Robert McNamara's Vietnam deception.

• Author: Nathan, James A.

AS THE interminable conflict in Southeast Asia wore on, Congress came to feel itself misled as to the circumstances surrounding the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the authority Pres. Lyndon Johnson took as his legal warrant for war. In August, 1964, as Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara remembers it in his 1995 memoir, In Retrospect, "the war [in Vietnam] seemed far off. Tonkin Gulf changed all that." The Administration portrayed purported North Vietnamese patrol boat attacks on two American destroyers in international waters as yet another incident of unprovoked aggression, this time not against South Vietnam, but, instead, against its great ally, the U.S. As such, North Vietnam's actions were said to be a challenge to American credibility.

The truth was much more complex. If the unacknowledged facts known to the Administration had been made clear to Congress, what was called a "functional declaration of war" most likely never would have been passed with such alacrity. (There were just two dissents, both in the Senate.) In early 1964, the U.S. had become involved in two separate intelligence operations in the Gulf of Tonkin directed at North Vietnam. The first--American seagoing patrols--were code-named DESOTA and were electronic reconnaissance missions. U.S. ships gathered intelligence from North Vietnamese-based shore radars and signals. Part of the process involved agitation--activating the North Vietnamese military monitors to see how their communications and codes functioned. American ships operated close in, around five miles from the North Vietnamese shore.

A CIA operation, code-named 34A missions, utilized U.S.-trained commandos in high-speed patrol craft. These covert forces "launched hit and run attacks against North Vietnamese shore and island installations." Although not coordinated directly with the DESOTA patrols, American commanders knew of the 34A missions and profited from monitoring the signals traffic produced by North Vietnamese radar and military units responding to the actions of the invading forces.

"On the night of July 30," McNamara writes, "a 34A mission carried out . . . two attacks. The next morning, the U.S. destroyer Maddox on a DESOTA patrol steamed into the Gulf.... Two days later, the Maddox reported it was attacked by torpedoes.... The Maddox reported no injuries.... At the time of the incident [the] Maddox lay in international waters, more than twenty-five miles off the North Vietnamese coast." The U.S. protested the Aug. 2 attack and sent another destroyer, the C. Turner Joy, to join the Maddox in the Tonkin Gulf. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, according to McNamara, subsequently was briefed on the 34A operations and the DESOTA patrols. "Although I have been unable to locate any record of the meeting," he writes, "I believe we stressed we had no intention of provoking a North Vietnamese attack on the DESOTA patrol.... We informed the Senators that the DESOTA patrols, as well as the 34A operations, would continue, and in fact another 34A raid occurred this time against the coast of North Vietnam [on the morning of Aug. 4]." McNamara also recalls his recorded testimony, wherein he was asked if it were not, in fact, the case that the U.S. was "backstopping" 34A raids? "Our Navy," McNamara replied, "played absolutely no part in, was not associated with, [and] was not aware of any South Vietnamese actions."

McNamara does not see how this denial is, in substance, disingenuous. Yet, the impression he gave the Senate, especially at the public Tonkin Gulf hearings on Aug. 6, 1964, is that there were no n cent raids of any importance, and if there had been any, they were not in concert with the U.S.; not part of any ongoing effort o confound, trouble, and preoccupy the North Vietnamese; not designed to violate systematically the territory of North Vietnam; and were solely exercises in self-defense--attempts to ward off supposed high numbers of infiltrating North Vietnamese forces crossing into the South by ground and junk.

Each of these impressions was false or, at best. lacking in candor. By his own admission. McNamara knew of and approved the DESOTA and 34A raids. If the missions were "compartmentalized" and followed different procedures, it does not mean they were not related. American monitors based on the U.S. naval presence in the area then audited and attempted to decrypt the message traffic. The 34A raids "lit" nearly the entire gamut of the North's monitoring and signals capability. For that reason, at the command level, the operations frequently were synchronized. There was a subsidiary purpose as well--34A raids buttressed South Vietnam's morale as much as they vexed the...