I have seen the Fort Hunt signs on DC Transit Bus route signs but never
knew exactly where it was nor what/when it was a Fort until now. Maybe
someday when I am in the area I will go visit it. You old-timers who served
will appreciate this.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
P.O. Box 1142
An offhand comment from a park visitor unveiled the untold story of a
secret Virginia facility where clever interrogation techniques and good
old-fashioned eavesdropping helped secure victory in World War II. Now the
Park
Service is racing to unearth all the details before the last remaining
witnesses vanish.
By Heidi Ridgley
It's a steamy summer night in 1943 in Alexandria, Virginia, just outside
the nation's capital, and another Army bus with dark windows is rumbling
down the George Washington Memorial Parkway, headed for a nearly
forgotten
fort dating back to the Spanish-American War. The frequent arrivals at
Fort
Hunt no longer raise an eyebrow among locals, who assume the newly
constructed facilities, complete with barbed wire fences and guard
towers, simply
support a World War II officer's training school. But there's a lot more
to
the story.
More than 65 years later, the activities conducted at Fort Hunt are
emerging as one of the best-kept secrets of the last century: The men and
the few
women assigned here took oaths of secrecy to their graves. When the
government began bulldozing the 100 or so buildings in 1946, this quiet
spot
along the Potomac became a place for simple Sunday pleasures like picnics
and
softball.
Since 1933, the plot of land has been managed by the Park Service, but
during World War II, the War Department took it over to house a
top-secret
military intelligence center, referred to then as P.O. Box 1142. The site
included prisoner-of-war interrogation programs run by the Army and Navy
known
as MIS-Y (Military Intelligence Service-Y) and Op-16-Z (Operation-16-Z).
>From July 1942 to November 1946, the U.S. military shepherded more than
4,000 prisoners of war (POWs) through Fort Hunt, housing, interrogating,
and
surreptitiously listening to the highest-ranking enemy officers,
scientists, and submariners. Notable members of the Third Reich
questioned here
include rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, spymaster Reinhard Gehlen,
and Heinz
Schlicke, inventor of infrared detection.
The intelligence that American military personnel uncovered primarily
focused on the Germans' rocket and submarine technology, which was
superior to
the Allies'. It may have played a role in the decision to bomb Hiroshima
and the subsequent victory for the Allies, helped rocket the United
States to
the top of the space race, defined Cold War strategies, and was a
forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency. Amazingly, the site's
historical
significance might have been lost forever had it not been for a
serendipitous
moment between a park ranger and a park visitor three years ago.
In late 2006, a ranger told a tour group about Fort Hunt's history as
part
of George Washington's farm, as a hospital and camp for World War I vets
marching on Washington to demand their war pensions, and as a Civilian
Conservation Corps camp in the 1930s, and one of the visitors offered,
"My
neighbor used to work here during World War II." The neighbor's name was
Fred
Michel, and he had since moved to Louisville, Kentucky. When park
personnel
phoned him, he revealed, "Yes, I worked at P.O. Box 1142 during World War
II, and I'd love to tell you everything about it," recalls Vincent
Santucci,
chief ranger at George Washington Memorial Parkway, the park unit that
oversees Fort Hunt. "We did some great stuff there," Michel told park
staff.
"But I signed a secrecy agreement."
P.O. Box 1142 documents were declassified in waves, starting in 1977 and
continuing through the 1990s. "But no one had told the vets that," says
Santucci. "They lived in isolation, not even telling the closest people in
their
lives." P.O. Box 1142 veteran Wayne Spivey, 89, a chief clerk who managed
the database of information gathered during Nazi interrogations, says, "I
didn't tell anybody because I didn't think anybody would believe me. When
people asked me what I did during the war, I told them I was stationed at
P.O. Box 1142," he says. "One fellow thought I worked for the post
office, and
I just let it go."
To assure veterans like Spivey and Michel that they could talk freely,
Santucci and other Park Service personnel had to go to great lengths. As
far as
these veterans knew, their work at P.O. Box 1142 remained classified,
their sworn oath to secrecy still a matter of national security. Then,
about
two years ago, Santucci appealed to the military intelligence community
for
help. The result: The chief of Army counterintelligence wrote letters to
each veteran, encouraging them to share their stories with the Park
Service,
telling them, "We need to preserve the important information and the
lessons
learned from the work that you did," says Santucci.
It wasn't a moment too soon. In fact, with so few World War II vets still
around, it's actually about 10 years too late, says Santucci. "This
information is going extinct like an endangered species," he says. (Fred
Michel
died as this article was being written.) "The things these veterans told
us
need to be in the history books," he adds. "We've now interviewed more
than
50 veterans, and we've found out about multiple top-secret programs." But
those who worked in one program didn't know about the other programs or
even
what others in their same program were working on. "It was very
compartmentalized," says Santucci. "That's the way intelligence works."
Further
confounding matters is how hard it is to track down living vets: Separated
by
their secrets, few stayed in touch.
But this much we know: P.O. Box 1142 housed two military intelligence
programs in addition to MIS-Y and Op-16-Z. The MIS-X (Military
Intelligence
Service-X) program helped American personnel overseas to evade capture
and
communicated with those held captive. This was the stuff of James Bond-or
Hogan's Heroes. The duty of an American POW was to escape or cause enough
chaos
in the prisoner camp to keep the German soldiers preoccupied and off the
frontlines. With the help of several manufacturing companies, personnel
at
1142 sent care packages to American POWs containing items like cribbage
boards and baseballs with radio receivers that could tune in to the BBC
for
coded messages. Decks of cards, pipes, and cigarette packs might contain
hidden escape maps, saws, compasses, or money to help POWs escape.
Another key program was MIRS-the Military Intelligence Research
Section-which studied documents to support tactical decisions but also
aided efforts
to extract information from POWs. This group armed American interrogators
with details that made them appear to know far more than they actually
did.
For example, after Army researchers spotted a newspaper photo of German
General Erwin Rommel surrounded by other generals at his daughter's
wedding,
they used it to corner a general who was eventually captured and
delivered
to 1142. "An interrogator would say, 'We already know most of the
information we need,'" says Santucci. "'And by the way, how was the
wedding? We know
you were standing next to general so and so, who was also captured and
gave
us plenty of information, so you might as well talk.'"
Personnel also interrogated prisoners and monitored them covertly. "They
even bugged the trees," says Santucci. "Although it's hard to believe
they
called them bugs-they were two-feet long." Often the agents eavesdropping
had little or no understanding of the details they were recording or the
significance of the information, which was then passed on to other
agents. Take
the V1 and V2 rockets, the weapons of mass destruction at the time. Set
on
a course toward England, the world's first long-range missiles flew until
their engines gave out and then simply fell wherever they were. At 1142,
monitor Werner Moritz recalled overhearing two German naval officers
talking
in their room: "Don't worry, once the work at Peenemunde prevails,
Germany
will be victorious." It took the Allies about a month to determine
Peenemunde's location, where the rockets were being made; soon after the
British
bombed the site.
In another instance, George Mandel, now 85, was assigned to a POW working
on purifying uranium, though at the time Mandel had no idea why. "In my
mind, I was just writing reports," he says. "Of course months later, when
Hiroshima happened, it all made sense."
At first, the prisoners were primarily U-boat captains and crew members
who had surrendered in the Atlantic. But as the war's end neared,
prominent
scientists surrendered or were recruited with the promise that if they
talked, they could pursue their studies in the United States. "The
Russians
captured more German scientists than the Americans," says Santucci. "But
we
captured the hall-of-famers to help in the Cold War." One such person,
believed
to have passed through 1142, was Wernher von Braun, the rocket scientist
who would eventually become a key part of NASA's efforts to put a man on
the
moon.
General Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's top spy against the Russians, also
surrendered to the Americans and ended up at Fort Hunt. "He probably
should've
gone to Nuremberg and been prosecuted for war crimes," says Santucci.
"Instead he became chief of Russian counterintelligence during the Cold
War. That
could be another reason why the military wanted to erase the things that
happened at Fort Hunt years ago." Mandel says Nazi party membership was
overlooked in some cases because the U.S. military was already gathering
intelligence on its next immediate worry: containing the Russians. "We
didn't like
the idea that we were treating Nazis well," says Mandel. "Many of us were
Jewish-not necessarily religious-but we knew how the Germans had made
life
difficult for Jews in Germany. Still the feeling was that we should
extract
as much information as we could."
In fact, many men stationed at P.O. Box 1142 were refugees from
Germany-Jews who were young boys when their family fled from Hitler in the
late
1930s. Some of them, like Henry Kolm, 84, lost relatives to the Nazis.
These men
were selected for their loyalty and their basic science skills but also for
their proficiency in German and their cultural background, which could
prove useful during interrogations. For example, Kolm recalls a
conversation
he had with one of his "customers" while playing chess. In an age when
discussions of "enhanced interrogation techniques" have arisen regarding
the
Middle East conflict, POWs housed here were wooed with kindness and
camaraderie. If they coughed up information voluntarily, they might get
treated to a
dinner in town or a shopping trip into Washington, D.C. In this case,
Kolm's colonel reminisced about his favorite remote mountain lake in
Austria.
Coincidentally, it was the same vacation spot Kolm's father had taken the
young Kolm, so he knew exactly what it looked like-down to the two small
sleeping huts. The stunned colonel was convinced "ever afterwards that
American
intelligence had a dossier on every detail of his entire life," says
Kolm.
"Very useful for my interrogation."
Even as the war came to an end, the work continued. When Germany accepted
defeat and the U-234 submarine surrendered at sea, the entire crew was
transferred to 1142. Among the sub's cargo: an unassembled jet fighter and
a
load of uranium oxide. "Not the stuff you could make a bomb out of," says
Kolm. But it indicated the Germans were on the right track. Interrogators
found
out the submarine's destination had been Japan. "If that had gotten to
Japan, we would've been facing kamikaze pilots flying rocket planes,"
says
Kolm.
Mandel recalls interrogating a prisoner about faster planes and proximity
fuses that could blow things up simply by getting close to a target. "We
didn't have any of that," he says. "German fighter planes suddenly became
so
much faster we couldn't catch them. So I asked a German prisoner what was
happening and he told me their planes didn't use propellers anymore-they
had
jet engines." It was this sort of technological ingenuity that almost
allowed the Germans to win the war. But as we know, that didn't happen.
The
Allies defeated Hitler thanks to innovative interrogation techniques at
Fort
Hunt. But the site's crucial role in the war would have been lost forever
had
it not been for the persistence of park staff who, once they discovered
the secret, doggedly pushed for more, realizing their race against time.
"We're losing the last generation of World War II vets," says Santucci.
"We
need to find as many as we can and hang on to their stories. Thousands
and
thousands of books have been written on WWII, but what we've uncovered at
Fort
Hunt is changing what we knew about military intelligence history. It's a
shame it didn't occur 10 years ago when more veterans were around. But
we've got it now and we're never going to let it go."
SIDEBAR: TELLING THE REST OF THE STORY
Now that the secret's out, there's a big story to tell at Fort Hunt. The
Park Service's plan is to create a visitors center at Fort Hunt, perhaps
in
a 1903 building used during the World War II era-the noncommissioned
officers' quarters. If funding is found, park personnel plan to install
interpretive signs, old photographs, and maybe even some war
paraphernalia. Although
the men who served at P.O. Box 1142 were instructed not to take photos or
mementos, many veterans have a small stash that they have since shared
with
the Park Service.
The Park Service is also hoping to mirror the experience of those agents
eavesdropping on the German POWs, by allowing visitors to don headphones
and
listen in as if they were monitoring a conversation. Using actual
transcripts from 1142 recovered at the National Archives, they hope to
hire native
German speakers to record the original dialogue in the mother tongue, so
visitors can listen in and read the English translation in front of them.
For
now, visitors will find little more than a public park with a flag, a
plaque, and a few interpretive panels. But with any luck, the full story
will
be told here within a few years' time.
Heidi Ridgley lives a few miles from the site of P.O. Box 1142, and she
hopes to be one of the first people to walk through its visitors center.
Thoughts about this article? Comments you'd like to share with the
editors? Send an e-mail to npmag@npca.org, and we'll consider printing
your letter
in the next issue of National Parks magazine. Include your name, city,
and
state. Published letters may be edited for length and clarity.
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