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

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.