Those darn spies!! Shades of Bush’s lil problem with missing WMD in Iraq, huh?

BURIED IN SPY AGENCY ARCHIVES, DOUBTS ON CAUSE OF VIETNAM WAR
By SCOTT SHANE
NYT Page One
10/30/2005

WASHINGTON — The 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 represents the first serious accusation that the agency’s communications intercepts were falsified to support the belief that North Vietnamese ships attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964, two days after a previous clash.

Most historians have concluded in recent years that there was no second attack, but they have assumed the NSA intercepts were unintentionally misread, not purposely altered.

The research by Robert J. Hanyok, the NSA historian, was detailed four years ago in an in-house article that 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 M. 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 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 NSA’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.

“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.

President Lyndon B. Johnson cited the Aug. 4 episode to persuade Congress in 1964 to authorize broad military action in Vietnam, despite doubts about the attack that arose almost immediately.

Asked about Hanyok’s research, an NSA spokesman said the agency intended to release the material late next month. The release has 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 called “Spartans in Darkness.” 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. Aid said he had heard from other intelligence officials the same explanation for the delay in public release.

Robert S. McNamara, who as defense secretary played a central role in the Tonkin Gulf affair, said in an interview that he had never been told of evidence that the NSA intelligence was altered to shore up the scant evidence of a North Vietnamese attack.

“That really is surprising to me,” said McNamara, 89, who 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.”

Though Johnson had doubts about the Aug. 4 attack — he later told George W. Ball, the under secretary of state, “Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!” — McNamara said he believed the intelligence reports played a decisive role in the war’s expansion.

“I think it’s wrong to believe that Johnson wanted war,” he said. “But we thought we had evidence that North Vietnam was escalating.”

Hanyok reportedly concluded that the deception was not known to or approved by top NSA officials or other high government officials, including McNamara. But the intelligence official said the evidence for deliberate falsification by mid-level NSA officers is “about as certain as it can be without a smoking gun — you can come to no other conclusion.

The supposed second North Vietnamese attack, on the American 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 M. Nixon to justify escalating the war, in which 58,226 Americans and more than 1 million Vietnamese died.

The details of Hanyok’s analysis, published in NSA’s Cryptologic Quarterly in early 2001, could not be learned. But the issues he examined included the times given for certain intercepts and the wording of translations and reports prepared on the basis of NSA eavesdropping at the time.

For example, the official said, in one Vietnamese message intercepted on Aug. 4, 1964, the phrase “we sacrificed two comrades” — a reference to casualties during the clash with American ships on Aug. 2 — was incorrectly translated in some NSA documents as “we sacrificed two ships.” That phrase was used to suggest that the North Vietnamese were reporting the loss of ships in a new battle Aug. 4.

The original Vietnamese version of that intercept, unlike many other intercepts from the same period, is missing from the agency’s archives, the intelligence official said.

Though the NSA, the eavesdropping and codebreaking agency based at Fort Meade, Md., is among the most secretive agencies in the government, in recent years it has made public dozens of studies by its Center for Cryptologic History. A study by Hanyok on signals intelligence and the Holocaust, entitled “Eavesdropping on Hell,” was published in unclassified form last year.

Two historians who have written extensively on the Tonkin Gulf episode, Edwin E. Moise of Clemson University and John Prados of the National Security Archive in Washington, said they were unaware of Hanyok’s work but found his reported findings intriguing.

“I’m surprised at the notion of deliberate deception at NSA,” Moise said. “But I get surprised a lot.”

If Hanyok’s conclusion is correct, Prados said, “it adds to the tragic aspect of the Vietnam War.” In addition, he said, “it’s new evidence that intelligence, so often treated as the Holy Grail, turns out to be not that at all, just as in Iraq.”