After graduating from the College of the City of New York in 1942, Milton Zaslow took Japanese language courses at New York University. As a combat intelligence officer, he provided direct support during landings on Tinian and Okinawa.
At the end of the war, Zaslow joined the Army Security Agency as a civilian linguist, where he added Chinese to his language abilities.
During the Korean War, he was one of three language analysts who discovered the usefulness of overlooked communications and developed firm evidence from Communist message traffic that the Chinese military was poised to intervene in the war.
In the early 1950s, Zaslow rose quickly through the supervisory chain. From 1961 to 1963, he was deputy chief, then chief of operations in Japan. In 1968 he became chief of the organization responsible for tracking developments in Vietnam, and he held this post through most of the rest of the war. In each of these supervisory positions in production, he was known for imaginative thinking in developing intelligence to support U.S. operations.
In 1969 Admiral Noel Gayler named him the first NSA Representative to the Department of Defense. His strong interactions with the national command authority brought NSA a great deal of respect for its role in direct support.
Zaslow held several other important posts in production, and also served as the NSA Representative in the United Kingdom from 1975 to 1978. He was Deputy Director for Telecommunications and Computer Services until his retirement in 1979.
Throughout his career as an analyst and senior manager, Milton Zaslow was respected as an innovative thinker who could be counted on to solve difficult problems and find new ways to complete whatever tasks he was given.