Before retiring in late 2002, Greg Thielmann, a native of Newton, Iowa, had been acting director of the Office of Strategic Proliferation and Military Affairs in the State Department, responsible for analyzing the potential threat Iraqi weapons posed. Thielmann had served in the foreign service for 25 years, including seven years in the State Department’s Intelligence Bureau. As the drumbeats  of war quickened, Thielmann reported to Secretary of State Colin Powell that evidence for an Iraqi nuclear program was seriously lacking, but Powell ignored him, Thielmann told CBS, in order to be loyal to President Bush and to build the case for war. “The main problem was that the senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence,” he said. “They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show.”

Now director of research and analysis for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Thielmann returned to his alma mater, Grinnell College in Iowa, and delivered a speech to his reuniting class based on recently declassified information about the Tonkin Gulf attack. The speech, titled "'Great Is the Shame…' the Use of Intelligence during Vietnam" did not address the flawed intelligence of the Iraq War, but of its gruesome cousin, the war in Vietnam. Though Thielmann does not mention Iraq, it is impossible to divorce the two as he discusses “a tale of mistakes made by intelligence analysts under the press of time and political pressure.”

The entire speech, provided by Thielmann, is below the fold.

“Great is the Shame…”

 

The Use of Intelligence during  Vietnam

 

by Greg  Thielmann

Grinnell College Reunion (Classes of  '71, '72, '73)

Grinnell College

 

June 2, 2007

 

 

Today I would like to dip into  a little history from the Vietnam War era – both personal and public — to  illustrate how intelligence information can be used and abused when a democracy  wages war.

I made a similar presentation  to contemporary Grinnell students last year. I then said that the Vietnam War  probably seemed as remote to them as the Italian Invasion of Ethiopia (in 1934)  did to my generation. The Vietnam War had ended some three decades before they  stepped onto this campus. Even then, it was a Cold War side-show to the  center-stage standoff between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Yet for the three  classes in our cluster, this was our war. Hardly any of us went to  Southeast Asia, but we were all profoundly affected by what was happening there.  I remember the Vietnam War as an uninvited, unwelcome, and glowering guest  during our college years. It shadowed every aspect of our Grinnell experience in  the late 60s and early 70s — from our political discussions, to our music, even  to what we imbibed, inhaled, or swallowed. It influenced our personal  philosophies and helped shape our career plans.

We were socialized,  radicalized, and divided by the war. It was a war fueled by the draft. When we  started at Grinnell, the draft hung over all American males of college age. And  Grinnell women happened to have boy friends, best friends, and brothers who were  also subject to the draft. That college attendance allowed us to postpone  eligibility for the draft was an important consideration for some of us.  Contemplating what awaited us upon graduation was a factor in our alienation  from older generations, a factor in the protests, in the use of drugs, the  interest in the Peace Corps, the lure of Canada. And all of us experienced the  early closing of Grinnell College in 1970, following the invasion of Cambodia  and the killings of students at Kent State and Jackson State.

I would like to take advantage  of a recently declassified article about an incident that propelled us into the  full-scale war Vietnam became – the Tonkin Gulf attack. And then I want to  relate a personal anecdote from the final months of the war ten years later,  when I had my first job with the State Department.

The Beginning

The Tonkin Gulf attack occurred  in August of 1964 when we were all teenagers. I was living just down the road in  Newton, a rising 9th grader, who had been rudely introduced to  political events by the Cuban Missile Crisis and the killing of President  Kennedy. And I was beginning to read about Vietnam in The Des Moines  Register.

In the summer of 1964, the  Vietnam conflict was still primarily a struggle between the Communist Viet Cong  and the non-Communist government in Saigon. We were told that the conflict was  an effort to protect an independent and “free” South Vietnam from domination by  Communist North Vietnam and to halt the further spread of Communism in Asia. I  was not yet privy to the perspective that the war was another stage of the  struggle to liberate Vietnam from colonial control and to unify the country as  promised in the 1954 Geneva Accords. Vietnam had become an issue in the  Presidential campaign between Republican Barry Goldwater and President Lyndon  Johnson. In partisan political terms, it was a question of bringing the full  might of the