29 October 2007

Arlington Hall



I always try to stop by the annual rummage sale at the Methodist church on the parcel west of Big Pink. I can't tell you precisely what I am looking for, but I do know that I recognize it when I see it. It would be something associated with the Army of a certain era, or knickknacks from overseas.

I am looking for what might come out of the attics in the houses of Arlington Forest, the aggregation of box brick houses that borders the Buckingham neighborhood. The whole place was a nest of Spooks, back in the day, since one of the big employers in this part of Arlington was the Army's signals intelligence organization on the sprawling campus of the girl's school across the road.

So far I have not found a box of rotors taken from a German Enigma code machine, nor any of the primitive electronics parts that formed part of the electro-mechanical decryption devices that were used to crack the codes with a little intuition and a lot of brute strength. I have found no crib sheets for the Japanese Purple Code, tough I still have hope that something will appear, a box filled with cryptic things the last generation saved and their kids don't understand.

Arlington Hall was a finishing school for young women, founded in 1927. The school suffered financial difficulties in the 1930s, even as Arlington Boulevard began to be paved as part of the National Road to the West Coast. When the concrete eventually passed by the front gate, the school had became a non-profit institution by 1940, when the Buckingham project was in a frenzy of building activity.

Two attractive gate houses marked the formal entrance to the apartment complex on George Mason Drive, which was then not a through street for frantic commuters. Buckingham was a destination, then, not a pass-through. Each of the gatehouses was flanked by a decorative brick wall pierced with a circle, the symbol of the Paramount Communities building company.

When the war came, the Army and the Navy scoured the city for places to establish extremely sensitive operations. The Navy settled on a girl's school located just south of Ward Circle in the District for its cryptologic operations, mostly targeted against the Japanese. The Army decided that Arlington was the place to be, and identified Arlington Hall as the perfect place for its code-breaking activities.

In 1942, Arlington Hall was facing condemnation proceedings, and the take-over by the Secretary of War under the Second War Powers Act was a blessing. Officially, the Arlington Hall became the headquarters of the Army Signal Corps, though that was a cover for the Intelligence and Security Command, or INSCOM. With that re-designation, the facility became Arlington Hall Station.

The effort was extensive. In addition to uniformed personnel, Arlington Hall Station provided employment for many women who came to the area looking for war-related work. The Buckingham neighborhood filled up with many girls who were happy to share quarters, or rent a closet, if it came to that. Arlington Forest, walking distance from the Station, was home to many civilian experts and military officers.

There were so many that the Henderson Mansion, located just beyond where George Mason Drive ended was appropriated as the Arlington Hall Officers Club. It is no exaggeration to say that what happened at Arlington Hall had the same importance as the Manhattan Project, and that the resources apportioned to it were nearly unlimited. The Russians were naturally interested in the activity across the road from Buckingham.

There are still some of the original owners left in Arlington Forest, though not many of them. There are none in Buckingham, for reasons we will get to presently. The Forest neighborhood was built at the same time as Buckingham, single-family homes in the $6,000 dollar range to complement the 120-acres of gracious garden apartments directly across Route 50 from Arlington Hall.

 Studs Terkel could have been one of them, though his time in FDR's bureaucracy ended before the complex was open for rentals. He went back to the Windy City to tell the tales of the working people of Chicago.

He had an OpEd in the Times this morning. Studs is a colorful old war horse of the Left, the muscular broad-shouldered sort that has largely passed away. He was born in 1912, and is about the last man standing of his generation. He can say what he wants without much fear of contradiction, having seen about everything in his century on the planet. He is looking around these days at the counter-terror surveillance program and relating it to his days in the Red Scare of the early 1950s. He wears his time on the Black List as fellow traveler like a badge of honor. I respect his version of history, and salute his indomitable opposition to injustice.

I hate to quibble with such an icon, but I wish I could have had him sit down with another old Bolshie who died last Friday. He knew Washington back in the day, and I think he knew the Buckingham neighborhood a little better than Dwight Eisenhower did. He certainly knew about the Spooks at Arlington Hall. Alexander Feklisov was a KGB agent master who ran some of the most productive networks in wartime America. His work began before the time of the Grand Alliance, and continued after, when the Cold War was chilling and Stalin was racing to get the bomb.

Some of the people in Feklisov's web are well known, and included physicist Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs. Others are not. He arrived in New York in 1941 and began running Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a couple who supplied the Soviet Union with top-secret information on the U.S. Manhattan project to develop the atomic bomb.
 
Feklisov later called the Rosenberg network one of the greatest in the history of Soviet espionage, which is not an immodest claim, considering what he was able to extract from them. In all, he ran seventeen major foreign agents in his career in America and Britain.

After working the Rosenbergs, he returned to Moscow for reassignment to Britain. It was a good thing, since the Russian Section at Arlington Hall was receiving more emphasis as the war was nearing the end-game.

Work on diplomatic messages benefited from the allocation of additional technical personnel and new analysts. One of them was man named Samuel Chew, who might have rented a room in Buckingham. He had been among those mathematicians focused on Japan. With the Soviet preparing to enter the war in the Far East, Stalin's intentions were unknown, and critical in importance. Chew devoted himself to identifying the basic structure of enciphered Soviet diplomatic messages. He passed the results of his analysis to a gifted linguist named Meredith Gardner, who led a team that applied an endless series of templates to backward reconstruct the KGB codebook.

Penetrating high-order codes is an effort that requires all the means of Spook tradecraft: Human intelligence, theft, blackmail, cryptologic analysis and mathematical genius.

The easiest way, of course, is to bribe or exploit the weakness of a code-clerk and skip the heavy-lifting. The Russians were as good at that then as they are now.

That is why some of the people renting in Buckingham were not working for the Government, and why some of the activity around the Officer's Club in the Henderson Mansion could not be accounted as purely social. Arlington Hall was a valuable target, In fact, after the Bomb itself, it was the main target.

Late in 1946, Gardner broke the KGB codebook's "spell table" for encoding English letters. With the solution of this critical problem, it was possible to go back to earlier messages and read significant portions that included names and phrases in English.

One afternoon, Gardner found himself reading a two year old message that contained a list of notable scientists of interest to the Russians, including several who were involved in the Manhattan project. It appeared that the most sensitive operation ever conducted by the United States Government was penetrated by the KGB, and it had been for years.

Arlington Hall went to full alert. If there were Communist Agents in the atom program, where else might they be working?

In the old Girl's School across the street from Big Pink, a special new program was established to guard the secret of America's vulnerability. It was called VENONA. At the Russian embassy, plans were made to get Alexander Feklisov and some of the other agent-handlers out of the country.

The FBI did not have access to the most sensitive communications in the US Government, and they did what they could. They started to round up the Reds they knew about, and Studs Terkel was outraged by what was happening to his friends. They really didn't need to look that far.

They could have started across the road from Big Pink, at Arlington Hall.

Tomorrow: VENONA

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Close Window