"CLASSIC: Operation Northwoods: How the US Planned to Attack Itself and Start a War with Cuba"

Fellow ridiculous historians, we're back with a classic episode. You may have heard about Cuba and the United States in the news recently or in the news for, you know, decades past.

Yeah.

It's been, it's hot. Yeah. I remember like there was a brief period where we, you could go. Yeah. My, my ex and my, my kid said, were able to go for that very, very brief period of time. If I'm not mistaken, it was under Obama, or maybe it was early Biden. But they said it was awesome, and then they closed it on back up because we got some issues with the Cuban government, some failure to see eye to eye, let's just say.

Yeah, very much so. It's a very long tale. And back in 2019, we did an episode about one of the stinkier things Uncle Sam tried to do in their fraught relationship with Cuba. The proper term is a false flag attack.

That's right. And that is about what it sounds like. It's flying a flag that ain't accurate. Dirty pool. Dirty pool. This involves attacks on U.S. citizens, soldiers, planes, and ships, all with the goal of blaming these attacks on Cuba. This is quite a stuff they don't want you to know crossover. Why don't we roll the tape? Tut, tut, tut.

Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you for tuning in. We are coming to you with fresh hot coffee and some fresh hot takes on this Monday morning as we record this. Who knows when you'll hear it. I'm kidding. It's either a Tuesday or a Thursday.

It's true, Ben. The takes that we plan to bring today are of the hottest variety. So be careful.

And you're Noel.

No, I'm not.

You're not Noel.

No, not today.

That was a false flag.

That's right.

That was a false identity of yours?

Well, I guess so. I mean, a false flag would be if I said I was China and then attacked the United States, but I was actually an agent of a different country trying to put the blame on China.

A good example of a false flag would be if super producer Casey Pegram hacked his own bank account and then blamed it on a different person or country. And then use that as an excuse to go to war. But you're a peaceful dude, Casey. I don't see you waging a one-man war against an entire country. No.

No false flags here.

No siree. Ben, are you saying that I would not be a believable China as an individual? People would not buy that I was, in fact, the country of China?

Well, maybe if you did it online in like a chat room. and you wrote in, you either, you spoke in Mandarin and you sounded like 1.3-ish billion people, or you wrote out the ideograms. I feel like you could pull it off. Maybe not in person, but online, definitely. You got this.

You got this. I really was hoping to be able to do it in person, Ben, but I guess if online's all I can manage, then that's what I'll do. So today, yeah, it's true. We're talking about a false flag attack. Specifically... against Cuba. It's true.

So we have defined false flag with a bit of a cavalier approach, but our two comparisons hit the mark. A false flag attack is a term that describes a country purporting to be attacked by a foreign entity of some sort when in fact they are attacking themselves, right? So there are so many alleged false flags throughout modern history.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident is one famous alleged false flag because according to the official narrative, Uncle Sam still says that was 100% legit. The rest is fake news. We often relegate the concept of false flags, the concept of this deceitful action to the realm of fringe theory, revisionist history, conspiracies and whatnot. However, today we are examining a case of a genuine would-be false flag proposed by good old folks here at the US of A.

And just a little background, this might be super obvious to most people, especially folks who listen to our other show, Stuff They Don't Want You To Know. we cover things like this all the time. A false flag attack refers to, I guess, the idea of in an engagement in warfare, you're supposed to identify yourself, right? Like using a flag or some sort of markings on your uniform.

Great.

Good point. And with a false flag attack, you are misidentifying yourself on purpose to create a diversion or draw the attention to a country that you are trying to kind of malign, essentially, or create a false conflict between these countries, unbeknownst to the party that you are impersonating.

Right, right. Nail on the head there, man. And today's episode takes us to the Cold War, takes us to the 1950s, 1960s, and to Cuba. So the United States was terrified by the threat of communism, right? And Cuba, the country and island of Cuba, was at the time seen as a proxy for the USSR, a communist nation right on the doorstep. The Reds, they called them. And the people in charge of the US military and the US political machine at the time were absolutely certain that there would be some for lack of a better phrase, there would be some sort of domino effect that first Caribbean countries would fall to communism and then that it would spread like some sort of ideological disease throughout South America.

And the next thing you know, there's an uprising in Mexico and maybe even Canada. This was alarmist, alarmist thinking, and it was taken seriously. So The U.S. spent a lot of time, as we learned later through declassified documents, trying to figure out ways to overthrow the government of Cuba or assassinate the leader of that government, a man that is probably familiar to many of us called Fidel Castro.

And here's the thing, this scheme that was cooked up, it wasn't just some kind of like harebrained idea. It was very much a product of the Joint Chiefs of Staff And its Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, who's kind of a big deal, looms large in international politics.

So we know that there were numerous failed attempts, some that never made it out of the pitch room, right? And there was the Bay of Pigs invasion, which was a failure by all accounts. And the attempts to depose or assassinate Fidel Castro were collected under a CIA program that was called Operation Mongoose, or its street name was the Cuban Project. So if you were a member of the agency and you were talking in, you know, semi-mixed company, you might just refer to it as the Cuban Project, led by General Edward Lansdale of the U.S. Air Force.

We're not 100% sure. Even now in 2019, where the idea for what would be called Operation Northwoods germinated. It may have originated with President Eisenhower toward the end of his administration. But past McNamara, we can't nail down a specific time and date. All we know is that Eisenhower did tell the head of the Joint Chiefs and other aides in his cabinet that he wanted to move against Castro before the inauguration of the new president. And all he was waiting for, basically, was for the Cuban government to give him some sort of excuse.

Any excuse.

Any excuse. And then the time grows short, right?

Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.

Eisenhower floats this idea. He says, you know, if This Castro fella doesn't provide an excuse to invade. Well, perhaps the U.S. could think of manufacturing something that would be generally acceptable. Generally acceptable means he was suggesting some sort of pretext for war, right? A bombing, perhaps, an attack, an act of sabotage. carried out against the U.S., and we would tell everyone that it was was the communist forces doing this, right? We're not talking about necessarily a huge catastrophic loss of life. We're talking about maybe a Coast Guard boat, right, that got sank or something that makes an ironclad case for us to tell the public, the U.S. public, that these are acts of Cuban aggression

and we must act to save American lives. The problem with that is that Cuba wasn't going to do that, so we were going to attack our own stuff. That was the idea, right?

No, totally. But they were not able to pull this off at the time. Kennedy would not approve any of this kind of action. And the general that was in charge of all this stuff, General Limnitzer, was really irritated at the fact that Kennedy would not play ball. And he was also irritated, equally irritated, at the fact that Castro seemed to be kind of like cooling his heels a little bit. You know, he wasn't going to be the one that was going to light the match that set the fire, you know.

Exactly, exactly. So fast forward to February 26th, 1962. We mentioned two generals so far. Let's remember the earlier one, General Lansdale. This is the guy who was cooking with gas in Operation Mongoose. And Operation Mongoose, again, is this sort of mixtape of increasingly cartoonish ideas about how to overthrow or assassinate Fidel Castro. Robert Kennedy hates this stuff.

It's like this is more and more ridiculous. We're talking about poisoned or exploding cigars. There was a plan at one point to try to make Castro lose his beard, which wouldn't kill him.

It would just, like, shame him. You know, his people would be like, Castro without a beard is like a bird without a song, you know? I can no longer follow you.

Which is weird and tells us how condescending these folks were. They thought very little of the intelligence of the Cuban people.

Yeah, clearly.

So Robert Kennedy goes to General Lansdale and says, look, just drop this mongoose thing. Drop all these efforts to antagonize or assassinate Fidel Castro. Instead, just concentrate on learning more about Cuba. Just concentrate on learning stuff before you try this regime change. And Lansdale hated this. He felt very, very sidelined. He thought that the Kennedy brothers... had gone soft on Castro. And this is where the other general that you just mentioned, Limnitzer, comes into play.

Yeah, because like we said before, he was very annoyed that he couldn't get the support of Kennedy, the president, or his brothers, you know, who were also powerful men. And there was this sense that his window for this invasion that he saw as being so crucial was, you know, kind of slipping through his fingers, right? And he... felt like these efforts, the two, so Ben, let's talk a little bit about what were some of the things they were doing to provoke the public, you know, the Cuban citizenry to maybe revolt against Castro. We did have some efforts to make that happen. Isn't that right?

Oh, it goes way back. It goes way, way, way, way, way back. As part of the Spanish-American War, the U.S. invaded and occupied Cuba when it was ruled by Spain in 1898 and occupied the country until 1902. And then there was a brief period of insolvence or independence, however you want to call it, and the U.S. occupied it again from 1906 to 1909, and then briefly 1912, and then from 1917 to 1922. The United States has a very, very long history of interfering with Cuba. For some, this was seen as a necessary step to prevent the encroachment of foreign powers. You know what I mean? First, the Spanish Empire, later the USSR, and for others, This was seen as a bellicose act of an outside country trying

to interfere with another country or nation's internal affairs. So there are a couple ways to look at it, but it's true. The CIA has a long history of fomenting revolution or attempting to do so through proxy protest groups. So students spontaneously protest. You know what I mean? Tale as old as time, unfortunately. So there were some activities like that, most likely.

Well, and unfortunately, again, that stuff wasn't working. No. It was very toothless, it seemed like. If it had ever worked at all, it certainly wasn't working anymore. And there just seemed to be no inclination on the part of the Cuban government to launch the attack that we very weirdly so desperately wanted, right?

Absolutely. So- Lemnitzer and the other Joint Chiefs get together, no doubt, in a smoky back.

Room and say— Yeah, they are the Joint Chiefs, after all.

They're the chiefs of the Joint's back room, you know?

Who knows?

I imagine that they would see marijuana as hippie stuff.

You think so?

Yeah, they were probably more hard drinkers.

You don't think it made them more creative? Look, hey, man, some of these ideas in Operation Mongoose sound like the product of a bunch of stoners in a back room.

Stoners? I don't know. That seems kind of aggro for stoners.

Yeah, maybe more like amphetamine poppers.

Amphetamines were very popular in that time, right? Also, you know, maybe this was like a pill thing. I don't even know. What pills did they have back then? Did they have Quaaludes?

Spennies? Quaaludes.

Yeah.

Poppers? Yeah.

Is that what? Quaaludes are my go-to drug joke because I don't know really what they are.

Well, have you seen Wolf of Wall Street? Yes. Remember that scene where he takes the Quaaludes and falls down the stairs repeatedly in like amazing comical form?

And tries to get in the car. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it makes you like a noodle person. That's what Quaaludes does.

I just like saying lewds.

Yeah. Remember that game Drug Wars that you'd play on the graphing calculator back in the day? No. No. No, it was like, do you remember this, Casey?

I totally remember this.

Yeah. So the TI-83 graphic calculators have these little apps you could load into them, I guess. I don't remember how you even did it, but one of them was Drug Wars and you'd play it with alphanumeric key entries to kind of like generate responses. And I remember one of the drugs you could buy was Ludes. And I was like, what is this Ludes? That sounds decadent.

It's a brand name. It's sold as, I think the drug is still around in different countries, but Don't do drugs, kids.

Definitely not.

You'll end up like the Joint Chiefs. And who knows, maybe, you know, ideology is a drug, and that's definitely, whatever they were doing, that's the drug that they got the highest on the most often. So they say, we're going to trick the American public. We need to get the U.S. behind us, and because this is an international operation... we would hopefully, ideally, also fool the rest of the world, or at least get a nod and a wink from our friendly countries who are also fighting communism. So they said, if we can get everybody to turn against Cuba, then they'll allow us to make war on this nation, but we'll know we did a super top-notch job if everyone agrees in the world outside of Cuba, insist that we

launch this war against Castro. There was a secret document from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which is declassified now, in which they say blatantly, explicitly, let me try a villainous voice out.

Here, world opinion and the United Nations forum. should be favorably affected by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere. At the end of that, everybody's like.

Yeah, of course.

And wringing their hands and all that stuff. That was a very Lord of the Rings villain kind of sound that you had there, Ben.

Yeah, Lord of the Rings is loosely based on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at least the Ringwraiths.

That's what I heard. So here's the thing that happens next. Operation Northwood, which had been approved by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it actually, this is what the plan contained. several quite horrendous acts of faux terrorism, but yet actual terrorism on American soil. The idea of folks being shot in the streets, refugee boats that were leaving Cuba to be sunk, and also launching a wave of violent acts, terrorist acts in Washington, D.C. and Miami and other places across the country. It would involve framing people for bombings.

Hijacking planes, planting evidence, and all of it would be blamed on Castro and Limnitzer and his crew would have everything they needed. to gain public support and international support for backing them in this war effort.

Another quote from the memo, we could develop a communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities, and even in Washington. They were planning this. This is absolutely right. And remember earlier we said that false flags, when they work, tend to be stuff like Gulf of Tonkin, right?

Not like a huge loss of thousands of lives. This, however, still feels like a cavalcade of catastrophes. The list that you read off for us, what was that? Innocent people shot in the street. Yikes. Boats being sunk on the high seas, right? violent terrorism in the capital of the U.S. and Miami and other places, framing people for bombings, hijacking planes, tracing it all back to Castro and some kind of this goes to the very top sort of idea. This feels like they were looking for whatever would have been most effective. And it would be nice to think that it would have immediately stopped the Once that call to war actually happened and they got the support of the West and they got the support of the domestic public.

But this is not what the joint chiefs or the U.S. military are supposed to be doing. Northwoods suggested that U.S. personnel would disguise themselves as Cuban agents and then they could burn ammunition, sink ships at Guantanamo. And they even said, look, let's just blow up a U.S.

Ship.

We can take the loss. We'll blame it on Cuba.

Blame it on Cuba. I mean, this thing was like, you know, the whole idea to a false flag attack or the idea of like crisis actors. That's a big term that gets thrown around like the conspiracy community. It's terrible.

I don't like it.

No, I don't like it either. But it's used by a horrible cancerous media personalities like Alex Jones to justify, you know, their position on things like the Sandy Hook school shooting where they say, oh, These weren't real shooters. They were, quote-unquote, crisis actors. And, you know, this was all staged for the purposes of creating uproar against gun violence or whatever. Absolutely absurd. In this case, absolutely provable and confirmed. They even were planning to do things like conduct fake funerals for these supposed victims, right? And I don't know if we've talked about this, Ben, but a lot of this comes from a declassified document from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, subject memorandum for the Secretary of

Defense's Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba. And it goes through and describes a lot of the things that we're talking about here. The author of this report, being General Limnitzer himself, goes on to talk about the Remember the Maine incident, which I was not familiar with up until this point. That was the explosion and sinking of the USS Maine that began the Spanish-American War that we mentioned earlier, where the casualties were listed in U.S. newspapers.

And that caused this kind of wave of national anger and contempt and, again, fomented that support of the war effort, which is important, right? Like we never– it's easy to forget or to think that like the government can just wave a wand and make war happen. But they do kind of depend on the support of the public, of constituents, because it's all– kind of a political game in the end, right?

Right. So one of the first lessons learned by the U.S. government about the public and war, especially war in other countries, came about in the Vietnam War. This was the first time that many domestic residents were able to see the unvarnished, unpropagandized results of invading a foreign country. They were able to see men, women, and children dying, many of whom were civilians. They were able to see war crimes in real time. This is before the Vietnam War. This, again, is a plan that exists in secret in a smoky back room. And they still pitched other ideas, too. They said, well, what if we refit an American jet to resemble a Cuban jet, and then we use it to harass civil air, which means private industry air or even just some poor

schmuck with a little plane in Miami. I don't know. That's hilarious to me. It's hilarious because everyone's okay. They also want to do a fake attack on U.S. military jets. They wanted to have submarines involved. They wanted a pilot to fly under assumed identity. And they had steps to this plan, which feel a little bit like a spaghetti at the wall kind of attempt at solving the problem.

What if we did this? What if we did that? It's a very Dr. Seussian approach to terrible, terrible actions. They say we could. They also acknowledge, this is very interesting, they also acknowledge, more or less, tacitly at least, they acknowledge that, remember, the main incident was indeed a false flag.

And this was during a time when no one admitted that publicly, at least no one associated with the government. Also, they said, why don't we have an, get this, an incident which will demonstrate that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down A charter civil airline. So what's a charter civil airline? That's like Delta Southwest, something like that.

A commercial passenger plane. They were going to do that? They were actually going to shoot down a plane?

No. Well, they were going to fake it. They were not actually going to kill the people.

Got it. Okay, so that's when the crisis actors thing comes in. I know you hate that term, but this does apply because this is literally folks that are posing as victims. Who would write? Like even they're talking about shooting people in the streets. Were they really going to shoot people in the streets or was it going to be people like pretending to be shot in the streets and then they were going to have fake funerals?

That's the tough part because at this time too, we have to remember social media doesn't exist. So you could, if you had people playing ball with you in the broadcast, radio, television, and the media of the time, the printed papers, then you could just, you could just make up some names. You could be like, well, It turns out that Casey, real name Pegram from any town, Illinois, was tragically a victim.

He leaves behind two children, a schnauzer, and a collection of vintage records.

Yeah, and also tiny spoons.

He's also a spoonist, yeah.

Yeah, and thimbles.

So what our point is here is that there's no way for Pegram the average newspaper reader or the average TV radio listener to go through and do due diligence to me a couple of times.

I said, do, do stuff. Yeah, that's funny too. My 12 year old self applauds you.

Well, I'm emotionally nine, so I'm glad I'm impressing an older person. So, so this, this thing though, we're, we're being a bit glib, but this is, this is evil. This is actually an evil thing to do because.

Why would they declassify this ever? Right? We've had this conversation on the other show, and so they want you to know about, like, what leads to things being declassified. Is it literally just a clock time thing where enough time has passed that this stuff doesn't matter anymore? We want to give the public a little bit of juicy stuff? Or, I don't know, is it just literally a storage thing, or we need to move some documents out of the secret vaults into this other vault so we can, you know, make more room for more classified stuff? Right.

Mistakes were made, huh?

So.

All details of this plan of Operation Northwoods were hidden for almost 50 years, more like 40 years, but for decades and decades were hidden. And that general that we mentioned earlier, Lemnitzer, he probably thought that this very dark brainstorming exercise was over and done with, that all copies of the paperwork, all copies of this memo were preserved.

Destroyed.

And he had an established practice of regularly destroying things if they would compromise him or his associates later. However, I do want to mention you can find this at the NSA archives. It is online now. You can Google it. Noel, you earlier read the name of the memo. We want you to find it, read it for yourself. I will say that it's written in very, to the point, simplistic language.

They're not trying to cloak this in some sort of legalese. Oddly enough, we know exactly how the Operation Northwoods documents came to light. At first, it turned out that not everything was destroyed, obviously. A lot of it was so much so that we don't know who knew what and when, but these came into the public eye In 1992, that's when they hit the mainstream, because of a film by one Oliver Stone. Casey, can you guess which one it is?

JFK.

Nailed it. Nailed it. Yeah, because of the Oliver Stone film JFK, which examined the idea of a conspiracy behind the internet. assassination of President JFK, President Kennedy. This conspiratorial film ultimately led to the discovery of Northwoods because Congress passed a law due to overwhelming public outcry. They passed a law to increase public access to government records. at least as far as they're related to JFK. And this is something that came out in the wash.

Very interesting. Speaking of assassination attempts, talk about dodging bullets. Fidel Castro was certainly a very popular target for assassination attempts.

Oh, he's the bell of the bloody ball.

That's right. Yeah. According to a gentleman who protected him during his regime, He survived over 600 assassination attempts, everything from snipers to some of the crazy methods the CIA were plotting against him.

Poisoned wetsuit.

Poisoned wetsuit. Go on, Ben.

Well, OK. So in 1975, the Senate Intelligence Committee said it had concrete evidence of this plan to offer Fidel Castro through proxy, of course, a wetsuit lined with spores and bacteria that that would give him a skin disease. This apparently involved the guy who would be their point man for this was a U.S. lawyer named James B. Donovan, and he was going to give Castro the wetsuit when he went to negotiate the release of prisoners from the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Eventually, they abandoned the plan because the lawyer gave Castro a different diving suit And they said, on his own initiative. But that's, yeah, just like you said, there are so many weird ways that the U.S. government planned to antagonize or kill Fidel Castro.

If you want to check out a list of those, you can go to Mental Flaw straight away for 10 ways the CIA tried to kill Castro by Stacey Conrad. We mentioned exploding cigar earlier. That kind of makes me think of the episode we did about the Nazis' attempts to, or like plans, plots to kill Castro. Winston Churchill, and that was with an exploding chocolate bar and also an exploding cigar. Several cigar-based murder attempts here, including poisoning his cigar.

We even have one that involved an exploding conch shell, ballpoint hypodermic syringe.

You know, the closest one, the closest they ever got by most sources was a poisoned milkshake in 1963. Castro may well have died, but the waiter at the Havana Hilton was trying to retrieve the pill that he was supposed to stick in the milkshake, but it stuck to the freezer. And then when he was trying to grab it and rip it loose, the capsule itself tore apart. Shame. Well, I mean, you know, don't ruin a good milkshake.

So this is literally all just about eradicating communism, huh?

You know, I think it's more than that. It's easy to say, yeah, they were targeting communism, but there are a lot of economic incentives at play. There are a lot of questions about regional hegemons. You know, you want to control other nations on your border.

They're close.

They're too close for.

Comfort, right? And, you know, it's crazy too. My daughter and her mom and stepdad, they briefly, there was this window that opened up for tourists to be able to visit Cuba. And they did that and had a lovely time. My daughter, it was a super amazing adventure for her. And then like very shortly after they got back, the Trump administration closed that window. And it's all about kind of putting pressure on them for trade and tariffs. And there's like that embargo that's been going on for so long.

It's part of the reason that in Cuba, they don't have any modern cars. It's all like older cars that they've been able to work on because they've been kind of in this trade bubble for so long, right? Yeah.

And my buddy Scott and I have an excellent episode on our show Car Stuff about the amazing ingenuity of Cuban nationals when it comes to those vehicles. You can see cars from the 50s and 60s that are maintained in this, this amazing fashion. By the way, car stuff is coming back and you can, you can hear more about everything that floats, flies, swims, or drives very, very soon.

So check it out. If you get a chance to tell my buddy, Scott, you heard about it here. You can say Ben sent me and Ben told me that you would give me a free t-shirt. If I write to you, it's true. It's true.

It's true.

It's not a false flag. So Ben, That is the story. The good news is that Operation Northwoods never occurred. As far as we know, there was no false flag that actually took U.S. lives or Cuban lives and used those deaths as a pretext to go to a hot war with Cuba. However, we might never have found out about this if it weren't for the public outcry of and public interest following Oliver Stone's film, JFK. And this is important for us to remember because it's often said that history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme. And yeah, maybe that's a cliche, but here's a pro tip about cliches.

They're usually called cliches because they're true. So now we have to, not as members of individual countries or nations or communities, but as a species, We must exercise critical thinking when we hear about these sorts of attacks, these sorts of things that could be Malcolm Gladwell-esque tipping points.

One of the most recent that's occurred as we record this is the rising tension in the Strait of Hormuz, which is largely controlled by the Republic of Iran. And recently, again, this is 2019, there have been alleged attacks on tankers. The U.S. says that Iran did it. Iran says they didn't do it. And Iran has also made other claims about its own tankers being taken. And there are some people, policy wonks, journalists, et cetera, who are keeping an eye on the situation and already claiming that a false flag is afoot. This has not been proven yet. And the weird thing about false flags is if Operation Northwoods is in the indicator, we learn about them about 40 years after they happen. But it makes for some fun podcast fodder.

It's okay because no one actually died.

Exactly.

So we hope that you will write to us and tell us whether you have visited Cuba. A couple of our close friends have. Our research pal, Ryan. Barish has visited Cuba recently. He was there for quite a while. I think he has dual citizenship, so he's able to go. Right, because he has German citizenship.

That's right.

Yep, yep. And I do want to, before we end today's episode, I want to get your opinion, Casey, on the 1992 Oliver Stone film JFK. Did you watch it? Did you like it? What's your take?

One?

Ten? I don't know.

I think it's great.

I think a lot of people have pointed out there's a lot of conjecture and stuff that's probably been disproven since that film came out. But just as a piece of filmmaking itself and as something that kind of goes to the wider skepticism, suspicion, whatever you want to call it, lingering doubts in the American psyche about that whole event, I think it's great.

Casey on the case. What do you think, Noel? Do you remember that one?

I have not seen JFK.

That's Kevin Costner, I believe.

Kevin Costner. I did see Nixon. I remember liking it just fine. I really liked Platoon.

Platoon was always a.

Favorite war movie of mine. But now in my older years, I realize that Full Metal Jacket is the superior film.

You're not in Apocalypse Now, man?

No, I think Full Metal Jacket is my favorite. Apocalypse Now would be second. Platoon would be third.

You know, I.

In terms of NOM movies.

I think because I did a stage play of Apocalypse Now.

Wait, what? Like in Rushmore?

No. Kind of. Yeah, true story.

That's amazing.

Yeah. Yeah. It was definitely a thing that happened. I think that's maybe that's why I love Apocalypse Now. I even love the documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now.

I do too.

That's Hearts of Darkness.

Great. I'm such a fanboy for that. Full Metal Jacket is great. Don't get me wrong. Just for my money, I love the brutal chaos.

Oh, yeah. And the madness of it too. It's a very Shakespearean almost tragedy. You know, you're right, Ben. Maybe if I held them side by side. I just have a real fondness in my heart for Full Metal Jacket. I haven't seen Apocalypse Now in some time. I think if I watched it today, I might flip.

We get a chance to see a new version of it soon because he's doing yet another director's cut.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

I don't know.

I'm kind of tired of seeing different versions of that movie, but I guess there's one more.

It might be a diminishing return.

At some point.

Well, yeah, a lot of people have pointed out that the extended cut, the redux cut, is kind of boring. There's about 40 minutes in there where they're just at that weird plantation. Yeah, the old French colonial. Rubber plantation, yeah. Which is kind of just... Drags for a long time.

There's a weird sex scene in there that just, it just occurs as it feels as if that, that scene, and I know this is not your other show movie crush, but that scene, that entire segment of the Redux film, it seems like backstage, they, they just in production had access to this place and they said, all right, let's just, let's do some stuff. You know, let's do a dinner scene.

They should talk about how they feel in very vague terms. And then let's do a, you know, let's do a sex scene because we still have the room. We still have the location. And they were like, all right, we got to get back.

To the story. Speaking of getting back to the story, our story's over.

That's true.

And so is our episode. But if you want to do any of the things we were talking about, write us, let us know. Your favorite false flag attack, something you think maybe was a false flag attack. Anything. Your favorite part of Apocalypse Now. How did you feel about the redux?

Too long? Did it lag a little bit?

How did you feel about that weird sex scene? Let us know. Write to us at ridiculous at iheartradio.com or hit us up on our Facebook group, which is the Ridiculous Historians.

You can also find us individually on Instagram. See me get kicked into and out of various places and countries. Spoiler alert, I've got a couple big trips coming up in summer, so stay tuned to that. I am at Ben Bolin.

You can find me at HowNowNoelBrown. It's mainly just me getting kicked in the shins by small children.

Yeah, I don't know why they hate your shins so much. It's a thing now.

Yeah, it really is.

And as always, thank you to our super producer, Casey Pegram. Thank you to our research associates, Gabe Luzier and Ryan Barish.

Big thanks to Alex Williams, who composed our theme. Thanks to Jonathan, the quizster Strickland for, you know, occupying that space of pure evil that allows the universe to exist in some weird form of harmony.

That's so nice that you give me a shout out because you guys get kind of antagonistic.

A little bit.

And of course, thanks to Eve's Jeff coat, who will be appearing on the show sometime soon. We hope as well as Christopher Hossie Otis. Thank you for listening. And Noel, thank you for taking this strange journey with me. May we never be the victims of a false flag attack. They should just be real flats.

Agreed. See you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

"CLASSIC: Operation Northwoods: How the US Planned to Attack Itself and Start a War with Cuba"

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