In international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin, destroyers of the United States Navy are assigned routine patrols from time to time.
Sunday, August the 2nd, 1964, the destroyer Maddox was on such a patrol.
Shortly after noon, the calm of the day is broken at General Quarters South.
In a deliberate and unprovoked action, three North Vietnam PT boats unleash a torpedo attack against the Maddox.
The destroyer was carrying out a mission of patrol in those waters, in international waters, when it was attacked.
Renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action and reply.
I am continuing and I am increasing the search for every possible path to peace.
We want nothing for ourselves, only that the people of South Vietnam be allowed to guide their own country in their own way.
We still seek no lighter law.
And we're joined on the phone by Daniel Ellsberg.
As many of you know, if it wasn't for him, we'd probably still be fighting the Vietnam War right now.
He leaked the Pentagon Papers, blew the lid off the whole thing, and I guess led Richard Nixon to such criminality that he ended up being driven from office.
Welcome back to the show, Dan.
How are you, sir?
I'm fine.
It was amazing to hear those clips again.
Yeah, I love that movie tone news.
Compared to the propaganda nowadays, it's not very sophisticated, is it?
Oh, it's about the same.
Okay, I'll give you that.
All right, so whenever anybody mentions the Gulf of Tonkin, I always try to send a link to the online version, which we'll be sure to link to in the summary of this at www.antiwar.com.
Chapter one of your book, Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
And it's about your first day at the office as the Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense, August 4th, 1964.
Take us back.
Tell us about that day, Dan.
Okay, I think first I should mention the reason why that's online.
It was coming out, my book was coming out, I was going to be on pit shelves starting in mid-October 2002, which was when the drums were pounding for getting us into war in Iraq.
And it was obvious to me that there was as much deception going on at that time as there had been in 1964 when I was in the Pentagon.
And I wanted to warn people of that.
In fact, I was hoping the Senate would not make the same mistake they made in 1964, and that is to give the President a blank check for going to war in contravention of the Constitution at his command, that he could pick the time and the occasion for going to war without hearings in Congress, without real consultation or decision by Congress.
And so I asked my publisher to put several chapters of my book on the line right away, even before they'd gone into stores.
And of course they weren't crazy about that idea, but they compromised on one chapter, and I chose his talk-and-go chapter in hopes really that somebody, some staffer in Congress, might actually see it and warn their bosses that they shouldn't reproduce that history, which they proceeded to do.
They did pass the equivalent to the talk-and-go resolution of 1964, and they did that in 2002, which again was an unconstitutional blank check to the President, an undated declaration of war.
Coming back to your question now as to what that chapter tells about and what my first night in the Pentagon was, the morning of August 4th, 1964, was actually my first day in the Pentagon as a full-time employee.
I had been there for years as a consultant, sometimes half the year, in the Pentagon and consulting for the White House and the State Department, mainly on problems of nuclear command and control.
But I had just joined as a full-time employee.
The assistant secretary wanted me to work for him on Vietnam almost exclusively, a subject I was not expert in, although I had been to Vietnam as a consultant in 1961.
And that's a subject I'd like to get back to toward the end of the interview, in fact.
Now, on the morning of August 4th, 1964, I was sitting in a desk just outside the assistant secretary's office.
I didn't yet have an office of my own.
Later I was to have a little cubicle right next to his office.
But I was just sitting at this desk when a courier came running in from the communications office in the department.
It was the first and only time, actually, that I ever saw one of these couriers running in with top-secret cables.
And in this case it was because it was a flash cable, which I don't recall ever seeing again either.
A flash meant that it was supposed to be delivered to the recipient from the origin within ten minutes to the major recipient.
And my boss was not even the major recipient.
He was the secretary of defense, and my boss was down the hall with the secretary of defense at that moment, picking out possible targets for a possible attack on North Vietnam already, because intelligence that they'd gotten earlier in the morning indicated that there might be an ambush for these destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf.
Now, it was a 12-hour time difference in the Tonkin Gulf.
So this was, at this point, nine in the morning for us, nine at night in the Tonkin Gulf on a moonless night, a lot of clouds and very choppy seas, essentially no visibility.
But the reason the man was running in with his flash cable was that it announced something that really had not happened except for two days earlier, since the Second World War, that was an attack on our naval ships in the Gulf of Tonkin in the South China Sea.
On Sunday, as your first clip indicated, there had been a torpedo attack on the USS Maddox, a destroyer in the Tonkin Gulf.
Everything else about that Sunday attack being announced in your clip was false.
It was described as unprovoked.
It was described as routine patrol, it was described as in the international waters, which was quite misleading.
In fact, we were running covert attacks on North Vietnam and some islands belonging to it and around it that summer with CIA patrol boats manned by a motley crew from all over the world, including a few Vietnamese, but run by— we bought the boats from Norway, as I recall.
And the first missions even had a Norwegian captain on them.
They were, in no sense, Vietnamese missions.
They were CIA, U.S. CIA missions run basically from Washington, D.C.
So we had launched one of those attacks just the night before the North Vietnamese responded on Sunday with a pass at this destroyer in which they fired several torpedoes, all of which missed.
And that was an unequivocal attack indeed, although it does seem that the destroyer fired the first shots as the torpedo boats came toward it.
But there were torpedoes in the water, they were well seen.
They were seen on—detected on both radar and sonar and actually, I think, witnessed in daylight and fortunately all missed the destroyer.
At which point, however, as I say, the idea that it was unprovoked was absurd as known to people in the Pentagon because they were responding to a covert attack, meaning one that we denied the existence of and if alleged by anybody, denied that the U.S. could have had any role in it.
As for the routine patrol that you heard about, well, it was routine in a certain sense in that we were routinely, secretly conducting essentially aggressive intelligence operations off North Vietnam as we did in various forms around the Soviet Union and Communist China.
It was as routine as the U-2 flights over the Soviet Union.
And although the moment of the actual exchange of torpedoes, the attack of torpedoes, the boat was in—ships were in international waters, that was because they had retreated from the coast of North Vietnam to get into international waters.
The track of these—this intelligence patrol, so-called DeSoto patrols, that was their codename, actually took them 9 or 10 miles off North Vietnam, which was well within the 12-mile limit that they claimed and which we knew they claimed.
The purpose of the patrols, in fact, was to make raids even closer, I should say passes even closer into shore to provoke the North Vietnamese into turning on their radars and have electronic communications that could be picked up by a destroyer so that we could plot their radar installations for future attack by us in case of an invasion or of a war.
We shouldn't get broken up.
So these were quite aggressive patrols.
The whole purpose of them, as I say, was to provoke some radar activity.
And in this case, the combination of that with the covert attack by patrol boats, which had just taken place the night before, led the North Vietnamese, in fact, to assume that there was a connection between the destroyer patrols and the patrol boats and to attack the destroyer in retaliation.
In fact, in the book, don't you say that the captain of the Maddox originally requested permission to back off during some of the covert activity because he predicted that very response?
He predicted that.
And, of course, after it occurred on August 2nd, he very exclusively said that they really ought to change the routes or even withdraw the patrol because, obviously, they were provoking this response.
And instead of that, the president added another destroyer, the Tonga Joy, to the patrol, a two-destroyer patrol, under the command of the commander of the Maddox, Captain Herrick.
And they called him Commodore because he had two destroyers under him.
So he enlarged the patrol, brought another carrier into the area to provide air cover for it.
And according to George Ball, the undersecretary of state later, he had little doubt that the purpose of these patrols from the beginning and certainly after the second attack was to provoke an attack in order to get an excuse for, quote, retaliating against North Vietnam and launching the first airstrikes against North Vietnam.
Ball did conclude that.
There's no question that the Navy did actually, I think, make the patrol, if anything, more provocative in its routing for the 3rd and 4th.
And, again, on the 3rd, the night of the 3rd, there was another covert attack on North Vietnam.
North Vietnam announced these, by the way, but the United States said we didn't know anything about them.
And in any case, if they were South Vietnamese attacks, we were not involved in them directly, which were total lies.
So unprovoked, a lie.
International waters misleading because the ships were actually penetrating what North Vietnam claimed as their territorial waters.
On the 2nd, there was an attack, but your second clip there refers to our alleged retaliation to what took place on the 4th.
And that was when this courier came in, as I say, announcing that there was, in fact, another attack.
Well, in fact, let me stop you there because Lyndon Johnson decided to not do anything about the first attack.
The response of the White House was, well, we all know that we covertly provoked it and all their torpedoes missed.
And so then, as you say, they went ahead and did another covert action on the night of the 3rd, but they didn't respond officially to the failed attack of the 2nd.
Well, they didn't respond other than to double the patrol, you know, and say we're asserting our right of freedom of the seas, quote, and so we're going to keep our routine patrol going along.
When I say intelligence patrol, these destroyers had on them, the Maddox in particular, a so-called black box.
It wasn't just a box.
It was sort of the size of a container, a freight container, which contained a lot of communications equipment in it, along with special communications dishes on the destroyer.
And inside the box were National Security Agency operatives who were manning these listening posts inside there and picking up all the radio communications, electronic radar, and every kind of electronic emission from North Vietnam.
So these were intelligence patrols of the kind, by the way, that led the Pueblo a few years later to be captured off North Korea when it was conducting a similar patrol.
Oh, nothing really routine, except to say that they were done pretty often, covertly and illegally, in terms of international law, in terms of approaching so closely inside the territorial waters.
Okay, well, to continue, this telegram that I read then was a very unprecedented and quite dramatic thing.
I am under attack.
I think he said in his first one, Now, this is the afternoon of the 4th, right?
No, this is the morning of the 4th in D.C., in D.C. and the late evening in the Tonkin Gulf, 12 hours distance.
So this is about 9 o'clock, as I say.
And very shortly, there was another cable, and they kept coming in at almost 10-minute intervals after that.
The Captain Herrick on the bridge of the Medics was taking evasive action in the dark waters off North Vietnam, and was well off North Vietnam by this time, because he, too, had gone out from the coast into the open waters.
And he was announcing two torpedoes, six torpedoes now, 11 torpedoes had been fired.
This began to be a little odd, because I remember hearing at some point in the morning that we thought they didn't have the 21 torpedoes that he ended up announcing in their arsenal, but they could have, who knows.
And a continuous attack.
He was under a weaving about.
The Turner-Joy out there was also announcing that it was getting radar contacts while the Medics was reporting sonar contacts.
Now, another peculiar thing from quite early on was the Turner-Joy reported only radar contacts, and the Medics reported only sonar contacts, although if there were real boats out there, each ship should have been getting both kinds of signals.
It was a little perplexing.
I guess the captain of the ship must have thought, man, I'm really good at this.
How many torpedoes have we dodged now?
A dozen?
Two dozen?
Well, no, no, to be very precise, 21.
But at which point the action was broken off after about an hour and a half, and the real action on the second, I think, lasted minutes, essentially, much less than an hour.
And this was going on for an hour and a half, but then it broke off.
Meanwhile, of course, the president, or rather, McNamara and my boss, McNaughton, were picking the targets, and I think by this time we're over in the White House presenting a target list to the White House, at which point we got a new cable.
I got a new cable sitting there for my boss, which in effect said, hold everything.
The, as you put it, as I best remember, over-eager sonar man has mistaken the beat of the ship's propeller against our wake as they took evasive action, those sort of S-shaped curves in the water.
And somehow he was mistaking the beat of the propeller against those waves in the water as an oncoming torpedo.
And there were a number of messages, then each one raising the doubts higher and higher, and finally saying, recommend no action be taken until daylight when we can make a reconnaissance.
They thought they had, some of their radar suggested to them on the turning floor that the shells they were firing at these supposed boats had sunk several of them.
And if so, there might well be wreckage in the water and probably oil slicks and maybe some crewmen floating around in the water in the morning to determine that there had been an attack.
But meanwhile, Herrick had pretty well decided that except for the first torpedo, as he said, and he was wrong about that because he later admitted, much later admitted, but he did think there had been one torpedo, but he said all the remaining reports are in question or questionable.
And of course, reading this in D.C., in the Pentagon, he had to take his confidence that there had been one torpedo with a grain of salt because he'd been just as confident over the other 20 torpedoes.
So how could he be so sure?
And in fact, it turned out he was mistaken about that.
And now, help me out with the timeline again here.
What time is it in Washington, D.C., by the time that you're getting all these warnings that, oh, never mind?
Yeah.
So this is 1.30 when he's saying, as I recall, 1.30 in Washington, when he's saying all very much in question and recommending no action be taken until the next day.
And now you're certainly certain of that at the same time that you have this information as Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense that everyone at the White House and on the National Security Council, et cetera, know all of this.
Well, it's clear to me that McNamara knew it because these cables were going to McNamara, actually, who was second-in-command under the president and was the Secretary of Defense.
And I was getting a copy of them within almost in the same time frame as the Assistant to the Assistant Secretary who was with the secretary.
I assumed at the time, of course, that the president must know this just as well as I did.
I might say that just in the last few years, Gareth Porter, a historian and friend of mine who's been writing a lot, I think he's interviewed by you quite a bit, actually.
Well, he's an expert on this subject, too, because of a book that he recently wrote in which he managed to convince me that it was likely that McNamara, after his study of the communications between the White House and the Pentagon, that McNamara may very well not have or probably did not inform the president of the fact that Herrick had these unequivocal doubts, one might say.
In other words, that their statements that evening, that there was unequivocal evidence of an attack, were lies.
They did, as far as I knew, believe on various grounds, partially spurious, that there had been some sort of attack.
But to say that it was unequivocal was absurd.
It could hardly have been more equivocal.
When Gareth first presented his thesis to me, I could hardly believe it.
I said, well, you know, I knew it.
How could the president not know it?
Then I realized, well, it was going to the Secretary of Defense, where I was.
It wasn't necessarily the case that McNamara had passed that on.
What we do know from communications was McNamara had said to the president on the phone that there were some questions raised which they were investigating.
But there's no evidence that he actually showed him or read to him the Herrick cables, which I think had to give anyone who listened to him a very strong sense, uh-oh, you know, wait, wait, this thing is very much in question.
Later, Senator Fulbright said that had he seen the Herrick cable at that time, he would never have undertaken to do what he was asked to do and did do, and that was shepherd the Kunkenkoff Resolution through the Senate.
It would so obviously have been in question that there was any attack at all.
Now, within days, it did become clearer and clearer that there had been no attack at all.
For some people, that was clear that very same night.
That was not true for me.
But it's turned out, for instance, that Ray Klein, the director of intelligence over at CIA, reached that conclusion that very night, as did many people in the area.
I've even talked to people who were following, who were in the Navy or were working for NSA at that time at various listening spots in the Pacific, in the Philippines, and even elsewhere, in Guam, and on ships.
And they all had not just doubts but almost certainty that there was no attack that very night because of the lack of any radio communications between the PT boats and Hanoi or each other.
They said to have reached the ships for attacking them 30 miles out to sea on a moonless night without any electronic emissions, no radar on the boats, and no radio communications guiding them to those boats, they said, was not just doubtful.
It was impossible.
And so they were sure from that lack of electronic activity that the ships were mistaken.
And meanwhile, a guy, starting with S, who later ran as vice presidential candidate under Perot.
We got his report in the Pentagon the next day.
And he had been on one of the carriers flying over the supposed action on the deck, you know, 60 feet above the water.
He said there was no question in his mind.
There was no tracks of these boats such as could have been available.
There were no boats out there.
He was certain.
And it is out in Stockdale.
That's what I was thinking.
Stockdale.
Right.
Right.
Okay.
Right.
Right.
It was a very peaceful time.
Well, now, when you say it became very apparent to so many people inside the national security state, how long did it take before it became apparent to the people at large?
I mean, I was born in the mid-70s, and from the time I ever learned about the Gulf of Tonkin, it was always as a story of how people got tricked into a war they didn't want.
But the American people by and large believed in LBJ and Robert McNamara's version of events.
For how long?
Well, there really wasn't a collaboration of the so-called 34A raids, the covert raids which had provoked the attack, if there were any, which provoked the actual attack on August 2nd and which would have provoked the provocation on August 4th, had there been a response.
They heard of those in hearings in the Fulbright Committee, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in February of 1968, which was four years later.
And before that, those hearings were triggered, actually, by some investigative journalism, by U.S. News and World Report, for one, that raised big questions as to whether there had been an attack at all.
But the hearings, I think, didn't conclusively prove that.
There was supposed evidence of...
You've raised an interesting question.
Let me just address it a little more in length.
There were supposedly cables, electronic intercepts of cables, after all, on the, I think, following day, supposedly, that confirmed that there had been an attack on the 4th.
And those were brandished by McNamara in 1968 at those hearings, but he wouldn't let any of the staff actually read, or the Senators, actually read the cables.
And then he read them to him.
In retrospect, it was clearly because he didn't want them to see the date-time groups on the cables, which had to be read carefully, and some of the staffers would have known how to interpret those.
But as some people in the Intelligence Committee realized very quickly, including Ray Klein, including an entire NSA, Nick Cordella, who was in charge of Electronic Communications Intelligence, those cables referred to the 2nd, not to the 4th, to the attack that actually had occurred.
They were mistakenly presented by McNamara and others as having applied to the 4th.
And that crucial lie, which was the main underpinning of the claim that there had been an attack, was not really revealed until just a couple of years ago, when an NSA, there were a couple of releases, which can be seen at the National Security Archive of George Washington University, I think it's nsarchive.org, something like that, that reveal that definitely, from the NSA and from the Navy, that these cables had been misrepresented in their timing, and that there were some other aspects of them, actually, that suggested some kind of fraud in the system, mistranslations, peculiar mistranslations of the cables, which made them look more definitive than they actually were.
So that was a major fraud that persisted for some 40, almost 40 years, and incidentally shows how Communications Intelligence clearance, security clearance, which was used to protect these cables from public inspection all those years, can be abused to protect crimes and lies, just like any other secrecy classification.
Well I wonder what was your reaction when you saw Lyndon Johnson go on TV, and you saw Robert McNamara go on TV, and say, oh yeah, it's unequivocal that there's this unprovoked attack and all this, when you and all your friends and colleagues inside the government knew better.
How did you respond to that?
Were you shocked by that?
Or did you decide just grin and bear it, or you didn't even care, or what?
All right.
Because I'd seen, as I say, I'd been a consultant there to some degree in particular since 59, so for five years I'd seen a lot of top secret and higher information, Communications Intelligence and so forth.
I'd seen a lot of lying.
So the idea of lying per se was not a big shock.
What I hadn't seen was lying about something live happening right in front of my eyes.
That was a little more dramatic.
I hadn't seen operational information coming in.
And really this was pretty unusual.
We didn't have CNN at that time with worldwide coverage, and so this stuff was coming in every ten minutes, actually a little delayed.
I'd say a ten-minute or fifteen-minute delay from when it was originating.
But since it was coming in in real time, I mean that was as close to real time as you could get.
It was like watching CNN.
And here I was hearing the president make flat-out lies.
I have to say that wasn't really that unfamiliar to me at that point.
So I don't recall being unusually shocked by it.
Of course, in retrospect, as was true in a few other instances within the next few months where I was involved, I was watching us get into a long, long war in which we ended up dropping four times the tonnage of World War II on Indochina.
And that started that night.
That was the first bombing.
We were being lied into a very big war.
See, that's the thing.
I guess the lie about a specific incident on a specific ship actually wouldn't seem that unprecedented.
But the fact that they would then use that to get a bill passed through Congress which says that the president can now escalate this into a full-scale invasion of the place is all based on a lie.
That's got to be pretty shocking, even to a young officer who's kind of in the know and what have you.
Well, to get back to that mood, Goldwater, of course, was calling at that time for a full-scale assault on North Vietnam right away.
And our assault was pretty full-scale in the end, but not as great as Goldwater was talking about.
So LBJ was kind of Obama to Goldwater's John McCain, huh, in terms of belligerence?
I'm afraid that that's a closer analogy than I would like it to be in reality, as it applies both to Obama and to all these people.
So what you're saying, though, is because of the dangerousness of Goldwater openly talked about using atomic bombs in Vietnam and so forth, LBJ was the best you're going to get, so whatever he's getting away with has got to be better than what the other guy would do, who's our only other choice.
Well, it was a complicated situation.
At that very time, I knew that McNamara, who I revered for a number of reasons, but because I knew that he abhorred the idea of nuclear war, as I did.
And so I felt very loyal to him.
This was in my earlier work on nuclear weapons.
At the same time, he was supporting the bombing for reasons I couldn't really understand, and I'm not sure of to this day.
And my boss also, as I did, opposed the idea of bombing North Vietnam for a lot of reasons, and couldn't understand really why his boss, our boss McNamara, really was for it.
He gave various reasons, McNamara, but they didn't seem to add up to be sufficient.
In this context, LBJ seemed to be the skeptic, and was a skeptic, about bombing North Vietnam.
Here he had one occasion where, by the way, on the very night of that incident, I did assume that there had been an attack.
To call it unequivocal was clearly false as an excuse for going ahead.
But I thought probably, which wasn't really a good enough reason, but probably there had been an attack.
Well, that didn't seem to be a total lie.
Right.
But the unprovoked in the other part worked very well.
The biggest lie of all was, we seek no wider war, as you quoted at the end.
Now, as I say, this is my first day working on this, but within days, I was aware that the Pentagon as a whole was working very furiously, in secret, preparing a wider war for Vietnam, which was virtually certain to occur right after the election.
Which would almost certainly include the bombing that McNamara was pressing.
But at the same time, I really did have the impression, not that day, but within weeks, that the president was properly skeptical.
He seemed to have his feet on the ground.
He would talk about to McNamara, you're bombing bullshit.
And I was hoping, I was counting on LBJ to possibly overrule McNamara on this, as he had the power to do on this issue and resist him.
And he did resist him for a number of months until February.
So ultimately, I was working for the president in an administration that I hoped wouldn't go as far as Goldwater wanted.
And here's the way to put it.
It didn't go as far as Goldwater wanted.
Goldwater wanted to hit all the targets immediately, wanted to use nuclear weapons, wanted to bomb the dykes, hit targets near China, possibly get into war with China, as the Joint Chiefs did.
And he wanted to do that all at once.
LBJ did resist that, but of course, in the end, he did more and more increase the bombing, along with McNamara, under this pressure from the Joint Chiefs in part, but he did do it.
He's the responsible one for doing it.
And I was looking for him.
I can't evade total responsibility, I mean, some responsibility either.
With all my misgivings, in fact, it's all the worse for my misgivings and my boss's misgivings, we did what we were told to do, and we helped McNamara plan the bombing and even tried to convince LBJ that he should do it.
I look back on that as the most shameful thing I was ever involved in, or that I did, with great regret.
I did play my role against my own feelings of what should be done.
I wasn't actually against, as I saw it then, wrongly, supporting the Vietnamese in their war.
I wasn't aware of the history at that point until I read the Pentagon Papers years later and realized that the war had never been legitimate.
That's another large story.
But at this point, I accepted the lies and the ideology then that we had a right to be defending South Vietnam, quote, against North Vietnam, but not, I thought, by bombing, which I thought would only kill a lot of people to no end, would possibly involve us in war with China, which would be a catastrophe, and was very misguided.
Nevertheless, I was in the mood of virtually every official in the government, which is, if the President wants it, or if your boss, the Secretary of Defense wants it, you do it, and you don't reveal it.
Actually, I bear, as you know, Senator Morris, who had voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, later told me when the Pentagon Papers came out in 1971, if you, Daniel, had given these papers to me when I had them in the Pentagon, in my safe, in 1964, rather than seven years later, he said the Tonkin Gulf Resolution would never have gotten out of committee.
And if they had bypassed the committee and brought it to the floor of Congress, it would never have passed.
And what he was really saying was that I could have acted differently in a way that might have spared millions of lives in Indochina, and 58,000 American lives, a very heavy responsibility at all, and one that I take very seriously, which is why I spend so much time in the last few years, starting in 2002, to tell people in the government who are sitting in the desks where I was and other people were, don't do what I did.
Don't wait until the bombs are falling.
Don't wait until the war has started in Iran or elsewhere.
To reveal lies that might wake people up and preclude them and get Congress to act constitutionally to prevent an unnecessary and a wrongful war.
Do what I wish I had done in 64, 65, rather than waiting until 69 and 70, 71.
But in 64, 65, go to the press and Congress, not just Congress alone, with documents.
And as I did in 69 and 71, take your chances on being prosecuted and going to prison, because you have a question here of a war's worth of lives at stake.
And compared to that, your own self-sacrifices could be very worthwhile.
Well, you know, there's an old saying that goes that three people can't keep a secret, and that whatever secret government we have, it's bumbling and incompetent enough that it probably doesn't get away with too much that really is secret.
But in your book, you really explain how just that sense of being in the known, being part of the group that knows the thing, is really the number one motivating factor in keeping you from telling the truth to Congress and to the press, and enables you and enables the average bureaucrat to be able to keep incredible secrets that ought to be known by the people.
Quite right.
It's funny, by coincidence, I was having a conversation this morning with my old lawyer from the trial, Charlie Metzen, who's now at Harvard Law School, and he was reminding me that I'd said something like what you said earlier about the three people, and I corrected him.
The quote that used to be in the Pentagon was, three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.
That's actually wrong.
The truth is that in the secrecy system where your career depends on your ability to keep secrets and your practice of keeping secrets, secrets can be very well kept, and not just by three people, but by thousands of people.
That's hard to believe for people outside the system that that could be the case, especially when you're talking about secrets that have to do with wrongful wars.
How much leaking did we actually get on the faulty intelligence, the false intelligence that led us into Iraq, for example, in the year 2001 or 2002?
The British are about to hold a hearing right now on their process of getting into the war, and they're addressing the question of whether those hearings can be open or closed right now.
Gordon Brown is facing a big revolt in his own party because he's been persuaded by Blair so far that they should be secret and closed and not under oath.
The Observer and others just leaked this last week some of the documents that might come out in that, showing, for example, a conversation between Blair and George W. Bush in which Bush was proposing to send a U-2 painted falsely with UN colors into over Iraq and get it fired on, meaning almost surely have it low enough provocatively enough that it will be fired on.
And then Bush can say Saddam has violated the UN resolutions, and that's an excuse for attacking.
Blair had some objections to that, but that was Bush's proposal.
That was exactly what LBJ did, not with UN colors, but to send U.S. destroyers close in to North Vietnam, and he got them fired on.
Stop it right there, because let me make sure that I get the context exactly right on this.
You say in Chapter 1 there that they were trying to provoke the North Vietnamese into turning on those border defenses, or their shoreline defenses, so that they could be mapped for further action in the future or whatever.
Now you're talking about a whole different level of provoking them, that LBJ was really looking for an excuse at that point.
Actively, I don't know, in the paperwork, he was looking for an excuse to start a war, full scale, with North Vietnam.
Well, let me clarify the impression that I may have just given, which you picked up on.
I am not sure at this point that LBJ, in fact, I doubt that LBJ had that motive in mind when he first co-paid sending those destroyers close to North Vietnam.
Did the Navy have that motive?
Ball believes, George Ball, the Undersecretary, definitely believes that they had, and that's very plausible.
And I think, on the whole, probably the case.
But I cannot say that there's proof or even strong evidence that's the case, except for the very patrol routes that they were following, which were quite provocative.
But did even the Navy imagine that they could get the North Vietnamese to actually attack our ships?
I don't know.
What I do know is that as soon as they did attack on August 2nd, Sunday, the daytime attack, that possibility became very lively in the minds of a lot of people.
And from then on, and I do believe that the Navy, at least, and possibly LBJ, again, can't be sure, had that in mind in doubling the patrol and sending the carrier over there.
It could have been just a sign that we were not giving way, but there really was no need to do that, other than in hopes of getting another attack.
What gets clearer, though, is that right after that, my boss, among others, Bill Bundy in the State Department, and many others, including McNamara, were having meetings and writing memos about how they could provoke an attack, and probably would want to do so later, as the summer war on.
It was clear that the President did not want further information before the war.
He had had his attack, he showed that he was capable of using force, it was a perfect blow politically against Goldwater.
Namely, he was just as willing as Goldwater to kill people in North Vietnam, send our forces into harm's way, but in a measured way, in a moderate, restrained way.
It was not the all-out attack that Goldwater was wanting.
So the President was not anxious to have another such thing.
He made his demonstration and got people worried and excited before the election.
Others were, however.
They didn't think that North and South Vietnam could be held together politically.
It was falling apart.
The corrupt and ambitious generals were fighting among each other.
There was a lot of chaos in Saigon at that point.
They weren't sure we could wait to start bombing North Vietnam until the election.
So they were laying plans for a new recommendation to the President for provocation.
I think I quote some of that in my book, and there's a lot more in the Pentagon Papers.
I'll be very concrete about it.
They actually described the Navy and the Air Force produced plans that would be increasingly provocative in order to get a response without being so obvious that it was our intention to provoke it.
So first you start out just with overflights of some sort.
But if they don't fire at those, or if they don't hit them, you bring the overflights lower.
And you get lower and lower, low-level overflights until they have a fair chance of hitting somebody.
One of the more interesting schemes was fly at supersonic speed over Hanoi so that breaking the sound barrier would break window panes in Hanoi.
That might allow them to rise to that one if they were being restrained before that.
Or you could simply make the destroyers closer and closer to shore.
This was all spelled out explicitly, practically beached in high font.
And later in February, in fact, they did send another patrol off North Vietnam with precisely that intention.
It was clearly the intention to provoke an attack.
It didn't turn out to be necessary because the Viet Cong attacked our bases inland on Quy Nhon, and we used that as the excuse.
So the destroyer patrols were pulled back.
In short, the advisors to LBJ were unquestionably, or explicitly, ready to put destroyers in harm's way with the possibility that a torpedo fired at them might not always miss.
And that destroyer would go down, killing some Americans, and maybe a lot of Americans on the destroyer, depending on how lucky the shot was.
Not only were they willing to contemplate that, but in February, they actually sent destroyers, on February 65, destroyers over there with that intention.
That actually happened, and the President okayed that, according to McMaster's, Colonel McMaster's thing in his book on what's called Deceit, Dereliction of Duty.
Very interesting book.
And so when people ask me, you know, could a President be capable of putting, let's say, a U-2 pilot like Bush in harm's way, getting killed in order to justify an attack, well, yes, the President I worked for did that.
And we now know that recommendations went up, including by McNamara, for the Northwoods plan in 1962, pretty much the same set of officials involved, in which they contemplated massive, very dramatic provocations of Cuba in order to justify the invasion of Cuba.
The JFK turned these down, these proposals down, but they included even false terrorist attacks on planes that would destroy the planes, and killing, possible killing of Americans, as I recall, in Miami or elsewhere, allegedly by Cubans.
In other words, false flag operations.
In short, we now have it in documents, and I was amazed to see that document declassified, by the way.
I'd never seen anything like it.
I never saw anything like it when I was in, except in terms of specificity of planning, except for, I have to say, the documents I did see in the fall of 1964, which contemplated directly provocative attacks, just like the attack, the overflight that Bush was talking about to Blair.
Now, the reason I mention that is to say, how much of that sort of thing did we hear in 2002?
In 2003, we heard nothing of it, until some of those documents were leaked in Britain, not in the United States.
To this day, the discussions of those so-called Downing Street memos, of discussions in Washington between the British head of intelligence and American top officials, have been leaked, and in some cases released, only in Britain.
Congress has not yet held a hearing in which they have demanded U.S. accounts of those same meetings, which undoubtedly exist and are safe in Washington, nor has anyone leaked them in the United States.
So, what I'm saying is that totally criminal and extremely consequential deceptions and provocative actions and lies can be held for many years, and in some cases, known to thousands of people.
The discussions between Blair and Bush will not be known to thousands.
They might be known to scores, though, and dozens, certainly.
Well, you know, I think people would be appalled to think that what amounts to, I mean, what you're talking about is people being in on treason, you know, setting up American sailors to die on the high seas, something like that, as a provocation to get us into a war.
People will keep things like that secret just to be in the in-group that knows the secret?
That's all?
That's all?
Well, I'm sorry to tell you, Scott, I know you're a young man here, comparatively.
Relatively speaking, anyway, but thank you.
Well, to me, I'm a 78-year-old, but the fact is that by the time I was your age, from working in the Pentagon and elsewhere, people will actually go along with just about anything to keep in an elite group where membership depends on their keeping the secrets of that group.
And it isn't only the government, by the way, it's corporations, it's unions, it's any group, it's PTAs, practically.
Now, they don't usually hold the power of life and death, corporations do, in terms of toxic wastes and safety precautions and whatnot.
And, you know, there are whistleblowers in that area who are willing to give up their careers to put out safety problems with tobacco, a few, not very many.
But there are people who have given up their careers to expose the lies and hazards of tobacco, for example, or asbestos, or various car manufacturers.
Almost nothing of that has happened in the Pentagon, where you have not only the career aspect of it, but also the allegation of national security, the inference, or the belief, that to expose any classified information is dangerous to, quote, national security.
Now, the person on the inside, in the position I was, may know very well that it's the secrecy that is endangering national security, and it's the criminal actions, or the extremely reckless actions, that are actually endangering national security.
But the question is, do I face the charge of treason, which they will face, even though in American law, in the American Constitution, that's not treason.
Putting out secrets of this sort to the American public is not treason.
Treason is very narrowly defined in the Constitution, as giving aid and comfort to the enemy, and adhering to a foreign power.
And of course, I'm not saying in any way that Toby Jay, or McNamara, or Bush, these people, were adhering to a foreign power, or wanted it well.
Ironically, their action, Bush and Blair, in attacking Iraq, could not have possibly been more welcome to Osama Bin Laden, or to Al-Qaeda.
And they are probably, Bush was probably Osama's candidate for life, for president.
He couldn't have benefited from recruiting for Al-Qaeda more than anything that he did.
But I don't infer from that that he really was an agent for Al-Qaeda, any more than Westmoreland's search-and-destroy strategy, which did not serve the interests of the United States very well.
It didn't mean he was an agent of Hanoi.
Just reckless, and with extremely bad judgment of what was good for the United States, and what was good in the case of the presidents for their re-election, for their domestic calculations.
Well, of course, the point being that people inside the government who steal documents and break their secrecy oath, to get that information to the American people, they're not traitors either.
Even if, hey, for example, the Pentagon Papers ends up all over the front page of the New York Times, well, they're going to read it in Moscow, but still, that's not treason, because that's not why you did it.
Definitely not.
We don't have an official secrecy in this country.
They do in Britain, because we have a First Amendment, which has always been held to preclude the kind of official secrecy they do have in Britain.
But most people think we do have an official secrecy.
Anyway, they don't know much about the First Amendment.
I didn't, when I was in the Pentagon, and I assumed I was breaking the law.
Actually, I wasn't.
I wasn't even charged in the end, of course, of treason, because I say that's narrowly defined.
The reason, by the way, it's the only criminal defense defined in the Constitution, was to limit it.
So it couldn't be expanded, except by the whole process of amending the Constitution.
It couldn't be expanded by a majority vote in Congress.
And the reason they wanted to do that was, a very narrow definition of aid and comfort to the enemy and adhering to the enemy, was that every signer of the Declaration of Independence was regarded as a traitor by the British government under which they had served up until then.
A number of them, by the way, were hanged later, or prosecuted, hanged.
They were pursued in various ways.
Our country was founded by traitors in the eyes of the British and, of course, the Third.
And they wanted to be sure that people who were dissenters in this country and who were furthering free speech and democracy in this country would not be accused or not be tried.
Let's take that back.
I was accused, and they will be accused of being traitors, but they won't be tried for being traitors.
You know, Patrick Henry once came across a quote after the war, when they were debating the Bill of Rights, was pushing for the importance of trial by jury.
And I remember the quote.
This was long after the revolution.
He said, I am not so old, but that I may not again be accused of treason.
And in that circumstances, he wanted to be tried by a jury of his peers and not just by the executive branch.
All right, now, I did say that I would get back to ask you about your original trip.
And I know we're already way over time here, but I think it's kind of really the bottom line of the whole story.
It's not just the Gulf of Tonkin or what have you, but your trip in the fall of 1961 to Vietnam, where you and everybody else who had classified information and were the military intelligence guys, knew that this thing was a disaster, it could never work, the South Vietnamese government could never stand, really, and that basically the only thing that could stave it off would be a full scale invasion, and that still wouldn't work.
You knew that in the fall of 1961.
This war that lasted until 75.
I'm not sure that I knew or the people I was talking to felt they knew that a full scale occupation of South Vietnam, which we essentially did do later in the 60s, would have no chance.
That would have been a realistic assessment.
But the basic thing in 61 was it was clear that nothing less than that would prevent a communist led victory of the Nationalist forces in South Vietnam.
It certainly didn't look worth it to me to undertake the kind of invasion that we actually did do, but I wouldn't say that I knew as early as that that it wouldn't work.
Now, some others did.
John F. Kennedy had been there in 1951 when the French were there and had been convinced by an American consulate officer, Ed Guardian, that he later made an ambassador, that, quote, the French are finished here.
They have no chance.
Nationalism is going to win.
Colonialism has no future in Asia.
And if we replace the French, the same thing would happen to us.
And Kennedy was convinced by that and therefore very much resisted sending combat units.
He did send advisors, but he rejected them in 61.
The strong and almost unanimous recommendation of his officials, civilian and military, to send combat units immediately as the only way to stave off this defeat.
So that's a whole other story.
I believe that what Bobby Kennedy told me later in 67, that his brother was determined not to send combat units.
And though he wanted to get through the election of 64 without appearing to give in in Vietnam, to lose Vietnam, that immediately after that election he would have negotiated out.
And I think that's probably true.
At least, as Bobby put it, that was his intention, whether he would have carried it out or not.
But that was not Johnson's intention.
And as I say, I don't think I was that prescient at that point to have that policy.
Having been in Vietnam, of course, I didn't realize that the troops we did have there were not succeeding and were not going to succeed.
Therefore, we should get out.
But it wasn't until I read the Pentagon Papers in 69, the earliest parts, that I realized that the war had never been legitimate.
Even from the beginning, we were supporting a French colonial reconquest of a country that had declared its independence.
It was trying to be independent of French colonial rule.
And for various geopolitical reasons, we were backing the French.
Later, we had no more right to win than the French had, or the Japanese, in the Second World War.
And that meant to me that all the people killed there, not only the civilians, but also the people who were fighting against us, were being killed without any legitimate reason on our part.
It was unjustified homicide.
And that, to me, spelled murder.
And murder was something that should be stopped as soon as possible, not waiting for a decent interval or for a graceful exit.
And stopping murder was something that justified taking risks myself, justified exposing bigotry in a way that I felt would probably put me in prison for life.
Well, and almost did.
You went on trial facing life in prison, right?
Well, 115 years.
With good behavior, that would be life in prison.
Yeah, there you go.
Well, pardon me for oversimplifying what it was that you understood in 1961 about how hopeless it was.
But in context, no one in 61 was talking about, hey, let's send in ground troops.
So to say that it was a lost cause without sending in infantry divisions is to say it was a lost cause in the fall of 61, right?
Wait, no, pardon me, Scott.
If I heard you rightly, you said something wrong just now.
In the fall of 61, as you say, I was over there.
I said nothing but combat troops would do it.
That was in Vietnam.
But in D.C., McNamara, Gil Patrick, his deputy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, McGeorge Bundy, Bill Bundy, virtually the whole crew of officials, with the surprising exception of Dean Rusk.
But all of the rest were in fact not only talking about sending ground troops.
They were urgently recommending sending ground troops.
And it was Kennedy who almost alone rejected that.
His only support at that time, as I say, Dean Rusk raised questions surprisingly, since he was before that and much more after that very much of a hawk.
I guess I confused what was being talked about in public about full-scale invasion or not versus what was being talked about inside the government.
No, no, no, no.
You're quite right.
Kennedy was not at all revealing that he was getting this advice or that his military.
He was lying.
He was saying the opposite.
He said that the advisors he was sending were all that the military had recommended and all that they felt was necessary.
That was a lie, but it was blindly believed.
So in the public, there was no worry about sending combat troops, although they should have worried, because keeping combat troops out of Vietnam depended on keeping John F. Kennedy in office.
And unfortunately, he was killed and replaced by somebody who was almost sure to send the troops.
Well, Daniel Ellsberg, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you coming back on Anti-War Radio.
OK, thanks a lot.
Can I ask you one more question real quick?
Sure, whatever.
Do you read Anti-War.com very much?
Every day.
It's my home page.
So when I open my computer, I go to Anti-War.com and I read it every day.
I couldn't keep up without it.
There's no substitute for it.
Thank you very much, Dan.
Bye-bye.
