SECRETS

PART III

by Larry Beinhart, October 24, 2007

It was a dark and stormy night at sea on August 4, 1964.

Off the coast of North Vietnam, sailors on the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy saw “ghostly blobs.” Fearing that they were enemy torpedo boats, the American ships took evasive action and began firing.

Reports were radioed back to Washington. Told that American forces were being attacked, President Lyndon Johnson ordered air strikes against North Vietnam.

Johnson prepared to go to Congress to ask for a war powers act—very much like the one President Bush got for Iraq. The National Security Agency (NSA) went to work on the presentation of the proof that the bad guys had shot first.

The NSA’s careful analysis of North Vietnamese and American signal traffic revealed that the United States had not been attacked. The ghostly blobs were tricks of light and darkness. The NSA did not inform the president of the error. Instead, they doctored the documents and committed a series of small forgeries—changed some dates and used bad translations—to turn the mistake into an official lie.

Based on NSA evidence, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, 416-0 in the House, 88-2 in the Senate, authorizing the war in Vietnam.

In 2001, NSA historian Robert J. Hanyok wrote it up for Cryptologic Quarterly, a classified publication. The article, “Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2-4 August, 1964,” reveals that Johnson wasn’t told about the deception for four years. When Johnson found out, he reportedly said, “Hell, those damn stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.”

It was kept secret from us, the American public, for 31 years, until Hanyok’s article was declassified in 2005. (Available at www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv.)

Secrecy, in the name of national security, is an invitation to lie. The offer is frequently accepted. Informants lie to agents who lie to bureau chiefs who lie to management who lie to cabinet officers who lie to the president who lies to us.

They do it to cover up failures: “For eight years, from 1986 to 1994 [the CIA] knowingly gave the White House information manipulated by Moscow and concealed the fact. To reveal it would have been too embarrassing. Ninety-five of these tainted reports warped American perception of the major military and political developments in Moscow” (Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA by Tim Weiner).

For money: From the summer of 2002 through June 2004, the US made secret payments of $335,000 a month for intelligence about Iraq to a group run by Ahmad Chalabi. “Internal reviews by the United States government have found that much of the information…was useless, misleading, or even fabricated” (Richard A. Oppel, Jr., The New York Times, May 18, 2004).

To advance a political agenda: Chalabi’s bogus information was spread far and wide by Bush, Cheney, Tenet, and Powell to make the case for war. It was also leaked to the New York Times. The paper printed it as news and helped make the nonsense reputable.

There are a thousand reasons to lie. The impulse is normally kept under control by the threat of exposure. But in a culture of secrecy it is unchecked. The system necessarily becomes corrupt.