They Proposed Shooting Down An American Airliner. The President Said No.
The memorandum is dated 13 March 1962, signed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and sat classified for thirty-five years. It is at College Park. It is not evidence for any of the claims it made plausible.
A months-long reporting project. Documents cited below are held in The Vault and available to readers.
COLLEGE PARK, Md. — It is a real document. It is signed. It is dated 13 March 1962.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent it to the Secretary of Defense under the subject line "Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba", and its annex proposes, in numbered paragraphs, sinking an American ship, staging terror in American cities, and blowing up a drone aircraft dressed as an airliner while holding funerals for passengers who never existed.
Anybody can read it. It is at College Park, it is free, and a reader could order it up this week.
The second sentence
Nothing in it happened.
The President rejected it. The chairman who signed it was moved to another post within the year. No ship was sunk, no aircraft was destroyed, no funeral was held for anybody invented.
Reporting the first half of this story is easy and it is what everybody does. Reporting the second half — and giving it the same size type — is the hard part, and it is the whole job.
Why it matters more than the things it is used to prove
Professor Delphine Marchetti-Osei put the thing our correspondent had been circling for two months.
A state that can produce this document is a state in which somebody, in a room, with a rank, thought it was a reasonable thing to type. That is a real and permanent fact about institutions and it should frighten a reader more than it usually does.
And a state that then rejects it is also a real fact, and it is the one that gets left out.
"You are allowed to hold both," she said. "Most people writing about this cannot, and the ones who can are boring, and that is a problem for democracy and not for me."
How it got out
Not a leak. Not a whistleblower. Not a hack.
It came out in 1997 through a records review board set up by a statute about the Kennedy assassination — a body with a legal mandate to open files, a staff, and a deadline. A Cuba planning document fell inside the net because of who signed it and when.
The former board member we interviewed was blunt about the lesson: "People want the story where somebody smuggles it out in a coat. The story is that Congress passed a law with teeth and a deadline, and then thirty-five years of paper came out. That is available to you again any time you want it, and nobody wants it, because it is not a film."
What this document is not
It is not evidence about any event after 1962.
This newspaper receives letters citing it as proof of four separate modern events. It is not proof of any of them, and it cannot be, because a proposal that was refused in 1962 tells you what some officers thought in 1962.
What it does do — and this is the reason it belongs on this desk rather than in a history journal — is destroy a particular lazy argument. Nobody can say such a thing would never be contemplated. It was contemplated, in writing, with numbered paragraphs, by the highest uniformed officer in the country.
The question after that is not whether it is thinkable. It is whether it happened, and that question needs evidence, and this document is not evidence of it.
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Sources & Method
We read the original rather than a transcription, because transcriptions of this document circulate with paragraphs missing in both directions. Then we did the part that is usually skipped: traced how it came out, which turns out to be a story about a records statute rather than a whistleblower.
Who we spoke to
- The memorandum itself, Public record, National Archives, College Park. Read in the original over two days May 2026 Free. Open to anybody. A reader can order it up this week.
- Prof. Delphine Marchetti-Osei, Historian of civil-military relations. Interviewed by video call twice May and June 2026
- A former member of the records review board, Named in our notes; on the record. Interviewed by telephone June 2026 Explains how a Cuba file came out through an assassination-records statute.
- Archival reference staff, Named in our notes. In person May 2026
Documents
- PX-2023 — Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, 13 March 1962, with annex accepted
What we could not confirm
- Nothing about the document. It is signed, dated, catalogued and public.
- Whether anything comparable was proposed later. We do not know, and the honest position is that a thing declassified in 1997 tells you about 1962.
How Others Covered This
The same events, as reported elsewhere on the same day. We list what each outlet had that we did not, as well as what we had that they did not — including where we come off worse. Why we print this.
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The Hollow PostPROOF THEY DO THIS
Ran the document as evidence for four unrelated modern events.
Had that we did not
Nothing.
Left out
That it was rejected; that nothing in it happened; and that the man who signed it lost his job.
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ApertureThe Paper In The Drawer
An essay on what it means that a state can produce such a document and then not act on it.
Had that we did not
Two historians of civil-military relations, both better than anyone we reached.
Left out
The declassification story — how it got out, and who forced it.
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They Buriedthis newspaperThey Proposed Shooting Down An American Airliner. The President Said No.
Printed the proposals and the rejection at equal weight, and explained why the second half is the harder half to report.
Had that we did not
The route to declassification, which is a story about a records board and not about a leak.
Left out
Our headline's first sentence is going to travel without its second, and we knew it when we wrote it. That is the second time this month. — V. Ashcombe-Doyle, standards editor
How was this story?
We publish the result, whatever it is. Reader verdicts appear on the front page and in our newsroom metrics.
Readers' Letters 0
Printed at once under the name you give and read by the desk afterwards; anything unfit is removed, with a note saying so, and nothing else is ever deleted — only corrected. Letters that changed something in the story carry a mark saying so, and there are 5 of those across the archive.