spartans_in_darkness

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Tep SEeRETNeeMIIHNXl
EO
EO
1.4. (c)
1.4. (d)
going to make a major effort during the upcoming
April national elections to overthrow President
Diem." To McGarr, cOMINT could pinpoint the
enemy's transmitters; the tendency for U.S. intelligence,
especially the cryptologic organizations,
to preserve the communist radio stations for the
purpose of retaining an intelligence source,
seemed to him counterproductive from a strictly
military perspective. His own understanding of
the problem was that the Vietnamese army was
not getting the support necessary to destroy these
stations." To him, there had to be channels to get
the intelligence on these stations to the
Vietnamese.
(TS//SI) McGarr had also made one other
recommendation: to get the U.S. Army Security
Agency to train the Vietnamese to produce better
cOMINT on their own. It was an idea that had
already been taken up in Washington. On 13
April, the Intelligence Board agreed that it was
time to commit U.S. communications intelligence
resources to the struggle. The USASA was tasked
to develop the operating plans. On 8 May, DIRN­
SA informed NSA elements in the Pacific region
of the approved plans which included the insertion
of a seventy-eight-man ASA unit into South
Vietnam, the provision of intelligence informa-
tion to the Vietnamese, and the arrival of a
fifteen-man team to train the Vietnamese in
intercept and D/F techniques. The training plan
was called Sabertooth, and it was hoped that its
results would change the face of Vietnamese
COMINT.
(~//~I) Earlier, we had talked about the first
ASA contingent to Vietnam, the 3rd RRU) which
had arrived in May 1961. We saw how theyhad to
throw out everything they previously had learned
about cOMINT and D/F and begin from scratch.
Their companion unit slated for the training of
the South Vietnamese was in much the same
straits. The Sabertooth team first assembled at
Fort Devens, Massachusetts, to receive special
indoctrination on South Vietnam. The original
Sabertooth plan called for an overly optimistic
target of training almost 400 South Vietnamese
officers and enlisted personnel in voice and manual
morse intercept, direction finding, traffic
analysis, textual processing, and command and
control of cOMINT units. Funding was approved
and training equipment arrived that summer.
By September 1961, Sabertooth began with a
ceremony attended by the nominal chief of
the ARVN cOMINT or anization,
and General McGarr.
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(V) Sabertooth
manual morse
intercept
tt'lining
classroom
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.etc
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