IC releases newly declassified Tet Offensive documents

On January 4, 2018, in recognition of the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War’s Tet Offensive, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats directed intelligence agencies to review their holdings for historical material of current interest relating to the IC’s role in the Tet Offensive.

On July 31, the Intelligence Community published the first installment of the newly declassified documents relating to the Tet Offensive, highlighting material from the Central Intelligence Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

Intelligence.gov will serve as the hub for information on the progress of the Tet Offensive document declassification throughout the process and will provide access to materials sourced from across the IC upon their release.  Follow @inteldotgov and #TetDeclassified for updates.

Additional documents will be released in three installments over a period of 15 months. As documents are released we will include additional features and information to improve functionality and discovery.

About the Transparency Initiative

Efforts to declassify historical information of current relevance are rooted in the IC’s 2015 Transparency Implementation Plan for the Principles of Intelligence Transparency, published on October 27, 2015. The plan identifies transparency priorities and translates the principles into concrete, measurable initiatives.

On December 9, 2016, the DNI instructed the Intelligence Community Senior Historians Panel to identify topics of historical interest for declassification and release, as a part of the IC’s continuing efforts to enhance public understanding of IC activities.

For the first release of this initiative, the panel recommended documents relating to the Tet Offensive be reviewed for declassification and released in commemoration of the Vietnam War.

About the Tet Offensive

The Tet Offensive was a series of surprise attacks launched by the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong on January 30, 1968, throughout South Vietnam that targeted multiple prominent sites, including the Presidential Palace and the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

While the attacks initially took the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces by surprise, they eventually recovered to repel the Viet Cong. The dramatic nature of the Tet Offensive began to turn U.S. public opinion against the war and precipitated the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam.

Source: ODNI