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FILE 042 · VOL VII · They Lied to Your Parents
The Joint Chiefs Signed a Plan to Kill Americans and Blame Cuba
The worst ideas are never secret because they are rare. They are secret because they are ordinary.
Based on: Operation Northwoods
Intake record
| Recovered from | Estate of a retired Army colonel, Alexandria, Virginia; a carbon copy in a locked attaché case |
|---|---|
| Contents | Carbon copy of a planning annex (1962), a son's notes from a recorded conversation (1997) |
| Finder | T. Ashford, son |
| Status | The original memorandum was declassified in 1997 and is publicly available. The annex in this case is not part of it. |
Recovered file
Tom Ashford's father, Walter, was a lieutenant colonel on the Joint Staff in 1962. He was thirty-eight, bright, ambitious, and very good at what the Army called contingency planning, which meant imagining things that might never happen and writing down how to do them.
When Tom read about Northwoods in the newspaper in 1997, he called his father that night. Walter was seventy-three by then, a widower, living alone in a brick house in Alexandria. Tom asked him if he had ever heard of it.
There was a silence on the line, and then his father said, "Come over Sunday. Bring a tape recorder."
The rest of this file is sealed. The ending, the sources and the archivist's note unseal with the file.
Unseal File 042 ($2.99) · its volume · everything ($49.99)
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