(Arlington Hall Station, where some of the tools of victory in 1945 were forged).

This used to be part of a story we couldn’t talk about. That changed just before the careers (and lives) of some of those folks who worked at Arlington Hall left us. Keeping secrets was a component of the Spook trade that appears to have passed away with them. Now, the “secrets” are stored in the garage next to old Corvettes and strewn to people who claim to be practitioners of another art that has disappeared: the one we called “journalism.”

That is a curious inversion of a trade that once worked pretty well. Keeping things quiet was a fundamental tenet of the intelligence officer’s life. Most took their secrets to the grave. I recall talking to Admiral Mac Showers about how it all worked. He had worked at Arlington Hall Station after the Big War- the second of them- came to a dramatic end. It is interesting to see the march of history as we seem posed on the edge of a third global conflict laden with nukes.

Hearing it as a personal story made it real, not a footnote in a dusty tome. He was part of the Armed Forces Security Agency, an organization formed from the various War and Navy department radio intelligence operations jammed together as part of what would become the No Such Agency, or NSA.

We sat on the patio of the Big Pink condo unit I owned at the time. We are now buying another one in that grand old building to be a little closer to necessary services. It was a shortfall in the planning process that failed to account for the vagaries of “age.”

It is a funny process if you have not lived that part yet. The Farm had seemed like a good answer, remote and defensible if necessary. Agricultural land all around. But what was not “around” down there in placid Culpeper was the array of medical services necessary for comfortable retirement living. Live and learn, you know?

It brought back a memory of a dinner some fifteen years ago. By chance, we met one of the female Naval officers who had worked at Nebraska Avenue during the same war that nearly consumed our parent’s generation. It was a nice meal at Bobby Van’s Steakhouse across the River on New York Avenue downtown. It was fun. She had a wry wit, and a remarkable memory for places and things. It was a far-ranging conversation. She remarked at one point that she had lived in Washington during the war years.

That sparked the conversation, since Mac and VADM Rex had told of their time in that place. Our new pal had been a WAVE- the acronym for a Woman Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services. She vaguely mentioned that she had worked up by Ward Circle. That sparked my interest. The Nebraska Avenue Complex is now the headquarters of the Department of Homeland Security, an organization in which I had worked briefly at its founding.

The campus is southeast of Ward Circle, where Massachusetts and Nebraska Avenues join in a hair-raising round-about. In 1942, the 38-acre site appeared ideal to house the radio intelligence functions that were being conducted in inadequate circumstances on the roof of the Main Navy building on Constitution Avenue.

The Nebraska Avenue site had the high ground, perfect for antenna placement above the swampy Capital.

The Navy has been accused of high-handed seizure of the property of the Mount Vernon Girls School. Justification was to house an ‘extremely sensitive mission.’ The popular story goes that surveying crews where the first ones to show up, two weeks after Pearl Harbor, followed by officers who told the faculty of the Girl’s School to take a hike.

Legally speaking, the whole thing was strictly on the up-and-up, just like the Army’s acquisition of the school at Arlington Hall, kitty-corner from Big Pink. The Second World War Powers Act of 27 March 1942 allowed for a “declaration of taking” in a condemnation proceeding. But this was agreed to in advance by school trustees as a necessary step to protect land titles. It was supported by an opinion of the US Attorney General, which as we know today is an unassailable justification for all sorts of things.

The land at Nebraska Avenue was not taken officially until the year after 1942, and the Spooks of Navy staff code Op-20G did not move in until February of 1943 in preparation for receiving the Machines from the National Cash Register Company at Dayton.

That part of the sensitive mission conducted at the old girl’s school has now been long declassified. We will recreate some of the extended story of how our government penetrated the German wartime codes as part of the establishment of our new means of governance. Knowing that story before we sat down to dinner enabled us to put two-and-two together. Amid the clank of crockery, we asked our new pal if she had worked on the Bombe.

The woman looked startled for a moment, since she had not disclosed anything more than the general location of her long-ago duty station. After a brief acknowledgment, she artfully changed the subject to a discussion of what it was like to live in Washington during those frantic times. She said that they had told her, on demobilization, that if anyone talked about what they did at Ward Circle, they would go to jail.

Sixty-one years later, she was not going to risk jail time, regardless of our professional bona fides.

You will note that the Bombe is not the same thing as The Bomb. Both were national projects of incalculable worth in defeating the Axis Powers. Both have their legacies here with us in the modern world, for good or ill. This morning there are press reports- ones digitally created to disseminate rather than examine- that the digital age has now given us self-learning Artificial Intelligence algorithms that may decide we humans are extraneous.

That is at the nexus of the revolution in which we live. Nebraska Avenue was the heart of Navy codebreaking. Valuable independent work was done at Station HYPO at Pearl Harbor, further from the flag-pole and closer to the fighting. Nebraska Avenue was the center, though, where the Bombe’s were located. The name came from one of the indomitable Poles who stole a copy of the commercial version of the German Enigma coding machines just before Europe descended into what seems to be a periodic madness. He reverse-engineered a device to crack the settings on the box, and called his primitive decoding technique the “Bombe.”

That is what the British codebreakers continued to call the mechanical calculating devices invented by Alan Turing at Bletchley Park near Cambridge. The Bombes automated the process by which the millions of possible daily settings on the German enciphering machines were checked. With the machines, sometimes the British were able to read the German messages faster than the German commands to which they were sent.

Britain had a sense of urgency at a place called Bletchley Park, but it was by no means the only place for innovation. In those days, the great State of Ohio was one of the hotbeds of technical innovation. A man named Joseph Desch was born in Dayton in 1907, just 4 years after the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. As a child, his family lived just about a mile from the Wright Cycle Shop where heavier-than-air flight began.

Desch was thirty-one years of age when he worked at the National Cash Register Corporation, conducting research on the ability of using vacuum tubes and electric circuitry in counting devices. The idea was to automate the high-speed mechanical computing machines and boost the speed of calculations.

It occurred to him that there might be applications in using a new thyratron (a gas-filled tube) developed by English scientist Wynn Williams. It was capable producing a counting ring of five digits. He theorized that if he used an arrangement of vacuum “trigger tubes” and gas tube counters in groups of ten, he would have the way to accomplish decimal counting.

From that began one of the roads to the electronic computer that is changing our world. He was not the only one doing this sort of work before the war, but his approach was one of the most effective. Joe intended to design an electronic deciphering device that minimized mechanical parts and optimized the code-breaking process. Of course, knowing how the German machines worked was essential to that development.

There was a tech target. A German commercial prototype was acquired by the Poles and provided to the Brits was incomplete. Pressure on Desch was enormous, as U-Boats ravaged the convoys headed east across the Atlantic.

The WAVE I talked to at dinner drew the line at talking about NCR or Dayton. She would not talk about anything further than the fact that she had trained there. She was comfortable discussing the vicissitudes of the life and the real estate market in wartime Washington. That included how hard it was for women officers to date enlisted guys, since the guys owned no civilian clothes and “fraternization” across enlisted and officer ranks was foribdden.

Desch took his secrets to the grave in 1987 just as the secrets were first being openly discussed. He could never explain the Medal of Freedom that President Truman gave him in 1947.

The Spooks have now fled Nebraska Avenue and Arlington Hall for the more secure confines of Fort Meade in Maryland. Arlington Hall was given to the State Department, and the stately main building still presides over the campus off Route 50, even if no one remembers what was done there. That is a matter best described by those who lived it.

Our pal the WAVE remembered, and at this distance, we are just glad she was willling to share what she did.

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com