cypherpunks

https://web.archive.org/web/20020305192247/http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/arie44lp.htm

The papers were declassified 15 years ago today, after their initial partial publication began 55 years ago today.

Sam Roberts of The New York Times reported in 2011:

AFTER all 7,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers were released last month, a parlor game was born: Find the 11 words that the government didn’t want you to read.

Those 11 words, on a single page, were supposed to be redacted when the papers were made public in their entirety by the National Archives and Records Administration. But the National Declassification Center reversed that decision after the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential library discovered that the full page — with all 11 words — had been released in the early 1970s by the House Armed Services Committee. Any effort to reclassify the words now would only call more attention to them.

That has not stopped policy wonks from trying to guess what they were. The answer may never be known, but John Prados, director of the Vietnam Project of the National Security Archive, a research institute at George Washington University, offered up (appropriately enough) 11 possibilities and zeroed in on two.

One confirmed that the National Security Agency could monitor Soviet leaders’ encrypted telephone conversations — specifically, one in 1967 between top Soviet leaders about a Vietnam War peace feeler from the Johnson administration, conveyed by the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

Dr. Prados suggested that the following 11 italicized words may have been the sensitive ones: “At 9:30 A.M. today according to a telephone intercept Kosygin called Brezhnev and said [there was] a great possibility of achieving this aim.”

But he was inclined to rule out those words as the redacted ones. One reason: the columnist Jack Anderson had written in 1971 about the security agency’s intercepts.

So Dr. Prados focused on a remaining possibility: instructions for an electronic monitoring mission in the Gulf of Tonkin in February 1965. The instructions mentioned an operation “covering a two destroyer Patrol Group with on-line Crypto Ratt” (translation: a secret secure-line radio Teletype that automatically encoded sensitive messages).

Although the agency declassified documents in 2008 that identified the equipment, this is the most likely redaction, Dr. Prados said, because the agency tends to protect secrets reflexively, whether or not they were already released.

Leslie H. Gelb, who directed the government task force that wrote the Pentagon Papers and is now president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, concurs that the radio teletype is the most likely.

“I didn’t even remember that was there,” Mr. Gelb said. “If I had focused on it, I wouldn’t have put it in because I wouldn’t have wanted to reveal it.”

In the end, Dr. Prados said, what is most revealing is the government’s enduring obsession with secrecy. “The most distressing aspect of the 11 words episode,” he said, “is that anyone at all felt a need to try and put toothpaste back into the tube after the passage of four decades’ time.”

note: today the internet archive only has archived 404s of the page which the New York Times linked to containing all of John Prados' 11 guesses about the 11 words at George Washington University's National Security Archive.

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you have to see it for yourself

This work assembles a Tamarian- English dictionary of utterances from the original episode and several follow-on novels, and uses this to construct a parallel corpus of 456 English-Tamarian utterances.

for more serious writing on the Tamarian language subject, see this and chapter 5 of this.