Gulf of Tonkin Incident

From The Black Vault Encyclopedia Project

Chart showing the US Navy’s interpretation of the events of the first part of the Gulf of Tonkin incident

The Gulf of Tonkin Incident was a pair of alleged attacks by North Vietnamese gunboats on two American destroyers, the USS Maddox and the USS C. Turner Joy, in August of 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin. Later research, including a report released in 2005 by the National Security Agency, indicates that the second attack did not occur.

The Tonkin incident occurred during the first year of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration — less than a year after the Kennedy assassination. While Kennedy had originally supported the policy of sending "military advisors" to Vietnam in an "advisory role", he had begun to change his thinking and shortly before his death in November 1963, he had begun limited recall of American forces. Johnson's views had been likewise complex, but had supported escalation in Vietnam as a means to challenge Soviet-Communist expansion in a policy called "containment". After Kennedy's death, Johnson would order more forces to support the west-allied South Vietnam government, beginning the United States' protracted presence in Southeast Asia.

1 The incident
2 Contradicting claims
- 2.1 Activity in the area at the time
- 2.2 Later statements
3 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
4 Interpretation
5 NSA Declassified Documents
6 Trivia
7 See also
8 External links
9 Footnotes
10 Copyright

The incident

On July 31, 1964, the American destroyer USS Maddox (DD-731) began a reconnaissance mission in the Gulf of Tonkin and was attacked by three North Vietnamese patrol boats, in international waters, on August 2, 1964. Admiral George Stephen Morrison was in command the local fleet from his flagship USS Bon Homme Richard (CVA-31).

The Maddox, suffering only superficial damage by a single machine gun bullet, retired to South Vietnamese waters where she was joined by the destroyer C. Turner Joy.

On August 4, a DESOTO patrol to North Vietnam coast was launched by Maddox and the C. Turner Joy. The latter received radar and radio signals that they believed to signal another attack by the North Vietnamese. For some two hours the ships fired on radar targets and maneuvered vigorously amid electronic and visual reports of foes. It is highly unlikely that any North Vietnamese forces were actually in the area during this gunfight. Captain John J. Herrick even admitted that it was nothing more than an "overeager sonarman" who "was hearing his ship's own propeller beat." However, at the time most of the crew had believed they were under attack. Also in 1995, General Vo Nguyen Giap, commander-in-chief of North Vietnamese forces at the time, disavowed any involvement with the August 4 incident, though he did confirm the August 2 attack.

Contradicting claims

During 1964, U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War increased. A program of covert South Vietnamese operations, designed to impose "progressively escalating pressure" upon the North, initiated on a small and ineffective scale in February. The active U.S. role in the few covert operations that were carried out was limited essentially to planning, equipping, and training of the South Vietnamese forces involved. However, U.S. responsibility for the launching and conduct of these activities was unequivocal and carried with it an implicit symbolic and psychological intensification of the U.S. commitment. In any case, the facts were completely at odds with Secretary McNamara's claim on August 6, 1964: "Our Navy played absolutely no part in, was not associated with, was not aware of, any South Vietnamese actions, if there were any." Four years later, McNamara admitted to Congress that the US ships had in fact been cooperating in South Vietnamese attacks against the North.

On November 30, 2005, the National Security Agency released hundreds of pages of long-secret documents on the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident. The most provocative document is a 2001 article in which an agency historian, Robert J. Hanyok, argued that the agency's intelligence officers "deliberately skewed" the evidence passed on to policy makers and the public to falsely suggest that North Vietnamese ships had attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964. Mr. Hanyok wrote that 90 percent of the intercepts of North Vietnamese communications relevant to the supposed Aug. 4, 1964, attack were omitted from the major agency documents going to policy makers.

Although information obtained well after the fact indicates that there was actually no North Vietnamese attack that night, U.S. authorities and all of the crew at the time said they were convinced at the time that an attack had taken place. As a result, planes from the carriers Ticonderoga and Constellation were sent to hit North Vietnamese torpedo boat bases and fuel facilities.

Activity in the area at the time

Regarding claims that the attacks on the US were unprovoked, veterans of US Navy SEAL teams say that US-trained South Vietnamese commandos were active in the area on the days of the attacks. Deployed from Da Nang in Norwegian-built fast patrol boats, the Lien Doi Nguoi Nhai (LDNN, soldiers that fight under the sea), made attacks in the Gulf area on both of the nights in question. However, the Maddox operation was for intelligence purposes and did not directly support the covert operations. Also, since the U.S. only recognised the North-Vietnamese territorial waters to extent 3 miles from shore, the U.S. was under the impression that their ship was in international waters, sailing 8 miles from shore.

On July 31, LDNN in "Nastys" (the name commandos gave to the fast attack boats) attacked a radio transmitter on the island of Hon Nieu. On Aug. 3, they used a shipboard-mounted cannon to bombard a radar site at Cape Vinh Son. The North Vietnamese responded by attacking hostile ships visible in the area. While US officials were less than honest about the full extent of hostilities that led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, critical claims that a naval commander fired weapons solely to create an international incident tend to overlook circumstances and opportunistic responses that suggest a less intentional motivation.

Some, such as U.S. Admiral Grant Sharp, Commander in Chief of the Pacific at the time, maintained that U.S. actions did not provoke the confirmed August 2 attack. He claims that North Vietnamese radar tracked the Maddox along the coast, thus being aware that the destroyer had not actually attacked North Vietnam. Yet they ordered their PT boats to engage it anyway. He also notes that orders given to the Maddox to stay eight miles from the North Vietnamese coast put the ship inside international waters, as North Vietnam claimed only five nautical miles as their ocean territory. In addition, many nations had previously carried out similar missions all over the world, and the U.S.S. Craig had earlier conducted an intelligence-gathering mission in similar circumstances to the Maddox without incident.

Daniel Ellsberg, who was on duty in the Pentagon that night receiving messages from the ship, reports that the ships were on a secret mission (codenamed DeSoto Patrols) inside North Vietnamese territorial waters. Their purpose was to provoke the North Vietnamese into turning on their coastal defense radar so they could be plotted.

Squadron commander James Stockdale was one of the U.S. pilots flying overhead August 4. In the 1990s Stockdale stated:

[I] had the best seat in the house to watch that event, and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets — there were no PT boats there… There was nothing there but black water and American fire power.

Later statements

In 1995, retired Vietnamese General Nguyen Giap meeting with former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, categorically denied that Vietnamese gunboats had attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964. A taped conversation was released in 2001 of a meeting several weeks after passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, revealing that Robert McNamara expressed doubts to President Johnson that the attack had even occurred.

In October, 2005 the New York Times reported that Robert J. Hanyok, a historian for the United States National Security Agency, concluded that the NSA deliberately distorted intelligence reports regarding the August 4 incident. He concluded that the motive was not political but was probably to cover up honest intelligence errors.

Mr. Hanyok's conclusions were initially published within the NSA in the Winter 2000/Spring 2001 Edition of Cryptologic Quarterly, about five years before being revealed in the New York Times article. According to intelligence officials, the view of government historians that the report should become public was rebuffed by policymakers concerned that comparisons might be made to intelligence used to justify the Iraq war that commenced in 2003.

Reviewing the NSA's archives, Mr. Hanyok concluded that the NSA had initially (probably innocently) misinterpreted North Vietnamese intercepts so as to make it appear there was an attack on August 4. Midlevel NSA officials almost immediately discovered the error, he concluded, but covered it up by altering documents, so as to make it appear the second attack had happened. Robert McNamara, who was defense secretary at the time of the incident, said in October, 2005 that he believed intelligence reports regarding the Gulf of Tonkin incident were decisive to the war's expansion.

On November 30, 2005, the NSA released the first installment of previously classified information regarding the Gulf of Tonkin incident, including Mr. Hanyok's article, "Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2-4 August 1964" Cryptologic Quarterly, Winter 2000/Spring 2001 Edition, Vol. 19, No. 4 / Vol. 20, No. 1.

The Hanyok article states that intelligence information was presented to the Johnson administration "in such a manner as to preclude responsible decisionmakers in the Johnson administration from having the complete and objective narrative of events of 4 August 1964." Instead, "only information that supported the claim that the communists had attacked the two destroyers was given to Johnson administration officials."

Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

Main article: Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

Lyndon Johnson, who was up for election that year, launched retaliatory strikes and went on national television on August 4. Although the Maddox had been involved in providing intelligence support for South Vietnamese attacks at Hon Me and Hon Ngu, Johnson's Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, went before Congress and denied that the United States Navy was supporting South Vietnamese military operations. He thus characterized the attack as "unprovoked." He also claimed before Congress that there was "unequivocable proof" of an "unprovoked" second attack against the Maddox.

As a result of McNamara's testimony, on August 7 Congress passed a joint resolution (H.J. RES 1145), known as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, that facilitated increased U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The Resolution gave President Johnson approval "to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom." Both Johnson and President Richard Nixon used the Resolution as a justification for escalated involvement in Indochina.

Interpretation

The "Gulf of Tonkin Incident" defined the beginning of large-scale involvement of U.S. armed forces in Vietnam. Historians have shown that the second incident was, at its best interpretation, an overreaction of eager naval forces, or at its worst, a crafted pretext for making overt the American covert involvement in Vietnam.

North Vietnam's Navy Anniversary Day is August 5, the date of the second attack, Vietnamese time, where "one of our torpedo squadrons chased the U.S.S. Maddox from our coastal waters, our first victory over the U.S. Navy".