According to informed sources in Thailand, the Bush administration largely succeeded in covering up at least 300 U.S. military and paramilitary deaths from last December's Indian Ocean tsunami. The American deaths resulted from the destruction by the surging sea of a joint U.S.-Thai Naval Intelligence Command on Phi Phi island, just north of Phuket on the Indian Ocean coast. A focus of the joint command was Thailand's indigeneous population of Chao Le ("sea gypsies') who are about 90 percent Muslim. The Chao Le, a Malay people, ply the Andaman Sea and maintain commerce with fellow Chao Le along the coasts of Malaysia and Myanmar (Burma). The intelligence command also provided protection for increased (and secretive) U.S. and British oil and gas exploration activity in the Andaman Sea off Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, and east India. A number of private military contractors (PMCs) working with the U.S.-Thai command and oil companies, were also killed by the tsunami but there are no hard figures on their total death count

Immediately after the destruction of the U.S.-Thai naval installation, three U.S. 7th Fleet Navy ships were dispatched from Hong Kong, where they were docked for Christmas, to the area off Phi Phi island. For three days, U.S. helicopters airlifted the bodies of foreign military personnel to the three offshore Navy ships. In addition, Israel immediately sent a military medical team to Krabi to identify the bodies of Israeli frogmen recovered from Phi Phi. It is believed that Israel lost a large number of frogmen in Thailand since just after the tsunami, it warned Egypt to keep all ships away from its Gulf of Aqaba coast, a sign that its naval defenses were weakened by the loss of the frogmen. Britain also sent a team of divers to search for British military personnel lost at the Phi Phi base and the surrounding region. CIA personnel zealously guarded the body storage areas holding the bodies of the American and foreign military personnel not airlifted to the Navy ships.

Although the U.S.-Thai base was secret, the foreign military presence (including mercenaries) was very noticeable to the non-fundamentalist Muslims, because of the physically and verbally abusive tactics of the Americans and other foreigners, especially their harsh treatment of local businessmen and their drunkeness and patronage of prostitutes, notably in Patong Beach. The Bangkok Post reported that a large number of "farangs" (ex-patriates) were secretly buried in Takua Pa and it is believed these included some of the U.S. military and mercenary forces in the Phuket region. The paper also reported that 300 U.S. military personnel were killed in the tsunami, although the story was not picked up by the foreign major media. U.S. "missing in action" (MIA) teams were sent from Hawaii, Laos, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina to exhume the bodies from Takua Pa to identify missing U.S. Special Operations Command personnel. The Bush administration largely succeeded in censoring this story. As for the military deaths, it is common Pentagon practice to label the deaths of military members on covert operations as "training accidents" or "non-combat related deaths."