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Spies and Commandos: How America Lost the Secret War in North Vietnam. By Kenneth Conboy and Dale Andrade. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000. x, 347 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-7006-1002-2.)
When the Pentagon Papers first appeared in U.S. newspapers in 1969, both the most significant and wide-reaching revelations and the most grotesque and ludicrous of them were seen to concern covert operations in Vietnam. The important revelations related to South Vietnam's secret maritime raids against the North, organized and supported by the United States. These raids helped to precipitate the Tonkin Gulf incident. The less momentous but more comical revelations concerned the efforts of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), just after the Geneva Conference, to make life difficult for the Communist government in Hanoi and Haiphong by contaminating the gas tanks of buses and planting small explosives, which looked like lumps of coal, in...