Early SIGINT Efforts in Vietnam (Part 6 of 7)

In late 1960, in response to the Laotian crisis, a special TDY team of four civilian intercept operators and one traffic analyst from NSA had arrived at Clark Air Base to assist in developing the Vietnamese mission, but it could only foster an improvement at the site for the duration of their visit.

One solution was to send civilian analysts from the NSA office responsible for Southeast Asia (known then as ACOM, soon to become B Group) as technical advisors to the field sites. In fact, in May 1961 there was a civilian analyst from NSA stationed in the Philippines to help there. When technical problems at Tan Son Nhut were discovered as well, a meeting was held amongst the NSA representative, Philippines, and NSA personnel at Clark Air Base to decide how to fix the shortcomings. The decision was made to consolidate the analytic and reporting missions from both sites at Saigon, giving the “front end” of the SIGINT mission, that is the field site in Vietnam, the wherewithal to carry out its work. Part of the plan called for the NSA civilian. [ — ] detailed to the ASA site at Clark, to go along to Tan Son Nhut and oversee SIGINT operations there.