It’s now abundantly more than CLEAR that NSA personnel mishandled the SigInt which led to the United States severely escalating from a very minor advisory role to a major presence of US troops in in VietNam 60 years ago. Without this escalation, VietNam would have been an extremely minor conflict, maybe on the order of US presence in Lebanon in 1958 or 1983 … in other words, far from ZERO involvement, but certainly not within several orders of magnitude in terms of trauma, casualties, or nearly 60,000 US deaths/MIAs and over 2,000,000 Vietnamese deaths that actually occurred.

WHY did the NSA personnel completely FUCK UP so badly … WHY did otherwise competent people so badly mishandle ambiguously SigInt in the way that they did, ie in which the ambiguous SigInt and even sketchier intelligence analysis of that ambiguous SigInt were publicly described by Dept of Defense Secy McNamara as “unimpeachable” during and after the Gulf of Tonkin incident? Were the NSA personnel political casualties, or just tossed under the bus to serve as scapegoats for what would have been a completely politically-motivated war to prove someone’s or even our nation’s SUSPECT manhood? Regardless of what we know from the leaked Pentagon Papers and the history of Vietnam from World War II on until August, 1964 … there were plenty of reasons to NOT get sucked into a completely unnecessary war – but WHY was the ambiguous SigInt so badly misinterpreted and then horrendously mislabeled as “unimpeachable evidence?”

For at least twenty years, since materials have been declassified and various corroborating reports have been published, it generally agreed by all who have looked at the known facts that the SigInt was indeed severely mishandled … but there’s no single agreed-upon reason for the mishandling.

It was likely a confluence of several different factors … and maybe some would say that it does not matter … EXCEPT that it very much DOES MATTER, because history WILL, with 100% certainty, repeat itself if we refuse to learn the lessons of what happened.

There are already way to many wars that can be justified for the right reasons when we are SURE of those reasons and who is giving them to us, but we should not be fighting more new wars and killing millions or tens of millions or more for COMPLETELY WRONG and DELUSIONAL reasons.

For anyone who is still not up to speed on exactly people are referring to when they speak about the general agreement …by almost everyone involved that the SigInt was indeed severely mishandled, they should read Robert J. Hanyok’s work Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish on Gulf of Tonkin SIGINT, which is available on the US Navy’s Naval History and Heritage Command.

This officially sanctioned Navy document provides an extremely detailed analysis of JUST THE FACTS of this matter and lays out how the mishandled SigInt of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Robert J. Hanyok was first an intelligence analyst with the NSA and then later a professional historian with the National Security Agency – the material is strictual factual and lays out the facts that are believed by consensus to be true; it’s not one bit speculative – the speculation is from others who are trying to figure out WHY the facts happened in the manner they did.

There are several complex and debated reasons why NSA personnel mishandled SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) during and after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Here’s a breakdown of what are likely to be the key factors:

1. Pressure for Confirmation:

  • The political climate of the time fueled a desire to justify escalation in Vietnam. This created an environment where intelligence that supported the narrative of North Vietnamese aggression was sought out and amplified.
  • Reports indicating the August 4th attack might not have occurred were downplayed or ignored as officials were eager for evidence to support a strong response.

2. Ambiguous Intelligence:

  • SIGINT intercepts in the Gulf of Tonkin were often unclear, partly due to limitations in technology and analysis capabilities at the time.
  • This ambiguity allowed for misinterpretations and the exaggeration of certain signals, fitting them into a pre-conceived narrative.

3. Organizational Dynamics:

  • Some historians argue that the NSA faced internal pressure to deliver intelligence that supported the government’s agenda. This could have led to analysts feeling the need to selectively interpret data.
  • A desire to please those above might have led to downplaying any doubts and uncertainties surrounding the second attack.

4. Misunderstanding the Enemy:

  • Analysts might have overestimated North Vietnamese aggression and misinterpreted their routine communications as evidence of an attack.

5. Later Revelations:

  • Declassified documents and later analysis by historians (such as Robert J. Hanyok) revealed how much of the SIGINT used to justify the escalation was flimsy and misinterpreted.

As incredibly painful as it is, we don’t have any other choice but to learn the lessons of the intelligence failure of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. While the Gulf of Tonkin incident stands as one of the clearest example that we have of the negative consequences of intelligence manipulation, it’s crucial to remember that SIGINT analysis is inherently complex and always necessarily subject to interpretation.

The people involved were not necessarily evil or stupid, but they were human, they made mistakes and the American people made an even bigger mistake by not having the courage and leadership to step up earlier and demand to have the justification unambiguously PROVEN, ie like Pearl Harbor OR Hitler/Stalin dividing up Poland and then immediately annexing the sovereign Baltic republics in September 1939.

Mistakes were made, BUT there were plenty pointing out that mistakes were being made, eg George Kennan, et al. The evidence was clear enough; there were people who were VERY LOUDLY speaking up and BEGGING the American public to recognized that communist China and the USSR were going to be ENEMIES, not allies, in late 1945 and thereafter!

But the American public, and its weak politicians who get elected by best seeking populist approval of an electoral majority of the American public, desperately wanted to believe that the war was completly over 80 years ago after Nagasaki. The War against free enterprise and constitutional republics that protect rights of all persons was CLEARLY not over 80 years ago. We must understand, why that threat to Western values of constitutional rights and free enterprise is still very LARGE. Especially when the current wars seem ice cold in comparison to the Cold War amorphous conflicts of Korea, VietNam, Afghanistan, Nicaragua/Cuba, Iran/Iraq, etc … those wars are definitely NOT cold and definitely NOT going to be confined to where they currently are.

This most certainly does not mean that we should be stampeded into a VietNam like escalation … the opposite is true; we should KNOW by know that our government will lie to us AND that the majority of the people will be just fine with the lies. We should realize why those distant wars WILL become very up close and PERSONAL as people come into agreement with or tacitly accept the notions that authoritarian government and state-owned enterprise OR even Politburo-regulated agriculture and food industries are in the best interest of individual sovereign citizens who make up a constitutional republic.

Coming into agreement with that LIE is tantamount to ceding the right to live.