31 October 2007

Spy Games


Building “B,” Arlington Hall Station

Arlington Hall kept its secrets well from everyone in the Buckingham neighborhood. Workers at the super secret facility knew better than to tell even their most intimate companions about what was being done behind the fence at the Girl's School across Route 50.

The secrets were held from the US taxpayers until 1995, even as self-righteous civil advocates held fundraisers for the traitor Alger Hiss from the State Department, and civil liberties defenders decried the execution of the Rosenbergs. The secrets that named Harry Hopkins in Franklin Roosevelt's White House and Harry Dexter White at Treasury were kept until long after they were in their graves.

The secrets were held from everyone except the Russians.

The moment the first decrypt of Soviet KGB messages sent from New York was witnessed by Bill Weiband, the NKVD agent. The secrets were later officially shared with Kim Philby, the phlegmatic British MI-6 liaison officer to the new CIA in 1949, when he visited Arlington Hall.

He was also the Secret Intelligence Service representative to the FBI as well, which was busy building cases against known and suspected Reds. Philby did not have unlimited access to Arlington Hall, but it was close enough that he was no stranger to the neighborhood. Nor was he alone. At least four major intelligence organizations played games outside the fence at Arlington Hall: The KGB and GRU, of course, opposed by Army Counter-intelligence and the FBI.

The Russians were aware of what was happening at Arlington Hall, long before the FBI was informed. Even then, the knowledge of precisely what was known, and how, was strictly compartmented. The “fact of” Soviet penetration of the US Government was known, or at least alleged, and hysteria was rising in the papers and in the Congress.

In the early 1950s, the residential areas around the Hall were destinations unto themselves. The Buckingham garden apartments were still in their original, idealistic state: George Mason Drive entered the development between the two duplex gatehouses, and the roads curved gently around the large park-like blocks with their genteel two-story brick buildings.

George Mason Drive formed a “T” intersection at the junction with Henderson Road at the K.W. Barrett school, and a long driveway lead up the gentle hill to the Henderson Mansion, which served as the Officer's Club for Arlington Hall. One of the best sources of free intelligence would be at the bar there, where whiskey loosened the strictures of secrecy. It was a logical place to linger for those who could patiently listen, and a clear vulnerability for Army Security.

Lubber Run Park, one of the first in the County, would have been a logical place for dead-drops and other games of tradecraft.

Convenient as it was for the hundreds of Arlington Hall employees in the Buckingham and Arlington Forest neighborhoods, the club was a security hazard, and the Army decided to relocate the facility inside the wire at the Station, where activities could be better monitored.

Philby drove in his motorcar across the Key Bridge and down the George Washington Parkway to come to Arlington Hall. In meetings,  Army analysts wondered aloud about the continuing mystery of the identity of “Homer,” the unidentified mole in the British Embassy. The intercepted messages referred only to the Russian agents by  code-names, and there were dozens of them. Some could be identified by the context of the information in the messages itself; others were more enigmatic.

That is why the decryption of messages sent in the last years of World War Two continued to occupy Arlington Hall for the next quarter century. The identity of the traitors was a continuing matter of national security until all were identified, or died of old age.

The spy in the British embassy could not have been Philby, of course. He was in the clear, since the messages covered a period when he was elsewhere. In 1944, the year covered by the first decryptions, he was in London, setting up the Section IX organization for the Special Operations Executive. His organization was tasked with operations against the COMINTERN and the Soviet Union.

It was all too delicious for words, since Philby had volunteered his service to the Soviet Union in 1928 while still a student at Cambridge. Kim took his nickname from the The son of With the other four in his immediate cell, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, the five men constituted the most serious breach of security in the history of Britain. Philby also did immeasurable damage to the United States, by virtue of his position in the Special Relationship.

While in Washington, Philby sat on the Special Policy Committee, which was charged with managing the joint operation to infiltrate agents into Albania to overthrow the Communist government of Enver Hoxha. Each set of agents arriving were scooped up immediately, and either killed or jailed. At least three hundred were lost in the infiltration attempts.

The conventional wisdom on the operation was that the Iron Curtain was impenetrable. No further attempts to meddle internally in Eastern Europe were conducted for a half-century. The Soviet won a significant battle without firing more than a few shots at close range to the back of the head.  

Philby welcomed fellow spy Guy Burgess to Washington in 1950, the year after his indoctrination to the secrets of Arlington Hall. Burgess was a profligate gay man, and drinking heavily at this time. Philby had him stay in the basement of his home at 4100 Nebraska Ave in the District so that he could keep an eye on him.

From the house, he could keep other things under patient surveillance. He could see the chapel on the grounds of the Navy Security Group from his front porch, and NSG was the sister to Arlington Hall in the SIGINT business.

Philby played all the games of tradecraft while he lived in the shadow of the Naval Spook Base. Once, he took a camera and buried it in Arlington, using a small garden trowel that he carefully used once more in the garden on Nebraska Ave to ensure that the soil on the tool could not be used for identification.

Things unraveled in 1951, and Burgess was recalled to England. He managed to escape to Russia with Donald Maclean shortly ahead of interrogation by MI-5, the domestic intelligence service that was also penetrated by Soviet intelligence. Philby fell under suspicion as the “Third Man” in the operation, but managed to lie his way past an internal investigation and a tepid exoneration by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.

Of course, there were not three men. There were at least five, and that was only in one cell. Blue-blooded traitor Anthony Blunt, safe under a grant of immunity, later gave up the names of twenty-one other Soviet agents. The authorities suspect there were more, since Blunt only talked about those who were dead, or had left the country.

Philby was not expelled from the Foreign Service until 1956, when he felt compelled to disappear in Lebanon and officially defect to the Soviets. At that point he passes out of the spy games of Arlington Hall, though his tracks down through the years continued to be the subject of examination through the Venona intercept program.

In Moscow, he was awarded the “Order of the Red Banner,” and had an affair with fellow defector MacLean's American wife. He served as an advisor to the KGB as he wrote his memoirs.

He passed away peacefully in 1988 and was accorded the honor of a hero's burial, and a postal stamp was issued with his image.

That was the year before Arlington Hall Station passed away, at least as a nest of spies across from the Buckingham neighborhood. It would change into a facility dedicated to training America's diplomats overseas.

The big “temporary” World War Two buildings would be ripped down, and replaced with a visitor's center and new classrooms.

Of course, the network of concrete roads and the wild building program in the Virginia and Maryland suburbs had permitted the spies and their families to move up with the American Dream of home ownership, and where they had once walked from garden apartments across Route 50, they now slogged in by car from Fairfax County, or the bedrooms of Calvert County.

Washington had died in the meantime, killed by something else. The spy games were over in this part of Arlington after nearly a half century. It is gratifying to think that the intercepts from Arlington Hall Station rolled up the great Soviet threat to national security, but as with all things in the Cold War, there is a legacy of ambiguity.

Bill Weisband, the spy who actually disclosed the existence of Venona, came under suspicion. He was suspended from duty and summoned to face a federal grand jury on the activities of the Communist Party of the United States. He skipped the appearance, and did a year in the slammer for contempt.

He was never prosecuted for espionage because of the spy games that were still in progress about the Rosenbergs and the other atom spies. The National Security Act of 1947 stipulated intelligence "sources and methods” cannot be revealed. The FBI feared that a trial would provide yet more damaging information to the KGB.

Weisband never revealed his status as a Soviet Agent to anyone, and he lived quietly down the road in Alexandria and making a living in the insurance business.

He died suddenly of a massive heart attack in 1967 while driving on the George Washington Parkway. As far as his son was concerned, the most exciting thing in his father's life was his means of leaving it, since he had to lurch across the body to grab the wheel and steer the car out of the traffic lanes.

Tomorrow: Remember the Titans

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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