We shot down two planes in the battle area, and one other plane was damaged. We sacrificed two ships and all the rest are okay. The combat spirit is very high and we are starting out on the hunt and [are waiting to] receive assignment. Men are very confident because they themselves saw the enemy planes sink. The enemy ship could also have been damaged.64
But in fact the NSA translation does not reflect what the navy listening post at San Miguel intercepted. In fact, the San Miguel intercept reads as follows:
We shot at two enemy airplanes and at least one was damaged. We sacrificed two comrades but all are brave and recognize our obligation.65
It would seem that some unidentified person or persons in the reporting unit of B Group, for reasons we can only speculate about, not only changed the wording of the translation and, in doing so, the import and meaning of the text, but also changed the call signs used by the North Vietnamese transmitter and recipient and reformatted the message to include material not contained in the original intercept. Sadly, the section of the NSA historian’s report on how this could conceivably have happened at Fort Meade was redacted by the NSA FOIA office. But more important, the intercept could not have been an after-action report because it was intercepted only an hour after the destroyer Turner Joy opened fire, and the “battle” raged for another two and a half hours. The only reason McNamara thought it was an after-action report was because he got it off the teletype from Fort Meade two and a half hours after the battle in the Gulf of Tonkin was over. Apparently McNamara did not bother to look at the times contained in the intercept itself.66
The Rush to Battle
In retrospect, it is clear that everyone in the White House was in a hurry to act, and nobody seemed to want to take the time to scrutinize the evidence that was available to see if it justified going to war. After reviewing the intelligence material for all of two full minutes, Secretary McNamara and the JCS agreed that the evidence, in their opinion, clearly indicated that an attack had taken place in the Gulf of Tonkin on the night of August 4. At five nineteen p.m. EDT (four nineteen a.m. GOT time, August 5), without waiting for additional information from Captain Herrick in the gulf or conducting a detailed assessment of the COMINT intercepts, McNamara ordered that the air strikes be launched within two and a half hours.67
At CINCPAC headquarters in Hawaii, a harried Admiral Sharp was still trying to figure out what had happened in the gulf from Herrick and the commander of the Seventh Fleet in Japan when McNamara’s strike execute order arrived on his desk. Finally, at about five p.m. EDT, Sharp was given the COMINT intercepts described above. After quickly scanning them with his intelligence staff, at five twenty-three p.m. EDT Sharp telephoned General David Burchinal at the Pentagon and told him that the intercept concerning the “sacrifice of two ships” had convinced him that the attack had taken place. Sharp told Burchinal that the intercept “. . . pins it down better than anything so far.” Burchinal asked Sharp, “Indicates that [the North Vietnamese] were out there on business, huh?” Sharp’s response was “Oh, yes. Very definitely.” Burchinal agreed with Sharp’s assessment, despite the fact that he had not yet seen the intercepts that Sharp was referencing. The only “hot” item that Burchinal had to pass on to Sharp from the Washington end was that McNamara was “satisfied with the evidence.”68
At five thirty-four p.m. EDT, Sharp sent a FLASH-precedence message to Herrick demanding a categorical and unambiguous answer as to whether he could “confirm absolutely” that the attack had taken place and that two North Vietnamese vessels had been sunk during the engagement.69
While Sharp was waiting for a reply from the Gulf of Tonkin, a FLASH-precedence message from NSA arrived in the Pentagon communications center. A report based on intercepted Chinese air force radio traffic, it ominously stated that the Chinese were in the process of sending a unit of MiG fighters from an air base in southern China to the North Vietnamese airfield at Dien Bien Phu.70
Twenty minutes later, Herrick sent Sharp a radio message containing a qualified answer to his inquiries:
Turner Joy claims sinking one craft and damage to another with gunfire. Damaged boat returned gunfire— no hits. Turner Joy and other personnel observed bursts and black smoke from hits on this boat.This boat illuminated Turner Joy and his return fire was observed and heard by T.J. personnel. Maddox scored no known hits and never positively identified a boat as such.
The first boat to close Maddox probably fired torpedo at Maddox which was heard but not seen. All subsequent Maddox torpedo reports are doubtful in that it is suspected the sonarman was hearing the ship’s own propeller beat reflected off rudders during course changes (weaving). Turner Joy detected 2 torpedo runs on her, one of which was sighted visually passed down port side 3 to 5 hundred yards.
Weather was overcast with limited visibility. There were no stars or moon resulting in almost total darkness throughout action.71
Herrick’s report was filled with so many inconsistencies that it served only to further muddy the waters, rather than clear them up. Herrick knew when he sent it that his report conflicted with a message sent by the captain of the Turner Joy, which claimed to have sunk one enemy vessel and damaged another. But in sum, Herrick told Sharp that based on the information available to him, he believed that the attack had taken place, subject to the qualifications contained in the body of his report, but that he would investigate further and provide more conclusive proof if he could. After reading Herrick’s message, at six p.m. EDT Sharp again called McNamara to tell him that Herrick now was convinced that the attack had taken place, but that there remained serious questions as to whether the engagement had, putting in jeopardy the retaliatory air strike.72
At six forty-five p.m. EDT, thirty-eight minutes after McNamara had sent the air strike execute order to CINCPAC, President Johnson met with sixteen senior congressional leaders from both parties and briefed them for ninety minutes, informing them that he had authorized retaliatory air strikes against North Vietnam and would seek a congressional resolution in support of his action.73
But the conflicting reports sent by the Maddox and the Turner Joy had created consternation at the Pentagon and at CINCPAC, both of which desperately wanted uniform and consistent reports from both ships as to what had occurred the previous night. Sharp sent a message to Herrick asking, “Can you confirm that you were attacked by PT or Swatow?” Herrick did not respond to the request, but the captain of the Turner Joy radioed at six ten a.m. local time (seven ten p.m. EDT, August 4) that he was convinced that an attack had taken place because a lookout had reported seeing a torpedo wake.74
The mounting number of conflicting reports from the Maddox and the Turner Joy only created more concern at higher headquarters. At eight a.m. GOT time, August 5, the commander of the Seventh Fleet, Admiral Roy Johnson, asked the captain of the Turner Joy for the names of the witnesses to the attack and an evaluation as to their reliability. Thirty minutes later, Johnson ordered the captains of the Maddox and the Turner Joy to initiate a search for debris that would prove that there had been a battle on the night of the 4th. After a twenty-minute search, both ships were forced to report that they had found no debris at the alleged site of the sea battle.75
At ten thirty p.m. EDT on August 4, while navy commanders in the Pacific were still furiously trying to collect and collate the evidence, President Johnson went on television to announce, “Air action is now in execution against gunboats and certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam.” As he spoke, sixty-four U.S. Navy fighter-bombers from the aircraft carriers Ticonderoga and Constellation struck North Vietnamesenaval bases, surface units, and oil storage depots, destroying or damaging twenty-five patrol and torpedo boats and more than 90 percent of North Vietnam’s petroleum storage capacity. The toll for America, however, was heavy. North Vietnamese antiaircraft gunners shot down two navy fighter-bombers, resulting in the first American prisoner of war (POW) and the first pilot confirmed dead in the Vietnam War.
In the White House and the Pentagon’s
haste to execute the air strikes, nobody bothered to tell NSA that it was happening. As NSA director Gordon Blake told an interviewer, “the retaliation took everyone by surprise. NSA wasn’t warned that there would be a retaliation. We weren’t even able to readjust our [SIGINT] coverage in order to see the effects of the retaliation.”76
On August 7, 1964, Congress nearly unanimously approved what became known as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized the president of the United States to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States,” thus allowing the Johnson administration to expand the role of American military forces in Southeast Asia.
Postscript
This was an intelligence disaster of epic proportions. After all the available information is carefully reviewed and the arguments on both sides given careful consideration, the overwhelming weight of the evidence now strongly indicates that there was no naval engagement in the Gulf of Tonkin on the night of August 4, 1964.
Declassified documents reveal that President Johnson secretly doubted whether a naval battle had actually taken place. On September 19, he kicked off a meeting of his national security advisers by telling them that he had “some doubt as to whether there had in fact been any vessels of any kind in the area.” Despite his doubts, that afternoon the White House issued an unequivocal statement that there had indeed been a naval battle that fateful night.77As time went by, though, Johnson exhibited increasing doubt as to the veracity of the NSA radio intercepts that had been critically important in justifying America’s entry into the Vietnam War. Years after the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, Johnson would occasionally tease Secretary McNamara about the intercepts, chiding him with sarcastic jabs such as “Well, those fish [certainly] were swimming,” or “Hell, those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.”78
This opinion is now shared by the two on-scene U.S. Navy commanders, Captains Herrick and Ogier (both retired), and even by a repentant Robert Mc-Namara.79Experts such as NSA deputy director Louis Tordella and INR’s Ray Cline have concluded that the intercepts were more likely puffed-up North Vietnamese postmortem reports concerning the August 2 battle, rather than descriptions of the events that allegedly took place on August 4.80
Even at NSA, there was much skepticism at the time about the veracity of the intelligence that the agency had provided that justified America’s entering the Vietnam War. Frank Austin, the chief of NSA’s B Group, which was responsible for all communist Asian targets, was, according to a declassified NSA history, “skeptical from the morning of 5 August,” as was Colonel John Morrison, the head of NSA Pacific in Hawaii, who wrote a lengthy and critical analysis of the NSA reporting, questioning whether an attack had taken place.81A declassified agency history of the affair notes, “The NSA analyst who looked at the traffic believed that the whole thing was a mistake. The [intercepted] messages almost certainly referred to other activity— the 2 August attack and the Desoto patrols. The White House had started a war on the basis of unconfirmed (and later-to-be-determined probably invalid) information.” 82
It was not until 2000 that NSA historian Dr. Robert Hanyok wrote a detailed study of the Gulf of Tonkin incidents for an internal NSA publication; it concludes, on the basis of a review of over one hundred NSA reports that somehow never found their way to the White House, that the August 4, 1964, Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened. Hanyok’s conclusions are sobering: “Through a compound of analytic errors and an unwillingness to consider contrary evidence, American SIGINT elements in the region and at NSA [headquarters] reported Hanoi’s plans to attack the two ships of the Desoto patrol.
Further analytic errors and an obscuring of other information led to publication of more ‘evidence.’ In truth, Hanoi’s navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on 2 August.” Hanyok’s controversial top-secret report alleges that NSA officials withheld 90 percent of the SIGINT about the Gulf of Tonkin attacks in their possession, and instead gave the White House only what it wanted to hear. He concludes that “only SIGINT that supported the claim that the communists had attacked the two destroyers was given to administration officials.”83
But what ever doubts may have existed in August 1964 about the credibility of the evidence provided by NSA about the Gulf of Tonkin naval engagement, in the end it really did not matter. It was no secret that, wanting to “look tough” in an election year, Johnson administration officials were looking for a casus belli for attacking North Vietnam. So President Johnson, Secretary of Defense McNamara, and the JCS appear to have cherry-picked the available intelligence, in this case SIGINT from NSA, in order to justify a decision they had already made to launch air strikes against North Vietnam. Ray Cline stated that Johnson and McNamara “were dying to get those air attacks off and did finally send them off with a pretty fuzzy understanding of what had really happened.”84The final word goes to an NSA historian, who concluded, “The administration had decided that expansion of American involvement would be necessary. Had the 4 August incident not occurred, something else would have.”85
CHAPTER 7
The Wilderness of Pain
NSA and the Vietnam War: 1964–1969
A man’s judgment is no better than his
information.
—LYNDON JOHNSON, 1968
Flying Blind
Recently declassified documents make clear that everything we thought we knew about the role of NSA in the Vietnam War needs to be reconsidered. One fact kept a secret until now was that after the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong converted all their communications to unbreakable cipher systems in April 1962, as described in chapter 5, NSA was never again able to read any high-level enemy communications traffic except for very brief periods of time. Throughout the war, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong constantly changed and improved their high-level diplomatic and military cipher systems, in the process killing off the few cryptanalytic successes that NSA enjoyed. As a declassified NSA history notes, “it was not the sophistication of Hanoi’s cryptography that hindered cryptanalysis, but the short shelf-life of its systems. Even then, the time between intercept and decryption was still months.”1At some point in the mid-1960s, NSA made the controversial decision to give up altogether on its efforts to crack the high-level North Vietnamese ciphers and instead focus its resources on solving lower-level enemy military codes used on the battlefield in South Vietnam and on traffic analysis.2
Since NSA could not provide any high-level intelligence about the strategic intentions of Ho Chi Minh and the rest of the North Vietnamese leadership, the U.S. government found itself repeatedly and unpleasantly surprised by the actions of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. Failing to forecast the North Vietnamese–Viet Cong 1968 Tet Offensive was perhaps the worst U.S. intelligence failure, one that occurred in part because, per a 1968 CIA postmortem report, “high-level Communist communications” were “for the most part unreadable” (italics added).3
NSA’s best intelligence was derived from reading the diplomatic traffic of foreign countries like Brazil and Indonesia, which maintained embassies in Hanoi. The cable traffic of foreign journalists visiting Hanoi was also a useful source of information. For example, in 1968 NSA intercepted a message from a Japa nese journalist in Hanoi to his home office in Tokyo reporting that he had interviewed and photographed a number of American POWs held by the North Vietnamese.4
The North Vietnamese Enter the War in the South
Immediately after the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, the U.S. intelligence community tasked NSA with intensifying its SIGINT coverage of both Viet Cong (VC) radio traffic inside South Vietnam and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) communications north of the DMZ. The agency’s monitoring of VC Morse code communications traffic quickly identified a number of major enemy corps and division-size headquarters staffs covering all of South Vietnam. NSA also began closely monitoring the radio traffic of the NVA unit that ran the entire army logistics infrastructure in North Vietnam and
Laos, the General Directorate of Rear Services (GDRS). GDRS was a critically important target because it was responsible for moving men and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from North Vietnam through southern Laos and Cambodia into South Vietnam.5
Within weeks of initiating intercept coverage of GDRS, NSA began intercepting message traffic suggesting that elements of a regular North Viet nam -ese Army unit, the 325th NVA Division, had begun preparing to cross into southern Laos from their home base in Dong Hoi in North Vietnam. In November 1964, SIGINT confirmed that an enemy radio station operating along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in southern Laos had suddenly converted its radio operating procedures to those used by regular NVA units. A few weeks later, in December, CIA “road watch” teams in southern Laos spotted several battalions of regular North Vietnamese troops moving down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the direction of South Vietnam. In the ensuing months, traffic analysis coming out of NSA tracked the movement of the 325th NVA Division through the Mu Gia Pass and southern Laos and into South Vietnam. Although U.S. Army direction-finding assets confirmed the presence of this division in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam in January 1965, the Military Assistance Command Vietnams’ (MACV) intelligence staff in Saigon refused to accept the presence of NVA regular forces in the country because it had not been confirmed by POWs or captured documents. It was not until early February that MACV finally agreed that the headquarters of the 325th NVA Division plus a subordinate regiment were in the Central Highlands.6
The Opening of the Ground War in South Vietnam
In South Vietnam, the ground war was moving into a new and more lethal phase. The initial landing of U.S. Marines took place in March 1965, and by June the entire Third Marine Amphibious Force was operating in the northern part of South Vietnam, based in the city of Da Nang. In July 1965, the first U.S. Army combat unit, the First Cavalry Division (Airmobile), arrived in South Vietnam. As the number of U.S. combat troops in South Vietnam rose steadily, so did the number and intensity of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong attacks. Forces on both sides began maneuvering for advantage, shadowboxing while waiting for the other side to make the first decisive move.
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