Documents Show Tonkin Gulf Intelligence Also ‘Skewed’

Drawing a parallel to faulty intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program given to the White House in the run up to the Iraq War, the National Security Archives has released recently unclassified documents showing that there was no second attack on U.S. ships in Tonkin Gulf on August 4, 1964. Then President Lyndon Johnson used reports of the Tonkin Gulf attacks as the basis for his presentation to Congress in support of intensified U.S. military intervention in Vietnam.

The documents published by the Archive include histories, chronologies, signals intelligence [SIGINT] reports, and oral history interviews. According to National Security Archive research fellow John Prados, "the American people have long deserved to know the full truth about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The National Security Agency is to be commended for releasing this piece of the puzzle. The parallels between the faulty intelligence on Tonkin Gulf and the manipulated intelligence used to justify the Iraq War make it all the more worthwhile to re-examine the events of August 1964 in light of new evidence."

The National Security Archives is independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Documents published by the Archive are declassified and acquired through standard use of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

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