ABSTRACT
The historiography of the US involvement in Indochina from the early 1960s to 1975 is rich with a myriad of analyses and accounts concerning intelligence.1 Former intelligence operatives, at all levels, have written memoirs or studies of the war, and there is an ever-increasing number of scholarly and well-researched works about some of the war's specific events.2 Over the last few years, even subjects such as the secret war in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and Laos have received the attention of historians.3 If one examines a large number of these accounts, it is possible not only to reconstruct the intelligence dimension of events such as the Gulf of Tonkin incident but also to get a clear idea of the strength and weaknesses of the US intelligence organizations in South-East Asia during this period.
