WASHINGTON, D.C.-In 1962, some of President John F. Kennedy's military advisors, led by then-Army Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, devised a phony terrorism campaign called Operation Northwoods in an attempt to justify an invasion of Cuba to overthrow Fidel Castro.

Among the ideas these U.S. government officials discussed were killing innocent Americans in cities and blaming Cuban "terrorists," blowing up U.S. ships and blaming Castro, blaming Cuba if the spaceship with John Glenn exploded [as some blamed Arab terrorists for the explosion of the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003], provoking a war by flying a spy plane over Cuba, and paying a Cuban official to attack U.S. forces at the Guantanamo Bay naval base.

The CIA even paid a Canadian agricultural technician working as an adviser to the Cuban government to infect turkeys there with a virus that would produce the fatal Newcastle Disease. Some 8,000 turkeys died. 1

Kennedy reportedly rejected the phony campaign and died himself in a suspicious assassination allegedly involving U.