The Gulf of Tonkin incident

The claim, in its accurate form: the resolution that opened the way to a full US war in Vietnam rested partly on an engagement that the available signals intelligence does not support.

Doubts existed at the time, including from the destroyer's own captain, and grew with the 1971 Pentagon Papers. The decisive material came in 2005-06, when the NSA declassified an internal historical study.

Paraphrased summaries of publicly circulating reports, not verbatim quotes from identified individuals. Unverified by definition.

• “A veteran wrote that he served on a destroyer that night and never believed there had been a second attack, and that saying so at the time went nowhere.”

  mixedReported 2005

  Paraphrased from veterans' published recollections

The 2 August engagement was real. The 4 August one was not: the NSA's own 2001 in-house study, declassified in 2005, concluded no attack took place that night and that intercepts had been mishandled and selectively presented. Robert McNamara later acknowledged the second attack did not happen. What the record does not show is a pre-fabricated hoax invented from nothing — the closer reading is a confused night at sea, then a deliberate choice to keep presenting it as an attack after the doubts were known.