NSA releases 1,600 Vietnam War POW/MIA-related documents

The National Security Agency / Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) will release 1,600 declassified documents related to the agency’s support to Vietnam War Prisoner of War/Missing in Action (POW/MIA) cases, the agency announced on December 11. These documents will be released in a series with the first 170 documents now available on nsa.gov. The publication of these documents supports NSA’s commitment to increased transparency.

The documents consist of NSA intelligence reports, memoranda and notes by NSA analysts that were directly or potentially related to incidents where a member of the U.S. military was known to have been taken prisoner or declared MIA. The Agency completed three “Correlation Studies” for the Senate Select Committee on Vietnam POW/MIA Affairs throughout the 1990s, beginning in 1992 and ending in 1996. These studies were released on nsa.gov in September 2014. The continuing need to protect information contained in the documents which remains properly classified required a small number of redactions to the information.

“The documents NSA released demonstrate how we contributed to U.S. Government efforts to locate service members taken prisoner or declared missing during the Vietnam conflict,” said David Sherman, associate director of policy and records. “NSA continues to support similar activities on behalf of Americans and others held against their will.”

Now, the entire archive of releasable material related to Vietnam POW/MIA issues will be available in a single location on nsa.gov as a service to family members, historians and the general public. Some of these documents were released previously in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

NSA/CSS believes the current series of releases represents a comprehensive set of all relevant NSA documents in its holdings of historical materials. If additional POW/MIA documents are discovered, NSA/CSS remains committed to reviewing the material to determine the potential for release and posting on nsa.gov.