Milton Zaslow, 87; Played Major Role In U.S. Intelligence

Washington Post - United States

Obituaries
Milton Zaslow, 87; Played Major Role In U.S. Intelligence

By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 25, 2008; Page B06

Early in the Korean War, Milton Zaslow and three other cryptologists working in China for the Armed Forces Security Agency were reading thousands of messages sent over commercial telegraph when they began to notice a large number that said: "Father died. Come at once," or "Mother ill. Come home."

They figured out that the Chinese army was recalling soldiers on leave to their units. Tracking the movements of four army divisions, Mr. Zaslow and his colleagues determined that the Chinese were preparing to enter North Korea. The discovery was important. The intervention of the Chinese in November 1950 greatly increased the war's intensity and scope.

Mr. Zaslow, 87, a seminal figure at the National Security Agency who played a significant role in U.S. intelligence from World War II through the Vietnam War, died of cardiac arrest July 15 at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring.

Because he worked for an agency that holds some of the government's most secret information, an agency that for years was itself a secret, the full details of Mr. Zaslow's career might never be known. But by the time he retired in 1979, he was the NSA's second-highest-ranking civilian.

His career at NSA included oversight of the agency's operations in Vietnam during the long war. He was involved in a variety of matters, including the reports of hostile action in the Gulf of Tonkin, which launched America's major intervention in the war, to providing signal intelligence for the failed 1970 rescue attempt of Americans held at the Son Tay prisoner of war camp in North Vietnam.

The New York native had just graduated from the City College of New York when the United States entered World War II. Trained in intensive Japanese-language classes, he was commissioned an Army second lieutenant and put in charge of 10 linguists, mostly Japanese Americans whose families were interned in the United States.

His unit translated captured diaries and documents picked up on battlefields, then accompanied Marines, acting as translators, in Tinian, one of the main Northern Marianas Islands. They swam ashore on Okinawa on Aug. 6, 1945, the day that the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

"The only things that kept me from sinking is I packed my bag so well [that] it kept me afloat. I carried a carbine and a .45 and 20 pounds of dictionaries," he told a Library of Congress interviewer.

His unit was among the first to enter Nagasaki after an atom bomb was dropped there, and it stayed to help with reconstruction.

After World War II, he transferred to the Army Security Agency, an NSA precursor. Posted to China, he began reading thousands of messages that led to the discovery of Chinese troop movements.

Fifty years later, Mr. Zaslow told a spellbound crowd at the opening of a Korean War exhibit at the NSA's museum, "I have been waiting a long, long time to talk about this." He said that despite their claims at the time, top military officials, including Gen. Douglas MacArthur, were briefed six months before the Chinese invaded. "But he said, 'Well, maybe they're not coming anyway, so maybe we can win the war,' " Mr. Zaslow told the audience.

The NSA was formed in 1952, and Mr. Zaslow rose through the ranks, leading its offices in Japan in the early 1960s, serving as the NSA's first liaison to the Pentagon in 1969 and overseeing the group dealing with the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc nations. He was stationed in London from 1975 to 1978.

According to an oral history project conducted for the NSA's Center for Cryptologic History, he said he "absolutely" believed that North Vietnam attacked U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964, although it has since been documented that there was no attack.

At the time, he was in constant touch with other NSA officials in Vietnam. "We saw the beginnings of Vietnamese actions. We reported them. And we reported the hostile actions on two occasions . . . in both cases before the event took place," he said. "Now there have been many arguments since then that there was a spurious raid that never took place. That's not what we felt we saw."

During the Vietnam War, the NSA, the CIA and military officials decided to raid the Son Tay POW camp, 20 miles west of Hanoi, where 50 to 100 U.S. service members were held.

As Mr. Zaslow was briefing the secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff about the raid's progress, an officer rushed in, saying North Vietnam had launched MiG fighters.

Supremely confident in his intelligence, Mr. Zaslow responded, "No MiGs," according to NSA historian Robert J. Hanyok in "Spartans in Darkness: American Signal Intelligence and the Indochina War, 1945-1975," which was declassified this year.

The raid failed. The POWs had been moved months earlier. But there were no MiGs.

In 1971, the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department's history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. When U.S. District Judge Murray Gurfein refused the government's motion to prohibit publication of the documents, Mr. Zaslow sought a meeting with the newspaper's lawyer.

"Zaslow, a rather short, pudgy-faced man with thick, wavy, black hair, reportedly arrived wearing a pistol strapped across his chest and accompanied by a security agent from M5 wearing two revolvers at his sides," wrote James Bamford in "The Puzzle Palace" (1982).

"Once they were alone, Zaslow wasted no time in saying why he was there: he wanted the Times to agree to delete from the Pentagon Papers anything that might alert foreign governments to the fact that their communications systems had been penetrated," Bamford wrote.

He left reassured. (The documents had already been edited to remove details of the espionage.)

Mr. Zaslow was the NSA's deputy director for telecommunications and computer services until his retirement in 1979.

His wife, Elinor "Nonie" Zaslow, died in 1996.

Survivors include two children, William Zaslow of Rogersville, Mo., and Ellen Zaslow of San Francisco.