Critique of intelligence on Vietnam kept secret
The U.S. National Security Agency has kept secret since 2001 a finding by an agency historian that NSA officers deliberately distorted critical intelligence during the Tonkin Gulf episode that helped precipitate the Vietnam War, according to two people familiar with the historian's work.
The historian's conclusion is the first serious accusation that communications intercepted by the NSA, the secretive eavesdropping and code-breaking agency, were falsified so that they made it look as if North Vietnam had attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964, two days after a previous clash.
President Lyndon B. Johnson cited the supposed attack to persuade Congress to authorize broad military action in Vietnam, but most historians have concluded in recent years that there was no second attack.
The NSA historian, Robert Hanyok, found a pattern of translation mistakes that went uncorrected, altered intercept times and selective citation of intelligence that persuaded him that mid-level agency officers had deliberately skewed the evidence.
Hanyok concluded that they had done it not out of any political motive but to cover up earlier errors, and that top NSA and military officials and Johnson neither knew about nor condoned the deception.
The research by the NSA historian was detailed four years ago in an in-house article. It remains classified, in part because agency officials feared its release might prompt uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq, according to an intelligence official familiar with some internal discussions of the matter.
Matthew Aid, an independent historian who has discussed Hanyok's Tonkin Gulf research with current and former NSA and CIA officials who have read it, said he had decided to speak publicly about the findings because he believed they should have been released long ago.
"This material is relevant to debates we as Americans are having about the war in Iraq and intelligence reform," said Aid, who is writing a history of the NSA. "To keep it classified simply because it might embarrass the agency is wrong."
Aid's description of Hanyok's findings was confirmed by the intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the research remains classified.
Both men said Hanyok believed the initial misinterpretation of North Vietnamese intercepts was probably an honest mistake. But after months of detective work in the NSA's archives, he concluded that midlevel agency officials had discovered the error almost immediately but covered it up and doctored documents so that they appeared to provide evidence of an attack.
"Rather than come clean about their mistake, they helped launch the United States into a bloody war that would last for 10 years," Aid said.
Asked about Hanyok's research, an NSA spokesman said the agency intended to release the material in late November. The release had been "delayed," said Don Weber, the spokesman, "in an effort to be consistent with our preferred practice of providing the public a more contextual perspective."
Weber said the agency was working to declassify not only Hanyok's article, but also the original intercepts and intelligence reports that form the raw material for his work.
The intelligence official gave a different account. He said NSA staff historians first pushed for public release in 2002, when Hanyok included his Tonkin Gulf findings in a 400-page classified in-house history of the agency and Vietnam.
High-level officials initially expressed support, but the idea lost momentum in 2003, in part because of the concerns about parallels with the Iraq intelligence, the official said.
Many historians believe that even without the Tonkin Gulf episode, Johnson might have found a reason to escalate military action against North Vietnam. They note that Johnson apparently had his own doubts about the Aug. 4 attack and that a few days later he told George Ball, under secretary of state, "Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!"
But Robert McNamara, who as defense secretary played a central role in the Tonkin Gulf affair, said in an interview last week that he believed that the intelligence reports had played a decisive role in the war's expansion.
McNamara, 89, said he had never been told that the intelligence might have been altered to shore up the scant evidence of a North Vietnamese attack.
The supposed second North Vietnamese attack, on the U.S. destroyers Maddox and C. Turner Joy, played an outsize role in history. Johnson responded by ordering retaliatory airstrikes on North Vietnamese targets and used the event to persuade Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin resolution on Aug. 7, 1964.
It authorized the president to "to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force" to defend South Vietnam and its neighbors and was used both by Johnson and President Richard Nixon to justify escalating the war, in which 58,226 Americans and more than one million Vietnamese died.
By Scott Shane - The New York Times - November 1st, 2005.
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