- WASHINGTON (AFP) -- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- "That's something I have never heard before,"
Steven Aftergood, director of the FAS project on government secrecy, told
AFP.
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- But he said that probably the "most historically
significant feature" of the declassified report was the retelling
of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- "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.
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- "There were previous indications of this but this
is the first time we have seen the complete study," he said.
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