The secret documents detailing Operation Northwoods were officially declassified and made public in the late 1990s.

The public only learned about this plan decades later. In 1992, Congress passed a law to release records related to the JFK assassination. Because of this, the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board made the secret Northwoods papers public in 1997. Over 1,500 pages of documents were released. This proved to the world that the chilling proposal was completely real, even though the government kept it hidden for almost forty years.