What Was Said in Private

Hanyok's study of the signals intelligence confirms that North Vietnamese torpedo boats engaged the destroyer USS Maddox on 2 August 1964. It concludes that no attack on U.S. ships took place in the Gulf of Tonkin on the night of 4 August. These are Hanyok's conclusions as he wrote them.

The FRUS editorial note and the public record give the sequence of 4 August. At 1:27 p.m. the Maddox reported that "a review of the action makes many reported contacts and torpedoes fired 'appear doubtful'" and that weather effects on radar and over-eager sonarmen may have accounted for many reports (FRUS 1964-68, vol. I, Doc. 276, quoting the Navy's 28 August 1964 chronology). At 4:47 p.m. Secretary of Defense McNamara, Deputy Secretary Vance and the Joint Chiefs met to marshal the evidence, in the words of FRUS Doc. 276, "to overcome lack of a clear and convincing showing that an attack on the destroyers had in fact occurred," and concluded that an attack had taken place.

At 11:36 p.m. President Johnson told the nation: "The initial attack on the destroyer Maddox, on August 2, was repeated today by a number of hostile vessels attacking two U.S. destroyers with torpedoes." Congress approved the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (Public Law 88-408) on 7 August. Section 1 approves "the determination of the President, as Commander in Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States." Section 2 states that the United States is prepared "to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force" to assist states covered by the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty.

Hanyok records that the Senate passed the resolution with two dissenting votes. Sources differ on the House tally, and it is not stated here. Hanyok writes that the administration tied the resolution to the 4 August incident, and that the resolution text refers generally to attacks on U.S. forces. In 1968 McNamara told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the supporting signals intelligence was "unimpeachable" (Hanyok, p. 2).

Hanyok also characterized the handling. He wrote that "From this evidence, one can easily deduce the deliberate nature of these actions," and that "This was an active effort to make SIGINT fit the claim of what happened during the evening of 4 August in the Gulf of Tonkin." The same page states that there are "no 'smoking gun' memoranda or notes buried in the files that outline any plan or state a justification."

Hanyok also wrote: "The question why the NSA personnel handled the product the way they did will probably never be answered. The notion that they were under 'pressure' to deliver the story that the administration wanted simply cannot be supported." Hanyok states that the question of motive probably cannot be answered.

A New York Times report of 31 October 2005 by Scott Shane states that Hanyok concluded mid-level officers skewed the evidence to cover earlier errors, and that top NSA and defense officials and President Johnson did not know of or condone it. The study text does not say this, so the statement is carried as reported. The Times also reported that higher NSA officials were "fearful that it might prompt uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq, according to an intelligence official familiar with some internal discussions of the matter." The attribution is to an unnamed official.

The record also contains defenses of the 1964 account. Hanyok describes McNamara's memoir as still finding the evidence for an attack convincing, and the Navy's history by Marolda and Fitzgerald as calling the evidence "conclusive" (p. 1). The FRUS note shows that officials on 4 August weighed five factors, including a determination by Admiral Sharp, before concluding that an attack had occurred. Hanyok adds that NSA staff in the crisis center "for the most part ... believed that it had occurred." In January 1972 NSA's Deputy Director, Tordella, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's staff chief that the 4 August intercept could refer to the 2 August attack (Hanyok, note 6).

The per curiam opinion quotes the rule that "Any system of prior restraints of expression comes to this Court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity," and that the government "carries a heavy burden of showing justification for the imposition of such a restraint." The Court stated that the government "had not met that burden. We agree." Each of the nine Justices wrote separately.

The opinions also record the government's position. Justice Stewart, joined by Justice White, wrote: "I am convinced that the Executive is correct with respect to some of the documents involved." He added that he could not say that disclosure of any of them "will surely result in direct, immediate, and irreparable damage to our Nation or its people." Justice White concurred "only because of the concededly extraordinary protection against prior restraints." The dissents of Chief Justice Burger and Justices Harlan and Blackmun objected chiefly to the speed of the proceedings. The Court's holding concerned the injunction and did not decide that publication was harmless.

The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, NIE 2002-16HC, carried its disagreements on its face. The Energy Department dissented on the aluminum tubes, and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research recorded that it "considers the available evidence inadequate to support such a judgment" (pp. 8-9). The Estimate's confidence table assigned low confidence to the judgment on whether Saddam would share chemical or biological weapons with al-Qa'ida. The copy available is a redacted release marked April 2004.

The Senate Committee's 2004 report and the commission's report examine the analysts. The Committee's 2008 report examines the statements of officials, and it reports statements that omitted the intelligence community's disagreement.

The minority views of Senators Bond, Chambliss, Hatch and Burr (pp. 100-101) state: "policymakers' statements were substantiated by the intelligence. As the Committee's Phase I report showed, it was the intelligence that was faulty." They call the report "majority-only" and say the minority was "cut out." Senator Warner filed separate views agreeing with "many of the points." The Phase I report of 2004 was unanimous.

Phase II reviewed statements from the "top levels of the Executive Branch" (p. 2). Statements by officials outside the executive branch were outside its scope.

The sentence reads in full: "But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Dearlove told the Inquiry that the remark concerned attempts "to join up terrorism and Iraq," that he "might well have used the word 'fitted'," and that he sought an amendment to Rycroft's record. The minute is a staff member's account of a meeting and not a transcript.

SIGAR ran its Lessons Learned program from 2014 to 2018. The Congressional Research Service counts 428 interviews, of which 62 were identified. The Congressional Research Service notes that the interviews took place up to 15 years after the events. The Pentagon Papers documents were contemporaneous with theirs.

The requests and suits ran from the last months of the Obama administration through the Trump administration, and the court's opinion of 30 September 2021 was issued in the Biden administration.

The statements of Lute, Boucher and Crowley are quoted here from the Senate hearing record, S. Hrg. 116-203, and not from the interview documents. Senator Paul quoted Lute's 2015 interview in his opening statement (p. 2), Boucher is quoted at page 3, and Senator Lee quoted Crowley at page 32. The grade is reported for that reason.

The events described in the interviews fall in the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations. Republican Senators Paul and Lee were among the critics at the hearing, and the Congressional Research Service records that Democratic members, among them Senators Gillibrand and Udall, called for an investigation.

SIGAR is the inspector general that collected the interviews in sections 2.8 and 2.9. The passage is its own finding about the reporting systems that fed officials' public statements, and it names Congress alongside the American and Afghan public as the audiences that exerted the pressure.

On 5 March 1962 Brigadier General Edward Lansdale, Chief of Operations of the Cuba Project, asked the Joint Chiefs for a "brief but precise description of pretexts." The memorandum of 13 March from Chairman Lemnitzer forwarded the result to the Secretary of Defense. The memorandum describes its contents as "a preliminary submission suitable only for planning purposes." It assumes that other agencies would make similar submissions and that individual projects would be "considered on a case-by-case basis."

Lansdale's memorandum for the record of 16 March 1962 describes a White House meeting with the President, General Taylor, the Attorney General, Bundy, Gilpatric, Lemnitzer, McCone, Alexis Johnson and Lansdale. Lemnitzer mentioned plans for "plausible pretexts to use force" (p. 2). On page 3 it records: "The President said bluntly that we were not discussing the use of U.S. military force".

The memorandum for the record does not name the Northwoods paper and does not state a decision on it. The record contains the proposal, the President's statement and no recorded approval or execution. No cited document records a decision by the President on the paper itself.

One further document has no paired public statement. A paper by Assistant Secretary McNaughton, dated 10 March 1965 in the State Department's compilation, with near-identical text in the Pentagon Papers, lists U.S. aims in Vietnam as 70 percent to avoid a humiliating defeat, 20 percent to keep the territory from China, and 10 percent for a better way of life for the South Vietnamese. Its first paragraph reads "70%—To avoid a humiliating US defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor)." No dated public statement is paired with it in the cited sources, so it appears as an exhibit and no finding rests on it.

The Afghanistan records have the same gap. No cited source pairs named officials' dated public statements on progress with their own interview statements on the same subject.