[FPSPACE] Sigint and the Vietnam War

[LARRY KLAES]

MORE ON U.S. SIGINT AND THE VIETNAM WAR

The National Security Agency has released some additional declassified
passages from its major historical study "Spartans in Darkness:
American SIGINT and the Indochina War, 1945-1975."

The large bulk of the 500-page report was declassified last December
(Secrecy News, Jan. 7). But in response to a mandatory declassification
review appeal from researcher Michael Ravnitzky, further
declassifications on 90 pages were released last month, including
disclosures authorized by "other government agencies."

Most of the new disclosures appear to be insignificant, not to say
tiresome.  For example, several previously redacted references to the
term "COMINT" (i.e., "communications intelligence") have been approved
for release.  Numerous allusions to the French war in Indochina have
been okayed too.  And several mentions of the year 1959, which had been
censored for reasons that are hard to fathom, have been restored.

Other newly declassified lines include these:

"With the deaths of Kennedy and Diem, the struggle in the South entered
a period of enormous flux and instability.  A plan developed by the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, under guidance from the Kennedy administration,
to reduce American forces in Vietnam by the end of 1965 to one-quarter
the 1963 level (25,000), was quietly scrapped." (p. 171).

"There had always been a suspicion going back to the 1950s about the
integrity of South Vietnamese security." (page 463).

"Westmoreland called the battle in Kontum Province the 'beginning of a
great defeat of the enemy'." (page 317).

"As for the Tet Offensive, despite official and personal claims, SIGINT
[signals intelligence] did not deliver an adequate warning in January
1968." (p. 465).

Perhaps most substantive is the brief discussion of a 1968 report of
the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board on the performance
of intelligence in Vietnam (pp. 340-41).

The 90 pages that include newly declassified material are posted here
(8 MB PDF file):

     http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/spartans/additional.pdf

The previously released body of the report (not yet including the newly
disclosed passages) can be found here:

     http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/spartans/index.html


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_______________________
Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists
web:    www.fas.org/sgp/index.html
email:  saftergood at fas.org
voice:  (202) 454-4691