White House Linked To Prostitution Scandal & Coverup

revgen · Oct 9, 2014

Aides knew of possible White House link to Cartagena, Colombia, prostitution scandal

As nearly two dozen Secret Service agents and members of the military were punished or fired following a 2012 prostitution scandal in Colombia, Obama administration officials repeatedly denied that anyone from the White House was involved.

But new details drawn from government documents and interviews show that senior White House aides were given information at the time suggesting that a prostitute was an overnight guest in the hotel room of a presidential advance-team member — yet that information was never thoroughly investigated or publicly acknowledged.

The information that the Secret Service shared with the White House included hotel records and firsthand accounts — the same types of evidence the agency and military relied on to determine who in their ranks was involved.

The Secret Service shared its findings twice in the weeks after the scandal with top White House officials, including then-White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler. Each time, she and other presidential aides conducted an interview with the advance-team member and concluded that he had done nothing wrong.

Meanwhile, the new details also show that a separate set of investigators in the inspector general’s office of the Department of Homeland Security — tasked by a Senate committee with digging more deeply into misconduct on the trip — found additional evidence from records and eyewitnesses who had accompanied the team member in Colombia.

The lead investigator later told Senate staffers that he felt pressure from his superiors in the office of Charles K. Edwards, who was then the acting inspector general, to withhold evidence — and that, in the heat of an election year, decisions were being made with political considerations in mind.

“We were directed at the time . . . to delay the report of the investigation until after the 2012 election,” David Nieland, the lead investigator on the Colombia case for the DHS inspector general’s office, told Senate staffers, according to three people with knowledge of his statement.

Nieland added that his superiors told him “to withhold and alter certain information in the report of investigation because it was potentially embarrassing to the administration.”

Edwards told Senate staffers that any changes to the report were part of the normal editing process and that he sought to keep the focus of his investigation on DHS employees, according to statements he made to Senate staffers that are part of the public record.

White House spokesman Eric Schultz said Wednesday that President Obama and his advisers did not interfere with the inspector general’s investigation. “As was reported more than two years ago, the White House conducted an internal review that did not identify any inappropriate behavior on the part of the White House advance team,” Schultz said. He cited a Senate report on the inspector general’s office from this April that said an inquiry was unable to verify Nieland’s contention that he was ordered to change the IG report over political concerns.

Whether the White House volunteer, Jonathan Dach, was involved in wrongdoing in Cartagena, Colombia, remains unclear. Dach, then a 25-year-old Yale University law student, declined to be interviewed, but through his attorney he denied hiring a prostitute or bringing anyone to his hotel room. Dach has long made the same denials to White House officials.

Dach this year started working full time in the Obama administration on a federal contract as a policy adviser in the Office on Global Women’s Issues at the State Department.

Dach’s father, Leslie Dach, is a prominent Democratic donor who gave $23,900 to the party in 2008 to help elect Obama. In his previous job as a top lobbyist for Wal-Mart, he partnered with the White House on high-profile projects, including Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” campaign.

He, too, joined the Obama administration this year. In July, he was named a senior counselor with the Department of Health and Human Services, where part of his responsibilities include handling the next phase of the Affordable Care Act.

Richard A. Sauber, who represents both Dachs, said that Jonathan Dach denies any involvement in the prostitution scandal and that no one in his family intervened with White House officials or federal investigators.

“The underlying allegations about any inappropriate conduct by Jonathan Dach in Cartagena are utterly and completely false,” Sauber said. “In addition, neither he nor anyone acting on his behalf ever contacted the DHS IG’s office about its report.”

Nevertheless, the question of whether the prostitution scandal reached into the White House had consequences beyond the West Wing.

Within the inspector general’s office, investigators and their bosses fought heatedly with each other over whether to pursue White House team members’ possible involvement. Office staffers who raised questions about a White House role said they were put on administrative leave as a punishment for doing so. Later, Edwards, the acting inspector general, resigned amid allegations of misconduct stemming in part from the dispute.

Also, the way the White House handled the scandal remains a sore point among rank-and-file members of the Secret Service more than two years later.

Former and current Secret Service agents said they are angry at the White House’s public insistence that none of its team members were involved and its private decision to not fully investigate one of its own — while their colleagues had their careers ruined or hampered.

Ten members of the Secret Service — ranging from younger, lower-level officers assigned to rope-line security to seasoned members of a counterassault team — lost their jobs because of their actions in Cartagena. The agents were told that they jeopardized national security by drinking excessively and having contact with foreign nationals.

They were treated “radically differently by different parts of the same executive branch,” said Larry Berger, a lawyer who represented many of the agents, who were union members of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association.

Given the renewed focus on the Secret Service after recent reports of a series of security lapses, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) wrote to White House chief of staff Denis McDonough last week voicing concerns that “steps were taken by the Administration to cover-up or deflect” White House involvement in the scandal. Chaffetz wrote that it remains unclear how the White House concluded that one of its team members was not involved, and he has requested records of Ruemmler’s review.

Dach’s role in Cartagena was far different from that of Secret Service agents who were responsible for the president’s safety. He was a volunteer who helped coordinate drivers for the White House travel office. He was paid a per diem, not a salary, and was reimbursed for expenses.

Dach and his fellow volunteers underwent background checks, according to a former administration official. That person said that on trips, team members are familiar with the president’s general itinerary in advance of his arrival but not the most sensitive information about his movements.

Travel volunteers, who are often recommended for the position by White House staffers, are repeatedly reminded that they are “mini-ambassadors” for the U.S. government and that their conduct reflects on the president and first lady, the former official said.

Administration officials interviewed by The Post earlier this year said there was no reason to investigate Dach beyond interviews with him and his fellow White House team members and a review of their expense accounts, because he was not a government employee and because prostitution is legal in parts of Colombia, including Cartagena.

One senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information, said Ruemmler believed it would be a “real scandal” if she had sent “a team of people to Colombia to investigate a volunteer over something that’s not a criminal act. . . . That would be insane.”

Ruemmler, now a private-practice lawyer who is under White House consideration to replace the departing attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., did not respond to requests for comment.

‘No credible information’
The prostitution scandal erupted on April 14, 2012, the day Obama arrived in the coastal city of Cartagena. News that Secret Service agents had brought prostitutes back to their hotel rooms instantly overshadowed a summit that White House officials had hoped would focus on building economic ties with Latin America.

Obama initially described the agents involved as “a couple of knuckleheads” and told reporters at the time that his attitude about the behavior of the Secret Service is “no different than what I expect out of my delegation that’s sitting here.”

“We’re representing the people of the United States,” he said, “and when we travel to another country I expect us to observe the highest standards, because we’re not just representing ourselves.”

The Secret Service first provided evidence pointing to Dach’s potential involvement in the scandal less than a week later, on April 20.

The information, which then-Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan gave to Ruemmler, was not detailed. It said Secret Service investigators had evidence indicating Dach registered a prostitute into his room at the Hilton Cartagena Hotel shortly after midnight on April 4. He also conveyed that Secret Service agents on the ground had information suggesting the same.

The senior administration official said the White House’s position at the time was that the information amounted to little more than “rumor.”

Also on April 20, a Friday, reporters asked press secretary Jay Carney whether White House staffers had been involved. He said his information was that the incident did not “involve anything but the agents and the military personnel.”

White House lawyers in Ruemmler’s office spent that weekend interviewing all of the travel-office advance-team members who had been in Cartagena, including Dach.

Dach denied any wrongdoing, according to the administration official. Fellow White House team members said he had gone to dinner with them on April 3 — the night they arrived in town to prepare for Obama’s visit — and accompanied them back to the Hilton in a staff van. None reported witnessing any misbehavior, the senior administration official said.

The lawyers determined that there was “no credible information” to implicate Dach or anyone else from the White House at that time, the official said.

A Dach family spokeswoman, Amy Weiss, said Wednesday night that Dach returned to the Hilton at approximately 10:48 pm on April 3 after dinner that evening with other team members. He texted a friend from his room that he was “exhausted,” she said; by that time, he had been awake and traveling for 23 hours.

The weekend inquiry conducted by White House officials was less extensive than those undertaken by Secret Service and Pentagon officials, according to several government officials familiar with the probes. Those agencies had devoted considerable resources to their investigations, conducting extensive interviews and sending teams to Colombia for more than two weeks to track down and interview prostitutes and hotel staff members.

The Secret Service also administered multiple polygraph tests to each of the agents, asking whether they had brought prostitutes to their rooms and paid for services, according to several agents and federal records.

The following Monday, in response to questions from reporters, Carney said that “there have been no specific, credible allegations of misconduct by anyone on the White House advance team or the White House staff.”

Carney added that, “out of due diligence, the White House counsel’s office has conducted a review of the White House advance team and . . . came to the conclusion that there’s no indication that any member of the White House advance team engaged in any improper conduct or behavior.”

About three weeks later, on May 11, the Secret Service again contacted the White House, this time with more detailed evidence pointing to Dach’s involvement, according to the senior administration official.

Sullivan informed Ruemmler that agency investigators had obtained copies of the Hilton hotel records, which listed Dach’s room number and showed an additional overnight guest had been registered to his room on April 4. The information was now based on investigators’ interviews with the hotel’s director of business development, front-desk manager and security chief, who explained how guests must personally register their overnight visitors and how they determined that U.S. personnel had done so.

Many hotels in Colombia, for security reasons, maintain detailed records of additional overnight visitors. At the Hilton, prostitutes are required to show identification to ensure they are not underage. That identification is photocopied by the hotel and stored with the records of the guest staying in the room.

The Post reviewed copies of the hotel logs for Dach’s stay, which showed that a woman was registered to Dach’s room at 12:02 a.m. April 4 and included an attached photocopy of a woman’s ID card. Through his attorney, Dach declined to discuss these details as well.

Hotel staff members in Cartagena told federal investigators that they had determined Dach was one of three guests at the Hilton who had additional overnight guests registered to their rooms, federal records reviewed by The Post show. The other two were a military staffer stationed at the White House and another Secret Service agent.

The records reviewed by The Post list three names — one of which is redacted and identified only as a White House travel-team member. Two government officials who have seen an unredacted version separately confirmed that Dach is the travel-team member listed.

The room number provided next to the redacted name, 513, matches the one listed for Dach on a bill and hotel registration records that administration officials shared with The Post.

The new information did not change the White House’s position.

Most Secret Service agents implicated in the scandal were staying at a different place, the Hotel Caribe. The White House learned from the Secret Service of a case of mistaken identity at the Caribe, in which one Secret Service agent was erroneously accused of bringing a prostitute to his room.

White House lawyers learned about the mix-up and cited it as a reason to question the evidence provided by the Secret Service.

Dach “gave responses that were not in any way indicative that he did in fact have an overnight guest,” the senior administration official said. “We concluded he was being truthful.”

Senate inquiry
Questions about Dach’s involvement in the scandal did not end there. Concerned that the primary investigation into the incident by the Secret Service was not thorough enough, a subcommittee of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in late May 2012 asked the DHS inspector general’s office to conduct its own investigation.

IG investigators reviewed information that pointed to Dach. An agent said he saw Dach with a woman he believed was a prostitute, and another had information after reviewing records that showed he had registered a woman into his room.

Nieland’s team also found that hotel officials had waived a fee normally charged to guests staying overnight. Hilton Worldwide officials in Virginia said their records showed Dach “was not charged for additional guest as a benefit of Hilton Honor Member.”

Weiss, the Dach family spokeswoman, said Wednesday night that the Hilton in Cartagena told Dach it has no records in Dach’s file indicating that he sought to waive any overnight guest fee.

Nieland’s team also collected research showing that the name of the woman in the Hilton records registered to Dach’s room matched that of a woman advertising herself on the Internet as a prostitute. The woman had posted photos of herself in undergarments in front of “Summit of the Americas” signs in Cartagena at the time of the trip, according to federal records and people familiar with the probe.

The Post sent two reporters to Cartagena but were unable to locate the woman.

Nieland later told Senate staffers that his superiors demanded that he remove from an official report references to the evidence pointing to the White House team member.

Nieland said the instructions came less than 24 hours after his superiors said Edwards had briefed then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano about the potential involvement of the White House team member, according to documents reviewed by The Post.

A spokesman for Napolitano told The Post that she never “ordered that anything be deleted in the inspector general’s report or asked for a delay,” but he declined to describe her conversations at the time with the inspector general.

Edwards was getting other complaints about the actions of his investigators, according to two people familiar with Edwards’s private testimony to the Senate committee. Two senior staffers to then-Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), who was the chairman of the committee, told Edwards he was not the inspector general of the White House and should avoid scrutinizing the White House in his report, according to the two people.

Nieland and two other members of the office fought or questioned alterations to the report. All three were later put on administrative leave for what they believed was their questioning of the changes.

Their superiors, including Edwards, said the discipline was unrelated to their complaints about the alterations.

The Office of Special Counsel, where one of the staff members resisting the changes filed a formal complaint against Edwards, issued a letter saying that there was convincing evidence that the action against him was retaliatory. Nieland was later suspended for an unrelated personnel matter, but he believed the move was retaliation for the questions he had raised the previous year. Senate investigators said they were unable to substantiate whether the third investigator was a victim of retaliation.

The strife within the inspector general’s office grew so severe that it was scrutinized by the Senate committee as part of a broader inquiry into Edwards’s conduct.

The Senate report noted conflicting accounts of Nieland’s role in the Secret Service investigation. Nieland’s superiors said Nieland told them he did not suspect a “cover-up” in their alterations. But Nieland later said to Senate investigators that he told his bosses that they were “sitting on information that could influence an election.”

Edwards, who later stepped down, disputed Nieland’s claims as part of the inquiry, telling Senate investigators the alterations were part of the ordinary editing process.

The Senate report said committee staffers could not determine whether politics or outside pressure were factors in the changes Edwards’s deputies ordered in the report. They noted that Edwards declined to provide the committee with any of his internal correspondence about the Secret Service investigation. The Senate report did conclude that Edwards had altered investigations at the behest of administration officials.

In a summary letter to Congress in September 2012, Edwards had made a passing reference to hotel logs that suggested a White House advance-team member may have had an overnight guest, but he said his investigators did not pursue the matter, because it was outside the agency’s jurisdiction.

The reference caught the attention of some reporters, who raised questions with White House officials, who continued to deny any wrongdoing by any White House team members. Since Edwards’s departure, his successor has made public a few more paragraphs in the report about information that pointed to a White House advance-team member.

Joshua Partlow in Cartagena and Ernesto Londoño, Alice Crites and Tim Farnam in Washington contributed to this report.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...98dc90-4e7e-11e4-aa5e-7153e466a02d_story.html

Wow. No wonder Eric Holder left his office recently. Fast and Furious, Benghazi, and now this.

TIME · Oct 9, 2014

Most corrupt White House in the nation's history... and we've had some doozies.

ZenMaster · Oct 9, 2014

I am not a US resident, so I am not the one to care, but lately it just seems that some things that in the past used to stay "covert" are much more easily exposed. Some of it is the omnipresence of the smartphones, of course, and some of it is the change of the generation, it seems.

Is generation Y more willing to blow the whistle?

TIME · Oct 9, 2014

ZenMaster said: ↑

I am not a US resident, so I am not the one to care, but lately it just seems that some things that in the past used to stay "covert" are much more easily exposed. Some of it is the omnipresence of the smartphones, of course, and some of it is the change of the generation, it seems.

Is generation Y more willing to blow the whistle?
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I'm sure you're right, but some of it is just a bigger collection of corrupt people.

ZenMaster · Oct 9, 2014

That is clearly the reason, but one can dream, can't one?

Barnstable · Oct 9, 2014

Ehhhhh, I don't really think this whitehouse is any more corrupt than some in the past. We've had some terrible secrets come out about some of them years afterwards.

What we have now is the secrets coming out during the administration because of the internet and how prevalent information sharing is in this day and age. This is just a different time. For instance I would have no doubt that other high level whitehoues administrations have had a ton of prostitution issues... the difference would be they didn't have that info put out to the public while in office. Would they have lied about it too? I bet they would... but they didn't have to. The information wasn't going to be as available so quickly, so no one knew till after the administration left office.

TIME · Oct 9, 2014

TIME · Oct 9, 2014

Barnstable said: ↑

Ehhhhh, I don't really think this whitehouse is any more corrupt than some in the past. We've had some terrible secrets come out about some of them years afterwards.

What we have now is the secrets coming out during the administration because of the internet and how prevalent information sharing is in this day and age. This is just a different time. For instance I would have no doubt that other high level whitehoues administrations have had a ton of prostitution issues... the difference would be they didn't have that info put out to the public while in office. Would they have lied about it too? I bet they would... but they didn't have to. The information wasn't going to be as available so quickly, so no one knew till after the administration left office.
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Barns, I would say this admin is easily twice as corrupt as any previous one.

Barnstable · Oct 9, 2014

Why do you say that?

TIME · Oct 9, 2014

@Barnstable

Even if it was JUST the IRS scandal, it would already be the worst. Never in US History has the tax collecting arm of the government been so blatantly abused for political purposes.

But, it's much more than that. I won't bore you with the ever growing list of scandals that has grown so long that most people have forgotten about the ones that have dropped one or two down the list.

Every administration has issues. Comes with the territory when you are dealing with massive power + $$$ + career politicians. Both Republicans and Democrats have had their share. This one is simply much worse.

Barnstable · Oct 9, 2014

@TIME I suppose this doesn't count because Kennedy actually stopped this from happening, but the first thing I thought about when I think of the most corrupt administration was Operation Northwoods in the 1960s.

The Department of Defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff planned to have the CIA commit acts of terrorism, bombings, attacks against the US military and civilians, and hijackings around the US in order to blame Cuba and have an excuse to go to war.

I guess it kind of depends on if you consider the Joint Chiefs of Staff to be a part of the administration, but that is the worst thing I've ever heard the US government do. Luckily the president at the time was better than Obama, or it might have happened.

TIME · Oct 9, 2014

Barnstable said: ↑

@TIME I suppose this doesn't count because Kennedy actually stopped this from happening, but the first thing I thought about when I think of the most corrupt administration was Operation Northwoods in the 1960s.

The Department of Defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff planned to have the CIA commit acts of terrorism, bombings, attacks against the US military and civilians, and hijackings around the US in order to blame Cuba and have an excuse to go to war.

I guess it kind of depends on if you consider the Joint Chiefs of Staff to be a part of the administration, but that is the worst thing I've ever heard the US government do. Luckily the president at the time was better than Obama, or it might have happened.
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I've never heard of that. Chilling. Sounds like a movie from the 60s called Seven Days in May.

Barnstable · Oct 9, 2014

@TIME Yep. It sounds like a John Greshim novel, but it was real. Read this article:

Operation Northwoods

US PLANNED FAKE TERROR ATTACKS ON CITIZENS
TO CREATE SUPPORT FOR CUBAN WAR

From BODY OF SECRETS, James Bamford, Doubleday, 2001, p.82 and following.
Scanned and edited by NY Transfer News.

...In [Joint Chief's chair] Lemnitzer's view, the country would be far better off if the generals could take over. [JFK assassination legend has it some general presided over the fudgy JFK autopsy. --Mk]
For those military officers who were sitting on the fence, the Kennedy administration's botched Bay of Pigs invasion was the last straw. "The Bay of Pigs fiasco broke the dike," said one report at the time. "President Kennedy was pilloried by the super patriots as a 'no-win' chief . . . The Far Right became a fount of proposals born of frustration and put forward in the name of anti-Communism. . . Active-duty commanders played host to anti-Communist seminars on their bases and attended or addressed Right-wing meetings elsewhere."

Although no one in Congress could have known it at the time, Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs had quietly slipped over the edge.

According to secret and long-hidden documents obtained for Body of Secrets, the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government. In the name of antiCommunism, they proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba.

Operation NorthwoodsClick images for full sized scans

Code named Operation Northwoods, the plan, which had the written approval of the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.

The idea may actually have originated with President Eisenhower in the last days of his administration. With the Cold War hotter than ever and the recent U-2 scandal fresh in the public's memory, the old general wanted to go out with a win. He wanted desperately to invade Cuba in the weeks leading up to Kennedy's inauguration; indeed, on January 3 he told Lemnitzer and other aides in his Cabinet Room that he would move against Castro before the inauguration if only the Cubans gave him a really good excuse. Then, with time growing short, Eisenhower floated an idea. If Castro failed to provide that excuse, perhaps, he said, the United States "could think of manufacturing something that would be generally acceptable." What he was suggesting was a pretext a bombing, an attack, an act of sabotage carried out secretly against the United States by the United States. Its purpose would be to justify the launching of a war. It was a dangerous suggestion by a desperate president.

Although no such war took place, the idea was not lost on General Lemnitzer But he and his colleagues were frustrated by Kennedy's failure to authorize their plan, and angry that Castro had not provided an excuse to invade.

The final straw may have come during a White House meeting on February 26, 1962. Concerned that General Lansdale's various covert action plans under Operation Mongoose were simply becoming more outrageous and going nowhere, Robert Kennedy told him to drop all anti-Castro efforts. Instead, Lansdale was ordered to concentrate for the next three months strictly on gathering intelligence about Cuba. It was a humiliating defeat for Lansdale, a man more accustomed to praise than to scorn.

As the Kennedy brothers appeared to suddenly "go soft" on Castro, Lemnitzer could see his opportunity to invade Cuba quickly slipping away. The attempts to provoke the Cuban public to revolt seemed dead and Castro, unfortunately, appeared to have no inclination to launch any attacks against Americans or their property Lemnitzer and the other Chiefs knew there was only one option left that would ensure their war. They would have to trick the American public and world opinion into hating Cuba so much that they would not only go along, but would insist that he and his generals launch their war against Castro. "World opinion, and the United Nations forum," said a secret JCS document, "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."

Operation Northwoods called for a war in which many patriotic Americans and innocent Cubans would die senseless deaths, all to satisfy the egos of twisted generals back in Washington, safe in their taxpayer financed homes and limousines.

One idea seriously considered involved the launch of John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth. On February 20,1962, Glenn was to lift off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on his historic journey. The flight was to carry the banner of America's virtues of truth, freedom, and democracy into orbit high over the planet. But Lemnitzer and his Chiefs had a different idea. They proposed to Lansdale that, should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, "the objective is to provide irrevocable proof that . . . the fault lies with the Communists et al Cuba [sic.]"

This would be accomplished, Lemnitzer continued, "by manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans." Thus, as NASA prepared to send the first American into space, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were preparing to use John Glenn's possible death as a pretext to launch a war.

Glenn lifted into history without mishap, leaving Lemnitzer and the Chiefs to begin devising new plots which they suggested be carried out "within the time frame of the next few months."

Among the actions recommended was "a series of well coordinated incidents to take place in and around" the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This included dressing "friendly" Cubans in Cuban military uniforms and then have them "start riots near the main gate of the base. Others would pretend to be saboteurs inside the base. Ammunition would be blown up, fires started, aircraft sabotaged, mortars fired at the base with damage to installations."

The suggested operations grew progressively more outrageous. Another called for an action similar to the infamous incident in February 1898 when an explosion aboard the battleship Maine in Havana harbor killed 266 U.S. sailors. Although the exact cause of the explosion remained undetermined, it sparked the Spanish-American War with Cuba. Incited by the deadly blast, more than one million men volunteered for duty. Lemnitzer and his generals came up with a similar plan. "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," they proposed; "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation."

There seemed no limit to their fanaticism: "We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington," they wrote. "The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States.

We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). . . . We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized."

Bombings were proposed, false arrests, hijackings:

*"Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government."

*"Advantage can be taken of the sensitivity of the Dominican [Republic] Air Force to intrusions within their national air space. 'Cuban' B-26 or C-46 type aircraft could make cane burning raids at night. Soviet Bloc incendiaries could be found. This could be coupled with 'Cuban' messages to the Communist underground in the Dominican Republic and 'Cuban' shipments of arms which would be found, or intercepted, on the beach. Use of MiG type aircraft by U.S. pilots could provide additional provocation."

*"Hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft could appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the Government of Cuba."

Among the most elaborate schemes was to "create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight."

Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs worked out a complex deception:

An aircraft at Elgin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CJA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone [a remotely controlled unmanned aircraft]. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida.

From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Elgin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will be transmitting on the international distress frequency a "May Day" message stating he is under attack by Cuban MiG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft, which will be triggered by radio signal. This will allow ICAO [International Civil Aviation Organization radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to tell the U.S. what has happened to the aircraft instead of the U.S. trying to "sell" the incident.

Finally, there was a plan to "make it appear that Communist Cuban MiGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack." It was a particularly believable operation given the decade of shoot downs that had just taken place.

In the final sentence of his letter to Secretary McNamara recommending the operations, Lemnitzer made a grab for even more power asking that the Joint Chiefs be placed in charge of carrying out Operation Northwoods and the invasion. "It is recommended," he wrote, "that this responsibility for both oven and covert military operations be assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

At 2:30 on the afternoon of Tuesday, March 13, 1962, Lemnitzer went over last-minute details of Operation Northwoods with his covert action chief, Brigadier General William H. Craig, and signed the document. He then went to a "special meeting" in McNamara's office. An hour later he met with Kennedy's military representative, General Maxwell Taylor. What happened during those meetings is unknown. But three days later, President Kennedy told Lemnitzer that there was virtually no possibility that the U.S. would ever use overt military force in Cuba.

Undeterred, Lemnitzer and the Chiefs persisted, virtually to the point of demanding that they be given authority to invade and take over Cuba. About a month after submitting Operation Northwoods, they met the "tank," as the JCS conference room was called, and agreed on the wording of a tough memorandum to McNamara. "The Joint Chiefs of Staff believe that the Cuban problem must be solved in the near future," they wrote. "Further, they see no prospect of early success in overthrowing the present communist regime either as a result of internal uprising or external political, economic or psychological pressures. Accordingly they believe that military intervention by the United States will be required to overthrow the present communist regime."

Lemnitzer was virtually rabid in his hatred of Communism in general and Castro in particular "The Joint Chiefs of Staff believe that the United States can undertake military intervention in Cuba without risk of general war" he continued. "They also believe that the intervention can be accomplished rapidly enough to minimize communist opportunities for solicitation of UN action." However; what Lemnitzer was suggesting was not freeing the Cuban people, who were largely in support of Castro, but imprisoning them in a U.S. military-controlled police state. "Forces would assure rapid essential military control of Cuba," he wrote. "Continued police action would be required."

Concluding, Lemnitzer did not mince words: "[T]he Joint Chiefs of Staff recommend that a national policy of early military intervention in Cuba be adopted by the United States. They also recommend that such intervention be undertaken as soon as possible and preferably before the release of National Guard and Reserve forces presently on active duty."

By then McNamara had virtually no confidence in his military chief and was rejecting nearly every proposal the general sent to him. The rejections became so routine, said one of Lemnitzer's former staff officers, that the staffer told the general that the situation was putting the military in an "embarrassing rut." But Lemnitzer replied, "I am the senior military office--it's my job to state what I believe and it's his [McNamara's] job to approve or disapprove." "McNamara's arrogance was astonishing," said Lemnitzer's aide, who knew nothing of Operation Northwoods. "He gave General Lemnitzer very short shrift and treated him like a schoolboy. The general almost stood at attention when he came into the room. Everything was 'Yes, sir' and 'No, sir.'

Within months, Lemnitzer was denied a second term as JCS chairman and transferred to Europe as chief of NATO. Years later President Gerald Ford appointed Lemnitzer, a darling of the Republican right, to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Lemnitzer's Cuba chief, Brigadier General Craig, was also transferred. Promoted to major general, he spent three years as chief of the Army Security Agency, NSA's military arm.

Because of the secrecy and illegality of Operation Northwoods, all details remained hidden for forty years. Lemnitzer may have thought that all copies of the relevant documents had been destroyed; he was not one to leave compromising material lying around. Following the Bay of Pigs debacle, for example, he ordered Brigadier General David W Gray, Craig's predecessor as chief of the Cuba project within the JCS, to destroy all his notes concerning Joint Chiefs actions and discussions during that period. Gray's meticulous notes were the only detailed official records of what happened within the JCS during that time. According to Gray, Lemnitzer feared a congressional investigation and therefore wanted any incriminating evidence destroyed.

With the evidence destroyed, Lemnitzer felt free to lie to Congress. When asked, during secret hearings before a Senate committee, if he knew of any Pentagon plans for a direct invasion of Cuba he said he did not. Yet detailed JCS invasion plans had been drawn up even before Kennedy was inaugurated. And additional plans had been developed since. The consummate planner and man of details also became evasive, suddenly encountering great difficulty in recalling key aspects of the operation, as if he had been out of the country during the period. It was a sorry spectacle. Senator Gore called for Lemnitzer to be fired. "We need a shake up of the Joint Chiefs of Staff" he said. "We direly need a new chairman, as well as new members." No one had any idea of Operation Northwoods.

Because so many documents were destroyed, it is difficult to determine how many senior officials were aware of Operation Northwoods. As has been described, the document was signed and fully approved by Lemnitzer and the rest of the Joint Chiefs and addressed to the Secretary of Defense for his signature. Whether it went beyond McNamara to the president and the attorney general is not known.

Even after Lemnitzer lost his job, the Joint Chiefs kept planning "pretext" operations at least into 1963. Among their proposals was a deliberately create a war between Cuba and any of a number of .n American neighbors. This would give the United States military an excuse to come in on the side of Cuba's adversary and get rid of "A contrived 'Cuban' attack on an OAS [Organization of Americas] member could be set up," said one proposal, "and the attacked state could be urged to 'take measures of self-defense and request ice from the U.S. and OAS; the U.S. could almost certainly obtain necessary two-thirds support among OAS members for collective action against Cuba."

Among the nations they suggested that the United States secretly were Jamaica and Trinidad-Tobago. Both were members of the Commonwealth; thus, by secretly attacking them and then blaming Cuba, the United States could lure England into the war Castro. The report noted, "Any of the contrived situations de above are inherently, extremely risky in our democratic system in which security can be maintained, after the fact, with very great difficulty. If the decision should be made to set up a contrived situation it be one in which participation by U.S. personnel is limited only to the most highly trusted covert personnel. This suggests the infeasibility of the use of military units for any aspect of the contrived situation."

The report even suggested secretly paying someone in the Castro government to attack the United States: "The only area remaining for ration then would be to bribe one of Castro's subordinate commanders to initiate an attack on [the U.S. naval base at] Guantanamo." The act suggested--bribing a foreign nation to launch a violent attack American military installation--was treason.

In May 1963, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul H. Nitze sent a the White House proposing "a possible scenario whereby an attack on a United States reconnaissance aircraft could be exploited toward the end of effecting the removal of the Castro regime." In the event Cuba attacked a U-2, the plan proposed sending in additional American pilots, this time on dangerous, unnecessary low-level reconnaissance missions with the expectation that they would also be shot down, thus provoking a war "[T]he U.S. could undertake various measures designed to stimulate the Cubans to provoke a new incident," said the plan. Nitze, however, did not volunteer to be one of the pilots.

One idea involved sending fighters across the island on "harassing reconnaissance" and "show-off" missions "flaunting our freedom of action, hoping to stir the Cuban military to action." "Thus," said the plan, "depending above all on whether the Cubans were or could be made to be trigger-happy, the development of the initial downing of a reconnaissance plane could lead at best to the elimination of Castro, perhaps to the removal of Soviet troops and the installation of ground inspection in Cuba, or at the least to our demonstration of firmness on reconnaissance." About a month later, a low-level flight was made across Cuba, but unfortunately for the Pentagon, instead of bullets it produced only a protest.

Lemnitzer was a dangerous-perhaps even unbalanced-right-wing extremist in an extraordinarily sensitive position during a critical period. But Operation Northwoods also had the support of every single member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and even senior Pentagon official Paul Nitze argued in favor of provoking a phony war with Cuba. The fact that the most senior members of all the services and the Pentagon could be so out of touch with reality and the meaning of democracy would be hidden for four decades.

In retrospect, the documents offer new insight into the thinking of the military's star-studded leadership. Although they never succeeded in launching America into a phony war with Cuba, they may have done so with Vietnam. More than 50,000 Americans and more than 2 million Vietnamese were eventually killed in that war.

It has long been suspected that the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident-the spark that led to America's long war in Vietnam-was largely staged or provoked by U.S. officials in order to build up congressional and public support for American involvement. Over the years, serious questions have been raised about the alleged attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats on two American destroyers in the Gulf But defenders of the Pentagon have always denied such charges, arguing that senior officials would never engage in such deceit.

Now, however, in light of the Operation Northwoods documents, it at deceiving the public and trumping up wars for Americans to fight and die in was standard, approved policy at the highest levels of the Pentagon. In fact, the Gulf of Tonkin seems right out of the Operation Northwoods playbook: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba . . . casualty lists in U.S. newspapers cause a helpful wave of indignation." One need only replace "Guantanamo Bay" with "Tonkin Gulf," and "Cuba" with "North Vietnam" and the Gulf of Tonkin incident may or may not have been stage-managed, but the senior Pentagon leadership at the time was clearly capable of such deceit.
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John3:16 · Oct 9, 2014

The media used to protect the president (think of Kennedy and his numerous affairs). Then they started attacking the president (Bush Sr and his "read my lips" and Clinton's BJ, and Bush's horrible speaking skills). Now, I think the media has gone overboard in ignoring Obama's faults (and his admin). The info we get is so "after the fact" it's not funny. Stuff just doesn't get reported or investigated like it should. The most glaring is the murder of a 16 year old US citizen that Obama admin ordered. I tell people about this and they look at me like I'm crazy, yet it's FACT.

As for this prostitute scandal... ehhh.... so minor in a long list of "transparency issues" I don't even care any more. Just waiting for him to get out of office. Maybe the truth will come out about him one day. Maybe not. Either way, we have a LONG way to go, as a country, and I don't think he's helped at all. So the sooner he's out, the better. And maybe we'll get someone in who makes a difference (who am I kidding?).

therealdeal · Oct 10, 2014

At this point the two major political parties are so corrupted and so jaded it's impossible to get anywhere with them. For the most part America votes on a president and we hope he doesn't screw us up any more than we already are. Awful.

In the case of this administration (and the tail end of the last one), it's been a disaster. Both domestically and abroad we've lost ground. I can't think of a thing this administration has done that will be looked on as an outright success besides maybe the death of Osama Bin Laden. But the list of wrong things that have been done is so lengthy, I just don't even care anymore. The fact that things like this have been continually swept under the rug though is pretty much a testament to how terrible our national media coverage is.

Can't wait until this clown is gone. Hopefully the next clown won't be as detrimental.

lakerswiz · Oct 10, 2014

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