You might be hungry for conspiracies, but this one might make you lose your appetite. America bombed a neutral country with more bombs than Allies used in WWII 😞
Operation Menu – A secretive US bombing campaign on a neutral country that spanned several years
Ever wonder if Nixon might’ve just been an OK dude other than the whole Watergate thing? Well wonder no more! Take a look at the bombing of a neutral country that proceeded and accelerated under his direct orders.
Yeahhhhh that’s a lot of bombs for a neutral country…
Now you bet your ass when a pesky rat runs into my neighbor’s house I open fire with my M16 to get that bastard! - Nixon metaphorically explaining here why the US should carpet bomb a neighboring neutral territory.
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Many Americans know-of and learned about the Vietnam war. Fewer Americans know about the great tragedy Cambodia suffered called the Khmer Rouge. And even fewer know that the US is a big part of why the Khmer Rouge was able to happen.
President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger launched something called Operation Menu that most likely set the Khmer Rouge in action. This secretive bombing campaign drove North Vietnam communists deeper into Cambodia, giving them a stronger foothold and influence in the country. Cambodia ended up being one of the most bombed countries in history, all because the neighboring country’s citizens were hanging out in their rural areas.
This conspiracy had it all, including:
bombing a neutral country
devising a secret reporting system
throwing records in an incinerator
keeping these operations unknown from allies and high ranking military members
lying to Congress when questioned
Yay?
Let’s dig in.
The Details
Before jumping into the details of the operation, you might be wondering why this was called Operation Menu in the first place. Short explanation: the plan was devised at a morning Pentagon planning session, so they called the first operation Breakfast. Then they just kept the naming convention related to group the missions, therefore Operations "Lunch" (Base Area 609); "Snack" (Base Area 351); "Dinner" (Base Area 352); "Supper" (Base Area 740); and "Dessert" (Base Area 350) [Source] were born and grouped into Operation Menu.
What a casual and cute set of names for eventually killing tens of thousands of innocent people!
Nixon established a restricted communication system to cover up Operation Menu’s tracks. One communication method was overt, ordering typical B-52 missions that were to take place in South Vietnam near the Cambodian border. The other method was cover and used back-channel messages between commanders. Only right before the missions were pilots and navigators given true locations of the targets.
After the missions were complete, Major Hal Knight gathered all missions paperwork and computer tapes and threw them in an incinerator.
Andddddd there goes the evidence!
Even with these precautions, the New York Times published an article on Operation Menu only a few months after the attacks began. This led to further Nixon paranoia, where he worked with the FBI to illegally wiretap a bunch of people he thought might be leaking information.
It doesn’t end here though. During the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings, they demanded all records of US bombings in Cambodia. These initial records didn’t even include Operation Menu in them! Only because of further questioning did one of the participants finally disclose the operations to Congress.
This still wasn’t enough though for the US government. Regardless of what was discovered already by Congress, the bombing continued in Operation Freedom Deal. When all was said and done, over half of Cambodia was bombed. Scholars disagree about the directly attributable number of casualties from the bombings, but estimates range from 30,000 to 500,000.
What This Means
Nearly1/3 of Cambodia’s population was killed during the 1970s uprising of their communist party. Operation Menu, along with the other bombing campaigns conducted by the US from 1965-1974 arguably caused a power vacuum that forced the People’s Army of North Vietnam further into Cambodia and increased the communist stronghold in Cambodia. This eventually led to the Communist Party of Kampuchea conducting their horrific acts on the Cambodian people.
President Nixon seems to be the presidential king of conspiracies… or at least the worst at executing them since he got caught. This conspiracy predated Watergate and probably was a huge incentive as to why Watergate was conducted in the first place.
I’m not paranoid, you’re paranoid - Nixon probably
Speculation Time
Since there was a system set up to keep records and communications secret from other US government and military members, this definitely wasn’t the first time it has happened. It also wasn’t the last. Nixon and the co-conspirators got caught this time, but what other operations have been conducted with elaborate systems to hide their existence? Probably a bunch. Think of MKUltra and how the CIA nearly got away with it if they had done a better job at scrubbing records!
Live shot of a government organization destroying evidence of their actions
Other Crazy Stuff
In this section, we like to provide links to other crazy topics we came across while doing research.
