WW II interrogation Center PO Box 1142 Thanks good friends! Long!

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.

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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.

Some Mound Park Portsmouth Ohio memories

Thanks Bob Looney and Ronnie Walters!

Sam

I am just finishing my eighth book, Bob. It takes a while to do a book, normally a year. None know how many years are left in our lives.




My earlier years were shared with neighborhood kids around McConnell ave. and Vinton and normally at Mound Park just up McConnell from us. Ronnie Walters was on his crutches from an early age and he moved faster on those helpers than most any of us could run. Skip Beekman and his sister Nancy, Walt Rowe and his sister, Barbara Swishelm (Married Carole Howell, the Trojan and Ohio State star). Nancy McFarland (Schlichter), the Tannions and others lived there. Our 1227 McConnell address was just above the flood marks of 1937. Jack Duschinski was your immediate neighbor on one side where Lovell Meadows and his beautiful olive skinned sister lived before. On your north was Pidgy and Jim Zeisler. C.A,. Hartley lived on Vinton later with his mother and sisters. Bob Staley and Don Ginn lived up the street a bit. Bill and Nancy Thomas, the Gemperlines and later Boomer with Bill and Nancy Thomas and Bill and Fred Colliers and their brood also lived closer to the park.



After you passed all of those kids you arrived at Mound Park, the true "Cultural Center of Our Universe".



There the Clark twins, Jim Smith, Don Flowers and I, kids in my grade at Highland School, played king of the hill and football and other things from dawn to dusk. Later we met 'Looney and Lyles' a seemingly inseparable pair, the Moseleys, Steve Clark and his brothers, and played baseball in the deserted dirt court tennis courts. We were Babe Ruth, Hank Sauer (Cincy Reds), and  Eddie Miller as the towering hits soared 100 feet or so over the eight foot fence in left and center field and gave us the 'star' thrill.



Dick Klitch and his dad were often coaching (Dick was a coach on the field even then) the Grandview Cubs. So many urchins shared the fun of that park. My faded memory tells me that Mr. Labold, who donated Labold field down by the stadia, donated the park and had willed it to the kids who played there. The local power people in Portsmouth politics reportedly won that away from us, but, even if the will came to million bucks, there were so many of us urchins we may have received a nickel apiece. :)



I had a few fist fights in the park and I know many others did. There were always instant audiences for the fisticuff events that happened on the spot. Ray Benner had the most, no doubt. Ray was tough but he tried Don Thomas, our resident giant and Dave, Mary, and Earl's brother, but never could beat Don as Don tells me now, matter-of-factly. I missed all of those Thomas-Benner events, but they were mainly on their way to school. Shorty, whom Ray protected as a little brother, probably witnessed all of them. Ray was a neighbor of Shorty Vallance and his sister, Wayne Widdig, Donnie Widdig and sister(s) on Logan extending westward from the park and Highland School. We hardly saw Wayne through the early forties when I was 8 to 12 years old. He, my brother, Ted Dunham,  and so many others were fighting in WW II, the Big One, which hasn't stopped all wars as was hoped and died for. When he returned though and they had the great softball tournaments in Mound Park, Wayne became that unbeatable fast pitch pitcher, almost in the class of Eddie Feigner, The King of 'The King and His Court".



Mound Park was like Highland School's home turf for grade school ball games and Sunday afternoon football games.   Our A, B, and C teams played there a lot.



There Bob. You got my memories flowing a little. There may be a few books from the park and our neighborhood. Jack Plymale, Frank Hunter, Blaine Bierley, my deceased brother-in-law, Don Lundy and many others could tell of the Mabert Road people, such as the storied Ray Pelfrey, east of us park urchins. Al Oliver, Larry Hisle, and the many fine black athletes of Portsmouth dearly love their kid days at Bannon Park and the Fourteenth Street Community Center. It isn't only for me to tell. My brothers George, Jim, and Paul have tales of their park eras. It was mostly a 'boys park' as parents probably didn't want their young girls among us rough necks.



Gib Lakeman and Gus Thompson and their ilk came later after 1945 and the wars end. We heard many war stories, some gruesome, in the park during the 52-20 days. The vets received $20 a week for 52 weeks, a full year, which afforded them loafing days in the park. They had terrific baseball pepper drills with line drives and hard grounders. Lee Brady, Don Delaney, Red Glasgow, Laken Warnock, Gib, Gus, and so many fine athletes hit and fielded the line drive shots in rapid succession. Of course, Lamoin Elliott, Ray Pelfrey, Walt Young, and Gib Lakeman liked to boot punts from the Sugar Bowl west side of the park towards the tennis courts on the east side.



How lucky we were, Bob and Ron! Besides that we had the Terrace Club Swimming Pool and stories there.



Now, you guys tell some ... ,





Sam















----- Original Message -----

From: GolfJL@aol.com

To: skegley@columbus.rr.com

Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2010 9:46 PM

Subject: Re: FW: Quiz on Our Country--SAM-SEE IF YOU CAN BEAT RON ON THIS TEST





SAM--I ENJOY IT WHEN YOU WRITE ABOUT THE GREAT TIMES WE HAD AT MOUND PARK. WHAT MEMORIES WE HAVE. GIB LAKEMAN WAS "ONE OF A KIND," WE WERE VERY FORTUNATE TO GROW UP THERE. THERE WAS ALWAYS SOMETHING GOING ON. I WISH YOU WOULD WRITE A BOOK ABOUT THOSE TIMES AND GIB LAKEMAN AND OTHERS.



BOB