Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba

Yes. "Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba" was signed and forwarded by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Secretary of Defense on 13 March 1962. The record here is NARA 202-10002-10104, JCS Central Files 1962, Box 29, released with the Kennedy files; every page carries the National Archives release footer. All 212 pages are on this page.

The package proposes staging the destruction of a chartered civil airliner whose passengers are described as college students, and the method it sets out is a substitution — a duplicate aircraft is destroyed in its place, so the passengers exist only in the story the world would be told. Other proposals in the same package do contemplate real casualties.

No. The civilian leadership refused it. What this record establishes is that the proposals were written, signed at the top of the American military and forwarded up — not that anything in them happened. The file is printed here whole so that the distinction sits on the page instead of being argued about.

It reached the public through the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board, which reviewed it in 1997 and released it with deletions; the postponed passages came out in October 2017 and the complete record was posted in the 2018 JFK release. The 2018 PDF runs 212 pages against the identification form's stated 197 because release sheets and duplicate file copies are bound in.

Not inside this document. The released file is a 300 dpi greyscale scan with no OCR text layer, so there is nothing behind the images to match a phrase against. Every page has its own anchor and the page strip jumps in tens, so a passage can still be linked to precisely once you have found it.