Post on 30-Jan-2023
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DEEP WATER, DARK SECRETS:
REASSESSING THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE TONKIN GULF INCIDENT
JOHN MORELLO, PH.D.
SENIOR PROFESSOR OF HISTORY
DEVRY UNIVERSITY
ADDISON, IL
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Abstract
It wasn’t long after the events of August 2-4, 1964 that questions arose about the Tonkin Gulf Incident and how it catapulted the United States into the Vietnam War. Initially, people wanted to know what two US Navy destroyers were doing in the Gulf of Tonkin that provoked North Vietnam into a military confrontation. In time the inquiry would be joined by the historical community, which was interested in more than just whathappened, but how and why the event managed to transform a limited American military presence in South East Asia into one ofthe most unpopular conflicts in American history. The theories have flown back and forth over the years, but somehow stuck in time as historians found they were unable to find all the facts to construct an unassailable explanation. Even Edwin Moise, whose 1996 Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War has become the authoritative work on the subject was unable to take advantage ofrecent findings. The historiography of the Tonkin Gulf needs an infusion of the new information available since Moise to once again test the validity of theories advanced over the years.
This historiography will reassess the interpretations of theevents of early August, 1964 from the moment the first shot was fired to Lyndon Johnson’s signature on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. It will reexamine how researchers at the time assessed the impact of these events on the US political climate and public opinion. It will also reexamine whether Johnson’s actions were an attempt to avoid the mistakes Harry Truman made in committing US power to Korea in 1950 (with the additional
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intended consequences of winning over party skeptics such as Senator William Fulbright and neutralizing GOP attacks on his leadership), whether Johnson’s penchant for secrecy in order to maintain congressional and public focus on domestic issues was accurately detailed, and finally whether historians got it right in claiming the Pentagon fudged the details of the Tonkin Gulf Incident in order to get the United States more deeply involved in Vietnam.
In his work Vietnam: A History, Stanley Karnow described the
Gulf of Tonkin as one of the world’s scenic wonders. “Junks and
sampans ply its blue waters, silhouetted against a horizon of
dark karsts rising strangely from the sea, their peaks shrouded
in gray mist.”(365). But the Tonkin Gulf must have seemed even
more forbidding to the crews of the US Navy destroyers Maddox and
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Turner Joy on the night of August 4, 1964. Chaos and confusion
had taken hold as the two ships fought off what appeared to be an
attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats. Veering wildly from
port to starboard to elude torpedoes and firing in every possible
direction, support was called in from nearby aircraft carriers.
Together the ships and planes concentrated their fire on a
variety of sonar detected targets until they vanished from the
screen. When it was all over, the task force commander wondered
if there really had been an attack, or if the incident had been
the result of an overeager sonar man. A pilot flying air cover
saw nothing that led him to believe he was repelling a North
Vietnamese attack. And in Washington, President Lyndon Johnson
would later declare that “dumb stupid sailors were just shooting
at flying fish”. But even his own misgivings did not prevent him
from using the ‘attack’ as an opportunity to officially sanction
broader military action in Vietnam.
While it may have been difficult for the US Navy to find the
enemy in the Tonkin Gulf that night, finding the truth about what
happened has proven to be just as elusive. It wasn’t long after
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that questions arose about the incident and how it catapulted the
United States into the Vietnam War. Initially, investigative
journalists wanted to know what two American warships were doing
that provoked North Vietnam into a military confrontation. In
time the inquiry would be joined by the historical community,
which also became interested in how and why the event managed to
transform a relatively limited American military presence in
South East Asia into one of the most unpopular conflicts in
American history. The theories have flown back and forth over
the years, but were somehow stuck in time as historians found
they were unable to find all the facts to construct a
satisfactory explanation. Even Edwin Moise’s 1996 Tonkin Gulf and
the Escalation of the Vietnam War, which was at the time the
authoritative work on the subject, was unable to take advantage
of recent findings. The historiography of the Tonkin Gulf needed
an infusion of the new information available since Moise to once
again test the validity of theories advanced over the years.
This historiography will reexamine the interpretations of
the events of early August, 1964 from the moment the first shot
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was fired to Lyndon Johnson’s signature on the Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution. It will survey how historians at the time assessed
the impact of these events on the US political climate and public
opinion. It will also reexamine whether President Johnson’s
actions were an attempt to avoid the mistakes Harry Truman made
in committing US power to Korea in 1950, whether Johnson’s
penchant for secrecy to maintain congressional and public focus
on domestic issues was accurately detailed, and finally whether
historians got it right in claiming the military fudged the
details of the Tonkin Gulf Incident in order to get the United
States more deeply involved in Vietnam.
On August 2, 1964, the USS Maddox was patrolling off the
coast of North Vietnam when she was attacked by North Vietnamese
patrol boats. The Maddox was part of the Desoto mission, the US
Navy’s contribution to a suite of covert operations designed to
agitate the North Vietnamese and distract them from their efforts
to topple the Saigon government and unify the country. The ships
participating in Desoto carried sophisticated electronic
monitoring equipment. Originally the mission had two objectives;
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to collect intelligence in support of the commander on the scene,
and to assert freedom of navigation in international waters.
Patrols like this had been in existence since 1962, plying the
waters off China and North Korea. When the Maddox appeared off
the coast of North Vietnam, the mission had been expanded to
include a broader collection of intelligence, namely photographic
and meteorological information (Hanyok 4). But in the summer
of1964 that mandate would be further expanded to provide another
mission, dubbed OPlan-34Alpha- with intelligence for attacks on
North Vietnam.
The Central Intelligence Agency had been authorized by the
Kennedy administration to train South Vietnamese commandos to
conduct raids on North Vietnam, but by 1963 the Agency had soured
on the idea since few of the raids succeeded, and worse yet, few
of the commandos returned. However, after Kennedy’s death, the
Johnson administration reconfigured the mission to include naval
support (Moise 5). The new assignment was not a stretch for the
Navy. It had been involved in Vietnam since the 1950s, assisting
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and advising the South Vietnamese Navy and providing in-country
logistics for US advisory personnel.
In 1964 Admiral Ulysses S.G. Sharp proposed using the Desoto
missions to “…update our overall intelligence picture in case we
had to operate against North Vietnam” (US News and World Report, July
23, 1984). By the summer of 1964 it was looking very likely that
the US would have to do more than provide advisers to South
Vietnam in order prevent its collapse. Johnson and his staff had
examined a range of options, including the bombing of North
Vietnam, which both he and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara
initially rejected (US News). 1964 was also a presidential
election year, and Vietnam was becoming a campaign issue.
Outside of his home state of Texas, and the halls of Congress
where he had been a fixture for decades, Lyndon Johnson was an
unknown quantity to most Americans. He often disagreed with
John Kennedy’s vacillations in handling the Vietnam situation,
but was rarely consulted on the matter. Now, as President,
Johnson was in a position to act decisively. But he wanted to
campaign as a man of restraint, a reassuring contrast to the
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image of his likely opponent, Republican Senator Barry Goldwater.
Yet he was still determined to act swiftly in response to events
in Vietnam as they developed. In May of that year he received a
proposal from National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy which
outlined a program of “selected and carefully graduated military
force against North Vietnam” (US News). The intent of the action
was not to destroy, but to threaten greater devastation unless
Hanoi relented. Desoto and O-Plan 34-Alpha became part of the
bundle of options Johnson had at his disposal. On the surface the
two missions were to appear separate. At least that was what
official Washington intended. But in time they would become
linked, both in terms of their overall mission and in the way
they were viewed by the North Vietnamese. An early indication of
the potential linkage emerged in January, 1964, when a Desoto
mission was tasked by General Paul Harkins, commander of US
ground forces in Vietnam with providing an O-Plan 34-Alpha
operation with intelligence regarding North Vietnam’s ability to
resist a projected attack (Hanyok 5). Five months later
Westmoreland requested another Desoto mission provide
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intelligence for another O-Plan operation. Specifically, he
wanted details on North Vietnam’s ability to defend islands off
its coast. In a matter of months the scope of the Desoto
mission had gone from general intelligence collection and the
assertion of freedom of navigation in international waters to the
act of supporting military operations against North Vietnam.
When Maddox first appeared in the Tonkin Gulf on August 1,
1964, crew members sighted several smaller vessels which were
initially identified as North Vietnamese. They actually turned
out to be South Vietnamese commandos returning from a raid on the
very islands the Maddox was supposed to electronically profile.
The following day and probably assuming the warship was connected
to the earlier raid, Maddox was attacked by three North
Vietnamese patrol boats. With the help of air support from the
aircraft carrier Ticonderoga, she turned away the attackers, badly
damaging all three (Moise 84). Ordered to remain in the area,
Maddox was joined by another destroyer, Turner Joy, and together
they resumed patrolling the Gulf, shadowed by Ticonderoga and
another carrier, Constellation, which had been also been dispatched.
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The reinforcements were just part of a system-wide buildup by the
US Joint Chiefs and their subordinates on the scene. Also
included were an increase in the number of fighter-bombers
deployed to South Vietnam, the placing of US troops in the area
on combat alert, and the compiling of a list of North Vietnamese
targets which could be hit by bombers and carrier based aircraft
(Karnow 368) . As Maddox and Turner Joy resumed operations, they
did with new instructions; not only would their electronic
monitoring be continued, but they were to steam within eight
miles of North Vietnam’s coast and four miles off its islands.
Those orders were later amended, and the two ships set a course
which took them twelve miles offshore (Marolda 421). Although
Hanoi had never publicly announced the width of its territorial
waters, naval intelligence officials suspected that it would
claim the twelve mile limit observed by other Communist nations
(US News, 1984).
The plot thickened on August 3 as yet another O-plan 34A
mission set out to attack North Vietnamese positions. The
combination of a growing US presence and commandos operating in
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the same general vicinity of the Gulf of Tonkin probably left the
North Vietnamese fairly confident there was some kind of
connection. That assumption was shared by US officials including
Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who in a telegram to ambassador
Maxwell Taylor in Saigon said “…present O-plan 34A activities are
beginning to rattle Hanoi, and the Maddox incident is directly
related to their effort to resist these activities”(Porter 301-
302). The presence of the commando operations in proximity to the
Desoto missions certainly wasn’t lost on John Herrick, commander
of the Maddox/Turner Joy task force. He was afraid North
Vietnamese retaliation might target his ships, a concern he
communicated to Admiral Thomas Moorer, the new commander of the
US Navy’s Pacific Fleet. Moorer ordered Herrick to take his
ships further up the North Vietnamese coast to avoid contact with
the commandos, adding that possibly the move might lead North
Vietnamese patrol boats away from the area the commandos intended
to attack on the night of August 3.
On the night of August 4, after a day of patrolling during
which Commander Herrick sighted the O-Plan 34 A boats returning
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to their base, he radioed that he had picked up multiple sonar
contacts, prompting Ticonderoga to scramble more jets for combat
air patrol operations (Hanyok 20). Those contacts disappeared,
but more were detected shortly after 9pm. Thirty minutes later
they, too disappeared. But within minutes Maddox reported it was
taking action to avoid a possible torpedo attack and was
returning fire. Battling the rain, wind, the dark and an
erratically operating sonar system, Maddox and the Turner Joy,
assisted by aircraft from Ticonderoga fended off what was believed
to be multiple torpedo attacks until just before midnight when
all went quiet. Hours later, however, firing resumed, only this
time in the form of US air strikes against North Vietnam in
apparent retaliation for what would be forever known as the
Tonkin Gulf Incident. And of course, two days later, Congress
passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, paving the way for an enlarged
US military role in Vietnam.
Attempts to sort out just what happened in the Gulf of
Tonkin first began to appear immediately after the incident
occurred, later after it had been seemingly explained away and
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long after the United States had become so deeply involved in
Vietnam that getting out was becoming more important than trying
to figure out how it all started. On August 5 Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara attended a joint Senate Foreign
Relations/Armed Services Committee meeting to consider President
Johnson’s Tonkin Gulf Resolution. The document itself had been
rewritten several times since it was first proposed by the Joint
Chiefs of Staff in May (Moss 126). It had been kept under wraps
for a number of reasons. Without provocation, the resolution
would make Johnson appear rash. He wanted to be sure that when
it was presented, the circumstances would require Congress to
unite behind him, including Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, the
likely Republican presidential nominee in 1964. With Goldwater’s
support, it would eliminate Vietnam as a campaign issue.
Finally, Congress was considering significant domestic
legislation, and Johnson didn’t want them distracted (Maitland
155). This latest version was literally hot off the presses,
having been tweaked the night before at the White House and in
the presence of Senate leaders who’d been summoned for a briefing
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on the Tonkin issue. Senators who were members of the Foreign
Relations Committee were given a sneak peak. It endorsed the
retaliatory raid which had taken place on the heels of the attack
and gave the president tremendous latitude in the event he might
have to deal with wider hostilities. They signed off on it, and
the next day it was before the committee, shepherded by its
chairman, Arkansas Democrat J. William Fulbright, and escorted
not only by McNamara, but also by Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
McNamara was unambiguous in his view of the events. To him it was
a clear case of aggression. The Maddox and Turner Joy had been
subjected to unprovoked attacks in international waters. He made
no reference to the real nature of the vessels’ presence in the
Gulf of Tonkin or even the O-Plan 34A raids and the possible
connection between the two (Maitland 160). McNamara even
stonewalled committee member Wayne Morse, who’d been tipped by a
Pentagon source about the raids (160). Rusk admitted the
resolution seemed open-ended, but promised the White House would
always consult with Congress (160). It sailed through the
committee and the rest of Congress with near unanimous
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support(unopposed in the House and just two ‘no’ votes in the
Senate) before reaching the White House, needing only a
presidential signature to activate it send the United States into
war.
Efforts to get to the bottom of the Tonkin incidents were
reported in piecemeal fashion after 1964, loose threads with
nothing or no one to connect them. Look Magazine featured an
interview with Senator Fulbright in May, 1966 in which he said he
didn’t know if the US provoked the attacks in the Gulf of Tonkin
(Look Magazine, May 3, 1966). In 1967 the Associated Press
released its own report on the Tonkin Gulf, the result of three
dozen interviews with the officers and crew of the Maddox and the
Turner Joy. The upshot of the AP story was that the ships were
engaged in electronic espionage off the coast of North Vietnam,
and that the interviews seemed to indicate a great deal of
confusion and uncertainty about the second attack (Associated
Press, July 16, 1967).
Joseph Goulden’s 1969 Truth is the First Casualty became the first
full scale study of the Tonkin Gulf incident to appear. His
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investigation focused on the all-important sonar equipment which
was critical in corroborating the government’s assertion that
Maddox and Turner Joy had been attacked on August 4. Not so fast,
cautioned Goulden: how could sonar prove incontrovertible
evidence when according to crew members it was functioning
erratically? And to further undermine the government’s claim,
Goulden revealed that Maddox’s most experienced sonar operator
was not at his console that night. He had been transferred to a
gunnery position and replaced by an inexperienced sailor who
repeatedly misinterpreted his own ship’s propeller noise as
incoming torpedoes. Goulden’s work also examined the Navy’s
conduct in the hours after the alleged attack. Naval brass, he
argued, went into spin mode as doubts began to surface about its
authenticity. And spin mode escalated to crisis mode when
Commander Herrick cabled his doubts to the Pentagon. The moment
that cable arrived, argued Goulden, the Navy scrambled to
pressure the on-scene commanders to confirm the attack. Only by
getting confirmation could the Navy press the Pentagon to urge
the White House to launch retaliatory air strikes. To be fair, no
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one on either end of the chain of command had a clear idea of
what was going on. Yes, Herrick may have cabled his doubts about
the attack, citing that “freak weather effects on radar and
overeager sonar men” may have accounted for many torpedo reports,
but in the same message he also expressed the view that the
“apparent ambush at the beginning” was real. He later reported
that Turner Joy had been fired on by small caliber guns and
illuminated by a searchlight. Members of Turner Joy’s crew also said
they spotted at least one torpedo in the water, silhouettes of
fast craft operating near the ship and radar contacts. Turner Joy’s
captain, Robert Barnhart was convinced he was under attack, and
many of his crew signed statements to back up their assertions.
Back on Maddox, both commander Herrick and Maddox’s CO, Herbert
Ogier were confused by the exaggerated number of torpedo reports,
but ultimately affirmed that an attack had occurred. Goulden’s
assertion that ‘Captain Herrick’s faith in being attacked a
second time grew in proportion to demands by his superiors for
verification that the attack was real’ (154) was a tad
sensational as well as a tad inaccurate. In the process he
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undermined the integrity of a naval officer with an honorable
record. What Goulden and Herrick had in common were that neither
man had all the information.
Equally helpful in trying to unravel the Tonkin mystery at
the time was John Galloway’s 1970 work The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
Galloway reported that Fulbright, in his continuing quest for
more information, tasked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
with getting to the bottom of the Tonkin affair. Galloway
revealed that many members shared Fulbright’s sense of chagrin
over how the original Tonkin Resolution hearings were handled
(Galloway 102). He wanted to hold new hearings, examine any
evidence which might poke holes in the administration’s case and
shed light on the decision making process in place at the White
House and the Pentagon. In preparation for the 1968 hearings the
committee unearthed a letter written by Admiral Arnold True.
True was the author of the manual of conduct used by destroyers
like the Maddox and Turner Joy, and an authority on international
law. In 1964 Secretary McNamara testified that on the day of the
first attack Maddox had fired warning shots at advancing North
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Vietnamese patrol boats. No such thing, Galloway claimed.
Admiral True asserted that under international law, warships
didn’t have to fire warning shots if confronted at sea (104).
Galloway also disclosed details of an anonymous letter delivered
to the committee urging it to demand the Pentagon provide the
‘Command and Control’ report of the Tonkin incident, which
included transcripts of conversations between Johnson, McNamara
and Admiral Grant Sharp, Commander In Chief, Pacific Fleet. The
conversations, argued Galloway, contained acknowledgements by
officials that the second attack was probably imaginary (105).
The timing of these conversations, he said, was important. The
President had authorized a retaliatory raid to coincide with a
televised address to the nation. Without confirmation of a
second attack, the speech would have to be cancelled and the
planes ordered to stand down. Galloway points out, again
quoting the unnamed source that even though Sharp personally
harbored some unanswered questions on the details of the
incident, he confirmed the second attack to McNamara. McNamara
passed the news to Johnson, who unleashed the air strike and made
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his address (105). The revelations undermined the government’s
case about the second attack. Galloway also reported that the
Johnson administration was trying to head off the new hearings
altogether. It sent Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Nitze to see
Fulbright who told him the administration had iron-clad proof of
the second attack. The proof consisted of intercepted North
Vietnamese radio transmissions claiming the assault had been
carried out by two Swatows, Chinese built gunboats, and a patrol
boat. The problem, argued Galloway was that Swatows don’t carry
torpedoes, and the patrol boat in question only carried two.
How, he wondered, could McNamara testify to Fulbright’s committee
in 1964 that Maddox and Turner Joy had been subjected to repeated
torpedo attacks? (107).
Galloway confirmed that when Secretary McNamara reappeared
before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1968 he repeated
his earlier claim about a second attack and offered the
corroborating testimony of Commander Herrick, who now said the
only doubts he had that night in the Tonkin Gulf was the number
of torpedoes fired at the Maddox and Turner Joy (New York Times
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February 24, 1968). McNamara argued the ships were in
international waters at the time, that they had no part in the
commando raids on North Vietnam, and that any insinuation that
the US might have provoked the attack was, in his words,
monstrous. He had the committee at a disadvantage, argued
Galloway, because he denied Fulbright and his colleagues’ access
to the Command and Control document they had requested, citing
security clearance issues. Consequently, concluded Galloway, the
committee and its staff were forced to rely on information
tendered voluntarily by the Defense Department (132). And when
the committee wrapped up its investigation in December, 1968,
Galloway concluded, it really had nothing to show except what the
Johnson Administration had chosen to let them see. It could not
prove that there wasn’t a second attack, even though the earlier
misgivings by the captain of the Maddox, the faulty sonar
readings, cables alluding to the firepower limitations of the
North Vietnamese Navy and the discovered transcripts of a
captured North Vietnamese naval officer suggested it. The
evidence seemed to be, in Galloway’s words concealed in ‘the
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labyrinth that surrounds the Department of Defense’ (137). And
Fulbright, unable to penetrate that labyrinth could only express
during the hearings his regret at having been the vehicle which
took the Tonkin Resolution to the floor of the Senate and
defended it. It would take time before all the facts would be
known, but Fulbright and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
had run out of time, just as the American people had seemingly
run out of patience. The Washington Post may have delivered the coup
de grace to suspicions about the second raid when it editorialized
that the hearings threw into question an incident which led to a
resolution demonstrating national unity. “That virtue has been
diminished by the attacks made on the integrity of the
foundations of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Senators…have
impaired the force and effect of assertion of national purpose.
And the country thereby is left facing dangers far more serious
than those it confronted in 1964” (Washington Post February 25
1968).
Success at penetrating the ‘labyrinth’ as Galloway called
it, proved difficult in the years immediately after 1968. There
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were a spate of works between 1971 and 1975; Anthony Austin’s The
President’s War, Eugene Windchy’s Tonkin Gulf and Gerald Kurland’s The
Gulf of Tonkin Incidents, but none of them really were able to answer
the questions raised by Galloway in 1970: why had Captain Herrick
expressed initial misgivings about the second attack, only to
reverse himself under oath before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee? Why hadn’t the Defense Department been called upon to
explain the cables it possessed identifying the North Vietnamese
ships allegedly involved in the second attack and the limited
firepower they had brought to bear on the two US warships? And
finally, why hadn’t anyone taken a closer look at the
interrogation transcripts of captured North Vietnamese personnel
which threw the attack into question? Galloway had asked the
right questions in 1970. Getting to the answers was proving to
be difficult. Austin and Kurland’s work focused in part on the
crew of the Maddox, some of whom were skeptical of a second
attack. Austin’s work belies a deep suspicion of the Navy’s
actions. He argued the service felt left out of the action in
Vietnam in 1964. After all, the Army, Air Force and the C.I.A.
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were there. What about them? The Desoto patrols were, he
claimed, were an attempt by the Navy to establish a presence and
play a role in the O-Plan 34A operations. The Navy, he said,
even went so far as to disregard Captain Herrick’s warning that
the Desoto operations would be viewed by North Vietnam as part
and parcel of the O-Plan activities and ordered him even further
into harm’s way. He claimed the Navy forced events in the Tonkin
Gulf to provoke a confrontation with the North Vietnamese, and
that it manipulated the news of the attacks in order to
manipulate the actions of policy makers in Washington. In doing
so, argued Austin, the Navy deceived the Executive Branch, which
in turn had to deceive Congress. Gerald Kurland wasn’t quite as
suspicious of the Navy, preferring instead to accept the fact
that atmospheric conditions in the Gulf that night had caused
sonar operators to misinterpret what was on their screens.
Windchy’s work looked at the thought process inside the White
House in 1964. He claimed the Johnson Administration had grown
pessimistic about the situation in Vietnam, and concluded it
could only be won ‘if a bigger effort were made’ (305). He
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outlined the thinking behind the need for a resolution containing
‘an all inclusive war authority to present to Congress at some
appropriate time’ (311). To Windchy, the events in the Tonkin
Gulf coincided with what the Johnson Administration perceived as
a crossroads in Vietnam. The North Vietnamese and their Viet
Cong surrogates were getting stronger; the government of South
Vietnam was getting weaker; and then, said Windchy, in the words
of one Johnson Administration official, ‘…we had the Tonkin Gulf’
(317). But despite the digging, the labyrinth Galloway spoke of
couldn’t be breached. The Defense Department continued to cling
to its assertion that at the end of the day, there was a second
attack. The questions left unanswered in 1968 would remain so
until years after the war had ended and the pain and passion it
had aroused had reached a manageable level.
The first significant break appeared in Anthony Pitch’s 1984
article in US News& World Report. It revealed “a growing consensus
within government that North Vietnam had assumed the Desoto
patrols were associated with the OPLAN 34A raids…and that North
Vietnamese action on August 2 was a retaliatory act” (61). The
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response by the Johnson administration was to continue both the
OPLAN raids and the Desoto missions. There was no intention, in
the words of Secretary of State Dean Rusk “…of yielding to
pressure” (61). According to the Defense Department, when night
fell in the Tonkin Gulf on August 4th, Maddox and Turner Joy were
fending off an attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats, which
according to a message intercepted by the National Security
Agency, had been given the destroyers’ coordinates and told to
prepare for combat. But the US News article suggested North
Vietnamese intentions were unclear. A senior CIA analyst on duty
in Saigon at the time saw the same message and interpreted it as
an order to investigate, not attack the warships. “There was no
unequivocal indication that the North Vietnamese had been ordered
to initiate combat action”, he said (62). Pilots flying air cover
that night were equally skeptical. One pilot, Commander James
Stockdale, flying his second photo combat reconnaissance mission
in as many days saw the destroyers’ wakes very clearly, but no
enemy ships. The photographs later confirmed his visual
impressions (62). US News also elaborated on the skepticism
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Captain Herrick felt about the attack from his position on the
bridge of the Maddox. “Most of the Maddox’s if not all of the
Maddox’s reports were probably false”, Herrick went on record as
saying (63). That Herrick shared his misgivings as well has his
confusion with his superiors is well known. What wasn’t well
known, at least until 1984 is why those misgivings never managed
to get to policy makers in Washington. For a while, claimed US
News, even Secretary McNamara was unsure of the accuracy of the
news from the Gulf, and sought clarification by trying to
establish direct voice contact with the Maddox. Although
technically possible, the move constituted a breach of the
military principle of chain of command, and offended Vice Admiral
Roy Johnson, commander of the Seventh Fleet. Johnson told
McNamara such communication could not be arranged, an assertion
he later admitted was not true (63). McNamara then reached out
to Admiral Sharp about the reports from the Gulf of Tonkin.
Pressed by McNamara, Sharp, according to US News reported that
the latest message from the destroyers “indicated a little doubt
on just exactly what went on.” Was there a possibility that no
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attack occurred? McNamara asked. “Yes,” Sharp replied, “I would
say there is a slight possibility.” (63) His assessment carried
particular weight, but according to US News the clinching pieces
of evidence were enemy naval communications intercepted during
the battle. They read: “have engaged enemy and shot down two
planes. Starting out on hunt and waiting to receive assignment.
Morale is high as men have seen damaged ships.” (63) McNamara’s
contention such cables were unimpeachable evidence left many
intelligence officials then and now unconvinced. Several
National Security Agency field stations reported intercepting the
same message on August 2. Only one listening post, located in
South Vietnam, said it was acquired on August 4. Years later,
according to US News, former CIA Deputy Intelligence Director Ray
Cline looked at the cables and concluded they couldn’t be
referring to the August 4 incident, but rather the August 2
engagement. “Things were being referred to which, although they
might have been taking place at the time, could not have been
reported back so quickly.” (63) In early 1972, Louis Tordella,
Deputy Director of the National Security Agency told the Senate
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Foreign Relations Committee that there was no doubt in his mind
that references in the August 4 intercepts to “enemy planes” and
“damaged ships” pertained to the August 2 engagement. (64)
By 1984 the waters had been sufficiently muddied as to the
legitimacy of the evidence pointing to a second attack, and with
it, incidentally, the legitimacy of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.
The Johnson administration’s case had hung on the assertions of
Commander Herrick that the attack took place, and the intercepted
North Vietnamese cables apparently ordering warships into action
the night of August 4th. But now, thanks to the US News
investigation, Herrick’s assertion had become suspect, due in
large part to his own investigation in which he proved that his
ship’s sonar had not picked up torpedo screws, but instead
Maddox’s own movements. Parenthetically, Herrick’s revelation
vindicated suspicions raised by John Galloway over a decade
earlier that three North Vietnamese patrol boats, only one of
whom carried torpedoes could have launched twenty six of them at
the Maddox and the Turner Joy that night. Even the intercepted
cables had raised eyebrows, with experts wondering if they’d been
31
correctly interpreted, or if they were part of an intentional
misreading of them in order to justify wider US action in
Vietnam. Nearly twenty years after the fact, journalists and
historians, working separately had raised substantive and
legitimate questions about the roles played by the US Navy and
the Johnson Administration in the Tonkin Gulf. But in order to
put a finer point on the matter, more digging would be required.
Naval historian Edward Marolda no longer believes there was
a second attack in the Tonkin Gulf. But in 1986, when Marolda
and Oscar Fitzgerald completed work on Volume 2 of The United States
and the Vietnam Conflict: From Military Assistance to Combat, 1959-1965, they
lacked access to the detailed information which would ultimately
cause Marolda to change his mind. Nonetheless, using the
information available at the time, the two chapters on the Tonkin
incident are both methodical and comprehensive. They lay out the
Navy’s reasons for its presence in the Tonkin Gulf, how it
believed it was supporting US interests in the region, and what
went through the minds of on scene commanders as well as their
superiors as they tried to grapple with the need for real time
32
information on events which were happening a world away. It is
in this area that perhaps Marolda and Fitzgerald do the greater
good. By exhaustively examining cable traffic, and in particular
the communications between John Herrick, the task force commander
on scene (even though Maddox was commanded by Herbert Ogier and
Turner Joy by Robert Barnhart), and his superiors, including
Admiral Roy Johnson, Commander, Seventh Fleet, his superior, Adm.
Thomas Moorer, Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet, and
ultimately Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, readers get a glimpse
at how, for better or worse, decisions were made which had long
term consequences for the United States. The work outlines the
start of the DESOTO patrols and how they gradually came to be
included in the Vietnam effort; one in December, 1962, and six
more in 1963. In 1964, Paul Harkins, Commander US Military
Assistance Command Vietnam asked the Navy to expand DESOTO’s
intelligence gathering operations in order to help the OPLAN 34A
teams attack North Vietnam’s coastal and island defenses.
William Westmoreland, Harkins’ replacement sustained the request,
but doubted the effectiveness of seaborne intelligence collection
33
and, according to Marolda, suggested the August patrol be
cancelled. Admiral Moorer contended the patrols provided
important training for naval personnel, helped the overall
intelligence effort in the region and was proof the US was no
paper tiger when it came to exercising its right to freedom of
the seas. He convinced the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which approved
the patrol (405).
As Herrick’s task force prepared to enter the Tonkin Gulf it
passed the boats carrying 34A personnel returning from their
attacks on North Vietnamese positions. On August 1, Marolda
tells us, US intelligence sources noted what was believed to have
been the first reaction by North Vietnam to the presence of
DESOTO patrols operating this soon after the commandos left. A
day later, Marolda reports, Herrick was warned he could be
attacked. He immediately requested that the mission be scrubbed,
that if the intelligence was correct, then continuing was an
unacceptable risk. (414) He was overruled by both Admirals Moorer
and Sharp. One day later, on August 2 Maddox and Turner Joy were
attacked by a collection of North Vietnamese gun and torpedo
34
boats, which despite all the firing and maneuvering only managed
to register a small hit on Maddox and paid a high price for it.
The military engagement was then followed by a series of cabled
engagements between Herrick and Moorer, who ordered the patrol to
proceed as a show of US resolve to assert its right of freedom of
the seas. Herrick, says Marolda, challenged the order when he
cabled back that ‘US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin can no longer
assume that they will be considered neutrals exercising the right
of free transit. They will be treated as belligerents from the
first detection (420). Marolda also reported the emergence of a
sense in Washington’s intelligence community that Hanoi
considered the 34A attacks and the DESOTO to be a joint
operation. In fact, he said the North Vietnamese filed a
complaint with the International Control Commission that the “The
US and South Vietnamese administrations sent two naval vessels to
shell Hon Ngu and Hon Me islands”. The conclusion was drawn, he
said, that the attack on Maddox could have been provoked by
‘enemy incursions into the Gulf of Tonkin’. Herrick lost the
verbal engagement when President Lyndon Johnson intervened and
35
ordered the patrol be resumed. Herrick complied. At the same
time orders were given to resume 34A operations, and North
Vietnamese installations were attacked on the night of August
3.in (Marolda 424). One day later Maddox and Turner Joy would be
drawn into an event which ultimately led to an expanded military
role for the United States. It’s during the interim as well as
the after action period in which Marolda reveals the mixed
messages, hidden agendas and possibly genuine concerns about
actions and consequences by officers and officials which drove
the Tonkin Gulf debate.
As Herrick and his taskforce resumed the patrol, Marolda
says Herrick fired off another cable to the effect that
evaluation of intelligence from various sources indicated DRV
considered the patrol directly linked with 34A operations. The
DRV considered US ships present as enemies because of these
operations and have already indicated a willingness to treat us
in that category. After the events on the night of August 4,
Herrick again cabled Moorer hoping to be a voice of moderation
and restraint. “The review of action makes many reported
36
contacts and torpedoes fired doubtful”, he said. “Freak weather
effects on radar and overeager sonar men may have accounted for
many reports. No actual visual sightings by Maddox….Suggest
complete evaluation before any further action taken” (440). That
was followed by another communiqué in which Herrick concluded
“the entire action leaves many doubts except for apparent ambush
at beginning”. That same message, however, included reports
culled from the captain of Turner Joy, who said his ship had been
fired upon and that at least one of the attacking craft had been
hit by her gunfire. While consensus by on scene commanders was
still gelling, Admiral Sharp reported that based on separate
intelligence sources there was no mistaking the enemy’s hostile
intentions. These reports, say Marolda, included North
Vietnamese accounts of aircraft falling into the sea and damage
to an American vessel. Yet another intelligence source indicated
that the North Vietnamese had lost two vessels in action. The
snippets of independent information were coalescing and were
pointing to the need for retaliatory action. All that was needed
was consensus by on scene commanders, and that, according to
37
Marolda came as preparations for the retaliatory raids –to be
dubbed Pierce Arrow-were underway. Captain Barnhart aboard Turner Joy
said he was attacked by two PT boats; it took Captain Herbert
Ogier until August 6 before he stated he believed at the time
that Maddox was under attack. And Commander Herrick finally
fell into line when he stated that “certainly a PT boat action
did take place.” That was enough for the Commander of the Seventh
Fleet, the Commander in Chief of the US Pacific Fleet, and the
Commander in Chief of the Pacific. President Johnson and his
advisers in Washington held the same view, and the US went to
war.
At the time of its publication in 1996, Edwin Moise’s Tonkin
Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War was hailed as the most thorough
study of its kind. Its size and level of detail can discourage a
reader. But its real potential for discouragement would be to
those readers who hoped proof of the second Tonkin Gulf attack
might be revealed. Using the first five chapters to explain the
role of the Navy and the Desoto patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin,
Moise devotes three chapters to a reconstruction of the events of
38
August 2 and August 4. Burnishing that chronology with weather
reports, cable transcripts, navigation charts, after action
reports, interviews of crew members, pilots, intelligence
officials and even data mined from interrogations of North
Vietnamese prisoners of war, sources that the Johnson
administration used to make the case for a second attack, Moise
makes an alternative case; that the August 4 battle was
fictional. However, he suggests, as did Anthony Austin over
twenty years ago, that didn’t stop the US Navy from passing it
off as fact, and portraying it as such to the Johnson
administration. With regard to the weather, Moise confirmed what
was already known; that strange things happened to a ship’s radar
and sonar operations in the Gulf of Tonkin. But his interviews
of crewmen on the Maddox, in particular Ensign Richard Corsette,
who commanded a forward battery was especially telling. “I know
the way our radar was acting”, Corsette asserted, “My firm belief
was that everything I locked onto was weather.” (109) Moise
returns frequently to the weather issue as it helped set the
stage for a series of confusing events on a confusing night.
39
Information gleaned from sonar man third class David Mallow also
casts the events of August 4 in a suspicious light. Returning to
his station as general quarters was sounded, Mallow began
reporting noise spokes to the ship’s Combat Information Center.
He did not, Moise writes, give any interpretation as to the
source of those noise spokes. Such an interpretation, or lack
thereof, said Moise, was confirmed by two of Mallow’s superiors,
who concluded the decision to pronounce the sound as torpedoes
was made higher up the chain of command (126). The ‘higher up’
in this case, asserted Moise, was Commander Herrick. Herrick
reported that when the news from the sonar room was relayed to
the bridge that noises had been detected, he said they sounded to
him like torpedoes (126). In time, said Moise, Herrick came to
realize that what he was actually hearing were the sounds of his
own ship’s propellers. But at the moment, careful reflection was
a luxury no one, least of all John Herrick could afford.
Moise uses chapter six of his work to relate the confusing
sequence of events which played out over two hours of firing and
maneuvering by the Maddox and the Turner Joy. Firing at least 300
40
rounds, mostly by Turner Joy, the two ships, several miles apart
would take aim at a target in the darkness, open fire, maneuver
to acquire another target, fire again, and then maneuver even
more to evade a host of torpedoes supposedly launched at them.
Moise’s debriefing of the crew continued to uncover their own
doubts as to just what they were firing at. Patrick Park, a gun
director on the Maddox claimed that the only target he was sure
of on his fire control radar that night was the Turner Joy. Moise
wrote that Park told him “there couldn’t have been a canoe out
there” (135). But the Turner Joy seemed to have had no misgivings
about what she was shooting at. In the early stages of the
engagement Moise reported Turner Joy’s detection system, more modern
and more automatic than Maddox’s showed contact after contact,
which Turner Joy fired at, claiming to have sunk two ships.
Douglas Smith, at the time an ensign assigned to Turner Joy as a
gunnery liaison officer told Moise he was sure that what he was
shooting at weren’t phantoms (135). But not everyone was so
sure. Robert Barnhart, commander of the Turner Joy was growing
suspicious about the authenticity of the attackers. According to
41
Moise, Barnhart reached a moment of truth when sonar reported an
enemy contact so close that a torpedo could not have missed his
ship. Rather than take evasive action, Barnhart ordered the
Turner Joy to maintain course. There was no torpedo attack and
from that point on Barnhart’s confidence about the attack took a
serious hit. It had already stretched the bounds of plausibility
aboard Maddox. Herbert Ogier, the ship’s commander conducted a
quick assessment, which Moise covered on page 140; both
destroyers reportedly dodged 26 torpedoes detected by the
sonarman on the Maddox. Sonar on the Turner Joy could detect none
of the torpedoes fired at the two vessels, while the radar on the
Maddox couldn’t locate the ships allegedly firing the torpedoes.
Eventually, Ogier realized that the number of noise spokes
reported by sonar had become ridiculous, and that what had been
interpreted as torpedo noises had to be something else. He
ordered an end to evasive action, and the incident came to an end
(140). In conferring with task force commander Herrick, the
two concluded that the Maddox’s own propeller noise was probably
being misinterpreted as torpedoes. Moise’s work also utilized
42
evidence already taken from aircraft carrier pilots, who were
directed by the Maddox and Turner Joy to locations where the
destroyer’s radar said the North Vietnamese boats were. No boats
were sighted by any of the pilots, and the film from one of the
plane’s photo-reconnaissance system confirmed it. What the
pilots could also confirm, said Moise, was bedlam and confusion
coming from the radio communications aboard the Maddox and Turner
Joy. Orders were given then countermanded. Bearings and vector
instructions were frequently interrupted by two or three other
voices announcing a torpedo bearing. Things became so confusing,
said Moise that someone from either the Maddox or Turner Joy’s
Command Information Center actually gave pilots coordinates for
an attack on the destroyers themselves.
Moise also took a hard look at the intercepted North
Vietnamese radio messages which the US government interpreted as
unequivocal proof that the second attack had taken place. The
cables, according to the Defense Department were orders
dispatching patrol boats T-142 and T-146, and Torpedo Boat T-333
to attack Maddox and Turner Joy. But Moise’s reinterpretation,
43
plus his research into the types of ships referred to in the
cable suggests something altogether different. T-333 was the
least damaged of the three torpedo boats that had attacked the
Maddox on August 2; T-142 and T-146 were Swatows, lightly armed
coastal patrol boats. If the mission referred to in the cable
was an attack on two destroyers more than 20 miles out to sea,
sending two patrol boats which had no weapons capable of doing
serious harm, and a torpedo boat with a damaged engine and out of
torpedoes (they only carried two) did not make much sense. (113).
Moise suggested the cable’s intention is even further perplexing
given the fact the torpedo boat in question had put ashore on the
afternoon of August 2 and remained there until at least August 5
(113). And if none of that raised sufficient doubts about the
authenticity of the second attack, Moise provided readers with
summaries of the interrogations of North Vietnamese naval
personnel. Despite what official US Navy records indicate, no
North Vietnamese naval personnel captured during the war
suggested under interrogation that any of that country’s vessels
had been sunk on the night of August 4 or that any combat had
44
taken place that night. The Navy pinned its case on the data
provided by Captain Nguyen Van Hoa, a North Vietnamese naval
officer who specialized in military law. Moise reports that
under questioning , Captain Hoa mentioned the attack on August
2, but had no information about an engagement involving the loss
of North Vietnamese boats on August 4 (194). He did mention an
incident in which three torpedo boats were lost in an engagement
with the US Seventh Fleet. Somewhere in Washington, Moise
argued, a US naval officer misinterpreted Nguyen statement about
the three lost torpedo boats as a reference to the attacks in
August, 1964 (194).
Yes, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats had been lost in
action against the US Navy, but in July, 1966, not August, 1964.
The information, claims Moise, was there in Hoa’s interrogation
transcripts. His chronology was off, and who could blame him.
He was a military law specialist, not a line officer, and his
knowledge of torpedo boat activities must have been limited.
Moise argued the only way he could have know about the sinkings
was the way most sailors learn about things; scuttlebutt. And
45
even that, claimed Moise, would have been limited to who was
responsible for the loss of boats T-333, T-336 and T-339, which
were part of Torpedo Boat Squadron 135 (195). Moise argued the
Navy either suppressed or ignored more valuable intelligence from
Tran Bao, one of nineteen survivors captured in the July, 1966
incident, and who had been deputy commander of Torpedo Boat
Squadron 135 in 1964. The simple math of it, concluded Moise,
was that there was no way North Vietnam could have lost three
torpedo boats to the US Navy in 1964. There were only twelve
torpedo boats in the entire North Vietnamese Navy, a gift from
the Soviet Union in 1964. There had been no additions or
subtractions until 1966. The prisoners listed the boats by
number, mentioned the crew and even the captains of each boat,
until T-333, T-336 and T-339 were lost in 1966. So the math
would indicate, Moise concluded, that torpedo boats couldn’t have
been part of the August, 1964 events. And if the US Navy was
really interested in getting North Vietnam’s take on those
events, asks Moise, why not quiz the prisoners? Tran had been
Deputy Commander of Squadron 135, and had written the August 2
46
after action report. Nguyen Van Gian commanded T-339 in 1964 and
was still commanding it in 1966. With nineteen men in custody
and their interrogations cross checked for inconsistencies, the
chances of an orchestrated cover up would be unlikely. It’s
here, suggested Moise, that the Navy exercised an early version
of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ with regard to the Tonkin Gulf
Incidents. Word came down from Pacific Headquarters to not ask
questions about that subject (195).
It’s not clear how often Cryptologic Quarterly is consulted to
answer questions as part of a scholarly inquiry or even the
significance of that contribution when something of note is
discovered. But in the case of the Tonkin Gulf Incidents, Robert
Hanyok, a senior historian with the Center of Cryptologic History
made a significant contribution to the dialogue with his 2005
article Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin
Mystery, 2-4 August, 1964. In his opening comments Hanyok acknowledges
that over time, there were still those who rejected the growing
skepticism about the August 4 attack; Robert McNamara, the
National Security Agency and those charged with writing the
47
history of the US Navy figure prominently in that category.
Their convictions rested on the belief that the intelligence
(what Hanyok refers to as SIGINT, short for signal intelligence)
was both accurate and sufficient. With that information, they’d
been willing to endure the charges of critics, citing radar,
sonar, eyewitness and archival evidence that the second attack
never happened (Hanyok 2). They had been willing to disregard
NSA Deputy Director Louis Tordella’s 1972 testimony that the
SIGINT had been misinterpreted. And they ignored Edwin Moise’s
work which utilized small portions of SIGINT released to him
under a Freedom of Information Act request. Yet, argued Hanyok,
even those few scraps of information Hanyok had in his possession
should have been enough to seriously undermine any validity of
the Johnson Administration’s belief the SIGINT reports it was
looking at confirmed the August 4 attack (2). Applying his
skills as both a cryptographer and historian, Hanyok assembled
the SIGINT discounting the second attack by dismantling the
SIGINT the Johnson administration said points in that direction.
His conclusion was that the Johnson administration, including the
48
President himself and the Secretary of Defense were deceived into
thinking they had all the information. In getting himself and
the reader to that conclusion Hanyok’s research concluded there
was only one word to describe what happened on the night of
August 4; nothing. Through what he referred to as “a compound of
analytic errors and an unwillingness to consider contrary
evidence”, Hanyok claimed American SIGINT elements in the region,
along with the NSA in Washington reached consensus that North
Vietnam was attacking the Maddox and Turner Joy that night. In
order to do that they committed further analytic errors and
obscured existing information in order to produce ‘evidence’ of
the attack (3). In the end, he said, SIGINT information was
presented in such a way as to preclude responsible decision
makers from having the complete and objective narrative of events
of August 4. For that to have happened, someone with access to
critical information either had to withhold it or manipulate it.
He stops short of pointing a finger. Although he suggests the
only plausible reason for such mishandling was to support the
Navy’s claim that the Desoto patrols were separate from any other
49
naval operation in the area (namely the O-Plan 34 A) and had
suffered a deliberate and unprovoked North Vietnamese attack.
Such a move would guarantee American retaliation, justify an
escalation in US military activities, and a larger role for the
US Navy at a time when it felt it was being left out of the
action. Had the intelligence been handled correctly, argued
Hanyok, it would have told them that Hanoi’s navy was engaged in
nothing that night other than trying to repair the two torpedo
boats damaged in the August 2 engagement with the US Navy.
Furthermore, it also would have indicated that even if North
Vietnam was contemplating an attack, which it wasn’t, it wouldn’t
know where to start because the SIGINT confirmed Hanoi didn’t
know where the American ships were. And that’s not because it
had lost track of them; it’s because it wasn’t looking for them
(3).
How could this have happened, asked Hanyok? First, large
portions (ninety percent, he claims) of the SIGINT from August 4
either never made it into the post-attack summary reports or were
purged from the final report written in October 1964. The missing
50
information told just where the North Vietnamese Navy was that
night and what it was doing. What actually went into the reports
were the aforementioned analytic errors, plus unexplained
translation changes and the conjunction of two unrelated messages
into one translation. It was this cryptologic Frankenstein which
would become the foundation of the Johnson administration’s proof
of the August 4 attack. The summaries weren’t manufactured out
of whole cloth, however. Legitimate intercepts were taken out of
context and inserted into the summaries to give them a fig leaf
of credibility. Whoever was responsible knew what he was doing
and covered their tracks, Hanyok argues. The sources of these
fragments were never referenced in the summaries, and significant
research had to be done to identify those sources before the
wheat could be separated from the chaff. Finally, in what could
be considered a missing smoking gun, Hanyok points to the
unexplained disappearance of a decrypted North Vietnamese after-
action report from August 4. The original went missing so
administration officials had to rely on a translated text. The
problem, he says is that the Navy and NSA English translations
51
are inconsistent. Without the original it’s hard to figure out
why there are differences in the translations and more
importantly why the NSA took two separate messages were turned
them into one (4). But regardless of the whereabouts of the
original, the doctored report claimed Hanyok was all the
administration needed to retaliate. It quoted an unidentified
North Vietnamese official who said that “two US planes had been
shot down, two NVA ships had been ‘sacrificed’ and that “the
enemy ship could also have been damaged” (23). Apparently no one
had stopped to reflect on the events of August 2: that two
American planes were reported leaving the scene of battle; one
was smoking as a result of a mechanical problem; the other was
providing escort; that during the engagement all three of North
Vietnam’s torpedo boats had been damaged, two seriously; and that
one of them had managed to get off a few rounds at one of the US
destroyers, hitting her. How did this scrap of information, at
that time two days old suddenly find itself the news of the hour
and the snippet which made all the other pieces fall into place
to prompt US retaliation? Not even Hanyok is completely
52
comfortable with mounting an accusation, but he has a couple of
ideas. He starts with the Marine listening post in Phu Bai,
South Vietnam, first reporting on August 4 of possible North
Vietnamese Naval operations planned against the Desoto patrol,
and shortly after that elevating possible to imminent, and adding
that North Vietnamese boats T-142, T-146 and T-333 had been
ordered to make ready for military operations (20). The Marines
concluded the ‘military action’ was an attack on the Desoto
patrol, and made no attempt to investigate further. Too bad for
US policy makers, concludes Hanyok, because if Phu Bai had been
ordered to do a more thorough job, none of the events after
August 4 might have happened. The communiqués from Phu Bai never
mentioned a target or any objective of the military operation or
even the nature of the operation. Another problem with the
message intercepted by the Marines was that it contained
references which Hanyok says were misinterpreted; T-146 and T-333
had been ordered to execute what translates into English as a
‘long march or movement’. What it really meant argues Hanyok, is
that T-333 and a sister ship, T-336, both of whom had been
53
involved in the August 2 action, were going to be towed for
repairs. A tugboat had been dispatched along with the T-142 to
handle this mission. Additionally all North Vietnamese boats
were under strict orders to avoid contact with US ships. The
North Vietnamese message, claims Hanyok, implied that Hanoi
thought the destroyers were close enough to its coast to place
its ships in danger, when in fact the Maddox and Turner Joy were
far out at sea. The second error committed by the Marines at Phu
Bai was its failure to consider just what the intercept meant
when ship T-142 radioed that the tugboat it was escorting was
indeed towing Torpedo Boats T-333 and T-336. The most confounding
part of the communiqué was the conclusion made by the analysts at
Phu Bai; “With torpedo boat T-336 added to its string, it appears
that T-333will not participate in any military operations.” It
would be hard for T-333 to do that, given the fact it was tied to
a tugboat and bound for safe harbor to affect repairs. So, the
boats originally reported being ready to attack the Desoto patrol
were incapable of even moving on their own. In fact, this
attempted salvage of the two damaged torpedo boats would occupy
54
the efforts of Hanoi’s sailors for much of the night of August 4.
The Vietnamese would try various methods of getting the two
damaged torpedo boats to a port for repairs. Late in the evening
of August 4 T-142 was ordered to escort the tugboat to its home
base, and was then sent to a location near Haiphong. It was then
issued new orders; she was now to tow torpedo boat T-336. All of
this chatter says Hanyok was being monitored not only by the
Marine Station at Phu Bai, but also at a Navy station in the
Philippines. The traffic included reports of fuel transfers
between the two damaged torpedo boats and the efforts of boats T-
142 and T-146 to complete the towing exercise, a mission which
still wasn’t completed by the morning of August 5. So in
reality, says Hanyok, none of the boats named in the original
Marine warning participated in anything but salvage efforts (25).
The question Hanyok poses at the end of this inquiry is this: if
the original suspect vessels, the T-142 and T-146, and T-333 and
T-336 were not participating in the anticipated attack on the
Maddox and Turner Joy, just who was? Hanyok says there weren’t
any further intercepted messages giving the mission to other
55
boats. If that’s the case, then just what was going on in the
Gulf of Tonkin? At this point, regardless of the emphasis added
by the Phu Bai station, all the SIGINT would accurately state was
that there was no signals intelligence reflecting a planned or
ongoing attack against the Desoto mission (26). The NSA issued a
summary report of the August 4 and 5 events which Hanyok claims
was an attempt to throw up smoke. It claimed the ships attacking
the Desoto patrol were Swatows, coastal patrol boats with no
torpedoes. But the real issue according to Hanyok was time,
distance and speed, though not in that particular order. In
order for the Swatows to make the attack, and to appear on either
Maddox or Turner Joy’s radar when they did, the attacking vessels
would have had to cover 180 nautical miles traveling at a speed
of nearly seventy miles per hour. Impossible, claims Hanyok,
since that would mean the boats were traveling 58% faster than
their known top speed (27). So the Swatow’s lack of speed and
armament ruled them out of the equation. What about torpedo
boats? Same situation, asserts Hanyok. The boats, which did
carry torpedoes, were 140 nautical miles from where the two
56
destroyers were. So in order for them to show up on radar and
mount and attack, they would have to have been traveling at about
70 miles per hour, nearly 40% higher than its known top speed.
In both cases, if Hanyok’s, math is to be believed, impossible.
The only other possibility which Hanyok raises, and in all
honesty makes sense, is that somehow Phu Bai interpreted the
movement of OPlan 34A vessels as potential attackers. They were,
according to Hanyok, moving along North Vietnam’s coastline at
about the time the ships of the Desoto mission were shooting at
those radar returns. If that’s correct, one could only imagine
the embarrassment at all levels of the Navy and the National
Security Agency. And it might explain in part why no reference
to that OPlan mission was made in the US Navy’s history in
Vietnam, why official Washington never acknowledged it or why
Defense Secretary McNamara never admitted to its existence during
his February 1968 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. To mention it would have undercut the
administration’s contention that the US was doing nothing to
provoke an attack. To admit that the Marine listening post at Phu
57
Bai, and the Navy’s own listening post in the Philippines mistook
them for the North Vietnamese and spread a false alarm would have
been too much to bear.
The events of the Tonkin Gulf were played out over forty-
eight hours. The events of the war it helped inspire played out
over eleven years. The effort to make sense of the former to
give meaning to the latter has played out over forty years. And,
like the war which seemed to some to lack clarity of purpose, the
search for that same clarity with regard to the Tonkin Gulf may
yet be an unresolved quest.
58
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