Washington – The National Security Agency has kept secret since 2001 a finding by an agency historian that NSA officers deliberately distorted critical intelligence during the Tonkin Gulf episode that helped precipitate the Vietnam War, said two people familiar with the historian’s work.
The historian’s conclusion represents the first serious accusation that the agency’s communications intercepts were falsified to support the belief that North Vietnamese ships attacked U.S. destroyers Aug. 4, 1964, two days after a previous clash.
Most historians have concluded in recent years that there was no second attack, but they have assumed the NSA intercepts were unintentionally misread, not purposely altered.
The research by Robert Hanyok, the NSA historian, was detailed four years ago in an in- house article that remains classified, in part because agency officials feared its release might prompt uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq, said an intelligence official familiar with internal discussions of the matter.
Matthew Aid, an independent historian who has discussed Hanyok’s Tonkin Gulf research with current and former NSA and CIA officials who have read it, said he decided to speak publicly about the findings because he believed they should have been released long ago.
“This material is relevant to debates we as Americans are having about the war in Iraq and intelligence reform,” said Aid, who is writing a history of the NSA. “To keep it classified simply because it might embarrass the agency is wrong.”
Aid’s description of Hanyok’s findings was confirmed by the intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the research remains classified.
Both men said Hanyok believed the initial misinterpretation of North Vietnamese intercepts was probably an honest mistake. But after months of work in the NSA’s archives, he concluded that midlevel agency officials discovered the error almost immediately but covered it up and doctored documents so they appeared to provide evidence of an attack.
“Rather than come clean about their mistake, they helped launch the United States into a bloody war that would last for 10 years,” Aid said.