Vietnam Intelligence 'deliberately skewed'

WASHINGTON, Dec. 2 (UPI) -- Vietnam war intelligence that played a critical role in expanding the conflict was "deliberately skewed," a secret study says.

The provocative document was one of hundreds of papers in long-secret information on the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident released by the National Security Agency, the New York Times said Friday.

In a 2001 article, agency historian Robert J. Hanyok argued that the NSA's intelligence officers "deliberately skewed" the evidence passed on to policy makers and the public to falsely suggest that North Vietnamese ships had attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964.

Based on the reported attack, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered air strikes on North Vietnam and Congress passed a broad resolution authorizing military action.

Hanyok wrote that 90 percent of the intercepts of North Vietnamese communications relevant to the supposed attack were omitted from the major agency documents going to policy makers.