I understand the desire of historians and others to see this article about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Heck, I want to read it – but I have no problem waiting a few more weeks until all the related documents are declassified and free for public inspection.

National Security Agency officers mistranslated interceptions involving the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, and their mistake was covered up by deliberate falsifications, says a researcher trying to obtain an article that lays out what happened.

Now, says researcher Matthew Aid, the NSA is blocking release of the article, by an NSA historian, about the incident that led to a massive U.S. buildup in Vietnam by President Lyndon B. Johnson with the near-unanimous backing of Congress.

Aid, who requested the article last year under the Freedom of Information Act, said it appeared that NSA officers made honest mistakes in translating the intercepted messages about what was reported as a North Vietnamese attack on American destroyers in the gulf off the coast of what was then North Vietnam.

Rather than correct the mistakes, the 2001 article in the NSA's classified Cryptologic Quarterly says, midlevel officials decided to falsify documents to cover up the errors, according to Aid, who is working on a history of the agency and has talked to a number of current and former government officials about this chapter of American history.

Aid said he had been told that the article, written by NSA historian Robert Hanyok, analyzes problems found in interceptions about the events. He said the nature and extent of the mistakes remained unclear, and that some senior officials at NSA who were not involved with the errors had taken issue with the journal article.

Let’s look at this objectively. It takes time to declassify documents – especially if they hint at our capabilities and methods for intercepting information today. Let the process work -- especially given the planned release date of the declassified documents.

In a written statement, NSA spokesman Don Weber said the agency had delayed releasing the article "in an effort to be consistent with our preferred practice of providing the public a more contextual perspective." The agency plans to release the article and related materials next month, he said.
"Instead of simply releasing the author's historical account, the agency worked to declassify the associated signals intelligence ... and other classified documents used to draw his conclusions," Weber said.

In other words, Aid will get the documents sometime around Christmas. There is no critical need to release the documents to the public today, given that we are dealing with incidents that are decades old.

Except, of course, that Aid seems o have a political agenda in his demand for immediate release of the article absent the supporting evidence.

Aid drew comparisons to more recent intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that overstated the threat posed by President Saddam Hussein's arsenal.

"The question becomes, why not release this?" Aid said of the article. "We have some documents that, from my perspective, I think would be very instructive to the public and the intelligence community ... on a mistake made 41 years ago that was just as bad as the WMD debacle."

In other words, he wants to analogize the conflicts in Vietnam and Iraq. He is not particularly interested in the accuracy of the Hanyok article or the analogy. He simply wants a club with which to beat the administration on a matter with which he disagrees.

HereÂ’s hoping the agency sticks to its guns so that everything comes out at once, allowing a full review of HanyokÂ’s conclusions.

Posted by: Greg at 02:32 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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