Vietnam War

The Vietnam War followed the French defeat at Dienbienphu and the division of Vietnam. On August 2, 1964, North Vietnamese boats attacked the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin; a second attack reported on August 4 almost certainly did not take place, as an NSA history declassified in 2005 concluded. The Johnson administration used the reports to obtain the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the legal basis for the escalation that brought American ground troops in 1965 (see Gulf of Tonkin Incident).¹

The CIA's War

William Colby, formerly the CIA's station chief in Saigon, headed Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) from 1968 to 1971, under which the Phoenix Program sought to identify and "neutralize" the Viet Cong's infrastructure through capture, interrogation and killing.² Ted Shackley became Saigon station chief in 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive, after running the agency's secret war in Laos, where the Hmong army of General Vang Pao fought the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.³ Air America, the agency's proprietary airline, flew covert transport across Southeast Asia and was accused of carrying heroin from the Golden Triangle.⁴ Richard Secord served in air operations in Laos and Vietnam.⁵

Behavioral Science

The Rand Corporation's Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Study, commissioned by ARPA in the mid-1960s, produced about 2,371 interviews, more than 60,000 pages, conducted at some forty sites in South Vietnam, including detention centers; Rand's own history later confirmed that its analyst Leon Gouré had promoted the air war with findings the interviews did not support.⁶ The Army's 4th Psychological Operations Group developed leaflet and loudspeaker equipment; in March 1969 alone 713 million leaflets were dropped over Vietnam, the main channel for the Chieu Hoi defection program.⁷ In Senate testimony Sidney Gottlieb said that in those years the military had been "considering the use of LSD on a fairly large scale."⁸

Opposition

Martin Luther King Jr. set out his opposition to the war in "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, a year before his assassination.⁹ In April 1968 Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin set fire to two Frankfurt department stores in protest against the war; they later founded the Red Army Faction.¹⁰ The CIA's domestic surveillance of antiwar groups, reported by Seymour Hersh on December 22, 1974, led to the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee.²