Outflanked in Vietnam By Laura Sullivan for The Baltimore Sun , May 2001

CODES
Documents reveal the Viet Cong’s
extraordinary success in monitor-
ing U.S. military communications.

Using a PRC-25
FM radio a cap-
tain with the 1st
Air Cavalry calls
in his position
near the A Shau
Valley. The PRC-25
was the standard
small tactical
radio in Vietnam.
Photo by Philip
Jones Griffiths/
Magnum

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I n the fall of 1969 in Bing Duong province of
Vietnam, a North Vietnamese soldier sat at a
table in a large underground tunnel, taking notes.
“Do you know about the heavy artillery
warning yet?” he scribbled in English as an
Amer can soldier’s voice crackled over his radio.
“Negative,” another American responded.
“The coordinates are 550 600, 3/5/31 until
1130 hours,” the first soldier said.
In the margin, the North Vietnamese sol-
dier wrote “heavy artillery = B52 Strike, at [11:
30 a.m.]” When the B-52 airplane dropped its
750-pound bombs on a target in a nearby prov-
ince 20 minutes later, the enemy was long gone.
The notebook is one of hundreds of docu-
ments recently declassified by the National
Security Agency depicting numerous similar
situations of foiled bombing raids and am-
bushes during the Vietnam War that offer
new insight into an underestimated enemy.
By revealing the North Vietnamese’s intensive
and successful efforts to breach American com-
“Outflanked in Vietnam”
munications, the documents, many now on display
at the NSA museum, begin to dispel the long-held
assumption that the Viet Cong were technologically
unsophisticated, many experts and veterans say.
For some, the disclosure is the last missing piece
that helps explain how a technologically advanced
nation like the United States couldn’t win a war half-
way around the world in a small country’s jungle.
“[These Viet Cong] efforts impacted the war in
terms of casualties and facilitating ambushes that
didn’t need to occur, and it allowed them to avoid
contact with American forces,” said Michael Jacobs,
the agency’s director of information assurance.
“There were a number of ambushes that occurred
in those days that always seemed a bit suspicious.
“When you couple [Washington’s reti-
cence about the war] with the failure to se-
cure communications, you begin to see ...
increasing casualties and great frustration
over blown operations, and over time, they
became reasons for the failure in Vietnam.”
The documents show that beginning with the
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buildup of American forces in Vietnam in 1961
through the early 1970s, American command-
ers had little idea the North Vietnamese were
exploiting their communications.
The first hint of enemy eavesdropping was un-
covered when American soldiers spotted a strange
antenna sticking out of the ground in 1969 and
stumbled upon an intricate tunnel system housing
two dozen men and “very high quality” transmit-
ters and receivers. The soldiers found more than
1,400 recent hand-copied voice transmissions and
even biographical data of hundreds of soldiers:
their birthplaces, speech patterns and habits.
In a declassified 1970 report on the incident,
American officials warned their commanders that
their soldiers weren’t properly encrypting their
conversations—and in many instances weren’t
encrypting them at all—and that hundreds of
missions had been compromised. By the time
A soldier operates an AN/MRC-34, the
communication security improved in the early standard divisional VHF radio in Vietnam,
1970s, the American war effort was already on with its trademark fly swatter-shaped
the decline. antenna. US Army photo.

“Outflanked in Vietnam” 3
 In one instruction manual taken from the
Viet Cong and held by NSA, the North Vietnamese
author wrote: “[American] exchanges are a little
strange ... but they are not very fast. Officers ...
when in communication with subordinate officers
or units report calmly and carefully even during
an attack. ... We can determine where the enemy
has discovered us, whether our plans have been
compromised.
“The messages they send are easy to under-
stand, because they do not encrypt coordinates
which is very advantageous for us.”
John D. Bergen, who studied many of these
classified reports as a lieutenant colonel in the
Army and later wrote the book “The Electronic
Battlefield” for the Center for Military His-
tory, said that American soldiers’ encryption
efforts were hampered by complicated coding
schemes as well as their ubiquitous FM voice
radios, which were cheap and simple to operate.
These radios had tremendous range and
transmitted in every direction, much to the ad-
“Outflanked in Vietnam”
vantage of the Viet Cong.
American soldiers often made their own home-
made codes, assuming the Vietnamese wouldn’t
understand baseball analogies or “Boston” to
signify “east.”
But unlike U.S. soldiers who rarely spent
more than six months in one place, Bergen
said, the Viet Cong spent years in the tunnels
of numerous intercept sites, working diligently
with often simple radio devices. Despite such
simplicity, their notes reflected extraordinary
organization, detail and sophisticated math-
ematics. Each Vietnamese soldier would study
one American unit seven days a week for months
at time, as Americans “chattered incessantly.”
“We thought we were invulnerable,” said
Bergen, who served as a battalion adviser in
Vietnam from 1968 to 1969.
“I think there is a lesson there as we engage
in peace-keeping situations all around the world
now,” he said, “that even when you are facing a
seemingly poorly armed and primitively organized
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entity, the worst thing you can do is underestimate
the enemy, just like we did then.”
For many American officials, it was difficult to
believe the Viet Cong had the information they did,
largely because the enemy went to great lengths
to portray their decryption and technological
abilities as nonexistent.
Douglas Pike, who was a Foreign Service
officer at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, remem-
bers there being much discussion about why so
many Air Force missions and bombing strikes
were unsuccessful. The common thinking, he
said, was that Russian trawlers were watching
the airplanes take off, perhaps “guessing” where
they were headed.
“That’s what we said publicly,” said Pike, now
the director of research at the Vietnam Center
at Texas Tech. “Later at the Embassy, in private
briefings we wondered if there was some leak-
age. Some people speculated that they must have
people on the ground who were listening in, but
you never knew what the validity of those allega-
“Outflanked in Vietnam”
tions were.
“It’s a kind of arrogance really,” he said. “We
just couldn’t believe people wearing black pajamas
could mount that kind of surveillance.”
But they did. Other documents confiscated
late in the war show, for example, that at a sur-
veillance site outside the 1st Calvary Division’s
headquarters, the Viet Cong monitored the
11th Aviation Group’s helicopter unit every
night, learning where the battles were to be
fought the next day and setting up ambushes.
Joe P. Dunn, professor and chair of the His-
tory and Politics Department at Converse College
in North Carolina, who is a national authority on
how the Vietnam War is taught, said these docu-
ments will begin to change people’s understanding
of the war.
“It deepens our understanding of how things
happened and ups the level of what they were do-
ing that we didn’t appreciate,” he said. “There’s a
lot more to learn over the next decade about the
technology and capabilities of the Viet Cong that
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 will likely lead to a reinterpretation of the war.”
Americans were also spying on the Viet
Cong, though their efforts were often hampered
by the Viet Cong’s diligent use of encryption. The
Vietnam War was also the first time the agency
used airplanes - albeit cramped, small ones - to
spy and gather electronic intelligence, which the
cryptologists dubbed “TWA” for “Teeney Weeney
Airlines. The first solider to die during the Vietnam
War, according to the NSA was cryptologist James
Davis, who died in an ambush outside Saigon in
December 1961.
Cole Miller, a retired NSA analyst who was one
of the first two cryptologists permanently assigned
to Vietnam, remembers seeing Davis’ wedding ring
and personal items on a table when he arrived.
“I just remember thinking, this is for real, folks,
we’re not just practicing anymore,” Miller said.
Like the Viet Cong, NSA attempted to hide
its presence.
Jack Barrett, also a retired analyst who served
in Vietnam, said they wore Army fatigues but their
“Outflanked in Vietnam”
badges said “Department of Defense Representa-
tive.”
“Half the people would salute us and the
other half didn’t know what to do,” he said.
The last wartime message the Viet Cong in-
tercepted was the last message an American sent.
From the Embassy in Saigon in 1975, a cryp-
tologist transmitted, “I have just received word
to evacuate. Will cease transmission immediately
after this message. We’re tired, but otherwise all
right. Looks like the battle for Saigon is on for
real. I commend to you my people who deserve
the best NSA can give them for what they have
been through, but especially for what they have
achieved.”
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