[citation needed] Private Jose F. Valdez, originally Joe P. Martinez, was laid down by Walter Butler Shipbuilders, Duluth, Minnesota, 22 April 1944; was launched as Round Splice on 27 October 1944; sponsored by Mrs.

Guy R. Porter; and transferred to the American Ship Building Company, Chicago, Illinois, for completion on 15 December 1944; and delivered to the U.S. Army for operation 16 February 1945.

On 22 December she arrived in the James River National Defense Reserve Fleet berthing area and was transferred to the custody of the Maritime Administration.

Converted to a Technical Research Ship and reassigned to MSTS, she departed Brooklyn, her homeport, in November 1961 on the first of her extended hydrographic cruises to the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

Since the "Happy Jose" did not regularly return to the US, the crew was rotated by flying them to a major port city in Africa, such as Cape Town.

Choice of a ship for the operation narrowed between Private Jose F. Valdez, then headed from the eastern Mediterranean to Gibraltar, and USS Liberty in port at Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

She returned to the USA unexpectedly early in September 1968 for installation of Technical Research Ship Special COMMunications (TRSSCOMM), a system that could relay messages directly to Washington by bouncing a microwave signal off the moon.

This system consisted of a sixteen-foot, dish shaped antenna mounted on a movable platform and capable of bouncing a 10,000 watt microwave signal off a particular spot on the moon and down either to the receiving station at Cheltenham, Maryland, or to one of the other Navy SIGINT ships.

The TRSSCOMM had the advantage of being able to transmit large quantities of intelligence information very rapidly without giving away the ship's location to hostile direction finding equipment or interfering with incoming signals.