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                                            ASA HISTORY
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The U.S. Army has supported its fighting forces with signals intelligence since World War I. The first permanent organization to do this was established in 1930 as the Signal Intelligence Service. During World War II, the SIS (renamed the Signal Security Service in 1943 and later the Signal Security Agency - SSA) exploited the communications of both Germany and Japan, shortening the war and saving many thousands of American lives.

The SSA was reorganized as the Army Security Agency (ASA) at Arlington Hall Station, Virginia, on September 15 1945. Operating under the command of the Director of Military Intelligence, the new agency had a sweeping charter. It exercised control functions through a vertical command structure. ASA established a worldwide chain of fixed sites - "field stations" - while maintaining large theater headquarters in the Far East and in Europe.

In 1949, all three military crypto logic services were centralized under the new Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), the precursor of today's National Security Agency. ASA transferred most members of its large civilian headquarters staff to AFSA in this process. However, because of the need once again to support troops in actual combat in the Korean War, ASA again expanded, deploying tactical units on a large scale to support the Army in combat. For the first time, ASA grew to include groups and battalions in its force structure.
                                             
In 1955, ASA took over electronic intelligence (ELINT) and electronic warfare functions previously carried out by the Signal Corps. Since its mission was no longer exclusively identified with intelligence and security, ASA was withdrawn from G-2 control and resubordinated to the Army Chief of Staff as a field operating agency.

In the 1960s, ASA was again called upon to assist U.S. forces in the field. On May 13 1961, the first contingent of Army Security Agency personnel arrived in South Vietnam (setting up an organization at Tan Son Nhut Air Base) to provide support to the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group and help train the South Vietnamese Army. During the early years of conflict, ASA troops in Vietnam were assigned to the 3rd Radio Research Unit. Their primary mission was to locate Viet Cong transmitters operating in the south. This mission was in its early stages when one of their direction finding (DF) operators, SP4 James T. Davis, was killed in a Viet Cong ambush on a road outside Saigon. The date of the ambush, December 22 1961, made Davis the first American soldier to lose his life during the Vietnam War.
                                   
The death of Davis brought home to ASA the dangers to proceeding into the jungle with short-range DF equipment to locate VC transmitters that might be only a few miles away. Since radio wave propagation in Southeast Asia required that DF equipment be very close to the transmitter, the obvious answer was to go airborne. ASA engineers began working on the problem, and by March 1962 they had their first airborne DF platform, a single-engine aircraft that flew low, slow, and had room for only a few people.
                              
In the fall of 1962, one veteran arrived in Vietnam assigned to the 3rd Radio Research Unit. He recalls that after Davis was killed operating a jeep-based PRC-10 direction finding unit, someone decided that this function could be better handled from the air. Within days, soldiers in the unit were calling it TWA (Teeny Weeny Airlines).
                                       
With the introduction of large U.S. ground combat elements into South Vietnam in 1965, the ASA organization in-country expanded. The 3rd RRU was replaced by the 509th Radio Research Group, which commanded three battalions and company-size direct support units assigned to all Army divisions. One of the 509th's subordinate battalions was the 224th Aviation Battalion (Radio Research), which pioneered in the introduction of Special Electronic Mission Aircraft (SEMA) to the battlefield. At the height of the war, the 509th radio Research Group commanded some 6,000 ASA personnel in-country. Meanwhile, the agency itself had greatly expanded, reaching a strength of 30,000 and attaining the status of a major Army field command in 1964.
    
However, the massive drawdown of the Army after the Vietnam War led to pressures to achieve economies by the consolidation of intelligence functions. In 1975, the Army Chief of Staff accepted the recommendations of the Intelligence Organization and Stationing Study and agreed to a wholesale reorganization of Army Intelligence. The decision was made to create multidisciplinary military intelligence organizations within the Army at both the tactical and departmental levels. As a result, ASA was effectively dismembered. ASA's tactical units were resubordinated to the local commander, its functional responsibilities for training and research and development spun off to other major army commands (MACOMs), and its headquarters and fixed sites used as the nucleus of a new intelligence and security MACOM. On January 1. 1977, Headquarters, U.S. Army Security agency, was redesignated as Headquarters, U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command.
                                        

SINOP TURKEY VIEW FROM ABOVE

KBOK RADIO STATION SINOP
LAND LINE ON BASE ONLY

THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED
 VIEW OF THE CITY OF SINOP

BELOW IS SOME OF THE NEW SINOP
BELOW IS SOME OF THE NEW SINOP
BELOW IS SOME OF THE NEW SINOP
BELOW IS SOME OF THE NEW SINOP
BELOW IS SOME OF THE NEW SINOP

SITES TO VISIT ASSOCIATED WITH
TUSLOG DET. 4 FIELD STATION
JUST CLICK ON THE GRAPHIC

MENWITH  HILL 
HARROGATE, YORKSHIRE, ENGLAND

13TH  USASA  FIELD  STATION

SITES TO VISIT ASSOCIATED WITH
MENWITH HILL FIELD STATION
JUST CLICK ON THE GRAPHIC

TWO ROCK RANCH
ARMY SECURITY AGENCY
 STATION
PETALUMA, CALIFORNIA

SITES TO VISIT ASSOCIATED WITH
TWO ROCK FIELD STATION
JUST CLICK ON THE GRAPHIC (when they are posted)

I INVITE OTHER MEMBERS OF THIS ELITE GROUP OF ASA PEOPLE TO SEND ME INFORMATION AND PHOTOGRAPHS OF STATIONS THAT YOU DON'T SEE ABOVE. WITH PERMISSION, I WILL ADD ANY FORMER ASA MILITARY SITES IN THE WORLD.

SINOP, TURKEY

ASA FROM
1945 - 1975

INSIGNIA FOR
ARMY SECURITY, USAR
 - OBSOLETE - 

VIETNAM ALL VETS

United States
AIR FORCE

I WILL BE ADDING TO THIS GROUP AND IF YOU SEE A ITEM THAT IS NOT ASA OR OTHER SECURITY GROUP PLEASE LET ME KNOW.