Reply With QuoteI Doubt that happened. R/Os knew each other. If it did it was a rare occasion.
Vietnam War Hoaxes and faked attacks.
Report reveals Vietnam War hoaxes, faked attacks
Tue Jan 8, 9:45 AM ET
North Vietnamese made hoax calls to get the US military to bomb its own units during the Vietnam War, according to declassified information that also confirmed US officials faked an incident to escalate the war.
The report was released by the National Security Agency, responsible for much of the United States' codebreaking and eavesdropping work, in response to a "mandatory declassification" request, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) said Monday.
From the first intercepted cable -- a 1945 message from Vietnamese leader Ho 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.
To recap:
North Vietnamese penetrated US comms and called in artillery and air strikes on friendly positions.
Now thats f*ked up.
I Doubt that happened. R/Os knew each other. If it did it was a rare occasion.
Personal: Moving Armored column out of Bien Cat, with 11th AC, about Dec 28th, 1967 at 22:00 hrs, we were ambushed and very nearly wiped out to a man...11 vehicles, 44 men. I was one of just a few who survived. The enemy had interecepted a telephone conversation between a coordinating lieutenant in Bien Cat and the leader of the Austrailian convoy we were headed off to escort. Americans were very naieve about the technological capabilities of the enemy forces. We considered the Viet Cong to be a bunch of rabble rousing kids who would set a mine or bang away with out much ability to really engage...we thought of them as criminals more than a military organization.
Up north, after Tet, there was a whole new respect for both the VC and the NVA, although, after Tet, we were primarily engaged with the NVA organized regiments, who were outstanding soldiers...
I watched a Huey coming in to land at Camp Eagle one day and was amazed to see flack bursting just thirty yards behind the helicopter. The enemy had actually manged to set up a heavy AA gun just outside the wire, right under our noses. The helicopter escaped, we ultimately, although belatedly managed to get some artillery onto the supected target area and destroyed the gun...but, the enemy had already escaped. That kind of siht was demoralizing as hell.
I have no doubt about the enemy being capable of interecepting US communications. But, as one who had to call in a few artillery and air strikes, I can not believe there would be any possible way they could routinely call in strikes on friendly units. Everyone pretty much knew exactly where people were operating and we also knew our liason people pretty well by voice.
Don't get me wrong on this...there is absolutely no doubt such a thing was occassionally possible.
There is a really excellent book out on the entire Vietnam experience that I haighly recommend, "Vietnam, A Histroy" by Robert Karnow. It has one of the very best analysis of the Tonkin gulf Incident I ever read. The book is a big one and covers everything from the first french colonization right up to the US scramble from the top of the US Embassy. It is quite an in depth study and is so well documented, when you finish, you will have no doubts about what happened and why. After I read it, I was completly changed in my attitude about the Vietnam expereince.
Mastermind -- Thank you for sharing some of your stories. Have you ever considered writing them down? I've met a lot of WWII vets in my time - and with a lot of them passing now, I feel kind of guilty that more of them didn't write memoirs....or that I didn't (I interviewed a lot of them for a real lengthy Journalism college project).
If you don't mind me asking, how many days had you been in country at the time of the Bien Cat ambush? I noticed that your profile says you got there in 12/67.
Hi Mastermind. Great site glad I found it.right up to the US scramble from the top of the US Embassy
Did you mean this pic?
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