Johnson once called Vietnam “a raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country.” But in 1964 it was rapidly becoming a foreign policy problem that threatened to overwhelm his entire presidency, much less earn him any credit.
America’s involvement in Southeast Asia had been marked by secrecy and deception from the start. Following the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh’s successful armed rebellion against French colonial rule after the end of World War II, the United States had taken over military assistance to the non-Communist South Vietnamese government created by the 1954 Geneva settlement ending the war and the French presence; because the agreement strictly limited outside military forces, the American troops sent to the region were called “advisers,” even when their numbers grew to thousands by 1962, under the command of a U.S. Army four-star general.
By March 1964, when McNamara warned that a renewed Communist insurgency in the South was “a test case of U.S. capacity to help a nation meet a Communist ‘war of national liberation,’ ” Johnson was sliding toward a policy that took concealment to a previously inconceivable height; he was in effect proposing to fight a major war while keeping it a secret from the American people as long as possible, apparently in the hope that it would all be over before the truth became known. When at the end of the 1964 he authorized a substantial military escalation, Johnson instructed his aides, “I consider it a matter of the highest importance that the substance of this position not become public except as I specifically direct.”3
There were alarming signs from the start, as well, that this was not a winnable war. The South Vietnamese government was led by a corrupt regime that refused to hold elections and was made up largely of refugees from the North who had fled Ho’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam; nearly all were Catholics and former soldiers or police officers of the French colonial government, and to many of the indigenous and primarily Buddhist South Vietnamese, they represented nothing more than a continuation of the hated colonial rule. American reporters noted that South Vietnamese villagers did not welcome Americans the way South Koreans had, and that U.S. and South Vietnamese government officials in Saigon did not dare venture even a few miles into the countryside without the protection of a military convoy. Across vast stretches of the South, Communist guerrilla fighters—which intelligence reports found were made up 80 to 90 percent of locally recruited peasants, not North Vietnamese infiltrators—operated with impunity, assassinating local officials and setting ambushes by night, then melting back into the rice paddies by day.4
But the necessity of believing in quick American success started at the very top and infused the thinking of Pentagon officials and commanders on the scene; even those closer to the fighting, who daily encountered uncomfortable truths, found that it did not pay to report unwelcome facts up the chain of command. McNamara had an apparently boundless faith in his ability to size up a situation by going straight to the raw data and numbers; on his first visit to the country, in May 1962, he sped from briefing to briefing, filling his notebook with statistics, then announced to reporters that the United States and the South Vietnamese had the Communist insurgents on the run. Neil Sheehan, a young UPI reporter, intercepted the secretary as he was getting into his car on his dash back to the airport.
How, Sheehan asked, could he be so confident about “a war we had barely begun to fight”?
McNamara fixed him with his trademark steely gaze. “Every quantitative measure we have,” the defense secretary intoned, “shows that we’re winning this war.”
The trouble was that every U.S. official, from General Paul D. Harkins, head of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam, on down knew that that was the only message the bosses wanted to hear. Intelligence reports from the field were rigorously edited by Harkins’s operations staff, who systematically reduced the number of enemy forces, inflated the number of enemy casualties, and swept under the rug the pathetic performance of South Vietnamese army troops. The weekly report Harkins sent back to the Pentagon was titled the “Headway Report.”5
In June 1964, William P. Bundy, assistant secretary of defense, had concluded that some form of congressional authorization would be required for the expanding American military operations in Vietnam; seeking to avoid a formal declaration of war, he drafted a joint resolution of Congress authorizing the president to use U.S. forces to protect any Southeast Asian nation threatened by Communism. But the feeling was that some provocation would be needed to justify the step. The situation had all of the ingredients for one of the worst intelligence fiascoes in American history: extreme secrecy, political pressure, an intelligence agency short on analytic experience but ambitious of White House entrée, an overconfident reliance on signals intelligence as an “unimpeachable” source, and a president and secretary of defense who insisted on seeing everything for themselves and were supremely confident of their ability to act as their own intelligence officer at a moment of crisis.
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Since 1962 the U.S. Navy had been running patrols along the Chinese coast to assert “freedom of the seas.” That was a traditional mission of the U.S. Navy going back to the Great White Fleet, if not the War of 1812. But the destroyers on these “Desoto patrols” also carried fastened to their decks a Top Secret ten-ton van that concealed a self-contained radio intercept post, operated by a Naval Security Group detachment.
On July 28, 1964, USS Maddox, a World War II–era destroyer, steamed out of the Taiwanese port of Keelung with orders to conduct a Desoto patrol along the North Vietnamese coast. Its mission was to locate and identify all North Vietnamese coastal radar transmitters, to assess whether the junk fleet was supplying Communist forces in the South, and to “stimulate and record” the North Vietnamese reaction to its presence. The Maddox was ordered to stay eight miles off the coast, outside the three-mile territorial limit Vietnam claimed, but to go provocatively near—as little as four miles—several islands in the Gulf of Tonkin where the North Vietnamese had small coastal defense installations and a patrol boat base.6
The Maddox arrived on station July 31, just hours after a raid by South Vietnamese commandos on radar stations at Hon Me and Hon Ngu islands. The attacks were part of a highly secret U.S. Navy operation called Oplan 34A that optimistically hoped to put pressure on the North Vietnamese government to halt its support of the insurgency in the South. The U.S. Navy trained and provided logistical support for the South Vietnamese special forces that carried out the attacks. The Maddox’s captain, John Herrick, had been briefed only in general terms about Oplan 34A and was not told anything of the operations taking place in the area during his assigned patrol. At NSA, the analysts in the B2 office, responsible for North Vietnamese communications, were equally in the dark. “None of us had been cleared for 34A, and we did not know that there were actions under way,” recalled Milt Zaslow, who headed the office.7
On the morning of August 1, ASA intercept station USM-626J at Phu Bai, near the city of Hue, on the coast of South Vietnam near the DMZ, intercepted a signal between two North Vietnamese patrol boats, sent in Morse code using a “low grade cipher system,” passing on tracking information that correlated with the Maddox’s assigned course near Hon Me Island.8 Shortly before midnight, Navy intercept station USN-27 in the Philippines read a message from the North Vietnamese naval base at Ben Thuy:
DECIDED TO FIGHT THE ENEMY TONIGHT [one group unreadable] WHEN YOU RECEIVE DIRECTING ORDERS.9
A report was sent as a flash message to the Maddox, and Herrick at once ordered her east out of the patrol area at ten knots. Throughout the night intercepted messages showed the North Vietnamese radar stations following the U.S. destroyer, but by the next morning, with no more overtly hostile action having occurred, Herrick resumed his patrol.
Shortly before noon on August 2, Phu Bai read a message stating that a planned attack by high-speed torpedo boats was under way. Phu Bai issued a Critic that reached the Maddox at 2:15 p.m. A few minutes later the Maddox’s radar picked up three North Vietnamese boats approaching at thir
ty knots from Hon Me. The Maddox turned east and increased speed to twenty-five knots. By three o’clock the torpedo boats were within five miles of the U.S. warship, closing rapidly at their top speed of fifty knots. Herrick sent an urgent message requesting air support from the carrier USS Ticonderoga and stating his intention to open fire on the pursuing boats. In the ensuing brief engagement the North Vietnamese boats launched their torpedoes, all of them missing; the Maddox returned fire with 250 five-and three-inch shells, hitting one of the boats and leaving four dead and six wounded. A few minutes later the Ticonderoga air patrol arrived and drove off the attackers. Aboard the Maddox there were no injuries; the ship was found to have sustained a single machine-gun bullet hole.10
It was 5 a.m. in Washington when news of the maritime skirmish reached the White House; by the time Johnson met with his advisers at 11:30 a.m., senior NSA officials who were asked to attend the briefing had additional information suggesting that the entire action might have been the result of “miscalculation or an impulsive act of a local commander,” as McNamara concluded: an order issued by the North Vietnamese naval headquarters in Haiphong two hours before the attack but not transmitted until it was actually under way instructed all boats to return to shore and to relay specifically to the torpedo boat squadron the order NOT TO MAKE WAR TODAY. It was a sign of NSA’s growing influence that CIA director John McCone was not invited to attend the White House meeting. Johnson ordered that U.S. plans for retaliatory airstrikes be placed on hold, but that the maritime patrol be reinforced; he called reporters into the Oval Office to warn that any further North Vietnamese interference with U.S. ships in international waters would have “dire consequences.”11
Captain Herrick proposed cutting short his patrol as an unacceptable risk, earning him a swift rebuke from the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Thomas Moorer: “Termination of Desoto patrol after two days of patrol ops subsequent to Maddox incident…does not in my view adequately demonstrate United States resolve.” Then, on the night of August 4, eighteen hours after the initial skirmish—“the darkest night I’d ever seen at sea,” in the words of one of the Maddox’s radar operators, in rough seas with a heavy chop, with a low overcast sky—the Maddox and a second destroyer, the Turner Joy, fired hundreds of rounds in a wild, four-hour-long zigzagging encounter in which their crews claimed to have seen gun flashes, searchlights, torpedo wakes, and radar and sonar contacts indicating attacks by multiple enemy boats that fired twenty-six torpedoes.
A welter of confusing and contradictory evidence in the ensuing few hours cast doubt on the whole incident. For one thing, the entire known North Vietnamese force of twelve torpedo boats could have fired at most twenty-four torpedoes. The Turner Joy’s far more experienced sonarman had detected no torpedo contacts. Neither ship had suffered any visible damage. The radar contacts had appeared and disappeared at all points of the compass; not a single continuous track was followed. The white streaks in the water that some crewmen reported, Herrick quickly determined, had been nothing but the churning created by the American ships’ own wild evasive maneuvers, dodging nonexistent torpedoes. Air patrols reported they had not seen any enemy vessels or wakes. “Review of action makes many recorded contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful,” Herrick reported. “Freak weather effects and overeager sonar-men may have accounted for many reports. No actual visual sightings by Maddox. Suggest complete evaluation before any further actions.”12
It was at that moment, with orders for the retaliatory airstrikes pending, that McNamara decided to become his own intelligence analyst in earnest, seizing on two signals intelligence reports that had just come in: one was a Critic from Phu Bai issued the night of August 4 reporting POSS DRV NAVAL OPERATION PLANNED AGAINST THE DESOTO PATROL TONITE 04 AUG. The second, which arrived at the White House just two hours after Herrick’s message casting doubt on the whole business, appeared to be an after-action report from an unidentified North Vietnamese naval authority: SHOT DOWN TWO PLANES IN THE BATTLE AREA. WE HAD SACRIFICED TWO SHIPS AND ALL THE REST ARE OKAY. THE ENEMY SHIP COULD ALSO HAVE BEEN DAMAGED.
To McNamara this was decisive; he would ever afterward maintain that proof of the North Vietnamese attack on August 4 had come from “intelligence reports of a highly classified and unimpeachable nature.” At 10:30 that night in Washington, the president of the United States went on television and announced, “Air action is now in execution against gunboats and certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam.” Three days later Congress, by a vote of 88 to 2 in the Senate and unanimously in the House, approved the resolution William Bundy had prepared months earlier for just such an occasion.13
The information NSA provided on the August 2 attack had shown the agency at its nimble best: it had decoded messages in virtual real time, flashed an alert to the commander on the scene in time to give him tactical warning, and had sent the White House within hours crucial additional evidence that the attack might have been an unauthorized adventure by an overly aggressive North Vietnamese patrol.
Its reporting on the August 4 phantom attack that precipitated America’s large-scale military intervention in Vietnam was another matter. McNamara undeniably seized and ran with the evidence he wanted to believe, but NSA’s inexperience in intelligence analysis and frantic efforts to supply the White House with information in the heat of crisis was what allowed him to do so. “Everybody was demanding the SIGINT; they wanted it quick, they didn’t want anybody to take any time to analyze it,” said Ray Cline, the CIA deputy director at the time.14
In fact, it had been a leap of complete guesswork on the part of the analyst at Phu Bai who issued the Critic on August 4 that a new attack on the Desoto patrol was about to take place: the actual intercepted North Vietnamese message, which McNamara did not see, referred only to unspecified “operations” by patrol boats that night. And as for the second message, the seemingly even more decisive after-action report, analysts at the NSA watch center later acknowledged that there had been a difference of opinion whether this referred to the earlier August 2 attack or a new incident. But under the pressures of the moment it had been sent out as evidence of a second attack.15
NSA’s subsequent efforts to cover up its mistake turned its sin from venal to mortal; what began as an innocent lapse became an act of deliberate falsification as the agency systematically concealed the truth, issuing a series of summary reports over the following days that backed with obedient certainty the administration’s position even as the evidence pointed completely the other way.
Within days NSA analysts were privately convinced that no second attack had occurred. The evidence was overwhelming: unlike on August 2, there had been no tracking reports transmitted by any of the North Vietnamese coastal radar stations on the night of August 4. At the very time the August 4 “attack” message was intercepted, other messages from North Vietnamese boats repeated orders to steer clear of the Desoto patrol altogether and left little doubt that the only “operation” taking place that night was a salvage operation to recover two boats damaged in the August 2 skirmish. And as for the August 4 “after-action” report, that had been transmitted while the Maddox and Turner Joy were in the midst of their four-hour phantom engagement and was merely a propagandistic recapitulation of the earlier action, not a formal after-action report at all.16
A classified, searingly honest accounting by NSA historian Robert J. Hanyok in 2001 found that in bolstering the administration’s version of events, NSA summary reports made use of only 15 of the relevant intercepts in its files, suppressing 122 others that all flatly contradicted the now “official” version of the August 4 events. Translations were altered; in one case two unrelated messages were combined to make them appear to have been from the same message; one of the NSA summary reports that did include a mention of signals relating to a North Vietnamese salvage operation obfuscated the timing to hide the fact that one of the recovered boats was being taken under tow at the very instant it was supposedly attacking the
Maddox and Turner Joy. The original Vietnamese-language version of the August 4 attack message that had triggered the Critic alert meanwhile mysteriously vanished from NSA’s files.17
Although there was never any evidence of direct orders from the White House to NSA to supply the confirmation it was looking for, there was no need: the doubters among NSA’s analysts kept silent while NSA’s middle and upper managers gave the administration what it wanted. Within a few days the agency was in too deep to admit it had been wrong, even if it had the inclination to do so. In 2005, after a story about the distortion of the Tonkin Gulf intelligence appeared in the New York Times, NSA finally agreed to partially declassify Hanyok’s study and 140 supporting documents. The Times noted that NSA’s top managers had resisted the move for several years, “fearful that it might prompt uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq” launched by President George W. Bush in 2003.18
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Among the first American “advisers” to arrive in Vietnam in 1961 was a contingent of the Army Security Agency, dressed in civilian clothes, who set up a makeshift headquarters in an empty hangar at Tan Son Nhut Air Base outside Saigon. To create workspaces they piled up boxes of Crations to form seven-foot-high partitions and cobbled together desks from sheets of plywood and scrap lumber.19 It had been a decade since NSA or the service cryptologic agencies had operated in a war zone, and it was quickly apparent that all of the lessons and skills learned in Korea had been forgotten. Manning the electronic parapets of spy satellites in space and permanent listening posts at large bases in Germany to watch for the start of World War III was different in every way from lurking on the edge of a jungle trying to direct fire on a shifting guerrilla force a few miles off.
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