Newly declassified White House documents shed light on a unique crisis in American history: when investigators working for President Richard Nixon discovered that the Joint Chiefs of Staff used a stenographer to spy on civilian command during the Vietnam War.

A Navy stenographer assigned to the National Security Council during the Nixon administration"stole documents from just about every individual that he came into contact with on the NSC," according to newly declassified White House documents.

The two-dozen pages of memoranda, transcripts and notes -- once among the most sensitive and privileged documents in the Executive Branch -- shed important new details on a unique crisis in American history: when investigators working for President Richard Nixon discovered that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, using the stenographer as their agent, actively spied on the civilian command during the Vietnam War.

The episode became known as"the Moorer-Radford affair," after the chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time, the late Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, and the stenographer involved, Navy Yeoman Charles Radford. The details first surfaced in early 1974 as part of the Watergate revelations, but remained obscure until historians in the 1990s and this decade began fleshing out the episode.