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 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 in the 1970s, including a Milan bombing with 16 casualties. "The CIA wanted to create an Italian 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 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 , 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 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 . 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 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 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 . 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 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 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.

A review of the US general nuclear war plan by the Joint Staff in 1964, which was recently published by George Washington University’s National Security Archive project, shows how the Pentagon studied options “to destroy the USSR and China as viable societies.” The review, conducted two years after the , devises the destruction of the Soviet Union “as a viable society” by annihilating 70 percent of its industrial floor space during pre-emptive and retaliatory nuclear strikes.

A similar goal is tweaked for China, given its more agrarian-based economy at the time. According to the plan, the US would wipe out 30 major Chinese cities, killing off 30 percent of ’s urban population and halving its industrial capabilities. The successful execution of the large-scale nuclear assault would ensure that China “would no longer be a viable nation,” the review reads.

The Joint Staff had proposed to use the “population loss as the primary yardstick for effectiveness in destroying the enemy society with only collateral attention to industrial damage.” This “alarming” idea meant that, as long as urban workers and managers were killed, the actual damage to industrial targets “might not be as important,” the George Washington University researchers said.

The 1964 plan doesn’t specify the anticipated enemy casualty levels, but – as the researchers note – an earlier estimate from 1961 projected that a US attack would kill 71 percent of the residents in major Soviet urban centers and 53 percent of residents in Chinese ones. Likewise, the 1962 estimate predicted the death of 70 million Soviet citizens during a “no-warning US strike” on military and urban- industrial targets.

The Pentagon continues to rely heavily on nuclear deterrence, and – just like in the 1960s – the US nuclear strategy still regards Russian and Chinese military capabilities as main “challenges” faced by Washington. The latest Nuclear Posture Review, adopted in February 2018, outlined “an unprecedented range and mix of threats” emanating from Beijing and Moscow. The document, which mentions Russia 127 times, cites the modernization of the Russian nuclear arsenal as “troubling” for the US. The existing nuclear strategy also allows the US to conduct nuclear strikes not only in response to enemies’ nuclear attacks, but also in response to “significant non-nuclear strategic attacks” on the US, its allies and partners. The newest US Nuclear Posture Review was heavily criticized by Russia and China. Moscow denounced the strategy as “confrontational,” while Beijing described the Pentagon’s approach as an example of “Cold-War mentality.”

Plan Totality (1945): earmarked 20 Soviet cities for obliteration in a first strike: Moscow, Gorki, Kuybyshev, Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Saratov, Kazan, Leningrad, Baku, Tashkent, Chelyabinsk, Nizhny Tagil, Magnitogorsk, Molotov, Tbilisi, Stalinsk, Grozny, Irkutsk, and Yaroslavl.

Operation Unthinkable (1945) assumed a surprise attack by up to 47 British and American divisions in the area of Dresden, in the middle of Soviet lines. This represented almost half of roughly 100 divisions (ca. 2.5 million men) available to the British, American and Canadian headquarters at that time. (…) The majority of any offensive operation would have been undertaken by American and British forces, as well as Polish forces and up to 100,000 German Wehrmacht soldiers.

Operation Dropshot (1949): included mission profiles that would have used 300 nuclear bombs and 29,000 high-explosive bombs on 200 targets in 100 cities and towns to wipe out 85% of the Soviet Union’s industrial potential at a single stroke. Between 75 and 100 of the 300 nuclear weapons were targeted to destroy Soviet combat aircraft on the ground. But the biggest proof is, I think, the fact that none of these plans was executed, even though at the time the Anglosphere was safely hidden behind its monopoly on nuclear weapons (and were Hiroshima and Nagasaki not destroyed in part to “scare the Russians”?) See here for more details]

Nuke Vietnam

A US general made preparations behind president’s back to nuke Vietnam, declassified memo shows:

The commander of US forces in Vietnam had devised a secret plan to use nuclear warheads against the communist North during the , before President Johnson halted the ongoing preparations, declassified documents reveal.

General William Westmoreland, who commanded American military operations in the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1968 had authorized a nuclear weapons transfer to the Southeast Asian nation, before national security advisor, Walt W. Rostow, notified the White House, prompting President Lyndon Johnson to immediately cancel the secret deployment of weapons, which could have sparked World War III, reports, citing declassified documents.

Finding themselves in a stalemate against the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) in the middle of the months-long Battle of Khe Sanh, Gen. Westmoreland devised a contingency scheme to use nuclear weapons should US forces be overrun by their enemy. The secret plan codenamed Fracture Jaw required the US nukes to get transferred from Okinawa, Japan to South Vietnam by the US Pacific command, under the leadership of Admiral Ulysses Simpson Grant Sharp Jr. The secretly planned operation was to be set in motion under a memo sent by Westmoreland to Sharp on February 10, 1968.

Once President Johnson was alerted about the plan by his national security advisor Rostow through an “eyes only” memorandum to the president, he immediately put a halt to the operation.

“When [President Johnson] learned that the planning had been set in motion, he was extraordinarily upset and forcefully sent word through Rostow and, I think, directly to Westmoreland, to shut it down,” Tom Johnson, a special assistant to the president at the time, told the NYT. According to special assistant Johnson, despite pressing the US generals to win the Battle of Khe Sanh, the 36th President feared a “wider war” could break out with China should the conflict escalate further.

Once word of the scheme reached the White House, Admiral Sharp was immediately ordered to “discontinue all planning for Fracture Jaw,” declassified documents dated February 12, 1968 show. Sharp also ordered staff to “place all planning material, including messages and correspondence relating thereto, under positive security,” noting that information about the secret operation “must be airtight.” “Johnson never fully trusted his generals,” said the former assistant. “He had great admiration for General Westmoreland, but he didn't want his generals to run the war.”

Project MKULTRA

In 2018, the CIA marked the 65th anniversary of the launch of Project MKULTRA, a secret program which engaged in mind control experiments on people. Now, thanks to new documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, the public has a chance to learn just how far those carrying out the gruesome experiments were willing to go.

For many decades, the CIA tried to prevent documents related to Project MKULTRA from being released. However, late last week, John Greenewald Jr., founder of The Black Vault, a website specializing in declassified government records, released new documents said to detail the bizarre extent of the project's experimentation on both people and animals.

The files, added to a trove of materials meticulously collected by Greenewald over the course of over two decades, detail experimentation on controlling the minds of human beings and dogs using psychotropic drugs, hypnosis, surgically-implanted electrical shock devices and radio waves.

In 2018, Canadian family members of Project MKULTRA survivors said they were planning to file a class-action lawsuit against the Canadian government and possibly McGill University over their role in the program, which was known to have used paralytic drugs, shock therapy, LSD, medically-induced comas, and exposure to repetitive messages for days on end in research aimed at reprogramming the psyche and, possibly, 'cracking' enemy spies through forced confessions.

However, according to 800 pages-worth of never-before-seen documents published by The Black Vault late last week, Project MKULTRA's 'research' went much further. The documents show, for example, that the project included elaborate experimentation on 'remote-controlled dogs', who were surgically implanted with devices which sent electrical signals to their brains to control their movement at distances for up to 200 yards. "The specific aim of the research program was to examine the possibility of controlling the behavior of a dog, in an open field, by means of remotely triggering electrical stimulation of the brain," one document explains.

The research on dogs was said to have followed up similar experimentation on rats. Discussions were also held on using cats for spy mission field work, as well as elaborate research on the possibility of using "electric fishes" for the "underwater detection, location and identification of objects."

© CIA / www.theblackvault.com/

CIA research on using 'electric fishes'. Another of the documents revealed new details on the use of experimental mind control drugs on unwilling human beings, suggesting experimenting with the use of such drugs on inmates in prison hospitals and drugging suspected criminals awaiting trial.

Excerpt from letter on the use of induced amnesia. Yet another document details experimentation with hypnotic speaking techniques to enable mind control over "large audiences."

© CIA / www.theblackvault.com/ Excerpt from letter on the use of hypnosis.

CC0 July 20, 1977: CIA Mind Control Project MKUltra Docs Released for First Time The MKULTRA program, which engaged in experiments on unwitting US and Canadian test subjects, was started in the early 1950s, gradually curtailed starting in the mid-1960s, and reported to have been shut down entirely in 1973. If the new documents presented by The Black Vault are verified, they will serve historians in helping to understand some of the even more grotesque aspects of a CIA project which already has a very dark history.