North , which came out at the end of February 1965, relates that a suspicious vessel was sunk in shallow water off the coast of South Vietnam on 16 February 1965 after an attack by South Vietnamese forces. The boat was reported to contain at least 100 tons of military supplies almost all of communist origin, largely from Communist China and Czechoslovakia as well as North Vietnam , The white paper noted that Representatives of the free press visited the sunken North Vietnamese ship and viewed its cargo.

Liechty said that he had also seen documents involving an elaborate operation to print large numbers of postage stamps showing a Vietnamese shooting down a US Army helicopter. The former CIA officer stated that this was a highly professional job and that the very professionalism required to produce the multicolor stamps was meant to indicate that they were produced by the North Vietnamese because the Vietcong would not have had the capabilities. Liechty claimed that letters in Vietnamese were then written and mailed all over the world with the stamp on them and the CIA made sure journalists would get hold of them . Life magazine, in its issue of 26 February 1965, did in fact feature a full color blow-up of the stamp on its cover, referring to it as a North Vietnam stamp . This was just two days before the State Departments white paper appeared.

In reporting Liechtys statements, the Washington Post noted:

Publication of the white paper turned out to be a key event in documenting the support of North Vietnam and other communist countries in the fighting in the South and in preparing American public opinion for what was to follow very soon: the large-scale commitment of U.S. forces to the fighting.42

Perhaps the most significant fabrication was that of the alleged attack in August 1964 on two US destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf off the coast of North Vietnam. President Johnson used the incident to induce a resolution from Congress to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed forces to prevent further North Vietnamese aggression. It was a blanket endorsement for escalation heaped upon escalation. Serious enough doubts were raised at the time about the reality of the attack, but over the years other information has come to light which has left the official story in tatters.43

And probably the silliest fabrication: the 1966 US Army training film, County Fair , in which the sinister Vietcong are shown in a jungle clearing heating gasoline and soap bars, concocting a vicious communist invention called napalm.44

The Johnson administrations method of minimizing public concern about escalation of the war, as seen by a psychiatrist:

First step: Highly alarming rumors about escalation are leaked .

Second step: The President officially and dramatically sets the anxieties to rest by

announcing a much more moderate rate of escalation, and accompanies this

announcement with assurances of the Governments peaceful intentions.

Third step: After the general sigh of relief, the originally rumored escalation is

gradually put into effect.

The succession of leaks , denials of leaks, and denials of denials thoroughly confuses the individual. He is left bewildered, helpless, apathetic. The end result is that the people find themselves deeply committed to large-scale war, without being able to tell how it came about, when and how it all began.45

Senator Stephen Young of Ohio was reported to have said that while he was in Vietnam he was told by the CIA that the Agency disguised people as Vietcong to commit atrocities, including murder and rape, so as to discredit the Communists. After

the report caused a flurry in Washington, Young said that he had been misquoted, that the CIA was not the source of the story. Congressman Cornelius Gallagher, who had accompanied Young on the trip, suggested that it may well be that he [Young] spoke to a Vietcong disguised as a CIA man .46

From a speech by Carl Oglesby, President of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), during the March on Washington, 27 November 1965:

The original commitment in Vietnam was made by President Truman, a mainstream liberal. It was seconded by President Eisenhower, a moderate liberal. It was intensified by the late President Kennedy, a flaming liberal. Think of the men who now engineer that war-those who study the maps, give the commands, push the buttons, and tally the dead: Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, Goldberg, the President [Johnson] himself. They are not moral monsters. They are all honorable men. They are all liberals.47

The International Communist Conspiracy in action:

During the heat of the fighting in 1966-67, the Soviet Union sold to the United States over $2 million worth of magnesium-a metal vital in military aircraft production-when there was a shortage of it in the United States. This occurred at a time when Washington maintained an embargo on supplying Communist nations with certain alloys of the same metal.48 At about the same time, China sold several thousand tons of steel to the United States in South Vietnam for use in the construction of new Air and Army bases when no one else could meet the American militarys urgent need: this, while Washington maintained a boycott on all Chinese products; even wigs imported into the US from Hong Kong had to be accompanied by a certificate of origin stating that they contained no Chinese hair. The sale of steel may have been only the tip of the iceberg of Chinese sales to the United States during the war.49

In a visit to China in January 1972, White House envoy Alexander Haig met with Premier Chou En-lai. Years later, Haig wrote: Though he never stated the case in so many words, I reported to President Nixon that the import of what Zhou [Chou] said to me was: dont lose in Vietnam; dont withdraw from Southeast Asia. 50

In 1975, a Senate investigating committee began looking into allegations that the CIA had counterfeited American money during the Vietnam war to finance secret operations.51

Two Vietcong prisoners were interrogated on an airplane flying toward Saigon. The first refused to answer questions and was thrown out of the airplane at 3,000 feet. The second immediately answered all the questions. But he, too, was thrown out. Variations of the water torture were also used to loosen tongues or simply to torment. Other techniques, usually designed to force onlooking prisoners to talk, involve cutting off the fingers, ears, fingernails or sexual organs of another prisoner. 52

It is not clear whether these particular Vietnamese were actual prisoners of war, i.e., captured in combat, or whether they were amongst the many thousands of civilians arrested as part of the infamous Phoenix Program. Phoenix was the inevitable consequence of fighting a native population: You never knew who was friend, who was enemy. Anyone was a potential informer, bomb-thrower, or assassin. Safety demanded

that, unless proved otherwise, everyone was to be regarded as the enemy, part of what the CIA called the Vietcong infrastructure (VCI).

In 1971, CIA officer William Colby, the director of Phoenix, was asked by a congressman: Are you certain that we know a member of the VCI from a loyal member of the South Vietnam citizenry?

No, Mr. Congressman, replied Colby, I am not. 53

Phoenix was a coordinated effort of the United States and South Vietnam to wipe out this infrastructure. Under the program, Vietnamese citizens were rounded up and jailed, often in tiger cages, often tortured, often killed, either in the process of being arrested or subsequently. By Colbys records, during the period between early 1968 and May 1971, 20,587 alleged Vietcong cadres met their death as a result of the Phoenix Program.54 A similar program, under different names, had existed since 1965 and been run by the United States alone.55

Colby claims that more than 85 percent of the 20,587 figure were actually killed in military combat and only identified afterward as members of the VCI.56 It strains credulity, however, to think that the tens of thousands of Vietcong killed in combat during this period were picked over, body by body, on the battlefield, for identification and that their connection to the VCI was established.

The South Vietnam government credited Phoenix with 40,994 VCI deaths.57 The true figure will probably never be known.

A former US military-intelligence officer in Vietnam, K. Barton Osborn, testified before a House Committee that suspects caught by Phoenix were interrogated in helicopters and sometimes pushed out. He also spoke of the use of electric shock torture and the insertion into the ear of a six-inch dowel which was tapped through the brain until the victim died.58 Osborns colleague, Michael J. Uhl, testified that most suspects were captured during sweeping tactical raids and that all persons detained were classified as Vietcong. None of those held for questioning, said Osborn, had ever lived through the process.59

Arthur Sylvester, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, was the man most responsible for giving, controlling and managing the war news from Vietnam . One day in July 1965, Sylvester told American journalists that they had a patriotic duty to disseminate only information that made the United States look good. When one of the newsmen exclaimed: Surely, Arthur, you dont expect the American press to be handmaidens of government, Sylvester replied, Thats exactly what I expect, adding: Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then youre stupid. Did you hear that?- stupid. And when a correspondent for a New York paper began a question, he was interrupted by Sylvester who said: Aw, come on. What does someone in New York care about the war in Vietnam? 60

Meanwhile, hundreds of US servicemen in Asia and Europe were being swindled by phoney American auto dealers who turned up to take down-payments on cars which they never delivered. Commented an Illinois congressman: We cannot expect our servicemen to fight to protect the free enterprise system if the very system which they fight to protect takes advantage of them. 61

On 27 January 1973, in Paris, the United States signed the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam . Among the principles to which the United States agreed was the one stated in Article 21: In pursuance of its traditional policy, the United States will contribute to healing the wounds of war and to postwar