Doug Horne, formerly of the Assassination Records Review Board, talks about what i think is the single most significant finding of the ARRB: Operation Northwoods, the template for November 22, 1963.
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Op. Northwoods does indeed sound like something out of a 007 novel. Ian Fleming, as special assistant to Britain’s Director of Naval Intelligence, came up with a long list of proposals to engage the Nazis. One of these proposals was the basis for Operation Mince Meat: floating the body of a British courier killed in a faked air accident along the enemy coast with false invasion plans to trick the Nazis into believing that an invasion might come in Greece rather then in Italy. It worked. Another was Operation Ruthless which involved an English flight crew dressed as Germans crash landing a captured German bomber in the North Sea, where a German patrol boat would come to their rescue, only to have the fake Nazis climb aboard, slaughter the German sailors, in hopes of capturing whatever code machines and accompanying code books might be aboard. Fleming, because he spoke German, thought he should be one of the crew. This idea was…”shot down” by Fleming’s bosses, but it was under serious consideration for some months. Desperate men do desperate things. Including (maybe) murdering heads of state?