U.S. government historian ordered to suppress findings on Vietnam war start

The NYT has a very significant article today, in which reporter Scott Shane reveals that,

    The National Security Agency has kept secret since 2001 a finding by an agency historian that during the Tonkin Gulf episode, which helped precipitate the Vietnam War, N.S.A. officers deliberately distorted critical intelligence to cover up their mistakes, two people familiar with the historian’s work say.
    The historian’s conclusion is the first serious accusation that communications intercepted by the N.S.A., 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 N.S.A. historian, Robert J. Hanyok, found a pattern of translation mistakes that went uncorrected, altered intercept times and selective citation of intelligence that persuaded him that midlevel agency officers had deliberately skewed the evidence.

    Mr. Hanyok concluded that they had done it not out of any political motive but to cover up earlier errors, and that top N.S.A. and defense officials and Johnson neither knew about nor condoned the deception.
    Mr. Hanyok’s findings were published nearly five years ago in a classified in-house journal, and starting in 2002 he and other government historians argued that it should be made public. But their effort was rebuffed by higher-level agency policymakers, who by the next year were fearful that it 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 M. Aid, an independent historian who has discussed Mr. Hanyok’s Tonkin Gulf research with current and former N.S.A. and C.I.A. 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 Mr. Aid… “To keep it classified simply because it might embarrass the agency is wrong.”

(Shane wrote that Aid’s description of Hanyok’s findings was confirmed by the intelligence official he had already referred to, ” who spoke on condition of anonymity.”)
As a citizen here in the US, I demand to see Robert Hanyok’s study. Both it and all the intelligence reports that it analyzed were completely funded by US taxpayers. And as Matthew Aid argues, in light of the controversy about the current administration’s deliberate misuse of so-called “intelligence information” in its (successful) attempt to build the case for starting a war against Iraq, we citizens and taxpayers need to be as clear as we can be about exactly how our government’s various “intelligence” organs work, and in particular how they can be misused and abused in such circumstances.
It seems, however, that what Hanyok has written about in his still-unpublished study is something significantly different from what the participants in the more recent “yellow cake”, “aluminimum tubes”, and “Muhammad Atta” disinformation conspiracies were doing…
Shane writes that his two sources (Aid and the anonymous intel official) both said that,

    Mr. Hanyok believed the initial misinterpretation of North Vietnamese intercepts was probably an honest mistake. But after months of detective work in N.S.A.’s archives, he concluded that midlevel agency officials discovered the error almost immediately but covered it up and doctored documents so that they appeared to provide evidence of an attack.

Actually, this account does not tell us anything about the motivation of those involved in the cover-up (as opposed to that of the people who made the original, apparently “honest”, mistake.) The main motivations of the cover-uppers could have been professional pride– as in, not wanting their particular analysis unit to have been caught making what looks like a fairly elementary mistake in translation– or they might well have been more heinous. Evidently, we need to see the whole timeline, and those original documents, in order to make a judgment on that.
Regardless of their motivations, the cover-uppers certainly helped catapult the US Congress into passing the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. (Wikipedia has a fairly good description of the whole episode here. However, their intro there still says of the false intel information that, “According to the Pentagon Papers and various researchers, the attacks were virtually fabricated by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration.” We need to see Hanyok’s work to get more clarity on whether it was a “fabrication” or the cover-up of an– originally perhaps honest– mistake.)
NYT reporter Shane writes that, “Many historians believe that even without the Tonkin Gulf episode, Johnson might have found a reason to escalate military action against North Vietnam.” But he quotes then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara as telling him in an interview last week that:

    “I think it’s wrong to believe that Johnson wanted war… But we thought we had evidence that North Vietnam was escalating.”
    Mr. 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.
    “That really is surprising to me,” said Mr. McNamara, who Mr. Hanyok found had unknowingly used the altered intercepts in 1964 and 1968 in testimony before Congress. “I think they ought to make all the material public, period.”

So Bob McNamara comes across as, in some ways, the Colin Powell of his day.
Regarding the present-day “cover-up”– or perhaps more accurately, official suppression– of the truth behind the Gulf of Tonkin allegations, Shane quotes his anonymous intel official (who may well be Hanyok himself?) as saying that:

    N.S.A. historians began pushing for public release in 2002, after Mr. Hanyok included his Tonkin Gulf findings in a 400-page, in-house history of the agency and Vietnam called “Spartans in Darkness.” Though superiors initially expressed support for releasing it, the idea lost momentum as Iraq intelligence was being called into question, the official said.
    Mr. Aid said he had heard from other intelligence officials the same explanation for the delay in releasing the report, though neither he nor the intelligence official knew how high up in the agency the issue was discussed. A spokesman for Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who was the agency’s. director until last summer and is now the principal deputy director of national intelligence, referred questions to Mr. Weber, the N.S.A. spokesman, who said he had no further information.

Right. “No further information.”
So back in 1964, someone, or some “midlevel” ones, at the NSA engaged knowingly in a cover-up about the truth of an alleged North Vietnamese “escalation” in the Gulf of Tonkin, and 55,000 US servicemen and some 1.5 million Vietnamese died as a result. In 2002-2003, some highly placed individuals in the Bush administration engaged apparently knowingly in a cover-up about the “truth” of the Niger yellow-cake (and possibly other WMD- and terrorism-related) allegations about Saddam’s Iraq… So far, the casualty toll is 2,000 US service-members, some 30,000-80,000 Iraqis, and quite possibly the existence of the state of Iraq and the stability of the Gulf region for several decades to come…
Yes, you can see why some high-ups in today’s NSA wouldn’t necessarily want the truth about 1964 to come out now. But if we want to cling to the notion that our country is a democracy, the whole truth must be told– about both of these very troubled periods.

10 thoughts on “U.S. government historian ordered to suppress findings on Vietnam war start”

  1. The Times story raises the possibility of someone having deliberately kept the mistaken date-time series numbers from McNamara. But in the larger context of that issue, it was McNamara himself who carried out the primary deceit in regard to the question of whether an attack had taken place.
    In my new book Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University of California Pres, I reveal that McNamara deceived not only the public but Johnson himself on what was known about the alleged attack on U.S. ships on August 4, 1964. Based on a minute-by-minute account of that afternoon, I show that McNamara learned that the task commander in the Gulf had begun to backtrack from his earlier certainty than an attack had taken place and was calling for a “recon by daylight” before anything was done. McNamara also learned that the Commander in Chief of Pacific Forces also believed that no strike order should be issued until the situation was clarified. But McNamara did not call LBJ to inform him. Instead he issued the strike order 40 minutes later, and then called LBJ to ask that a public announcement be made that the attacks had taken place. And he did all that before he had learned that there were any alleged intercepts of North Vietnamese messages about an attack on U.S. ships that day.
    The evidence indicates that LBJ was not told that there was no other evience for the attacks except the alleged intercepts until the entire NSC was meeting that evening — after DOD had announced that attacks had taken place and LBJ could not cancel the strikes except with the greatest embarrassment.
    McNamara’s deceit effectively took the war powers of the hands of the President. That story turns the narrative of the road to war in Vietnam represents a major revision of our understanding or responsibility for the bombing of North Vietnam.

  2. Gareth, that’s fascinating. Es[pecially this: But McNamara did not call LBJ to inform him.. Do you have the URL for your book from U. Cal. Press?

  3. Gareth- Is it not also the case that the primary mission of those ships in the Tonkin Gulf was to provoke some type of hostile action by the North Vietnamese? I’m sure they referred to it as “probing enemy defenses” or some such thing. I think the significance of this particular incident has been overblown, because somebody (or some group of people) essentially jumped the gun. They were so eager to report an attack that they imagined one had occurred. But sooner or later they would have succeeded in provoking a real attack in any event. It was inevitable. The decision to go to war had already been made before this incident occurred.

  4. Yes, the U.S. ships were on what was called “DeSoto patrols” which were aimed at getting the North Vietnamese to turn on their coastal radar — and thus collect data that could be used for target selection for U.S. bombing.
    Furthermore the “DeSoto patrol” in the Tonkin Gulf coincided with attacks by South Vietnamese commandoes under overall command of the U.S. military against North Vietnamese coastal targets. A further twist in the story, which I have just learned about, is that McGeorge Bundy, who knew the details of the schedule of both the coastal commando attacks and the U.S. naval patrols, was not keeping Johnson informed about either one.
    My book documents in great detail how the national security advisers of both Kennedy and Johnson tried to maneuver the President into war over South Vietnam.
    The URL for the University of California webpage for Perils of Dominance, for those who are interested in learning more, is http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10089.html

  5. Gareth, your book looks very interesting. I just ordered it from Amazon. See, there are benefits to participating in the discussion here!

  6. I’m mystified that in Shane’s NY Times article and subsequent commentary, Walt Rostow’s arguably pivotal role is all but invisible. Rostow, by most accounts the foremost hawk, literally wrote the text of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (TGR), and did so before the alleged attacks had even occurred. Not surprising, then, that when Rostow died Feb. 13th, 2003, a mere eight days after Powell addressed the UN, references to his TGR were virtually blacked out of mainstream retrospectives of his life and career, just as the NSA has continued to do with Hanyok’s findings. It’s increasingly clear we were systematically prevented from applying to our prewar Iraq deliberations the most relevant, compelling Vietnam lesson at precisely the moment when it ought to have made a definitive difference. Senate democrats had previously discussed the possibility of a closed-door Iraq intel session but I suspect it was Shane’s article that precipitated rule 21 the next day.

  7. I’m mystified that in Shane’s NY Times article and subsequent commentary, Walt Rostow’s arguably pivotal role is all but invisible. Rostow, by most accounts the foremost hawk, literally wrote the text of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (TGR), and did so before the alleged attacks had even occurred. Not surprising, then, that when Rostow died Feb. 13th, 2003, a mere eight days after Powell addressed the UN, references to his TGR were virtually blacked out of mainstream retrospectives of his life and career, just as the NSA has continued to do with Hanyok’s findings. It’s increasingly clear we were systematically prevented from applying to our prewar Iraq deliberations the most relevant, compelling Vietnam lesson at precisely the moment when it ought to have made a definitive difference. Senate democrats had previously discussed the possibility of a closed-door Iraq intel session but I suspect it was Shane’s article that precipitated rule 21 the next day.

  8. I’m mystified that in Shane’s NY Times article and subsequent commentary, Walt Rostow’s arguably pivotal role is all but invisible. Rostow, by most accounts the foremost hawk, literally wrote the text of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (TGR), and did so before the alleged attacks had even occurred. Not surprising, then, that when Rostow died Feb. 13th, 2003, a mere eight days after Powell addressed the UN, references to his TGR were virtually blacked out of mainstream retrospectives of his life and career, just as the NSA has continued to do with Hanyok’s findings. It’s increasingly clear we were systematically prevented from applying to our prewar Iraq deliberations the most relevant, compelling Vietnam lesson at precisely the moment when it ought to have made a definitive difference. Senate democrats had previously discussed the possibility of a closed-door Iraq intel session but I suspect it was Shane’s article that precipitated rule 21 the next day.

  9. Why is Eric Alterman so keen to obscure the relationship between Scott Shane’s Oct. 31st NY Times article and the Senate’s closed-door session the very next day? In “The First Casualty of War,” LA Times, Nov. 3rd, Alterman flatly states as a fact that it is purely a coincidence the two events even occurred in the same week, never mind the sequence.

  10. Shane’s anonymous intelligence source implicitly slants it that in 2003 the NSA feared exclusively postwar comparisons with Iraq intelligence already known to have been flawed, thereby attempting to finesse the administration’s far more germaine prewar censorship of Hanyok’s cautionary revelations. At the end of Eric Alterman’s piece–where my old high school English teacher always said your most important point should appear–Alterman then parrots the anonymous intelligence source’s diversionary postwar focus, anchored by Alterman’s own judgmental tone for added emphasis. So the Alterman piece, which the subsequent Newsday reprint explicitly identified as opinion, serves to minimize the public’s perception of both Hanyok’s significance and Shane’s impact in relation to congressional oversight by obscuring their sequence, timing, and relevance as early as 2002 and as recently as last week.

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