08 November 2007

Nailed




The Spooks had a good run at Arlington Hall Station, and the national security aspect at the heart of the Buckingham neighborhoods went on until the mid-1980s.

You might have thought that the men in the long coats from the Soviet Embassy would have lost interest after the Venona affair was revealed to them, and the codes changed so that they were no longer vulnerable. That would not be the case. They continued to sniff around the neighborhood, listening in, for years.

If the code-breakers had moved out, other spooks moved in behind them to occupy the huge “temporary” buildings around the bulk of the graceful neo-colonial school building.

The major reorganization of the military establishment set in motion in 1949 kicked off many changes. The Joint Chiefs of Staff announced the establishment of the Armed Forces Security
Agency (AFSA), charging it with the oversight of cryptologic and communications security operations throughout the military. AFSA effectively stripped the Army and Navy of their independent code-breaking capabilities.

The Army ran their enterprise from Arlington Hall, the Navy from Nebraska Avenue, near Ward Circle in the District. In 1952, the AFSA was renamed the National Security Agency (NSA), and preparations were made to consolidate operations at Fort Meade, in Maryland.

You can imagine how excited the workforce was to uproot from the comfortable environs of Buckingham and Arlington Forest and decamp for the wilds of Maryland.

The Fort is much closer to Baltimore, the Charm City, though precious little of that ever wore off on Fort Meade. I am convinced, as an aside, that the deep cultural schism in the modern intelligence community stems from the fact that most of the Spooks think that Washington is the center of the universe, while NSA firmly believes it is nailed just south of Baltimore.

The Army maintained physical control of Arlington Hall Station, and hundreds of local residents continued to work there, even if there were not nearly so many as there had been during the War. INSCOM- the Intelligence and Security Command- was the major employer in the neighborhood until the next step in the re-organization of the intelligence establishment began.

Most of the intelligence budget is hidden in the bowels of the larger DoD accounts so it is not so painfully visible. The Services still maintained large autonomous intelligence resources in places like INSCOM. The shock of the U2 shoot-down in 1959 showed how little the United States really knew about what was going on in the Soviet Union.

Some of the U-2 film that nailed the Soviet missiles was analyzed right across the road, and the resulting Missile Crisis in Cuba brought Arlington Hall, and the Buckingham neighborhood, to the brink of nuclear annihilation.

Treading so near the abyss gave everyone the willies, and caused a major re-organization in defense intelligence. In late 1962, the Defense Intelligence Agency was established to unify military intelligence in a joint organization.

On New Year's Day, 1963, a new Intelligence Production Center was established to analyze the new imagery that was being collected on the Soviet Union. The Space Age arrived at Arlington Hall, since the crumbling "A" and "B" buildings on the campus became home for hundreds of analysts stripped from several Army, Navy and Air Force organizations.

The location was perfect, just minutes from the Pentagon.

Big Pink began to rise across the Route 50 in 1964; in July of 1965, residents were just moving in as DIA accepted responsibility for the
Defense Attache System - the last function the Services transferred to DIA. Big Pink was a bit pricey for the junior Government Spooks.

Many of them rented in Buckingham village, but more than a few senior officers moved into Frances Freed's proud tower to occupy their time while training in language and tradecraft at Arlington Hall.

Then they were sent overseas, to sensitive posts all around the world where they collected intelligence over the canapés on the diplomatic cocktail circuit.

Some friends of mine remember the early days of DIA. Tony and worked for the Gas Company, but his wife Theresa was an analyst at the new DIA. They lived in the Forest for a decade, over on Columbus street, but before that has a place in the Dominion Arms Apartments on South Glebe Road.

The Dominion is important to the story of Buckingham, since it was the first high rise apartment building in Arlington.   It was only seven stories tall and inhabited by mostly older citizens.   They screened prospective tenants closely, and were somewhat reluctant to accept a couple as young as my friends, who might entertain friends and have fun.

The building is still there, pristine, and had many innovations that caught the imagination of Frances Freed. The first floor featured a barbershop downstairs and a dry-cleaner that catered to the military customers at Arlington Hall Station and Fort Myer. Frances decided to make Big Pink in the same mold, though with bold new architecture. The first floor would include commercial space for the amenities that the upscale residents would find useful.

The neighborhood was oriented very much to the pedestrian. Workers from Buckingham could walk across Route 50 at the light and in the front gate; from the Dominion Arms it was an easy walk to the back gate,

My pal Louie used to work there, too. We were driving back from the Pentagon the other morning, and came up Route 50. I asked him what it was like in the old days, and he began to laugh.

He came right out of Vietnam and hired on, so he knew about the original cadre of DIA workers. Being dragooned from the Services as they were, they constituted the sweepings of what their parent organizations wanted to get rid of.

He said that he worked in Building B, where the floors were wide-planked wood and the windows did not close, due to the sagging of the "temporary" buildings. He said it was hard to believe that this had been the heart of the most sensitive code-breaking in Washington, or that it remained a place for the discussion and storage of Special Compartmented Intelligence.

One of the people in his section was charged with collecting biographical data on military leaders in sub-Saharan Africa. She had a rat's nest of a desk that attracted fruit flies, regardless of the time of year, and when it rained, she wore a Wonderbread plastic bag to protect her hair-do.

She announced one day, a year or two after joining the organization, that she had almost completed identifying all the countries in Africa. She also had noticed that many of the African leaders must be related, since they shared the same last name.

Louie asked her if it was "LNU?"

"Yes!" she exclaimed. "How did you know?"

Louie is a card, and he drew her on further. He asked if they often had the same first name: "FNU."
 
"Have you been working on these cases?” she said with excitement. “That is exactly right!"

“LNU” and “FNU,” as you well know, was attache shorthand for “first or last name unknown.”   Louie had been a Green Beret, so he did not have a great deal of sympathy for the slow footed.

In fact, that is precisely what he did to one of the Navy guys assigned to the sub-Saharan Africa desk. Each day in the summer, when the Navy was in white uniforms, the Lieutenant Commander would arrive in the office and immediately remove his white shoes and place them under his desk so they would not get scuffed walking around during the day.

White shoes, by the way, are one of the great aberrations of military life. When he got ready to leave Building “B” in the evening, he would sit down and slide his feet into them without untying the laces, pick up his briefcase and walk to the door.

Louie noticed the behavior, and as a former special operations type, found the predictability to be an offense against good tradecraft. One day he brought a hammer and some ten-penny nails to work.   When the Commander had wandered off for coffee in his stocking feet, he nailed the shoes to the floor. When quitting time came, the hapless officer sat down, slipped on the shoes and rose to grab his briefcase.

Naturally the shoes did not go anywhere, and the poor guy almost broke his legs when he tried to leave the desk.

He was a little defensive after that, which Louie considered a good thing. When the Commander's time at DIA came to an end, he put all the things from his desk into two cardboard moving boxes. When he went to get his check-out sheet signed, Louie removed everything and nailed the boxes to the floor before carefully replacing everything just as it had been.

You can imagine the scene when it came time for the Commander to pick up his boxes and leave the building for the last time.

In fact, you can imagine that in a much larger scale when the whole DIA moved out. DIA's major functional elements were finally consolidated under one roof when the Agency dedicated the Defense Intelligence Analytic Center at Bolling Air Force Base on 23 May 1984.

Intelligence in Buckingham was moving to the District, behind the wire on the other side of the river in Anacostia. Some of the anlysts thought it was like deploying from civilization to Fort Apache. It definitely was a wrenching move. Many would have preferred to stay in Arlington, even with the wooden floors.

The new building was all concrete, and regardless of the quality of the analytic workforce, it was going to be hard to nail anything down at all.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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