Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency
by James Bamford
Doubleday, 2001; ISBN 0-385-49907-8
For the purpose of revealing the facts of American state terrorism, the book Body of Secrets is useful primarily for uncovering the existence of “Operation Northwoods”. This was a top-secret U.S. military plan in 1962 to commit acts of terrorism on American citizens in Miami and Washington D.C., while blaming it on Fidel Castro and Cuba.
Author James Bamford states that during the Kennedy Administration:
“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.”
From http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/:
Pentagon Proposed Pretexts for Cuba Invasion in 1962
“In his new exposé of the National Security Agency entitled Body of Secrets, author James Bamford highlights a set of proposals on Cuba by the Joint Chiefs of Staff codenamed OPERATION NORTHWOODS.
“This document, titled ‘Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba’ was provided by the JCS to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, as the key component of Northwoods. Written in response to a request from the Chief of the Cuba Project, Col. Edward Lansdale, the Top Secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba.
“These proposals — part of a secret anti-Castro program known as Operation Mongoose — included staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United States, developing a fake ‘Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,’ including ‘sink[ing] a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated),’ faking a Cuban airforce attack on a civilian jetliner, and concocting a ‘Remember the Maine’ incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage. Bamford himself writes that Operation Northwoods ‘may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government.’”
Fortunately, Body of Secrets was first published in April 2001, before the 9-11 attacks. It is highly unlikely that it could have been published afterwards — without the Operation Northwoods information being censored. Now tens of millions of people around the world are awakening to the growing body of evidence which proves conclusively that 9-11 was a modern-day Operation Northwoods.
The great bulk of this 700+ page book focuses on the National Security Agency (NSA) itself, of course, and the information about Operation Northwoods is only a very small part of it. The reader needs to know that while the publisher’s hype portrays Body of Secrets as an exposé of the NSA, in fact the book was written with the full cooperation of the NSA — and they make no secret of it. On the “About the Author” page of the Random House website for this book, it states openly:
“Crypto City” – the visible, above-ground part of the NSA complex“...the NSA cooperated with Bamford. ...the director of the NSA, Lt. Gen Michael V. Hayden ... granted Bamford unprecedented access to Crypto City (the NSA campus in Ft. Meade, MD), senior NSA officials, and thousands of NSA documents while he researched Body of Secrets. The NSA even hosted a book signing for Bamford on the grounds of Crypto City. It lasted more than four hours as hundreds of NSA employees lined up to have their copies of Body of Secrets autographed.” http://www.randomhouse.com/features/bamford/author.html
That should send a major warning signal to any reader who is actually interested in the truth, and nothing but the truth. You know there has to be a great deal of pro-government, pro-military, pro-NSA disinformation and propaganda in the book, artfully woven together with the truthful information.
Nevertheless, it’s now too late for them to delete the information about Operation Northwoods. The NSA’s full cooperation with the writing of the book constitutes an official U.S. government admission that Operation Northwoods did indeed exist. And if such evil plans from 1962 are revealed in a book fully authorized by the NSA, there can be no doubt that they are merely the tip of the iceberg, and other such plans have been in existence at least since then. One of them was finally used on September 11, 2001.
It is also doubtless that another U.S. government-sponsored terror attack will be committed in the future, enabling the U.S. military-government to declare nationwide martial law and enslave the population, violently crushing all domestic opposition for the remainder of this predatory nation’s miserable existence. May it be a short one.
Reviews
From Amazon.com:
Everybody knows about the CIA — the cloak-and-dagger branch of the U.S. government. Many fewer are familiar with the National Security Agency, even though it has been more important to American espionage in recent years than its better-known counterpart. The NSA is responsible for much of the intelligence gathering done via technology such as satellites [the Echelon program] and the Internet. Its home office in Maryland “contains what is probably the largest body of secrets ever created.”
Little was known about the agency’s confidential culture until veteran journalist James Bamford blew the lid off in 1982 with his bestseller The Puzzle Palace. Still, much remained in the shadows. In Body of Secrets, Bamford throws much more light on his subject — and he reveals loads of shocking information. The story of the U-2 crisis in 1960 is well known, including President Eisenhower’s decision to tell a fib to the public in order to protect a national-security secret. Bamford takes the story a disturbing step forward, showing how Eisenhower
“went so far as to order his Cabinet officers to hide his involvement in the scandal even while under oath. At least one Cabinet member directly lied to the committee, a fact known to Eisenhower.”
Even more worrisome is another revelation, from the Kennedy years:
“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 Northwoods]
Body of Secrets is an incredible piece of journalism, and it paints a deeply troubling portrait of an agency about which the public knows next to nothing. Fans of The Sword and the Shield will want to read it, as will anybody who is intrigued by conspiracies and real-life spy stories.
— John J. Miller
Publisher’s hype:
A no-holds-barred examination of the National Security Agency packed with startling secrets about its past, newsbreaking revelations about its present-day activities, and chilling predictions about its future powers and reach.
The NSA is the largest, most secretive, and most powerful intelligence agency in the world. With a staff of thirty-eight thousand people, it dwarfs the CIA in budget, manpower, and influence. Recent headlines have linked it to the economic espionage throughout Europe and to the ongoing hunt for the terrorist leader [and CIA asset] Osama bin Laden.
James Bamford first penetrated the wall of silence surrounding the NSA in 1982, with the much-talked-about bestseller The Puzzle Palace. In Body of Secrets, he offers shocking new details about the inner workings of the agency, gathered through unique access to thousands of internal documents and interviews with current and former officials. Unveiling extremely sensitive information for the first time, Bamford exposes the role the NSA played in numerous Soviet bloc Cold War conflicts and discusses its undercover involvement in the Vietnam War [Vietnam GENOCIDE, actually].
His investigation into the NSA’s technological advances during the last fifteen years brings to light a network of global surveillance ranging from on-line listening posts to sophisticated intelligence-gathering satellites [Echelon]. In a hard-hitting conclusion, he warns that the NSA is a two-edged sword. While its worldwide eavesdropping activities offer the potential for tracking down terrorists and uncovering nuclear weapons deals, it also has the capability to listen on global personal communications.
Like the breakout bestsellers on Cold War espionage The Sword and the Shield and Blind Man’s Buff, Body of Secrets is must-reading for people fascinated by the intrigues of a shadowy underworld. As one of the most important works of investigative journalism to come out of Washington in years, it should be read by everyone concerned about the inevitability of Orwell’s Big Brother.
From Publishers Weekly:
The National Security Agency (NSA), writes Bamford, has made the United States an “eavesdropping superpower,” capable of capturing, deciphering and analyzing “signal intelligence” communications in whatever form it may exist and from whatever nation it may be transmitted. Yet with a budget ($4 billion a year) and staff (numbering in the tens of thousands) that dwarf its more famous cousin, the CIA, and with a headquarters, known as “Crypto City,” that is its own self-contained community, little is known of NSA among the public and, more troublingly, even within other parts of government.
Uncovering the secrets of NSA, its history and operations, has become Bamford’s life’s work, first begun in his now classic The Puzzle Palace (1982) and continued in this significantly revised and expanded present volume. With remarkable access to highly sensitive documents and information, Bamford takes the reader from the beginnings of NSA during the early cold war, through its roles in such watershed events as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the [genocidal] Vietnam War, to the amazingly sophisticated developments in information technology taking place within NSA today. What Bamford discovers is at times surprising, often quite troubling but always fascinating.
In his conclusion, he is at once awed and deeply disturbed by what NSA can now do: ever more sophisticated surveillance techniques can mean ever greater assaults on the basic right of individual privacy. In a computer system that can store five trillion pages of text, anyone and everyone can be monitored. Writing with a flair and clarity that rivals those of the best spy novelists, Bamford has created a masterpiece of investigative reporting. ... This is the stuff spy thrillers are made from: The Puzzle Palace was a bestseller, and this will be, too. (Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.)
About the author
From the publisher’s website:
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/bamford/author.html
James Bamford was raised in Natick, Massachusetts, and spent three years in the Navy before attending law school in Boston on the G.I. Bill. After graduation, intrigued by the machinations of the Watergate scandal, he gravitated toward journalism. However, rather than pursue a newspaper career he decided instead to write a book.
That book was The Puzzle Palace: A Report on NSA, America’s Most Secret Agency. Published in 1982, it was the first book ever written about the National Security Agency and it became an immediate bestseller. It is now considered a classic. Bamford was first attracted to the subject of international espionage after reading The U-2 Affair by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross and The Secret War: The Story of International Espionage Since World War II by Sanche de Gramont.
While researching The Puzzle Palace, Bamford used the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to recently declassified NSA documents. Nevertheless, the NSA — notoriously obsessed with secrecy — threatened to prosecute Bamford for a breach of national security. [An action which they knew full well would only give credibility to the book’s contents. Therefore, such a threatened prosecution can only be regarded as an act of NSA publicity for a book they covertly approved of.] Bamford’s research, however, was totally legal and the government eventually backed off. [Yeah right, like the U.S. Corporate Mafia Government would simply “back off” in the face of something so insignificant as the law.] In fact, the government ended up using The Puzzle Palace as a textbook in its Defense Intelligence College. Bamford continues to champion congressional oversight and public scrutiny of the U.S. Intelligence Community.
Bamford spend nearly a decade as the Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings where he won a number of journalism awards for his coverage national security issues. In 1997, as the media profession began turning away from international news coverage and focusing almost exclusively on Monica Lewinsky and other domestic political scandals, Bamford left ABC to work on a new full-length book about the NSA. This became Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency. Initially published in April 2001 to rave reviews, it also became a national bestseller.
Unlike before with The Puzzle Palace, this time the NSA cooperated with Bamford. Alarmed by Hollywood films like Enemy of the State that portrayed his agency as a ruthless cadre of assassins [and yet the same Zionist plutocracy which owns Hollywood, the press and all the mass-media also effectively owns the U.S. government and the NSA], the director of the NSA, Lt. Gen Michael V. Hayden, wanted the American public to have a more accurate picture of how the NSA functioned. In order to encourage better communication between the NSA and the press, Hayden granted Bamford unprecedented access to Crypto City (the NSA campus in Ft. Meade, MD), senior NSA officials, and thousands of NSA documents while he researched Body of Secrets. The NSA even hosted a book signing for Bamford on the grounds of Crypto City. It lasted more than four hours as hundreds of NSA employees lined up to have their copies of Body of Secrets autographed.
Currently, Bamford is a distinguished visiting professor at the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications, including cover stories for the New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine. He is based in Washington, D.C. His next project deals with the intelligence aspects of the events of September 11.
Related pages
The United States Government Committed the September 11 Attacks
The CIA, Insider Trading and the World Trade Center Terror Attack
Fake Terror: the Road to Dictatorship
Operation 911: NO SUICIDE PILOTS
9-11, Mossad, the CIA and “False Flag Operations”
9-11 Was a Mossad “False Flag Operation”
The Israeli Connection To 9-11
Fox News Special Report: Israeli Spying on the U.S.
Massive Israeli Spy Ring Linked to September 11
Related sites
Pentagon Proposed Pretexts for Cuba Invasion in 1962
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/
“In his new exposé of the National Security Agency entitled Body of Secrets, author James Bamford highlights a set of proposals on Cuba by the Joint Chiefs of Staff codenamed OPERATION NORTHWOODS.
“This document, titled ‘Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba’ was provided by the JCS to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, as the key component of Northwoods. Written in response to a request from the Chief of the Cuba Project, Col. Edward Lansdale, the Top Secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba.
“These proposals — part of a secret anti-Castro program known as Operation Mongoose — included staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United States, developing a fake ‘Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,’ including ‘sink[ing] a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated),’ faking a Cuban airforce attack on a civilian jetliner, and concocting a ‘Remember the Maine’ incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage. Bamford himself writes that Operation Northwoods ‘may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government.’”
sunspot.net - maryland’s online community
http://www.baltimoresun.com/bal-te.md.nsa24apr24.story
“U.S. military leaders proposed in 1962 a secret plan to commit terrorist acts against Americans and blame Cuba to create a pretext for invasion and the ouster of Communist leader Fidel Castro, according to a new book about the National Security Agency.”
[Opf-l] Operation Northwoods: acts of terrorism that never happened
http://www.earlham.edu/archive/opf-l/May-2001/msg00062.html
“In the early 1960s, America’s top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.
“Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban emigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.”
Body of Secrets
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/bamford/home.html
“To outsiders, its initials once stood for No Such Agency. To its employees, they stood for Never Say Anything. Today the NSA, which is responsible for eavesdropping on the rest of the world and breaking foreign crypto systems, is the nation’s largest, most hidden, and most important intelligence agency.
“While hundreds of books have been written on the far smaller and more familiar CIA, only one previous book — James Bamford’s The Puzzle Palace — has ever penetrated the National Security Agency. With the publication of his new book, Body of Secrets, many are saying that the agency’s initials now stand for Not Secret Anymore.”
Important note:
One of the things they don’t keep secret is the fact that the NSA cooperated fully with the writing of this book. Therefore the intelligent reader will know that there must be a great deal of pro-government disinformation and propaganda woven together with whatever truthful information is included.
Pearl Harbor: Mother of all Conspiracies
http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/6315/pearl.html
“...everything that the Japanese were planning to do was known to the United States...”
— ARMY BOARD
1944
Are Americans the Victims of a Hoax?
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/hoax.html
“The time has come to stop using the flag as a blindfold, to stop waving our guns and our gods at each other, to take a close look at the facts which have emerged from the attacks on the World Trade Towers and to recognize the very real possibility, indeed probability, that We The People are the victims of a gigantic and deadly hoax.”
Stan Goff: The So-Called Evidence Is A Farce
http://www.truefacts.co.uk/cgi-bin/trufax.cgi?a=110901l
“I’m a retired Special Forces Master Sergeant. ... I studied and taught military science and doctrine. I was a tactics instructor at the Jungle Operations Training Center in Panama, and I taught Military Science at West Point. ...
“Based on that experience, and operations in eight designated conflict areas from Vietnam to Haiti, I have to say that the story we hear on the news and read in the newspapers is simply not believable. The most cursory glance at the verifiable facts, before, during, and after September 11th, does not support the official line or conform to the current actions of the United States government.”
Defrauding America
http://www.defraudingamerica.com/
“Government Agents and Deep-Cover Operatives Reveal and Document Widespread Corruption In Key Judicial and Other Government Offices.”
“This website, and the books referred to, can provide you case studies of widespread corruption in government...”
Guilty for 9-11: Bush, Rumsfeld, Myers
http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/indict-1.htm
“Andrews Air Force Base is a huge military installation just 10 miles from the Pentagon.
“On 11 September there were two entire squadrons of combat-ready fighter jets at Andrews. Their job was to protect the skies over Washington D.C. They failed to do their job. Despite over one hour’s advance warning of a terrorist attack in progress, not a single Andrews fighter tried to protect the city.”
US planned war in Afghanistan long before September 11
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/nov2001/afgh-n20.shtml
“The United States ruling elite has been contemplating war in Central Asia for at least a decade. ... American oil companies have acquired rights to as much as 75 percent of the output of these new [Caspian Sea oil] fields, and US government officials have hailed the Caspian and Central Asia as a potential alternative to dependence on oil from the unstable Persian Gulf region.
“The major problem in exploiting the energy riches of Central Asia is how to get the oil and gas from the landlocked region to the world market. ...US oil companies and government officials have explored...pipeline routes...south from Turkmenistan across western Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean.”
The CIA: America’s Premier International Terrorist Organization
http://serendipity.magnet.ch/cia.html
“Most of this page concerns the CIA’s involvement in drug trafficking, but we should first note that this is only one part of its activities, the means by which it finances its operations in addition to the billions of dollars it gets from U.S. taxpayers courtesy of the U.S. federal government (the exact amount, of course, being kept secret from U.S. taxpayers).
“In addition to being the principal source of U.S. propaganda for domestic and foreign consumption the CIA is the covert operations division of the U.S. government and as such has engaged in many terrorist activities.
“In fact the CIA is a terrorist organization, funded by the profits of international drug smuggling.”
Homeland Insecurity:
Phoenix, Chaos, The Enterprise, and the Politics of Terror in America
by Douglas Valentine
http://www.counterpunch.org/homeland1.html
“This ability to commit the most horrific acts of terror, and successfully blame them on its enemies through black propaganda, is what makes the CIA’s inclusion in the OHS [Office of Homeland Security] so dangerous.
“This one-two punch, in conjunction with the CIA’s expertise at ‘provoked responses’ and ‘false flag recruitments,’ also makes the CIA itself a prime suspect in the terror attacks of 11 September, and the current propaganda campaign being waged in America now, as a pretext to threaten terror against the Bush Administration’s domestic political opponents, as well as to win support from the terrified middle class for the illegitimate Bush regime.”
Related books
Manufacturing Consent:
The Political Economy of the Mass Media
by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
Inventing Reality:
The Politics of News Media
by Michael Parenti
The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media:
Decoding Spin and Lies in Mainstream News
by Norman Solomon
Pirates and Emperors, Old and New:
International Terrorism in the Real World
by Noam Chomsky
The Real Terror Network:
Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda
by Edward S. Herman
Bin Laden, the Forbidden Truth
by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie
published originally in France as Bin Laden, la Verite Interdite
This book reveals that FBI deputy director John O’Neill resigned in July 2001 to protest official U.S. government obstruction of his investigation of terrorism.
The authors report that O’Neill told them: “The main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were U.S. oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it.”
Osama bin Laden is a Saudi who has worked with the CIA since the 1980s, when they supplied him with U.S.-made Stinger missiles so his forces could shoot down Russian helicopters in Afghanistan.
Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy
by Robert W. McChesney
War, Lies & Videotape:
How media monopoly stifles truth
edited by Lenora Foerstel; multiple authors
The Hidden Persuaders:
What makes us buy, believe – and even vote – the way we do?
by Vance Packard
Toxic Sludge is Good for You!:
Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry
by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton
Dumbing Us Down:
The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
by John Taylor Gatto
Lies My Teacher Told Me:
Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
by James Loewen
A People’s History of the United States:
1492 — Present
by Howard Zinn
Apocalypse 1945:
The Destruction of Dresden
by David Irving
Saving Private Power:
The Hidden History of “The Good War”
by Michael Zezima
War At Home:
Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It
by Brian Glick
Western State Terrorism
Alexander George, editor; essays by Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, Gerry O’Sullivan and others
The Fire This Time:
U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf
by Ramsey Clark
Desert Slaughter:
The Imperialist War Against Iraq
by the Workers League
Killing Hope:
U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since WWII
by William Blum
Rogue State:
A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
by William Blum
Hidden Agenda:
U.S./NATO Takeover of Yugoslavia
by Ramsey Clark, Nadja Tesich, Michel Chossudovsky, Slobodan Milosevic, numerous authors
NATO in the Balkans:
Voices of Opposition
by Ramsey Clark, Sean Gervasi, Sara Flounders, Thomas Deichmann, Gary Wilson, Richard Becker and Nadja Tesich
To Kill A Nation:
The Attack on Yugoslavia
by Michael Parenti
Eyewitness Sudan:
The War of the Future
Video, produced by Ellen Andors
What Uncle Sam Really Wants
by Noam Chomsky
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
by Gore Vidal
Derailing Democracy:
The America the Media Don’t Want You to See
by David McGowan
The Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Blackshirts and Reds:
Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
by Michael Parenti
The Beast Reawakens
by Martin A. Lee
Corporate Predators:
The Hunt for Mega-Profits and the Attack on Democracy
by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Against Empire
by Michael Parenti
The Sword and the Dollar:
Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race
by Michael Parenti
The Hotel Tacloban
by Douglas Valentine
The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb
by Gar Alperovitz
Deadly Deceits:
My 25 years in the CIA
by Ralph W. McGehee
Bloody Hell:
The Price Soldiers Pay
by Daniel Hallock