The 1960s began with brave promises; however, events soon began to go awry. Although successive crises with the Soviet Union over Berlin and the Soviet deployment of missiles to Cuba were resolved peaceably, the Viet Cong insurgency in South Vietnam continued to fester, despite the involvement of an increasing number of American military advisers. In early November 1963 a beleaguered President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam was assassinated during a coup by his own Army. Intended to stabilize the deteriorating security situation in South Vietnam by removing an unpopular leader, the coup had the opposite effect. As a revolving-door series of ephemeral governments came and went in Saigon, Communists gained an increasing foothold in the countryside. Meanwhile, President John E Kennedy had been assassinate in Dallas; his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, had a wealth of experience in domestic politics but no substantive understanding of foreign affairs. Johnson won election in 1964 on a platform of peace and social reform, but soon found that developments in Vietnam would imperil both goals. By early 1965 a Viet Cong victory seemed imminent.
America responded initially with limited air raids against the Viet Cong's sponsor, North Vietnam. When this action proved unproductive, ground troops were committed to the South under the direction of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), a joint, Army-dominated "sub-theater" headquarters. The North Vietnamese countered by steadily increasing their war buildup, sending in their own regular forces to supplement the activities of the guerrillas. Thus the United States lurched into an undeclared war. l On the American side, this remained a limited effort. The president's main focus was on constructing a "Great Society" at home, and he regarded the war in Southeast Asia as an unpleasant distraction. As a matter of deliberate management, the conflict was fought without passion, without censorship, without mobilization, and without raising taxes. Increasingly, it was fought without
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popular enthusiasm. On the other hand, for the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong proxies, the war was total.
By the end of 1967 an American Army of 485,000 soldiers and marines, backed up by an enormous logistical system, had deployed in country; and officials talked brightly that there was now "light at the end of the tunnel."2 The Tet offensive at the beginning of 1968 dispelled this dream, however. It broke the will of an administration and shattered the confidence of the American people. After Tet, all roads ran downhill. The Johnson administration decided to stop reinforcing the war effort; its successor chose to withdraw gradually from the war and return the tar baby to the luckless South Vietnamese. In the meantime, the United States was unraveling on the domestic front. Racial unrest resulted in rioting on a massive scale, while an increasingly violent antiwar movement grew in strength on the nation's campuses.
What ensued was an almost complete debacle. A cease-fire in place in Vietnam at last was signed in Paris in 1973. A similar agreement, signed in Korea twenty years before, had endured. However, the government of South Korea had been in full control of its own territory, and American military might had backed up the agreement. Neither of these conditions proved true in Southeast Asia. Hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese troops remained in place in the South, and a peaceful end to the conflict seemed remote. American ground forces were completely withdrawn from Vietnam, and any chance that the peace settlement would stand was undermined by the disintegration of the Nixon administration amid the toils of the Watergate scandal. Confronted by a North Vietnamese blitzkrieg and abandoned by its American allies, in 1975 the South Vietnamese government collapsed.3
All of these events had a massive impact on Military Intelligence. Some structural changes that took place during this period were driven by new developments in technology. Most, however, were brought about by the military commitment to Southeast Asia and its manifold repercussions. The Vietnam conflict, its domestic side effects, and the economic and psychological constraints produced by the outcome of the venture all worked to reshape the organization of Army Intelligence.
Vietnam: Buildup and Deployment
The Vietnam conflict proved a formidable challenge to Army Intelligence, as well as to the rest of the American defense establishment. The Army was forced to function in an unfamiliar environment and deal with an unfamiliar language, under rules of engagement giving the enemy a chance to accept or decline battle
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at will. The detailed, quantified information which the decision makers of the day demanded was not easy to develop when the enemy was a guerrilla under jungle canopy, and when the exact state of the "hearts and minds" of an indigenous population involved in a civil war was so hard to assess. Under such conditions it is not surprising that the performance of Army intelligence engendered controversies that lived on long after American troops had left Southeast Asia.4
Previous conflicts had witnessed a vast expansion of the Army's departmental-level intelligence staff. However, these conflicts had been fought before the subordination of Army intelligence to unified intelligence agencies. In Southeast Asia, the Defense Intelligence Agency would be responsible for the analytical effort. As a result, the OACSI staff actually contracted over the course of the war, and its internal organization was shaped as much by factors such as the increased availability of computer support, the need to manage new technologies, and the necessity for coping with counterintelligence problems on the domestic front as it was by the war in Southeast Asia itself. The real growth of the Army's intelligence and security organization was in the field. The Army Security Agency built up to a strength of 30,000, onefifth of which was deployed in Vietnam at any one time, and other components grew correspondingly.
As long as the American military presence in South Vietnam had been confined to an advisory role, the demands on the Army's intelligence resources had not been excessive. In early 1965 the MACV was receiving intelligence support from a collection detachment subordinate to the Japan-based 500th intelligence Corps Group, a counterintelligence detachment, and some two hundred intelligence officers serving as advisers with South Vietnamese troops. In-country cryptologic work was handled by the Army Security Agency's 3d Radio Research Unit (RRU), which comprised aerial as well as ground-based elements. 5
The influx of American troops in large numbers changed all this. In response to the requests of Maj. Gen. Joseph A. McChristian, MACV assistant chief of staff for intelligence, or J-2, in 1965 the 525th Military Intelligence Group was deployed in packets from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to serve as command and control headquarters for the intelligence effort.6 It was joined by the 1st Military Intelligence Battalion (Aerial Reconnaissance Support) and the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion (Field Army). Soon afterward, two additional Military Intelligence groups were introduced, built up from cellular teams dispatched from the United States. These were the 135th Military Intelligence
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Group, a counterintelligence unit, and the 149th Military Intelligence Group, with a collection mission.7 The groups absorbed the personnel and functions of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion's counterintelligence and collection companies. Meanwhile, the 519th was itself greatly expanded to support four combined United States-Vietnamese processing and production centers. The unit included a large technical intelligence detachment augmented by detachments from the Army technical branches.
In the fall of 1967, following the departure of General McChristian, there was another substantial reorganization of intelligence units within South Vietnam. The 525th Military Intelligence Group restructured its subordinate units into six provisional battalions, respectively located at Da Nang, Nha Trang, Bien Hoa, Can Tho, Saigon, and (for a time) Tan Son Nhut Air Base; the 135th and 149th Military Intelligence Groups subsequently were inactivated.8 This effort was supplemented by the activities of over six hundred intelligence advisers serving with the Vietnamese; by intelligence detachments attached to all independent brigades and higher formations; and by aerial surveillance companies that operated in support of the "field forces," Army corps-level headquarters organizations with additional advisory functions. Army Special Forces and the Vietnamese Montagnards under their control also played a significant role in furnishing combat intelligence.
Army Security Agency support in country expanded as well. At the height of the war effort, the agency's 509th Radio Research Group, which had replaced the 3d Radio Research Unit, commanded a fixed field station at Phu Bai; the 224th Aviation Battalion (Radio Research); the 303d and 313th Radio Research Battalions, each attached to an Army field force; a communications security company; and some twenty direct support units (DSUs) attached to divisions and brigades.9 Other ASA assets positioned in Thailand and the Philippines also supported the cryptologic effort.
As it evolved, the Army Intelligence effort in Vietnam became heavily committed to collaboration with the South Vietnamese, who knew the language and terrain and already possessed a useful, if fragmented, data base. General McChristian organized a Combined Intelligence Center at Tan Son Nhut Air Base near Saigon, manned by U.S. and South Vietnamese personnel and under the joint control of MACV and the South Vietnamese high command. Similar combined centers handled prisoner-of-war interrogation, document exploitation, and analysis of captured materiel.10 In a kind of reverse advisory role,
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South Vietnamese Military Intelligence detachments worked directly with American formations at the level of independent brigade and above.
Vietnamese assistance was necessary because of some American deficiencies. Vietnamese linguists were in especially short supply, which made close cooperation with the South Vietnamese essential. And although there had been an American advisory presence in the country since the 1950s, America went into the war without benefit of an adequate intelligence data base. At the time DIA was formed, ACSI had delegated the task of compiling order of battle data for Southeast Asia to the U.S. Army, Pacific, while USARPAC in turn had assumed that the Military Assistance Advisory Group, Vietnam, was carrying out this responsibility. In reality, no one had done the job, and American combat forces deploying into Southeast Asia had been confronted with an intelligence vacuum. 11
Moreover, although the McNamara regime had strengthened the previously neglected conventional forces, the Army still lacked enough trained intelligence professionals to meet its needs in Vietnam. It took a long time for the Army's intelligence training establishment to retool to meet the needs of the conflict. The Army Intelligence School did not begin to offer a Vietnam-oriented short course until 1968, and training for intelligence officers serving as advisers at the district and province level in Vietnam was not provided until 1970. Moreover, in this conflict, the reserve components could not compensate for the deficiencies of the Regular Army There was a substantial Military Intelligence presence in the reserves, but linguistic skills were lacking, and in any case the administration had declined to deploy them. This may have been a blessing in disguise, since unit readiness in many cases was low Maj. Gen. Charles Denholm, commanding general, U.S. Army Security Agency, deemed the ASA reserve units "almost useless." 12
As in previous wars, communications security in the field continued to be a major problem for the Army This was aggravated by the compartmentalized nature of the war, the extensive use of aircraft, and above all by the ubiquitousness of the radio-telephone. A Vietnam-era division, for example, had 3,000 of
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these transmitters, compared to 225 in a representative World War II division. Proper communications security often required units to shift radio frequencies and call signs. But the crowded electromagnetic environment presented by a communications-rich war meant there were not enough available frequencies, while helicopter companies that operated over hundreds of miles in support of units drawn from a number of nations found that any change in call signs produced paralyzing confusion. The Army's manpack speech security devices were too heavy and cumbersome to be lugged through the jungle easily, and troops resorted to the use of homemade radio-telephone codes that became transparent all too easily Many commanders preferred to ignore the whole problem, choosing to sacrifice security considerations to speed and availability of communications. 13
There were other shortfalls. At first, lower-echelon commanders complained that they were deprived of vital timely intelligence, either because of compartmentation considerations or because scarce intelligence assets were being held under close control at higher levels. Ultimately, however, Army Intelligence constructed a serviceable organization in Vietnam, even though some of its problems were never solved. Units down to the maneuver battalion learned to coordinate intelligence with operations by establishing joint tactical operations centers. Commanders improvised special companies with the capacity to conduct long-range reconnaissance patrols; in 1969 the Army formally made these units elements of the 75th Infantry and designated them as "Rangers."14 The Army also met the expanding intelligence and security needs of the combat divisions committed to Vietnam by expanding their intelligence detachments to full companies and providing the divisions with TOE ASA companies in direct support. In addition, Special Security Offices in each division disseminated the most sensitive intelligence derived from nationallevel acquisition systems. Intelligence sources available only to high-level commanders for strategic applications during World War II now could be put to tactical use. As the war progressed, the number of individuals indoctrinated for compartmented intelligence in combat divisions tripled.
Additional ground intelligence was provided by the teams of the 5th Special Forces Group, 1st Special Forces, in Vietnam and the Vietnamese Civilian Irregular Defense Groups they advised. The Special Forces camps, scattered along the thinly populated interior spine of South Vietnam, served as an outpost screen to detect the movement of infiltrating enemy columns. Besides engaging in ground reconnaissance, the Special Forces conducted intelligence and counterintelligence operations through their contacts with the local Montagnard tribesmen. Members of the Special Forces also served as the Army component of the MACV Studies and Observation Group, a joint service element under JCS
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supervision that collected intelligence and carried out special operations in denied areas in conjunction with its Vietnamese counterpart organization. 15
American advisers also contributed to the intelligence effort. Working hand in hand with their Vietnamese counterparts at the province and district levels, they became increasingly involved in an attempt to identify and neutralize the Viet Cong infrastructure that supported the insurgency through a network of district intelligence and operations coordinating centers established throughout South Vietnam. The centers had "a dual mission to produce and exploit both VC infrastructure and tactical Military Intelligence." Originally begun as a unilateral American effort to upgrade the effectiveness of Republic of Vietnam security organizations, the program was formally embraced by the South Vietnamese government in 1968 and assigned the dual code name PHOENIX/PHUONG TRANG.16
Better cryptologic support to the field came about when the Army Security Agency established management centers to service each Army field force and introduced tactical direct support units down to the level of the individual combat brigades. In the process, the agency moved into the front lines. ASA special operations personnel worked with the patrols of the Special Forces, and an ASA element mounted in armored personnel carriers was organized to provide support to the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. 17 The guerrilla nature of the war meant that Army Security Agency personnel usually working in safe rear areas were exposed to hazard. The large fixed field station at Phu Bai was maintained as a fortified camp, bristling with minefields, concertina wire, pillboxes, sandbagged bunkers, watchtowers, trenches, and mortar positions. ASA casualties during the Vietnam conflict were many times greater than during the Korean War. 18
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In the area of communications security, the Army Security Agency sought to bring about improvement by changing its approach. During the first stages of the war, tactical units in the field received communications security support from their attached ASA companies and detachments. At that time, communications security was conceived of as essentially a policetype function of monitoring friendly communications and warning of possible compromises. This arrangement proved to be ineffective, producing conflicts with supported commanders. As a remedy, the agency evolved a new concept of "before the fact" assistance, having its personnel serve as advisers rather than as policemen. 19 Under this doctrine, communications security personnel assisted in planning operational communications procedures and instructed troops on the necessity of communications security. To implement this better, in 1969 the agency's incountry communications security assets were withdrawn from the direct support units and concentrated in the 101st Radio Research Company A similar centralized ASA security company was also formed in Europe. The new, nonpunitive approach was facilitated by the simultaneous fielding of the Nestor family of speech security devices, which eliminated much of the security problem at the source.20
Organizational innovations in the intelligence and security field were supplemented by the introduction of new technologies. Airborne electronic support, first pioneered in Vietnam and conducted from fixed-wing aircraft and later from helicopters, was one.21 Other elements of Army Intelligence were able to make productive use of gadgets such as unattended ground sensors and "people-sniffers." Infrared and side-looking airborne radar sensors supplemented the traditional visual and optical techniques of aerial observation, while the pairing of observation and armed helicopters into "pink teams" with the dual missions of finding and fighting gave another dimension to traditional aerial reconnaissance. At the top, MACVs J-2 staff slowly automated its intelligence data base and collection management procedures.
In the end, of course, it was not enough. Although Army Intelligence could provide the higher commanders with significant forewarnings of the 1968 Tet offensive, the intensity of the enemy attack was underestimated. But the fact remains that Army intelligence could provide the kind of warning before Tet in 1968 that it had been unable to furnish before the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. However, despite the similar military outcomes of the Tet and Ardennes counteroffensives-in each case, the enemy scored some disconcerting gains, but paid for them with disproportionate losses-Tet did something that the German
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Ardennes offensive had not done: it convinced the home front that the war could not be won. The fighting went on, but negotiations and a program of Vietnamization became the order of the day. As the American military presence in South Vietnam shrank, so did the presence of Army Intelligence. The last Army Intelligence elements left South Vietnam in 1973, following the signing of the Paris Peace Accords.22
The Vietnam conflict had furnished Army Intelligence with a short list of lessons learned and a long list of casualties. The war's effects on the structure of Army Intelligence were not confined to Vietnam. The rapid turnover of personnel engendered by the policy of troop rotation adversely impacted the cohesion and professional capacity of units far removed from the war zone, as had the diversion of equipment and spare parts to the fighting front. On the home front, the war and the opposition it provoked led Army Intelligence into a situation that compromised its image. Finally, the antimilitary and anti-intelligence reaction that prevailed in America as the Vietnam conflict came to a close posed deep threats to the whole Army Intelligence organization.
The U.S. Army Intelligence Command and the Home Front
Even while the fighting went on in Vietnam, Army Intelligence was actively engaged in operations in another area, the American home front. The principal Army player here was the U.S. Army Intelligence Command (USAINTC), the Army counterintelligence element formed in 1965 to conduct operations in the continental United States. The command had been allotted substantial personnel to carry out its mission. Its seven Military Intelligence groups controlled a network of 300 field and resident offices across the nation. The merger of Army counterintelligence and criminal investigative records into the investigative Records Repository (IRR) gave the command a massive data base, which was supplemented in 1966 when USAINTC became the DOD agent administering the newly created Defense Central Index of Investigations, a master file of all counterintelligence and criminal investigations performed by the armed services, and the National Agency Check Center, which performed records searches on files maintained by non-DOD agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and local police departments. By 1967 the command had extended its responsibilities beyond its original jurisdiction, assuming the case control function for routine background investigations requested by the major commands overseas.
Centralizing counterintelligence operations in the United States under a single Army command produced the desired effects in terms of speed and efficiency The new organization not only had a greater capacity to coordinate and conduct counterespionage investigations against military suspects but also was bet-
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ter able to conduct background investigations. Under the old decentralized system, it had taken an average of ninety-seven days to process a standard background investigation. By 1967 USAINTC completed these investigations in an average time of thirty-one days. However, centralization would prove to have less desirable effects. It gave Army counterintelligence a high profile, and gave civilian policy makers an organization to task for domestic intelligence collection in what was rapidly becoming a time of trouble. The end result for Army Intelligence was less than satisfactory.
Under delimitations agreements dating back to the 1940s, the FBI had primary responsibility for counterintelligence investigations of civilians in the continental United States. Army counterintelligence confined its attention to the military and to those civilians who applied for security-sensitive civilian and military positions with the Army. Most of the Army's counterintelligence effort and resources were devoted to background investigations of the latter. However, the events of the 1960s conspired to break down the neat demarcation line between military and civilian counterintelligence jurisdiction in the United States and to draw Army Intelligence deeply into civilian affairs. Federal troops were frequently alerted and occasionally deployed to restore order when local authorities were unable to maintain control in the numerous crises of the period. Commanders needed intelligence support, and it quickly became apparent that it was too late to attempt to gather intelligence once an actual troop deployment had begun. It also became apparent that the existing civilian intelligence agencies were fragmented and often ineffectual.
The FBI may have had theoretical responsibility for civilian counterintelligence, but its director, J. Edgar Hoover, was aging and increasingly uncooperative. The bureau itself, although having a good track record in apprehending interstate car thieves, kidnappers, and the occasional spy, was primarily a crimefighting agency with neither the capacity nor the inclination to produce finished domestic intelligence. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of FBI agents were middle-aged white males, limiting the bureau's capability to conduct effective undercover work against the radical black and student groups that seemed to pose the greatest threat to national security. As conditions of disorder became progressively worse, the Army moved to fill an intelligence void.
Local commanders had first begun to request counterintelligence support from the assets they controlled during the civil rights disturbances in the South in the first part of the decade. USAINTC became involved in giving crisis support soon after it had been set up, as a result of Army involvement in the Watts rioting in August 1965. The command formulated its first contingency plan for collecting domestic intelligence in early 1966. STEEP HILL, as the plan was code named, was designed to be implemented only after there had been an actual deployment of federal troops.
The command soon realized that STEEP HILL, redesignated GARDEN PLOT in 1967, was inadequate. For USAINTC to be of any help to Army commanders in
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a civil disturbance situation, it would have to begin collection as soon as there was any likelihood of a deployment of federal troops. To meet the requirement, the command devised a new collection plan, Rose HILL, later redesignated PUNCH BLOCK and LANTERN SPIKE, successively. Unrest in America's cities caused PUNCH BLOCK to go into effect eight times during the summer of 1966. By this time, in the words of the USAINTC official history, civil disturbance collection had become a "minimal, but increasing" part of the command's workload .23
The troubled summer of 1967 brought matters to a head. The LANTERN SPIKE civil disturbance collection plan was implemented four times, and federal troops were actually committed to deal with a major riot in Detroit. As a result of the Detroit disturbances, Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance, who had served as the agent of the Executive Branch in handling the federal intervention, tasked the Army with "reconnoitering the major cities" to gain information on critical elements of topography and vulnerability before troops were sent in again. He also suggested that "the assembly and analysis of data with respect to activity patterns is also needed." 24 This put the Army into the domestic intelligence business on a greatly enlarged scale.
After the Detroit riots, the priorities of the U.S. Army Intelligence Command changed perceptibly. The Army now began to collect intelligence data that would not only allow it to intervene effectively in urban riots, but would also help it to cope with the threat of the increasingly violent antiwar movement. By 1967 the popular consensus in support of American commitment to Vietnam was beginning to waver. An uncensored media had brought the horrors of war to American living rooms, and the Johnson strategy of fighting a painless war by allowing generous exemptions for college students while tripling the draft call had made a time bomb out of the nation's campuses. Radical students and others had started to challenge not only the war, but the whole American system allegedly responsible for it. The Army now felt it had to defend its personnel and installations from possible subversion, sabotage, and even guerrilla warfare. In response to these perceived menaces, USAINTC steadily widened its collection activities, and the files of the Intelligence Records Repository began to bulge with the names of individuals and groups with no connection to the Department of Defense except their reputed opposition to it.
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The rioting that devastated the nation's capital following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was the final straw. In response, OACSI set up civil disturbance units in its Counterintelligence and Counterintelligence Analysis Branches in 1968, and the Department of the Army issued a classified Civil Disturbance Collection Plan levying intelligence requirements upon USAINTC that were so sweeping that they could not be filled by the traditional methods of overt collection or liaison with FBI and local law enforcement officials.
To accomplish the tasking, the command had to initiate an extensive collection program against domestic targets. And by now, Army Intelligence elements other than USAINTC were also involved in the domestic intelligence field. In an independent effort, CONARC and several Zone of the interior armies had deployed counterintelligence personnel from their tactical units to engage in domestic collection operations and had compiled computer data bases on suspected potential troublemakers. The Army Security Agency had used its own assets on several occasions in 1967 and 1968 to monitor the demonstrators' citizen-band radios.
Even at the height of this type of activity, the bulk of USAINTC's resources remained committed to the traditional role of conducting background investigations. But the amount of activity devoted to domestic intelligence had a significance beyond its limited size. The perceived domestic crisis, coupled with Johnson administration demands for more and more information, led Army Intelligence into dangerous waters. Its activities crossed the traditional dividing line between the civilian and military in American life and overstepped the law, since neither the collection activities nor the civilian intelligence data bank of USAINTC had been authorized by statute.25
As early as 1969, after a change of administrations, Robert F Froehlke, assistant secretary of defense for administration, expressed doubts about the wisdom of the whole operation. The Army went beyond its own requirements to involve itself in civilian concerns to such a degree, and the assistant secretary was concerned that the Army might be diffusing its limited intelligence assets, trying to collect intelligence on too large a portion of American society. As Froehlke ruefully admitted, the demands made upon USAINTC for domestic intelligence had gone "substantially beyond the capability for Military Intelligence units to collect. They reflected the all encompassing and uninhibited demand for information directed at the Department of the Army." 26
What ended the Army's domestic intelligence program, however, was not doubts, but public exposure. In early 1970 the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Army and the U.S. Army Intelligence Command for "spying on civil-
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ians."27 The subsequent publicity, accompanied by recriminations from politicians and journalists, led not only to the end of this particular program, but ultimately to the end of USAINTC itself. The whole Army Intelligence community had suffered a major setback.
Beyond the Battle: Intelligence Trends in the 1960s
The Vietnam War and the domestic crisis within the United States were not the only forces exerting pressure on the structure of Army Intelligence during the 1960s. Increasing technology also shaped its development. This was especially important for the Army Security Agency Personnel and financial constraints also impinged upon the structure of Army intelligence during this period. The Army was engaged in fighting a large-scale war in Southeast Asia for which the country had never been properly mobilized. The short tours of duty in Vietnam caused constant personnel turbulence. The demands of the war gutted units outside the combat zone of equipment as well as people; ASA, with its dependence on high technology, was particularly affected. By the end of 1968 those ASA tactical units not actually committed to Vietnam, having been stripped of equipment and spare parts, delivered only 50 percent of their support requirements.
The financial problem was compounded in that the United States had an unfavorable balance of trade, and policy makers at the national level were constantly concerned with the bleeding away of America's gold reserves. Economic as well as technological considerations prompted the drive to consolidate many of ASA's European operations at a major new facility in Augsburg. Financial pressures were also partially responsible for the consolidation of the two Military Intelligence groups in Europe into a single unit in 1969. The headquarters of both the 513th and 66th Military Intelligence Groups moved to Munich, Germany, where the 66th absorbed the personnel and functions of the former.
Although Army Intelligence had its problems during this era, it improved its institutional position in a number of ways. One of the most significant advances was in professional development. As a result of a study undertaken by the Norris Board, the Army Intelligence and Security Branch was redesignated the Military Intelligence (MI) Branch on 1 July 1967. The new title symbolized the unity of the intelligence field rather than its diversity. More important, the Army assigned the renovated branch an official combat support function, whereas the old branch had been designated as a combat service support organization only.
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The upgrade presented the prospect of attracting better officers to intelligence careers and providing members of the branch with greater access to the system of Army higher education that had become professionally indispensable for military career advancement.
As a step toward providing further integration of the various intelligence disciplines within the Military Intelligence Branch, in 1968 the U.S. Army Intelligence School began to offer an MI Officers Advanced Course intended for Army Security Agency officers, as well as for other Military Intelligence professionals. This step was taken in accordance with the recommendations of the Haines Board, another Army study group that had concentrated on deficiencies in intelligence training.28 The new advanced course did not completely solve all the problems associated with the area, since the Haines Board's proposal to consolidate the Army Security Agency Training Center and School with the Army Intelligence School was not accepted, but the branch course represented a major step in breaking down the wall of isolation between signals intelligence officers and those with other intelligence specialties.
There were also new organizational developments. The Army Intelligence staff moved back into the field of intelligence production, as the Army soon discovered it had needs in this area that DIA could not fulfill. By 1966 OACSI's Special Research Detachment, originally set up as a liaison group with NSA, had become a full-fledged production center. The same year, OACSI created a threat analysis element to produce Army-specific studies. By 1967 even DIA had to admit that the task of conducting all Military Intelligence production simply was too great for one organization and agreed that the Army and the other services should provide "special finished intelligence" directly related to departmental missions.29 Two years later, USAREUR organized its own production element, the U.S. Army Intelligence Center, Europe.
The Army's mechanism for disseminating its most secret intelligence also was expanded significantly. In 1965 ACSI had decided to attach special security offices to each Army division by fiscal year 1968. Although every Army division assigned to Vietnam had such support, the constraints on resources imposed by the fighting in Southeast Asia prevented implementation of the plan worldwide. However, the system expanded into other areas, as Army requirements for access to sensitive compartmented intelligence grew. In addition to servicing military and diplomatic needs, the Special Security Detachment increasingly became involved in providing private contractors with the highly classified information they needed to do research and development for the government. In 1967 the steady growth of these tasks led the Norris Board to recommend that the Army establish four geographic Special Security regions to act as subor-
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dinate headquarters for the Special Security Detachment's fifty-five field offices. The recommendations were accepted, and shortly afterward the status of the detachment was upgraded to that of a "group" headquarters.
The Army Security Agency was substantially restructured during the course of the 1960s. TOE units were reintroduced to the United States and Vietnam, and in 1966 all the agency's battalions were converted from a fixed to a flexible structure. There were also more cosmetic changes. At the end of 1967 the Department of the Army decided that TDA units would no longer bear numerical designations. As a result, on IS December 1967, the Army Security Agency's numbered field stations, special operations commands, and special operations units received new geographic designators. Finally, the Army undertook some qualitative initiatives in the human intelligence field, even though resources and personnel allocated to this area declined steeply after 1963. In 1969 ACSI organized a field operating agency to direct certain programs in this area.
Westmoreland, McChristian, and Military Intelligence
In mid-1968 the former MACV commander, General William Westmoreland, became the Army chief of staff and subsequently supervised three major organizational changes within Army Intelligence. The first came about in 1969, when Westmoreland reviewed the organization of the Army Staff and decided that the number of field operating agencies under ACSI's direct supervision was not compatible with the proper organization of a DA staff element. ACSI's job, in Westmoreland's estimation, entailed staff supervision and program management, not operations. As a result, OACSI underwent a sweeping reorganization. Six major elements were spun off and resubordinated to USAINTC. These included the 902d Military Intelligence Group, which had previously performed high-level counterintelligence operations under direct ACSI control; the Administrative Survey Detachment, which ran Army Intelligence personnel programs; the Personnel Security Group, which adjudicated loyalty and suitability cases for the Army; the Army Imagery Interpretation Center; the Intelligence Materiels Supply Office; and the newly created field operating agency for human intelligence.30
In certain ways, the new reorganization amounted to another reinvention of the wheel. At the Army Staff level, it meant returning to the organizational principles originally adopted during World War II. The U.S. Army Intelligence Command was transformed from the continental United States-focused counterintelligence organization originally planned into a simulacrum of the earlier U.S. Army Intelligence Corps Activity. In addition, however, the command assumed control of sensitive operations heretofore controlled only at the DA
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level, a trend strengthened in 1972 when OACSI transferred its Special Research Detachment to the command.
A second change that came about at this time was an enlargement of OACSI's area of functional responsibilities. Army Intelligence had delegated oversight of the Army's mapping work to the chief of Engineers since World War II. In 1969 Westmoreland directed ACSI to assume staff supervision of certain Army topographic activities, and the Engineer Topographic Command was created to carry out the map-making function by consolidating the Army Map Service with other Engineer elements involved in topography. ACSI also took over staff supervision of Army weather intelligence at this time.
The last organizational innovation of the Westmoreland years initially promised to be the most sweeping. Early in 1969 the ACSI, Maj. Gen. Joseph A. McChristian, who had served as Westmoreland's J-2 in Vietnam, concluded that the Army's fragmented intelligence assets in the continental United States were too physically dispersed to provide the Army with enough support. Reviving the old proposal of the 1950s, he recommended concentrating them in a single intelligence center. The proposal did not, however, touch upon the operations of the Army Security Agency.
McChristian initially had an ambitious concept for the center. It would concentrate in one location an operational intelligence headquarters much like the one McChristian had set up in Vietnam, a counterintelligence center (essentially USAINTC), the U.S. Army Intelligence School, support troops, and tactical units. This would give many elements of the Army Intelligence community a home for the first time. The tactical units and aircraft would be necessary because McChristian felt that one of the center's main purposes would be to give the troops realistic intelligence training in the field. The first plans called for the center to have a troop base of 21,000.
The existing Army Intelligence center at Fort Holabird, Maryland, was obviously unsuited for such an expanded role. The post was small, and the training requirements imposed by the Vietnam War had greatly overcrowded it. The post was hemmed in by an industrial area that precluded expansion. Although the streets of Baltimore were as good a place for counterintelligence agents to practice surveillance techniques as anywhere, Holabird offered no room for field maneuvers. In addition to all these liabilities, the air space in the area was overcrowded, and the electromagnetic environment was cluttered. In a search for an alternative, the initial survey team narrowed the choice to Fort Riley, Kansas, and Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and selected the latter.
At this point, the plan for a new Army Intelligence center began to narrow sharply in scope. Planners soon realized that although Fort Huachuca offered space, it had little water. McChristian then suggested that Fort Lewis, Washington, might be developed as an alternative site, but the post would have needed extensive rehabilitation, and this would take too much time and money Because of these constraints, the proposed composition of the center shrank,
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and then shrank again. It turned out that Fort Huachuca could not comfortably accommodate even a brigade of supporting troops. Originally, planners had thought that the U.S. Army Intelligence Command would move bodily to the new center, leaving behind a kind of USAINTC rear, consisting of a Directorate of Investigative Records to administer the command's bulky and hard-to-move data base. This idea was scrapped also. Since most of USAINTC's activities were in support of the Department of the Army and other national-level agencies, the command could not practicably move beyond the Washington-Baltimore corridor.
Ultimately, the composition of the new Army Intelligence center was scaled down drastically The final version of the center included the Army Intelligence School and the U.S. Army Combat Development Command Intelligence Agency, together with Army combat surveillance and electronic warfare activities already in place at Fort Huachuca, all of this supported by a bare minimum of tactical units. As part of the process, the Army Intelligence School was redesignated and given the more prestigious title of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School. The school moved to its new desert home at Huachuca in phases during the first part of 1971.31 By this time, events were in process that would be much more damaging to Army Intelligence than the reduced plans for its new center.
Lean Years
The early 1970s saw the U.S. Army in decline. The decision to stage a phased withdrawal from Vietnam led to a drastic cut in troop strength, and between 1969 and 1973 the Army shrank in size by almost half, from a force of 1.5 million to one of 800,000. More important, its ranks were plagued with incidents of drug abuse, racial turmoil, and lack of discipline. The final elimination of the draft in 1973 deprived the Army of its reservoir of college-trained enlisted men and confronted it with daunting recruitment problems. Operating in an environment of constraints, the Army would have to rely increasingly on reserve forces to meet any future combat contingencies. The STEADFAST reorganization of 1973 made this dependence on the reserve components explicit, in addition to retrenching the Army Staff and realigning much of the Army's command structure.32 If the Army as a whole struggled during this period, Army Intelligence was particularly hard hit. It fell victim not only to popular disillusionment with the results of the war, but also to public indignation against alleged counterintelligence abuses.
The unraveling of the Army's domestic counterintelligence program began in the first months of 1970, when the American Civil Liberties Union initiated a lawsuit against the Department of the Army and the U.S. Army Intelligence
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Command on the grounds that they were involved in illegal surveillance of civilians. The initial suit was followed by a fire storm of adverse media publicity, all of which culminated in a congressional investigation in early 1971. The controversy had immediate effects on USAINTC. On 19 February 1970, all civil disturbance and civilian biographic data stored in the Investigative Records Repository were ordered destroyed. A similar purge was ordered of the independent domestic intelligence data bases maintained by CONARC and several of the field armies in the continental United States. The ambitious Civil Disturbance Information Collection Plan was formally rescinded in June. The U.S. Army Intelligence Command went into a 180-degree reversal, of course. As the command's official historian stated, "instead of collect, process, and store, the order of the day was research, screen, and destroy." 33 The effect of the "spying on civilians" charges was to degrade the whole counterintelligence mission. By the end of February 1971 the Army had suspended all USAINTC countersubversive and offensive counterespionage activities.
These new developments soon affected the organizational structure of Army counterintelligence. On 1 March 1970, the Defense Investigative Review Council was set up under the assistant secretary of defense for administration to exercise general supervision over the counterintelligence activities of all the armed services and to curb any possible abuses. After some deliberation, the council decided to centralize all service-connected background investigations under a new civilian body, the Defense Investigative Service, which was established at the end of 1971 and became operational in October 1972.34 Meanwhile, contrary opinions had been voiced. In June 1970 presidential assistant Frederick Huston, unnerved by the depth of dissent over the recent American incursion into Cambodia, suggested that all government intelligence agencies conduct their operations without regard to legal or Constitutional niceties. His views did not prevail.35
The formation of the Defense Investigative Service was the beginning of the end for the U.S. Army Intelligence Command as a major Army headquarters. Conducting standard personnel background investigations had been the command's bread and butter, constituting 90 percent of its work load. USAINTC had to give up 1,400 personnel spaces to the new agency Three of its Military intelligence groups were inactivated, and the number of field offices was reduced from 303 to 50. The command turned over control of the Defense Central Index of Investigations and the National Agency Check Center to the Defense Investigative Service. USAINTC retained custody of Army counterintelligence files, but the criminal investigation records held by the Intelligence
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Records Repository were removed from its control and assigned to a new U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command. Since 1949 a major general had controlled Army counterintelligence activities. By 1972 the U.S. Army Intelligence Command was under the command of a colonel.
After the Army Intelligence School moved to Fort Huachuca, Fort Holabird became superfluous to Army Intelligence. In the interests of economy, USAINTC relocated in the summer of 1973 to Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, a large, multipurpose post. However, since the records of the Army Criminal Investigation Command remained behind at Holabird, the move was a further blow to the concepts behind the SECURITY SHIELD study of 1964. By 1974, USAINTC had lost most of its mission responsibilities and numbered less than 2,000 persons. In addition, the Office of the Secretary of Defense criticized that the Army's counterintelligence structure was top heavy in management and not cost effective.
USAINTC's remaining activities hardly seemed significant enough to warrant its retention as a major command, especially at a time when the Army was under heavy pressure to reduce its headquarters establishments. The command was particularly vulnerable to charges of managerial layering-it shared Fort Meade with the headquarters of a major subordinate unit, the 109th Military Intelligence Group. Another major element, the 902d Military Intelligence Group, had been programmed to move to Fort Meade in the summer of 1974. As a result, the Army discontinued the command on 30 June 1974.36 On the same day, the Army also inactivated USAINTCs three remaining Military Intelligence groups with area responsibilities for the continental United States and reassigned the Army Imagery Interpretation Center and Special Research Detachment to ACSI's direct control.
USAINTC was replaced by the U.S. Army Intelligence Agency, a field operating agency directly subordinated to ACSI with an initial force structure of just two CONUS counterintelligence groups: the 902d Military Intelligence Group, which lost its traditional high-level mission and became responsible for the geographic area east of the Mississippi, and the 525th Military Intelligence Group, of Vietnam fame, which was reactivated to perform a parallel mission in the western part of the United States. The agency inherited (sometimes in rearranged form) some smaller miscellaneous elements from USAINTC.- a technical service activity providing polygraph, technical service countermeasures, and computer security assistance; the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Support Activity, comprising the Investigative Records Repository and the Personnel Security Group; and the Administrative Survey Detachment.
USAINTC was not the only part of the Army intelligence community affected by the currents of the times. Centralization and economy were the watch
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words of the day. In 1970 a blue ribbon panel appointed by President Nixon had called for much greater integration of service intelligence activities at the DOD level. The Defense Investigative Service was just one of three new Department of Defense agencies that the Nixon administration created to assume intelligence functions which the uniformed services previously had performed. In 1972 the Army topographic assets that ACSI had supervised since 1969 were integrated into the new Defense Mapping Agency.37 During the same year, an attempt was made to integrate all service cryptologic elements into a Central Security Service that would act as the military arm of the National Security Agency. This threatened to strip the Army of much of its remaining role as a manager in the cryptologic field. In practice, however, the Central Security Service did not live up to its initial expectations, and the reorganization did not bring about any substantial change in the relationship between the Army Security Agency and the National Security Agency
The Army Security Agency, although still the largest single intelligence element in the Army, shared the problems of the greater Army during this period. It had to deal with strength ceilings, recruiting problems, and diminished funding. Additionally, it suffered from the problems caused by a large shortfall of equipment and spare parts in the field. As a result of the demands of the war in Vietnam, much of the remaining equipment was obsolete and ill suited to the demands of a high-intensity conflict.
The retrenchment of the agency began in 1970, when it turned over its acoustical intelligence mission to the U.S. Air Force. In 1971 the Army discontinued the 507th and 508th U.S. Army Security Agency Groups, located respectively in Europe and in Korea, and replaced them with smaller elements: the 502d Army Security Agency Group, a TOE unit, in Europe and an unnumbered field station in Korea.38 The reduction continued inexorably as the agency stood down from Vietnam and closed long-established field stations. Of the 99 separate units which ASA fielded in 1970, only 73 still existed in 1972. For reasons of economy, ASA's traditional regional headquarters in Europe and the Pacific were discontinued in 1972.
Meanwhile, the approaching end of the draft made questionable whether the Army Security Agency could enlist enough men to meet mission requirements. As a result, for the first time in its history the agency began recruiting women for cryptologic specialties. Although WACs had served with the SSA's 2d Signal Service Battalion in the continental United States during World War II, the WAC detachment stationed at Arlington Hall at the time of the Korean con-
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flict had performed largely administrative functions. By 1976, however, one-tenth of ASA's uniformed personnel worldwide were female.
Although the Army Security Agency was deeply affected by developments in the cryptologic field, it survived the STEADFAST reforms intact. STEADFAST had resubordinated almost all Army training centers, including the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School, to the newly created Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), but ASA's vertical command structure allowed it to retain its own training base. However, the 1973 reorganization of the Department of the Army did have its effect on Army Intelligence at the staff level. In line with the thrust of STEADFAST, the staff of the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence was reduced by one-third between 1973 and 1974.39 Production and support functions previously carried out within OACSI were transferred to separate detachments with their own TDAs in 1973, and responsibility for administering attache personnel was transferred to the Administrative Survey Detachment in 1974.
A Time of Transition
After the setbacks of the early 1970s, Army Intelligence began to regroup. Even though it operated under continuing personnel and fiscal restraints, the Army Intelligence community undertook a series of initiatives that would put it in a better position to respond to future challenges.
The U.S. Army Intelligence Agency (USAINTA), established in mid-1974, was originally intended as a low-profile organization with the narrowly limited mission of conducting the Army's residual counterintelligence operations in the continental United States. The assets initially assigned to the new agency were modest. Moreover, its mission was constrained and its activities hampered by congressional legislation, congressional investigations, and executive orders that cumulatively had a chilling effect on counterintelligence operations.40 By early 1975 the agency's Investigative Records Repository was required to establish a Freedom of Information Act Office to respond to queries from the public about the contents of the Army's files. However, the agency came into existence just at the time that the disestablishment of U.S. Army, Pacific, made it necessary to resubordinate USARPAC's 500th Military Intelligence Group, primarily a collection element. For want of any more plausible arrangement, the Army gave the U.S. Army Intelligence Agency command of the orphaned group, thus acquiring an area of overseas intelligence responsibility that had been denied its predecessor, USAINTC. Since
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the 500th Military Intelligence Group no longer had the mission of supporting a major Army headquarters in Hawaii, it redeployed to Japan in the summer of 1976.
The Army's desire to realign its counterintelligence command and control system to better satisfy the civilian leadership also contributed to the expansion of the U.S. Army Intelligence Agency's geographical area of responsibility. The Defense Investigative Review Council established guidelines that prohibited Army investigations of non-DOD-affiliated civilians within the fifty states and the Panama Canal Zone, but less stringent prohibitions were in effect overseas. To ensure uniform adherence to these policies, it seemed wise to bring all counterintelligence operations within the council's jurisdiction under the control of a single agency This again resulted in USAINTA's assuming responsibilities that USAINTC had never exercised. The U.S. Army Intelligence Agency gained control of counterintelligence investigations in the Canal Zone and Hawaii and was assigned command of the 901st MI Detachment, which previously had reported directly to the Defense Nuclear Agency Moreover, the command began to diversify the scope of its activities, upgrading and redesignating its technical services element as the Operational Security Group and embarking on initiatives in collecting human intelligence.
ACSI's Special Security Group also expanded its activities. With the fighting in Vietnam over, the group could at last find enough resources to implement its long-delayed plan to provide each Army division with a special security office. Experience gained in Vietnam had demonstrated this to be a necessity under conditions of modern warfare.
The Army Security Agency also began to evolve in fresh directions. The first step was to give ASA's signal security activities in the Western Hemisphere an organizational base that would conform to the new doctrine that stressed providing advice and support to commanders on signal security issues, rather than monitoring communications to detect violations. This concept emphasized the positive aspects of security rather than the negative, and it allowed ASA to deal with the possibility that improperly secured electronic equipment could now pose as much of a security hazard as badly trained communications personnel. To facilitate this approach, the agency organized the Signal Security Activity at Vint Hill Farms Station in June 1975.
The Signal Security Activity took over a support function that previously had been fragmented among eleven separate units in the continental United States, Alaska, and the Canal Zone. Four subordinate field detachments, each with a TEMPEST capability, monitored the possibility of information compromise from electronic emanations. At the same time, the Army shifted general staff supervision over the communications security/signal security area from ACSI to the assistant chief of staff for communications and electronics. Among its other advantages, the transfer distanced the Army Security Agency from any further charges of "spying on civilians."
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Even more important for the Army Security Agency was the growing importance of electronic warfare, part of the agency's mission since 1955. In 1969 the Joint Chiefs of Staff expanded the definition of electronic warfare beyond the accepted "jamming" and "antijamming" roles to encompass the new concept of electronic support measures, which embraced threat detection and avoidance, targeting, and homing. Because of the nature of the combat situation in Vietnam, electronic warfare had played almost no role in that conflict. However, the rapid development of electronic warfare technology and the emphasis given to "radioelectronic combat" in the fighting doctrine of what was then the Army's most probable future adversary made it clear that things would be very different in any potential high-intensity war.41
Unfortunately, the agency's traditional emphasis on its cryptologic mission and the damage the Vietnam conflict had caused, both to equipment readiness and to research and development, had left it poorly positioned to meet the electronic warfare threat. In 1972 the Army's Scientific Advisory Board estimated that less than 10 percent of Army Security Agency resources were devoted to electronic warfare and pointed out that much of the available equipment was obsolete.
In response, the agency began to restructure itself to give greater electronic warfare and signals intelligence support on the tactical level. Aerial platforms were fielded in Europe and Korea, and the agency began to develop new types of units that could integrate signals intelligence with electronic warfare. These units were to coordinate with the tactical formations they supported through ASA-manned elements within unit tactical operations centers responsive to the needs of both the intelligence and operations staff officers. The events of the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 gave a striking demonstration of the importance of electronic warfare even in a mid-intensity conflict. In the aftermath of this conflict, Maj. Gen. George Godding, commanding general, U.S. Army Security Agency, proposed that his organization be redesignated the U.S. Army Electronic Warfare Command. Although the proposal was not accepted, it showed that ASA was now prepared to redefine its traditional mission.
By the end of 1974 the structure of Army Intelligence was in flux. It was still adjusting to painful shortages of money and personnel, while at the same time major components of the Army intelligence community were moving in new directions. However, changes were being made on a piecemeal basis, without any overall plan or centralized guidance. The Army secured a chance to impose a new coherence on its intelligence structure on 31 December 1974, when the chief of staff directed the implementation of a comprehensive study he hoped would impose some cohesion on the many significant changes in process.
1 For a caustic evaluation of the Johnson administration's conduct of the war, see David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972).
2 Kathleen J. Turner, Lyndon Johnson's Dual War: Vietnam and the Press (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 211.
3 It should be noted that the official Army photo history of the Vietnam War, which begins its coverage in 1945, tactfully chooses to end its account in 1973.
4 Some of the controversies are explored in T. L. Cubbage II, "Westmoreland vs. CBS: Was Intelligence Corrupted by Policy Demands," Intelligence and National Security 3 (July 1988): 118-80.
5 Operations of this little-known unit are mentioned in Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1988), p. 203, and in Robert F. Futrell's The Advisory Years to 1965, The United States Air Force in Southeast Asia (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1981), p. 244.
6 Lt. Col. Arthur D. McQueen, "The Lion Goes to War," Military Intelligence (April/June 1977): 28-36.
7 The reorganization of Army Intelligence in the Republic of Vietnam between 1965 and 1967 is described in General Joseph A. McChristian, The Role of Military Intelligence, 1965-1967 (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, 1974), pp. 3-20.
8 Shelby Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle (Washington, D.C.: U.S. News Books, 1981), pp. 235-36.
9 Ibid., pp. 233-34.
10 McChristian, The Role of Military Intelligence, pp. 21-78. A description of the Combined Intelligence Center, Vietnam (and much else), is contained in Bruce E. Jones, War Without Windows: A True Account of a Young Army Officer Trapped in an Intelligence Cover-Up in Vietnam (New York: Vanguard Press, 1987). See also Col. Huang Ngoc Lung, Intelligence, Indochina Monographs (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1982), pp. 82-83. Lung feels that the relationship between U.S. and Vietnamese intelligence did not become "really close and effective" until 1969.
11 General Bruce Palmer, Jr., The 25-Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1984), pp. 39-40.
12 The Secretary of the Army's Program for Command Supervision of Readiness: Command Presentation by U.S. Army Security Agency, 10 Sep 68, p. 19, Army Cryptologic Records. During the Berlin Crisis of 1961 the deployment of two ASA battalions had ended in a fiasco; the units were so ill trained that that they never got beyond the gates of the ASA Training Center and School at Fort Devens, Massachusetts. Eventually, the 241st and 277th Military Intelligence Detachments were called into federal service in the token reserve mobilization following the Tet offensive, but they never went overseas.
13 John D. Bergen, Military Communications: A Test for Technology, United States Army in Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1987), pp. 396-401.
14 Powe and Wilson, The Evolution of American Military Intelligence, p. 115.
15 Shelby Stanton, Green Berets at War: U.S. Army Special Forces in Southeast Asia, 1956-1975 (Novato, Calif.- Presidio Press, 1985). See also the same author's Vietnam Order of Battle, pp. 239-53.
16 ICEX Newsletter 67-4, 4 Dec 67, p. 6. By 1969, however, the Army command in Vietnam had become disenchanted by the program because of the perceived excesses of the Provincial Reconnaissance Units that served as executive agents in "neutralizing" Viet Cong cadre. Jeffrey J. Clarke, Advice and Support: the Final Years, United States Army in Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1988), pp. 379-80. Perhaps participants took too literally the injunction to take "a `rifle shot' approach" in dealing with the infrastructure problem. ICEX Briefing Paper, 30 Aug 67, p. 1. A recent detailed examination of PHOENIX is Dale Andrade, Ashes to Ashes: The Phoenix Program and the Vietnam War (Lexington, Ky.: D.C. Heath, 1990). For the personal account of an Army participant in this much maligned and misunderstood program, see Stuart H. Herrington, Silence Was a Weapon: The War for the Vietnam Villages, A Personal Perspective (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982).
17 Some of these ASA activities are captured in photographs in John P. Finnegan, Military Intelligence: A Picture History (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1985), pp. 167-68.
18 Casualties among Military Intelligence personnel were not restricted to members of the Army Security Agency. During the Tet offensive, the Hue detachment of the 525th MI Group was overrun and its members killed or captured. The first Medal of Honor ever granted to a Military Intelligence officer was awarded posthumously to 1st Lt. George Sisler, assistant intelligence officer of a Special Forces team.
19 USASA Commanders Conference, 5-12 May 69, Staff Presentation Roundtable Discussions, Army Cryptologic Records.
20 Bergen, Military Communications, pp. 407-08.
21 The 224th Aviation Battalion (Radio Research) managed the fixed-wing assets, flying 100 aircraft at the height of the conflict. Included in its inventory was a handful of four-motored reconverted patrol bombers acquired from the Navy.
22 Individual Army Intelligence personnel did remain behind as members of the Defense Attaches Office.
23 U.S. Army Intelligence Command Annual Report of Major Activities, FY 1971, p. 40, copy in INSCOM History Office files.
24 Ibid., p. 41. Vance was not the only high government official interested in Army collection capabilities against civil disorders. In late 1967 Attorney General Ramsey Clark established the Inter-Divisional Information Unit in the Justice Department "to make full use of available intelligence." For the first two years of its existence, the unit drew heavily on Army counterintelligence for its data. Paul Cowan, Nick Eggleson, and Nat Hentoff, State Secrets: Police Surveillance in America (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1974), pp. 14-15.
25 Christopher H. Pyle, Army Surveillance of Civilian Politics, 1967-1970 (New York: Garland Publishers, 1970), is a scholarly account of the Army's domestic intelligence activities by a participant-observer and whistleblower.
26 U.S. Army Intelligence Command Report of Major Activities, FY 1971, p. 48.
27 Palmer, The 25-Year War, p. 83. A surprisingly measured evaluation of what all this amounted to can be found in Cowan et al., State Secrets, p. 13. "The overall picture is of a moderately large bureaucratic apparatus built to conduct formal interviews for background checks and trying to do the impossible job of predicting major social disorders. It sponged off the FBI for most of its information and used plainclothes operatives for the rest. The information filled numerous computerized files, caused irrelevant briefings, and did little else- within the army."
28 Powe and Wilson, The Evolution of American Military Intelligence, p. 105.
29 Intelligence Organization and Stationing Study (IOSS), Aug 75, Exec Sum, p. 29, copy in INSCOM History Office files.
30 Department of the Army Historical Summary, Fiscal Year 1970 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1973), p. 82.
31 Dr. Bruce Saunders, "U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School," Military Intelligence 10 (April June 1984): 61.
32 Department of the Army Historical Summary, Fiscal Year 1973 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1977), pp. 45-46.
33 U.S. Army Intelligence Command Report of Major Activities, FY 1971, p. 219.
34 Department of the Army Historical Summary, Fiscal Year 1973, pp. 53-54.
35 Theodore H. White, Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon (New York: Dell Publishing, 1976), pp. 174-77.
36 Department of the Army Historical Summary, Fiscal Year 1974 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1977), p. 42.
37 Department of the Army Historical Summary, Fiscal Year 1972 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1974), p. 44.
38 The discontinuance of the 508th USASA Group in Korea in 1971 took place in the context of a major reduction in troop strength there. This drawdown was part of the implementation of the "Nixon Doctrine," which sought to shift the main burden of providing ground forces for defense to our allies.
39 Department of the Army Historical Summary, Fiscal Year 1974, p. 38.
40 A telling indication of the disfavor into which any type of military counterintelligence operation had fallen at this time was Congress' decision in 1974 to discontinue all military censorship units in the reserve components.
41 Don E. Gordon, Electronic Warfare: Element of Strategy and Multiplier of Combat Power (New York: Pergamon Press, 1981), p. 153.
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