In September 2025, we welcomed a group of Army Security Agency (ASA) veterans — including John Peart, Gerry Freed, Brian Harrison, Lonnie Long, Bill Mears, Vernon Greunke, Phil Rutherford, Joe Adams, and several others — to talk about a service many Americans have never heard of but that shaped U.S. intelligence through the early Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, and into the 1970s.
We’re bringing them back and adding more voices for a deeper conversation about who the ASA was, what its mission meant in their lives, and how their work echoes into the present.
Founded on 15 September 1945, the ASA grew out of a long Army lineage of signals intelligence and communications security work that traced back through the World Wars. Its mission was straightforward in purpose, if cryptic in practice: intercept enemy communications, decode them, analyze them, and keep Army communications secure. ASA soldiers didn’t march down Main Street in uniform with medals — they lived at listening posts, in fixed field stations from Turkey to Japan, in remote hilltops in Southeast Asia, and in tactical units alongside fighting forces. The motto Semper Vigiles — Vigilant Always — wasn’t just ceremonial, it was their lived reality.
What made ASA service different was not just the technical intensity of the work — signals intelligence, direction finding, cryptography, electronic warfare — but the culture of compartmented secrecy. ASA soldiers often knew only the fragment of a mission they were assigned; they could not speak about their work, even to fellow veterans outside secure channels, for decades after service. Yet the intelligence they pulled from ether and wire was woven into strategic decisions, operational planning, and battlefield support from Korea to Vietnam.
In Vietnam, ASA personnel served under the cover name Radio Research. The first unit sent — the 3rd Radio Research Unit at Tan Son Nhut in May 1961 — marked the earliest sustained Army presence there, four years before conventional ground forces arrived. Specialist 4 James T. Davis, a direction-finding operator, was killed in an ambush in December 1961 and is remembered as the first American combat casualty recognized by the Department of Defense in that war. The ASA compound at Tan Son Nhut was later named Davis Station in his honor.
Last year’s conversation with Peart and others — veterans whose names and faces many in the audience had never heard before — revealed the depth of this hidden service: long nights at intercept consoles, the strange beauty and loneliness of bivouac hilltop stations, the thrill when a cryptic net “went hot,” and the frustration of having to keep the story locked away long after returning home.
For this follow-up program, Peart and several of his fellow ASA veterans will return to share more of their experiences. They’ll be joined by additional ASA veterans — some you’ve heard before in conversation with VBC and some who are joining this community for the first time — to talk about the human side of intelligence service: the friendships forged under strict secrecy, the challenges of reintegrating into civilian life with stories they couldn’t tell, and the pride they felt in work that, for decades, almost no one outside the classified world understood.
We’ll also trace the ASA’s broader arc: its growth as a SIGINT and COMSEC force during the early Cold War, its expansion through Korea and Vietnam, and its eventual absorption into the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) in 1977, when Army intelligence reorganized into multi-discipline formations. Though the ASA name disappeared, its legacy survives in today’s Army intelligence and electronic warfare units.
