's like that one scene at night that battle, the night battle in Apocalypse now. Yeah, exactly. So one of the ideas was for a submarine, a U.S. submarine to fire these star

shells off the coast and convince the Cubans that the second coming of Jesus was happening and that Jesus was against Castro. Yeah, they were going to shoot it off on All Saints Day. And that was based on the premise that Cubans were deeply, deeply Catholic and that they would see this as a sign. And these are just ideas again. They never did this. All of these are just ideas, but they were ideas that were literally put forth in writing by the U.S. government to the president. So the clock is ticking on Lansdale. And I read that basically every week, he would go to the Oval Office and asked to be taken off of this assignment. Oh, really? Yeah. He was apparently a golden child. Like you said, he was an ad exec in a CIA operative. He basically shaped the geopolitical

map of Southeast Asia by himself in the 50s. And the Kennedys were like, hey, you seem pretty great at this. Let's see what you can do at Cuba. And he just ran into a brick wall in Cuba. In no small part because like you were saying, the Kennedys didn't give him any teeth, any authority. So he had to beg for everything from everybody, from this multi-agency task force that he was in charge of. It was a terrible, terrible thing. And then again, that clock is ticking. So in addition to coming up with ways to get the Cubans to topple Castro, Lansdale also was trying to figure out how to justify overaction, an actual military invasion. Right. And so he asked the joint chiefs who were one of the agencies that were part of the task force he oversaw for some info on that.

Like what would it take, do you think, for the United States to be able to justifiably invade Cuba and remove Castro as its leader, problem solved? Yeah. Like how can I scare the president bad enough kind of? Yeah. Right. Exactly. So they, well, no, also, I think he was also trying to figure out what we could do to make that happen. You know what I'm saying? Could we also push Cuba into a corner and make them do something? It would be like, oh, well, our hands are tied. We have to invade. But the reason that it would scare Kennedy too is like he was against military action. You just got to keep that in mind. After the Bay of Pigs, he said, no, we're not invading Cuba. So now Lansdale's trying to figure out basically how to

change the president's mind. And I guess, yeah, like you were saying, if it meant through scaring him, whatever it took, he just wanted out of this stupid assignment where he's trying to figure out how to trick the Cubans into overthrowing Castro. Right. So this is what this briefing was all about in February of 1962 from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to basically put it forth that this cannot be ignored. The quote was, the communist regime in Cuba is incompatible with the minimum security requirements of the Western Hemisphere. I mean, that's like, that sentence kind of says it all. It is incompatible having him in power with the safety of the Western Hemisphere. So we got to get rid of them. They said that we can't count on, like you see what happened

with the Bay of Pigs, there is no insurgents happening in Cuba that we can count on basically at this point. And we need to intervene directly. And I don't think Russia will even be super mad at this point yet. Yeah, yet. That was a thing because they said that Cuba's not part of the Warsaw Pact, which is kind of like the Soviet Union's version of NATO. And since they weren't a member of that, the Soviet Union had no obligations to back them up if they were invaded by America. And the fact that they didn't have any military bases there meant they also didn't have any reason to back up Cuba. So it was possible that if they invaded Cuba to topple Castro, the Soviets would not be drawn into it. Maybe JFK was wrong about it sparking World War III.

They didn't know that for a fact, but that was their assessment of it, right? Yeah. So on February 2nd, Brigadier General William H. Craig, he was the Joint Chief of Staff's rep for Operation Mongoose, he submitted this memo to Lansdale that said it was called possible actions to provoke harass and disrupt Cuba. And this is where some of these really kind of wacky ideas start coming forth. Some not quite so wacky, like the Mercury mission was about to happen with John Glenn later that month. And they were like, hey, if anything goes wrong with this thing, we could basically manufacture proof that Cuba was behind it. And that would give us a reason. Yeah. That was one of the more reasonable things in there.

It really was. There was Operation Freeride, the idea that they were going to drop one-way tickets to Mexico City over Havana for people to just leave. That's amazing. I guess that was one of the, if Castro had no one to rule, then maybe he would just leave himself. Castro would just shut down the airports or something. Yeah. Yeah. That was not very well thought out. It wouldn't have worked. No. There was also Operation Good Times too, which was, they were going to produce a fake photo. And this was at a time when it was hard to do that,

at least make a convincing one, of Castro, presumably naked, hanging out with beautiful women and a bunch of food at a time when the Cubans were having a lot of trouble putting food on their own plates. And this picture was going to have Castro surrounded by food and women. And they were going to caption it, my ration is different. And they thought that that would just, that would be yet for Castro. So yeah, these are the ideas that they were coming up with. But when they kind of turn their, I think when they said like, wow, these are the ideas were coming up with this stuff's not going to work. There's no counter-revolutionary insurgency to spark in Cuba.

Like what are we going to do? We need to figure out how to, how to get our army in there. Right. Get army in there. And then that kind of set the table, all of us set the table for Operation Northwoods, which was put forward by Army General. It's so funny. I'm glad that, that Livia mentioned Dr. Strangelove, which had not come out yet, because some of the names in this are very, like, you can kind of tell that Kubrick and the writer were very much influenced by like real stuff that was going on for some of the ridiculous names from Dr. Strangelove. And then, you know, later on, when we get to like what was actually in Northwoods, it, you can only hear it as if it was read from George E. Scott, General Buck Terjinson, like

you can hear him saying these things, but Army General Lyman Limnitzer was this guy's name. And he was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1960, very hawkish to say the least, right-wing guy who, I mean, this guy, he wanted to attack everybody at all times. He wanted a preemptive nuclear war launched against the Soviet Union at one point. That was a proposal that he took to Kennedy. He proposed that in writing. He said, here's a plan to, for a surprise attack against the USSR. Let's do it. Yeah. Yeah, he was that kind of guy. He was one of those ones that I mentioned earlier, fight communism everywhere it pops up, anytime it pops up, just invade and take over. That's, that was like his, his plan. This guy's running the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

So Kennedy didn't like him, right? The head, no. He was an Eisenhower appointee. Kennedy didn't like him and he didn't like Kennedy, especially after the Bay of Pigs. He was one of the people that Kennedy did not trust. And then he thought Kennedy was reprehensible for not ordering an airstrike to back up the Bay of Pigs exile invaders. Right. So there was no love lost. But Lansdale was, it sounds like kind of appropriately the guy to come up with Operation Northwoods, which was, as far as we have in documentary evidence, the only false flag operation the United States ever came up with. Okay. Is that true? Documented evidence. I don't think there's ever been evidence of anything like this. I mean, there's a, there's a historian who

wrote about it later, a journalist who said it was probably the most corrupt document the United States government's ever come up with. Right. Which is really saying something. I mean, I'm not, so I'm not Pollyanna here. I don't think the US government has clean hands and is just, you know, looking out for the good of everybody at all time. Like, I think it's done some deeply shady stuff, but I also personally think that Operation Northwoods may have been, as far as planning goes, the pinnacle of that shadiness. Right. Yeah. I'd like to get at least. I believe it too. March 5th, the Joint Chiefs Lansdale issued a request to them to provide a quote, brief, but precise description of pretext, which they would consider would provide

justification for US military intervention in Cuba was passed along on March 5th, I'm sorry, March 13th, a limnit surpasses it to Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara. And this is something that McNamara, you know, years later was kind of like, I don't know. Was that a thing? I don't really remember that. Yeah. I'm not really sure that was true. He was a scumbag himself, too. Yeah. I recommend the great, great documentary by Errol Morris when he talks to Robert McNamara basically for, yeah, for 90 minutes straight or however long it is. It's crazy what he got him to say and to see. I know. And he tried to get him to see, and McNamara is like, does not compute to a moral. It was really fascinating stuff. It really was. I didn't realize that was Errol Morris.

I should have guessed though. Yeah. The master. That's so good. Yeah. I loved midnight cowboy. What? I wanted to throw you, I wanted to sniff you off the case. You sure did. So this memo was called justification for US military intervention in Cuba. That was the official title, signed by limnits or in the Joint Chiefs. And, you know, this was basically, here, what do you think of this plan? You might think it's wacky, and we've never done anything quite like this officially, but here it is, President Kennedy. Right. Kennedy said, or let me see that. Ain't that bad? No, that was pretty bad. So he looked it over, said, no, thank you very much. I appreciate you going to all this trouble, but I reject this out of hand. We're not going to

create some sort of mayhem, blame it on the Cubans, and then use it as a pretext to invade. We're just not doing that. And right when that happened, right when he realized that this is not going to be implemented, limnits tried to get all documentation of this destroyed. He wasn't successful, as we'll see, obviously, because we're talking about it now. He's like, can we torch this? Oh, God, I signed that thing. Yeah. I thought we were all going to do this. And in fact, in the Operation Northwoods memo, he talks about how he anticipates that other agencies that were all part of Operation Mongoose Task Force would be submitting similar proposals, which are basically ideas for how to make it look like Cuba attacked the United States,

so that we can invade Cuba. And it turned out he was the only one who put his name on a document that he then handed into the president that was that. It's sort of like the scene in like an army movie where they ask for volunteers and everyone, but one person takes a step back. And then one guy's left standing there. Have you ever seen, there's a video of some dogs that did that to another dog. There's three dogs. I think they're all little poodles. And one of them, Peter, pooped on the staircase. And the mom is making the video, is asking them, like, who did this? And right when she says, who did this, the other two look at the third one. And then she said, who did it? And they take a step back and the ones just standing there still. It's one of the most

amazing dog videos I've ever seen. I saw the Nature video the other day that was a deer, that, you know, how they had like fake deer and things in the woods. That was a real deer that had mounted one of these fake deer. Have you seen that? I've seen pictures, you know, on the internet. So it has mounted this deer and it's kind of going at it. And the fake deer is sorted from the neck up. It's pieced together. That whole section falls off. This deer jumps off of the back of that thing. And like, I wish there was like a human narration going on, because it looks at like, it's kind of circling this thing, looking at it like, what was I just doing this thing to? Right. So we figured out it was fake.

Oh, I would say so. I killed you. I'm sorry. It's good stuff. Yeah. Should we take a break before we get into the absurdity of Operation Northwoods? Yes. All right. We'll take our second break and we'll talk about some of these crazy wacky ideas right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Articular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born,

it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer,

I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Chuck, I think we're calling these crazy wacky ideas. And they are crazy wacky ideas. You shouldn't do stuff like false flag operations and invade countries based on them. But they're also, I think, only crazy wacky because they were in the 60s, they were directed at Cuba, which makes it seem even wackier in hindsight now today. And then lastly, they weren't implemented. Had they been implemented, there would be, in no way, shape or form, crazy or wacky. They'd be abhorrent.

Yeah, I mean, we're kind of laughing about this stuff now, but it's really not funny. No, that's what I'm trying to do. Stop laughing. Yeah. Sorry, I'm in a good mood. That's good. I'm glad to hear it. All right, so let's talk about some of these false flag operations. Again, signed by General Lyman Lymanitzer. That's right. We already talked about sort of attacking Guantanamo. There are things called over-the-fence attacks, which were uniformed Cubans basically riding near the bases, throwing fire bombs inside the base, setting aircraft on fire, kind of giving the illusion that Guantanamo is under direct attack. And these would probably be exile Cubans who were sent from Florida down to Guantanamo to pose as

Cuban nationals under Castro who were attacking, but they would be paid. And then, remember that movie, Wag the Dog? Oh, sure. They would probably be whacked afterward. Yeah. That's the thing though. And this is, if you read the fine print, aside from one of them, these are all basically elaborate ruses where no one actually dies. Yes. That's very important. I know a lot of people believe, I was gonna say suspect, I think believe is a much more correct word, that September 11th was a false flag attack. Yeah, some people think that. I mean, I get that. I get believing that and why you would believe that. But if you look at Operation Northwoods, they go out of their way to basically stage death. People don't actually die. They weren't part of the plan killing people,

and then let alone the idea of killing thousands of Americans. Just the fact that that many people died, I don't believe that anyone has ever held power in America that is capable or willing to kill that many Americans all at once. I just don't believe it. I don't think the world works that way. I think the world can be a very, very dark place. I don't think it's that dark. At least that there's like that depth of betrayal from the American government to the American people. I just, I don't believe it. I agree. So I thought we probably should at least mention 2001 as a false flag operation. That's right. There it is. Another one from this era was to remember the main incident, which was basically, let's just blow up one of our ships in Guantanamo Bay,

or another vessel near Cuba. They proposed sinking ships and all kinds of crazy plans like that. The one that really speaks to me as far as George C. Scott reading it from Dr. Strange Love is this direct quote, we could sink a boatload of Cubans on route to Florida, real or simulated. They could be dummies or we could actually really do this with real humans. That was the one that I was like, okay, that actually does overtly say, yeah, we could kill some people. The other ones, the ones that I'm like, okay, they're really going out of their way to make sure nobody is actually hurt. There was one where they were going to send a charter plane, like a commercial airliner from the US, probably from Florida,

on route to somewhere carrying American tourists off to vacation, like Jamaica, Venezuela, Guatemala, all the vacation hotspots, right? And they were going to release actually two planes at once, identical planes, except one of them was going to be a drone, remote-controlled plane. And then they were going to reroute the one with the actual people in it and then send the drone along over Cuban airspace and blow it up and then blame it on the Cubans. Yeah. So if you'll notice in that plan, there's like, all those people are safe. They're all fine. They're all, they're safe. This is all a decoy. That's what this operation was. It still wouldn't just, they wouldn't say or they weren't saying like, yeah,

we'll just blow up a plane full of tourists. It just doesn't happen. That doesn't happen. Yeah. But some of the stuff to me could serve as setting the stage for things getting out of hand and leading to real bloodshed. They had ideas for a simulated Cuban-backed assault on Dominican Republic or something using fake aircraft, painted up to look like Cuban aircraft. Yeah. I mean, all of a sudden something like that gets out of hand and real lives are being lost when it's misinterpreted. Yes. And I mean, that's a really good point. And also like the whole basis of this is like, so we can invade Cuba. And when we invade Cuba, there's going to be a lot of loss of life and bloodshed from that invasion too. So even if we went out of our way to make sure the people

who were in the false flag operation didn't actually get hurt, somebody's eventually going to die because of this false flag. These ideas that this guy came up with. Yeah. Another idea was a fake attack on a plane, like a U.S. Air Force plane in international waters. So basically that would be a pilot who was flying as in, you know, under an alias. They would broadcast over the radio that they had been jumped by MiGs, which was, I guess, the Soviet fighter jets. I saw Top Gun. I know this stuff. Sure. And it would fly, I guess, under the radar at a low altitude and land safely. And then stored, the pain would be repainted, given a new tail number, and then a submarine would drop plane parts into the water where it supposedly happened so they could like pull those things

out of the ocean. Yes. Show the world. Again, totally fake. Totally fake. There were other ones where like they're like, well, maybe we could injure Cuban exiles in Miami, like assault them and blame it on the Cubans, et cetera, et cetera. Like basically anything you could think of that could give America a reason to say, look, this Castro regime is unpredictable, unstable, and they're now attacking us. We're going to have to invade. That was the point of Operation Northwood's ideas. But it had a bit of a stroke of genius that was kind of hidden in there a little bit that I thought was kind of well put. It was using a number of these different things, making them seem through, you know, a separation of in time and space, making them seem like

unrelated events, also staging other events too that didn't necessarily have anything to do with anything to kind of like give cover and camouflage the actual events and the goals. And that if you put it all together, the US could be like, look at how crazy this Castro regime is. We're going to have to invade. I thought that was, as far as unhinged documents go, I thought that was a little bit of sanity shining in it. Yeah. I mean, I think they should have dropped those one-way plane tickets. That was my favorite idea on all this stuff. Totally. So, you know, we know that Kennedy didn't accept this proposal. The Cuban Missile Crisis unfolds in October 62, and Operation Mongoose was sort of fully laid to rest. And

Lansdale, for his efforts, he was replaced by a man named Sterling Cutrell, who was, he wasn't like an insider for the Kennedy clan. And so he was a little more cautious about everything. They were still, you know, I think the Joint Chiefs had the idea, like they didn't put this idea to bed completely. They put Operation Mongoose down, but they still didn't like put to bed the idea that like, hey, maybe we should still provoke Cuba and see if we can like set them up to invade. Like that went through the 63. Yeah. All the way through 1963, the Hawks were just trying to figure out how to get it done. And it obviously didn't happen. And what somebody pointed out in one of these, the articles that were the sources for Olivia's article was like,

Castro's still there. He outlived all these guys. Oh man. I think it was in like the 90s or the early 2000s when the article was written. They're like, he's still there. He's still giving seven hour speeches and like all of these people are long dead. Yeah. And that, I mean, that's the case, like America and Cuba just entered its own like kind of mini Caribbean Cold War with tons of sanctions against Cuba and limits on travel. And you know, I think the average American would just not really understand why they just know that Castro was a communist. And, you know, that was all you needed to know to play sanctions on Cuba. And we even further would have no idea whatsoever that Operation Northwood ever happened was ever proposed. If it wasn't for Oliver Stone's

1992 movie or 1991 movie JFK, isn't that a neat little bizarre footnote? Yeah, it really is. Because like you said, limits are trying to get this thing completely destroyed and not even like, hey, can we bury this? Like let's destroy it. There was an investigative reporter named James Banford who wrote a lot about this that called it the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government. And if not for Oliver Stone, sort of that JFK movie was so popular for like Americans after that calling for the release and like opening of records. We may never have known. So, hey, Ollie Stone. Yeah, he got an act of Congress passed through his movie. That's how popular that movie was when it came out. It'd be like passing the Hobbit Act or something

back in like 2007. To never make another Hobbit movie would be that act. Or another eight hour Beatles documentary. How about that? Ouch. Well, since Chuck said, Ouch, everybody, that's it for Operation Northwoods, which means it's time for Listener Mail. Man, I mean, just hostility toward the Beatles here at the end. You didn't see that coming, huh? Outright hostility. I get the Peter Jackson link, but all right, I'm going to call this from a night shift nurse doing great work. Hey guys, my husband recently introduced me to your podcast about two years into the backlog and loving it. I started with your most recent pod and work backwards, but my husband scrolls through and

picks one at random, Russian roulette style, which seems insane to me. I've been trying to figure out if our listening style says anything about our personalities. I would say I'm a little more methodical and he's more spontaneous in life. So maybe there's something to that. Yeah. So Lindsay, 1,000%. I mean, your husband is flying by the seat of his pants, it sounds like. Yeah. Fast and loose. He's like, yeah, let's hear what they have to say about stupid grass. Yeah. You know what we had to say? A lot. We did those long episodes. And you know, we've talked about this before. There is no wrong way to listen to any show, including stuff you should know. We personally sort of endorse the sandwiching idea, which is if you're new to the

show, listen to the most recent release, because that way sometimes they're timely, but at least you're in the know about current jokes and things we're referencing. And if we have live shows going on, like people miss out on kind of information release. And then see sandwich. So you listen to the most recent and then you pick one from the backpack catalog, the deep web. No, no, no, not the deep web. So we've endorsed that, but there's no wrong way to listen. You can be one of those two times as fast, play our voices two times as fast, weirdos. I think that's wrong. That's the one that's wrong. Just hit download, you know. I'm just teasing. No, it's right. However, you listen is great. It's weird, I think, to listen to us as if we were the chipmunks. But yeah,

I think it's funny though too. If that's your jam, then go for it. Watch this. I think it's funny though too. It's going to be like four times when they get to that part. That's right. I love it. Or maybe we should do this. What are you, John Wayne? No, but it's sped up at two times. It sounded like myself. Right. It wasn't John Wayne, wasn't it? That was great, Chuck. You just brought a smile to my face. Good. All right, let me finish this up. Anyway, I'm a night shift nurse. I listen to podcasts, especially on my way home from work, to decompress for my shift. Thank you for keeping me company on my drive, keeping me awake after working these long hours. Find your voices soothing,

yet engaging. Really admire that you can do that and admit when you are wrong as well, which is such a hard thing to do in these polarizing times. That is from Lindsey Johnson, MSNRN. Nice. Thank you, Lindsey, doing God's work out there. We appreciate you. We appreciate your husband also for introducing you to us. I don't know what he's doing, but... Hey, man, whoever he's doing is fine with me. Agreed. If you want to be like Lindsey and get in touch with us, we would love that. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.ihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Munga Shatikler, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me, and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes, because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.