34. In addition, events in Colombia were misrepresented outrageously by Vice President George H. W. Bush and others to justify a secret U.S. National Security Decision Directive 221 in April 1986 that led eventually to Bush’s militarization of drug interdiction and aggressive “Andean initiative” in 1989. See Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: The CIA, Drugs, and Armies in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 94–103; Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 87–88.
35. Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1990), 611, 613, emphasis added, quoting William R. Corson, The Armies of Ignorance: The Rise of the American Intelligence Empire (New York: Dial, 1977), 315–21, whole passage quoted in Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 61. Nor am I prepared to add Panama in 1989 to the list, although it has been alleged that one of the incidents cited as grounds for the invasion—the killing of an unarmed marine named Robert Paz—was possibly the result of a provocation. (“It was also reported by the Los Angeles Times that ‘according to American military and civilian sources’ the officer killed was a member of the ‘Hard Chargers,’ a group whose goal was to agitate members of the PDF. It was also reported that the group’s ‘tactics were well known by ranking U.S. officers’ who were frustrated by ‘Panamanian provocations committed under dictator Manuel A. Noriega’” (Wikipedia, “United State Invasion of Panama,” citing Los Angeles Times, December 22, 1990, “Some Blame Rogue Band of Marines for Picking Fight, Spurring Panama Invasion”).
36. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States, authorized ed. (New York: Norton, 2004), 261–62.
37. Bamford, Body of Secrets, 301. William Bundy took issue with this judgment, arguing that escalating the war north “didn’t fit in with our plans at all” (Robert McNamara, “The Tonkin Gulf Resolution,” in Light at the End of the Tunnel: A Vietnam War Anthology, ed. Andrew Jon Rotter [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991], 83). But Ball was correct in reporting that bombing fit in with some people’s plans.
38. Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 200, citing John Prados, The Hidden History of the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995), 51.
39. Porter, Perils of Dominance, 200–201. Cf. FRUS, 1964-1968, vol. 1, 714–15.
40. “Department of Defense Actions to Implement NSAM No. 273, 26 November 1963,” Enclosure D for meeting of Admiral H. D. Felt with JCS, December 11, 1963, NARA #202-10002-10109. The same document points out that “CIA guidance to Saigon Station for intensified planning was dispatched following the Honolulu Conference (CAS 84972, November 25, 1963). As James Galbraith has commented pertinently, “In other words, the CIA began developing intensified plans to implement OPLAN 34A, the program of seaborne raids and sabotage against North Vietnam that would lead to the Gulf of Tonkin incident and eventually to the wider war, one day before President Johnson signed the directive authorizing that action” (James K. Galbraith, “Exit Strategy: In 1963, JFK Ordered a Complete Withdrawal from Vietnam,” Boston Review, November 24, 2003, http://www.bostonreview.net/BR28.5/galbraith
.html).
41. Galbraith, “Exit Strategy”; cf. John Newman, JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power (New York: Warner Books, 1992), 434; Scott, The War Conspiracy, 294.
42. Scott, The War Conspiracy, 294–95.
43. Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, March 13, 1962 (Northwoods Document), NARA #202-10002-10404.
44. Robert J. Hanyok, “Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2–4 August 1964,” Cryptologic Quarterly, declassified in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 132, http://www.gwu
.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/relea00012.pdf.
