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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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