spartans_in_darkness

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from Fort Meade was a series of summary reports
issued between Sand 7 August. It is these reports
which make up first official NSA judgment on
what happened. Because of this, the summaries
deserve a close look, since they establish the tone
and form for the later chronology, which became,
in a way, the final NSA statement on what had
happened.
(TS//SI) NSA issued five summary and situation
reports after the incident, beginning early on
S August. Of the five, numbers "Rat" through
"ROS," the pertinent ones are the first three, especially
the first and third. These three reports
explicitly state that the 4 August attack occurred.
Report "ROl" notes that the reports from the
destroyer that it had sunk two torpedo boats were
later "confirmed by a DRV message which stated
'that we had sacrificed two ships and the rest are
okay'." 166 The statement was a direct quote from
the suspect NSA translation. It differed from the
Vietnamese losses reported by the U.S. ships.
NSA received all messages from the Desoto patrol
via the JCS. All through the afternoon of 4
August, the destroyers reported at first that three
boats had been sunk, then later changed it to one
sunk and one, possibly two, damaged.l'" The second
post-incident report, known as "Gulf of
Tonkin SIGINT Situation Report No.1," included
the statement "following the 4 August attack."
(TS//SI) It was the third report that was the
most open in supporting the idea of the second
attack. It was stated in the lead sentence of the
report that "This report is a summary of those
DRV naval communications during the period I­
S August which demonstrate irrefutably that DRV
naval boats did, in fact, engage in preplanned
combat against U.S. destroyers patrolling in
international waters." 168
(TS//SI) However, the confident tone of the
third report is belied by its thin layer of evidence.
And this problem was noticed by some of its
recipients. Late on the afternoon of 6 August, a
DIA representative queried NSA if additional
SIGINT was available from the 4 August incident.
He reported that Secretary McNamara was not
satisfied with the contents of this third summary
report, "that it was insufficient for his purposes."
In reviewing the SIGINT from the incident, it was
discovered that there was a large gap with no
intercept - specifically, the time leading up to the
supposed attack. Based on this discrepancy,
urgent messages were sent to the field sites
requesting all intercept.l'" And, as we have seen,
the field sites had nothing else to add.
(TS//SI) There are problems with the way this
series of reports portrays the information in
them. For example, the first report mentions the
salvage operations of the two damaged DRV torpedo
boats which had been discussed earlier.
However, unlike what we discovered, the summary
does not go on to report that these operations
continued into the time of the attack as reported
by the marines at Phu Bai. The authors of the
third report tried to address this with the speculation
that the attacking boats might have come
from Quang Khe or some other base in the DRV
Southern Command.'" But this has already been
shown to be wrong since the distance traveled for
the boats to have attacked from the east could not
have been accomplished because of the limitations
of the boats' speed.
(TS//SI) Perhaps the most serious problem,
though, is the lack of any citation of source
reports which made up the summaries. This is a
critical point, since the information referred to in
the summaries is coming from already published,
serialized NSA and field site reports and translations.
The very lack of notes is odd since this type
of summary reporting required that source notes
be included. It seems that if the Agency was
attempting to build a case demonstrating that an
attack had occurred, then the source reports and
translations which substantiated the position
would have been included. However, this was not
the case. In fact, there were cases in which information
used in the summaries as evidence, was,
in fact, not related at all, or impossible to verify.
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