What was the connection between A-34 operations with South Vietnamese commandos who were supported by the CIA and the US Navy to the Maddox patrol in the Tonkin Gulf. Could you describe it?

The South Vietnamese attacks on military installations along the coast were part of a graduated campaign of pressure against the North Vietnamese military forces to prevent them from causing trouble in the south. The US Navy participation, the naval patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin were passive. They were what I would call intelligence collection exercises.

Knowing in advance from the South Vietnamese that the commando attacks were going to take place, it was very useful for the United States for its own purpose in knowing the terrain in that area to pick up the electronic signals and any messages that were relayed back and forth indicating where North Vietnamese forces were, what they were doing, and what their reactions to the attacks were. This was the job of the destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin during these incidents.

If you could refine it just a minute, a bit, and talk about there was a real connection between the two operations, one passive, one active?

The South Vietnamese, paramilitary forces had the active rote. They attacked North Vietnamese installations. The US naval vessels had only a passive role. They were observers distant observers of these attacks, monitoring them primarily through monitoring the electronic signals that were passing back and forth.

Go on to the Tonkin Gulf Incident, the two incidents, August 2nd and August 4th. What did you know about the second incident? Why do you think it did not occur?

I think it's pretty clear now that a torpedo attack on the US destroyer did not occur on the second night, during the second incident. There were torpedo boats in the vicinity and it is not possible to prove that they did not attack, but my impression is that the evidence is very insubstantial concerning a second torpedo attack.

But if I can take you back to that particular time, at the time you were leading the interception, could you describe whether, how the confusion, the problem...?

The intelligence officers initially were...

Start again. You overlapped Stan's questions.

Oh. The intelligence officers initially found it very confusing to interpret exactly what was happening on the night of the second incident. The reason was that many intercepted messages were being picked up in the Tonkin Gulf by different listening posts and passed to the United States for receipt in Washington.

These messages were being read in the White House, the Defense Department, and in the CIA. The intelligence officers kept trying to put the messages in proper time sequence and discover what their content was. Unfortunately, some of the messages received on the day after the second incident related to events that took place in the first incident two days before.

It was impossible, dealing with the first reporting of these events, to sort them out carefully and decide the exact sequence of events. That was the source of the confusion, and the confusion was compounded, of course, because as is normal the intelligence process goes on systematically and separately from the policy deliberation process.

So the intelligence officers were having trouble getting unconfused, the policy officers were getting the preliminary reports and preliminary indications of what was happening because it was a critical situation and they acted on the basis of the first reports which hit their desk.

Given the mood in the White House at the time, do you think that the president really wanted to have the exact evidence of what happened or was it irrelevant?

I think that the president and the senior officials were initially deeply concerned to get...

Let's do it again.

Do it again? Ha, Ha, sorry.

I think the president and his principle policy advisors were deeply concerned to get evidence that an attack on a US naval vessel, had taken place. They didn't really care when or how complicated the evidence was about it.

Now, since there clearly was some kind of attack on the destroyer, US destroyer, in the first incident, this was a foregone conclusion and the next three or four days were occupied primarily by trying to get a credible account of that whole period and to use it for a proposal to Congress to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. The policy makers were interested in the credibility of evidence, but the detailed analysis was not of great importance to them.

When the Administration officials, mainly McNamara and Rusk, went up to the Foreign Relations Committee to the hearings about the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, could you describe what kind of material did they have, what kind of intelligence did they, they...presumably had faulty intelligence or...?

They had incomplete intelligence.

Try it again?

Yeah. The policy officials from the State Department and Defense Department, Rusk and McNamara, primarily, when they discussed these incidents with Congress and talked about the policy implications had imperfect, incomplete evidence as to what had happened.

They had the preliminary reports, some of them raw messages from the field, some of them summary accounts from CIA or the Defense Intelligence Agencies. They had interpretive comments from their own staffs. They were taking the fact of an attack on a naval vessel and carrying the analysis to the implications in US policy.

The detailed analysis of intelligence detail the exact account of what happened and what we knew about it hour by hour, day by day, took too long inevitably for this process to be effected by it. The whole policy debate was in a sense over before the final analysis of the two incidents together had been completed.

As an intelligence specialist, do you think this is the way to run a railroad?

I would, of course, like to see policy decisions always made on the basis of completed research and careful analysis. In nearly thirty years of watching the process, I have found that the more critical the situation or the more important to our president the situation is, the less chance there is to do a 100 percent perfect job in intelligence.

Normally, there is not time and especially when military conflict is the issue. What the president is responsible for, as commander in chief, the security of his troops and their deployment. So when he feels that an American force of any kind is under military attack, he moves into a special, critical operational mode in which the intelligence normally is trailing behind and the president, like other generals in commanding troops, is usually making intuitive guesses as to what's happening based on the evidence available to him as he goes along.

When they went up to the hill and Rusk and McNamara went up to the hill, do you feel looking at the way they used the intelligence or didn't use the intelligence, that there was honest confusion of did they just want to be selective about what they used to get the resolution?

McNamara and Rusk may have been aware of some confusion about the details of the situation they were reporting. I think, though, they considered that normal and honest confusion and that they were clear in their minds about what they considered the central fact.

That fact was that some kind of a North Vietnamese military attack had been made on the US naval forces in the Gulf of Tonkin in international waters. That was the critical policy issue.

Whether it consisted of two attacks or one attack was a matter that was of great importance in pinning down the details and in explaining the gravity or the situation. So the emphasis on the second attack, I'm afraid, was overdone, was exaggerated. But it clearly was a result, or an imperfect understanding of the Rusk and McNamara details of the attack.

You have to remember that the South Vietnamese military forces were in a war all this time and they were fighting the North Vietnamese as well as they could. The United States was assisting them and the covert operations were known about in Washington, sometimes planned in Washington, but conducted by the South Vietnamese Forces.

The US naval activities in the Gulf of Tonkin technically were not part of that war at all. These were US military exercises in the vicinity of a crisis area. So the Maddox and the Turner Joy were on intelligence collection patrols, naval ships, listened to electronic signals wherever they are and these were specially equipped ships to pick up the electronic signals relating to these conflicts between the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese.

Of course, they also amounted to a show of force by the United States in support of the South Vietnamese. Now from the point of view of North Vietnam, I feel confident they considered US and the South Vietnamese forces in complete collusion to embarrass and damage North Vietnamese military facilities threatening the South. Therefore they probably thought of the presence of the Maddox and the Turner Joy as a provocation, as a part of a military harassment of North Vietnamese forces.

But our position was that the destroyers, the US naval destroyers, were merely maneuvering in the Gulf of Tonkin, in international waters, collecting intelligence about North Vietnam and its radar facilities and its naval forces in particular reacting to an attack which we knew in advance was going to take place.

But could we have assumed that the North Vietnamese made the connection and yet we kept the patrols out there anyway?

I think that the American policy at the time was committed to helping the South Vietnamese defend their territory and we were prepared to take that amount of risk which is involved in having US naval forces in the vicinity of these local combat situations. This was a risk. I do not think it was intended to provoke a North Vietnamese attack, but clearly the authorities in Washington were prepared to accept that risk.

Do you want to ask the questions about the later McCone visits?

No, I'd go into it. I'd ask this again.

Alright. Alright, let's go back and redo this other part, which was...I'm asking you to repeat it a bit. Why did you think that the second incident did not - just talking about the second incident - why it didn't occur and the intercepted...?

Yes, I think there was in the minds of intelligence officers initially before they had time to do full research and perhaps for many days or indefinitely in the minds of policy-making officers, confusion between the first incident and the second incident which were reported as North Vietnamese, torpedo boat attacks, on US naval destroyers.

Unquestionably, an attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats took place on the night of the first incident. Its gravity is a little hard to pin down, but it was a deliberate attack. It was reported by many shore stations and by the destroyer commander in the vicinity on the night of the second incident that a second torpedo boat attack took place.

My view after looking over all of the data a few days later after the policy decisions had been made was that there was a great deal of confusion as to the time precise events took place and that many reports which seem to relate to the second night the second incident in fact, were delayed reports by North Vietnamese describing the damage done and the events of the first incident.

That was very difficult to determine in Washington on the day after the second incident and there was a lot of legitimate confusion that had to he sorted out by patient correlation of the reports from the field.

If you could carry yourself back to that period, do you think, at that time do you think the second incident took place?

At that time, I felt it was questionable whether the second incident took place. I simply was not sure. It was not until after a number of days of collation of reports in the field had taken place that many of the reports which seemed to relate to the second incident were proved either to be unsound or to relate to the first incident.

This is what intelligence analysis is all about and in the military situation, quite often the commanding officers in this case, the President of the United States don't wait for the details to be settled if they feel they are in a critical situation with a danger of military conflict. They make decisions without waiting for the intelligence detail.

Ray, not to put any words in your mouth but could you tell, is it possible that you could say that you had doubts about it but after reviewing the stuff and the material, you would come to the conclusion that it did not happen?

Yes, much later. Much later. I can...

Could you say that?

Yea, Yea. My first reactions as intelligence officer to the raw material hitting the desk was that two incidents occurred. As I assembled the data and began comparing the precise times at which reports originated, very quickly I began to doubt that the second incident had actually occurred.

Clearly, there was a proximity of North Vietnamese motor torpedo boats and the US destroyer. However, the evidence that an actual attack took place began seeming spongier and spongier as one examined it in careful detail a few days after the event.

Much later in examining that evidence, I would lean to the conclusion that the attack did not take place although that cannot be proved either. We simply, what you can say is that most of the evidence suggesting an attack on the second night evaporated and there is no conclusive evidence that an attack took place.

What counsel did the CIA give or, I want to say the CIA, not McCone and...

Yea.

...give the president as he accounted, after the bombing as contemplated major troop commitments?

’65... yea. I think... I think the CIA line of analysis was fairly consistent from the beginning.

We better...

Better start over again. Okay. Jesus, they got a lot of trucks out there.

In 1964 and 1965 the CIA line of analysis, the consistent pattern of interpretation of the Vietnam situation was pretty much the same. It was that there was a very difficult civil war, insurrectionary situation going on. It would be very hard to stabilize the South Vietnamese forces to win it and to resist North Vietnamese attacks.

I think our advice to the policy makers was always that we should settle down for a very long, hard military support effort and a long process of building up South Vietnamese forces. We did not anticipate that this would be easy nor that the North Vietnamese would fold in any short period of time.

There were disagreements, particularly with our military intelligence experts and with Secretary McNamara over the difficulties ahead. But CIA's position was we should either go in very determinedly for the long haul using the maximum pressure on North Vietnam to end their intervention in the South or not go in at all with military forces. That's the point you really want.

In terms of...the advice, on commiting the American troops. As I remember it, it was if the bombing is as moderate as it is, don't do it.

Yea, well in particular the CIA view was that restricted bombing of North Vietnam which was very light and deliberately avoided key targets in the Hanoi-Haiphong area and continued to be our policy. There was no chance of a successful US military intervention in support of South Vietnam.

Therefore, while this was not our responsibility to make a decision, I recall that our consistent advice was no military intervention by US forces unless we recognize that we were in a regional war which involved heavy bombing of the North.

Good, perfect.