Open Secrets Project Governments are supposed to defend the law and protect their citizenry. However, the lofty principles authorities proclaim to embrace can be at odds with actual agendas. Many governments secretly resort to illegitimate activities to achieve outcomes that would otherwise be unjustifiable. Invariably, many of these activities are eventually disclosed by whistleblowers or declassification of documents. Such false flag operations occurred in many countries. Nazi arsonists set the fire at the German parliament building in 1933 to justify persecution of their opposition. In 1978, Germany’s government acknowledged its secret service set the bomb it had framed on the Red Army Faction. In 1931 Japan blew up train tracks, blaming China to justify the Manchuria invasion. Britain admittedly bombed ships carrying Jews en route to Palestine from 1946 to 1948 under the guise of “Defenders of Arab Palestine”. British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan conceded that with President Dwight Eisenhower he planned attacks in Syria in 1957 attributed to Syria’s government to effect regime change. Israel admitted it planted bombs at U.S. diplomatic facilities in Egypt in 1954, blaming it on Egyptian Muslim fundamentalists (“Lavon Affair”). According to a top Turkish general, his forces destroyed a Cyprus mosque in the 1970s attributing it to their enemy. High-level American sources recently admitted that the Turkish government carried out the chemical weapons attacks in Syria and blamed them on the Syrian government. Italy’s former head of military counter-intelligence, General Gianadelio Maletti, declared in 2001 that the CIA instigated rightwing terrorism in the 1970s, including a Milan bombing with 16 casualties. "The CIA wanted to create an Italian nationalism capable of halting … a slide to the left and … it made use of rightwing terrorism." These activities were part of “Operation Gladio”, a clandestine NATO Cold War operation. Prince Bandar, the former head of Saudi intelligence recently admitted that his government controls “Chechen” terrorists. Several Gulf state officials, including the United Arab Emirates foreign minister publically conceded in 2017 their extensive financing and arming of Syrian terrorists to overthrow Assad’s government. In the United States, White House officials instructed the FBI to blame the 2011 anthrax attacks on Al Qaeda and also tried to link the anthrax and 9/11 attacks to Iraq to justify regime change. The “Pentagon Papers”, “Family Jewels“, “Iran-Contra Affair”, “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and other illicit activities have emerged. Other notorious code names include: Operations Artichoke, Cointelpro, Condor, Gladio, Mockingbird, Mongose, Northwoods, Paperclip, Phoenix, Stuxnet, Washtub and Zapata. These were variously aimed at manipulating public perception to implement policies by use of force, exercising mind control, overthrowing foreign governments, altering election outcomes, hijacking civilian planes, killing innocent civilians and assassinating leading individuals in the economy, labor and politics of many countries. While such revelations may cause a political upheaval, they rarely result in any accountability of the principle actors or implementation of fundamental policy changes to prevent a re-occurrence. Although these acts often violate national or international laws they seem to also quickly vanish from public discourse as unfortunate “aberrations”. Even when additional related operations are subsequently exposed, the combined evidence of such persistent policies is rarely scrutinized. In some cases, the original official version of events is stoically maintained despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Thus, the Kennedy assassination, a watershed moment in American history was officially attributed to a single actor with a “magic” bullet. Decades later, any alternative scenarios are still being summarily dismissed as “conspiracy theories”. It almost seems that even after disclosure, such illicit actions are permanently shielded by a veil of secrecy. The “Open Secrets Project” selects some of these seminal events to present visual mementos based on originally classified, historic documents. The first works in this series are: “Operation Northwoods”, “JFK, The Second Bullet”, and “Atomic Bombs for the USSR”. Operation Northwoods Operation Northwoods was a proposed false flag operation against the Cuban government developed by the U.S. Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962. The proposal called for the CIA or other U.S. government operatives to commit acts of terrorism against American civilians and military targets that were to be blamed with phony evidence on the Cuban government to justify a war against Cuba. The plans included the assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington". A 2 February 1962 memorandum entitled "Possible Actions to Provoke, Harass or Disrupt Cuba," written by Brig. Gen. William H. Craig was submitted to Brig. Gen. Edward Lansdale, the commander of the related Operation Mongoose project. The proposals were rejected by the Kennedy administration. "Appendix to Enclosure A" and "Annex to Appendix to Enclosure A" of the Northwoods document published online by the National Security Archive on 6 November 1998 Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba [includes cover memoranda], March 13, 1962, TOP SECRET, 15 pp. JFK, The Second Bullet Released under the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 on October 12, 2017 is a 1964 FBI document about Oren Fenton Potito, a Christian Identity minister. The document relates claims Potito made at a public meeting citing the “Surgeon General’s report” on the assassination; he stated the first bullet entered the President’s throat below the Adam’s apple clearly showing that two persons were involved with the first shot being fired from the bridge across the park way in front of the car. To further substantiate this, Potito said there was a bullet hole in the windshield of the President’s car.” Together with the limousine’s windshield bullet hole evidence this report proves JFK was killed in a crossfire by multiple agents. “Atomic Bombs for the USSR” At the height of World War II, when the US and Soviet Union were close allies, the Pentagon drew up plans to obliterate the Soviet Union. According to a secret document dated September 15, 1945, the Pentagon had envisaged blowing up the Soviet Union with a coordinated nuclear attack directed against major urban areas. All major cities of the Soviet Union were included in the list of 66 “strategic” targets. The tables below categorize each city in terms of area in square miles and the corresponding number of atomic bombs required to annihilate and kill the inhabitants of selected urban areas. Six atomic bombs were to be used to destroy each of the larger cities including Moscow, Leningrad, Tashkent, Kiev, Kharkov and Odessa. The Pentagon estimated that a total of 204 bombs would be required to “Wipe the Soviet Union off the Map”. Were the August 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks used by the Pentagon to evaluate the viability of a much larger attack on the Soviet Union consisting of more than 204 atomic bombs? The key documents to bomb 66 cities of the Soviet Union were finalized 5-6 weeks after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (6, 9 August 1945). On September 15, 1945 — just under two weeks after the formal surrender of Japan— General Lauris Norstad sent a copy of the estimate to General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project and in charge of producing whatever bombs the USAAF might want. The documents confirm the US was involved in the “planning of genocide” against the Soviet Union. Moreover, central to our understanding of the Cold War which started in 1947, Washington’s September 1945 plan to bomb 66 cities into smithereens played a key role in triggering the nuclear arms race. The Soviet Union was threatened and developed its own atomic bomb in 1949. While the Kremlin knew about these plans to “Wipe out” the USSR, the broader public was not informed because the documents were of course classified. Today, neither the 1945 plan to blow up the Soviet Union nor the underlying cause of the nuclear arms race are acknowledged. The Western media has largely focused its attention on the Cold War US-USSR confrontation. The plan to annihilate the Soviet Union dating back to World War II and the infamous Manhattan project are not mentioned. Washington’s Cold War nuclear plans are invariably presented in response to so-called Soviet threats, when in fact it was the U.S. September 1945 plan to wipe out the Soviet which motivated Moscow to develop its nuclear weapons capabilities. Had the US decided not to develop nuclear weapons for use against the Soviet Union, the nuclear arms race would not have taken place. Neither The Soviet Union nor the People’s Republic of China would have developed nuclear capabilities as a means of “Deterrence”. The Soviet Union lost 26 million people during World War II. The USSR developed its own atomic bomb in 1949, in response to 1942 Soviet intelligence reports on the Manhattan Project. How many bombs did the USAAF request of the atomic general, when there were maybe one, maybe two bombs worth of fissile material on hand? At a minimum they wanted 123. Ideally, they would like 466. This is just a little over a month after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This initial 1945 list of 66 cities was updated in the course of the Cold War to include some 1200 cities in the USSR and the Soviet block countries. William Burr, U.S. Cold War Nuclear Attack Target List of 1200 Soviet Bloc Cities “From East Germany to China”. National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 538, December 2015. Plans for a nuclear war devised by the US Army in the 1960s considered decimating the Soviet Union and China by destroying their industrial potential and wiping out the bulk of their populations, newly declassified documents show.