> Report reveals Vietnam War hoaxes, faked attacks
> 1 day ago
>
> 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.
> During the war, North Vietnamese intelligence units sometimes
> succeeded in penetrating US communications systems, and they could
> monitor American message traffic from within, according to the report
> "Spartans in Darkness."
> On several occasions "the communists were able, by communicating on
> Allied radio nets, to call in Allied artillery or air strikes on
> American units," it said.
> "That's something I have never heard before," Steven Aftergood,
> director of the FAS project on government secrecy, told AFP.
>
> But he said that 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.
>
> 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.
>
> "What this study demonstrated is that the available intelligence
> shows that there was no attack. It's a dramatic reversal of the
> historical record," Aftergood said.
>
> "There were previous indications of this but this is the first time
> we have seen the complete study," he said.