Report reveals Vietnam War hoaxes, faked attacks

Tue Jan 8, 9:45 AM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - North Vietnamese made hoax calls to get the US military to bomb its own units during the Vietnam War, according to declassified information that also confirmed US officials faked an incident to escalate the war.

The report was released by the National Security Agency, responsible for much of the United States' codebreaking and eavesdropping work, in response to a "mandatory declassification" request, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) said Monday.

From the first intercepted cable -- a 1945 message from Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh to his Russian counterpart Joseph Stalin -- to the final evacuation of US spies from Saigon, the 500-page report retold Vietnam War history from the perspective of "signals intelligence," the group said in a statement.

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...probably the "most historically significant feature" of the
declassified report was the retelling of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin
incident.

That was a reported North Vietnamese attack on American destroyers that
helped lead to president Lyndon Johnson's sharp escalation of American forces in Vietnam. (Sound familiar?)

The author of the report "demonstrates that not only is it not true, as (then US) secretary of defense Robert McNamara
told Congress, that the evidence of an attack was 'unimpeachable,' but
that to the contrary, a review of the classified signals intelligence
proves that 'no attack happened that night,'" FAS said in a statement.