No subject

Chi Minh to his Russian counterpart Joseph Stalin -- to the final evacuation
of US spies from Saigon, the 500-page report retold Vietnam War history from
the perspective of "signals intelligence," the group said in a statement.
 
During the war, North Vietnamese intelligence units sometimes succeeded in
penetrating US communications systems, and they could monitor American
message traffic from within, according to the report "Spartans in Darkness."
 
On several occasions "the communists were able, by communicating on Allied
radio nets, to call in Allied artillery or air strikes on American units,"
it said.
 
"That's something I have never heard before," Steven Aftergood, director of
the FAS project on government secrecy, told AFP.
 
But he said that probably the "most historically significant feature" of the
declassified report was the retelling of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident.
 
That was a reported North Vietnamese attack on American destroyers that
helped lead to president Lyndon Johnson's sharp escalation of American
forces in Vietnam.
 
The author of the report "demonstrates that not only is it not true, as
(then US) secretary of defense Robert McNamara told Congress, that the
evidence of an attack was 'unimpeachable,' but that to the contrary, a
review of the classified signals intelligence proves that 'no attack
happened that night,'" FAS said in a statement.
 
"What this study demonstrated is that the available intelligence shows that
there was no attack. It's a dramatic reversal of the historical record,"
Aftergood said.
 
"There were previous indications of this but this is the first time we have
seen the complete study," he said.