Arlington Hall

Arlington Hall (also called Arlington Hall Station) was the headquarters of the US Army's Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) cryptography effort during World War II. Its site presently houses the George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center. The site is located on Arlington Boulevard (U.S. Route 50) between S. Glebe Road (Virginia Route 120) and S. George Mason Drive in Arlington, Virginia.

History

Arlington Hall began its existence during the 1920s as a private girls school which by 1941 resided on a convert|100|acre|km2|sing=on campus and had acquired the name of "Arlington Hall Junior College for Women". On June 10, 1942, the U.S. Army took possession of the facility under the War Powers Act for use by its Signals Intelligence Service. [ [http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/inscom/trail.pdf On The Trail of Military Intelligence History: A Guide to the Washington, DC, Area: Arlington Hall: From Coeds to Codewords' prepared by the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command History Office, pp. 16-17] Accessed Jan. 17, 2008]

During the War, Arlington Hall was in many respects similar to Bletchley Park in England, though military and only one of two primary cryptography operations in Washington (the other was the Naval Communications Annex, also housed in a commandeered private girls' school). Arlington Hall concentrated its efforts on the Japanese systems (including PURPLE) while Bletchley Park concentrated on European combatants.

The Arlington Hall effort was comparable in influence to other Anglo-American WW II-era technological efforts, such as the cryptographic work at Bletchley Park, the Naval Communications Annex, development of sophisticated microwave radar at MIT's Radiation Lab, and the Manhattan Project's development of nuclear weapons.

After World War II, the "Russian Section" at Arlington Hall expanded. Work on diplomatic messages benefited from additional technical personnel and new analysts—among them Samuel Chew, who had focused on Japan, and linguist Meredith Gardner, who had worked on both German and Japanese messages. Chew had considerable success at defining the underlying structure of the coded Russian texts. Gardner and his colleagues began analytically reconstructing the KGB codebooks. Late in 1946, Gardner broke the codebook's "spell table" for encoding English letters. With the solution of this spell table, SIS could read significant portions of messages that included English names and phrases. Gardner soon found himself reading a 1944 message listing prominent atomic scientists, including several with the Manhattan Project. Efforts to decipher Soviet codes continued under the super secret Venona project.

Another problem soon arose—that of determining how and to whom to disseminate the extraordinary information Gardner was developing. SIS's reporting procedures did not seem appropriate because the decrypted messages could not even be paraphrased for Arlington Hall's regular intelligence customers without divulging their source. By 1946, SIS knew nothing about the federal grand jury impaneled in Manhattan to probe the espionage and disloyalty charges stemming from Elizabeth Bentley's defection and other defectors from Soviet intelligence, so no one in the US Government was aware that evidence against the Soviets was suddenly developing on two adjacent tracks. In late August or early September 1947, the FBI was informed that the Army Security Agency had begun to break into Soviet espionage messages. By 1945, the Soviets had penetrated Arlington Hall with the placement of Bill Weisband who worked there for several years. The Government’s knowledge of his treason apparently was not revealed until its publication in a 1990 book co-authored by a high-level KGB defector.

Arlington Hall became one of the organizations and facilities of the National Security Agency after this agency was created in 1952. From 1945 to 1977, Arlington Hall served as the headquarters for the United States Army Security Agency. When the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) was organized at Arlington Hall on January 1, 1977, INSCOM absorbed the functions of the Army Security Agency into its own operations. INSCOM remained at Arlington Hall until the summer of 1989, when INSCOM relocated to Fort Belvoir. During the early 1980s, Arlington Hall served as a facility of the Defense Intelligence Agency. [ [http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/inscom/trail.pdf On The Trail of Military Intelligence History, p. 17] Accessed Jan. 17, 2008] [ [http://www.inscom.army.mil/textsite/history.asp US Army Intelligence and Security Command's (INSCOM) Text-Site: INSCOM History, by the INSCOM History Office] Accessed Jan. 17, 2008] .

In 1989, the Department of Defense transferred the eastern portion of Arlington Hall to the Department of State. In October 1993, this portion of the site became the National Foreign Affairs Training Center when the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) moved there. [ [http://www.afsa.org/fsj/JulAug05/honley.pdf Honley, S.A., Focus on FSI/FS Training: FSI Settles into Arlington Hall, Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2005] Accessed Jan. 17, 2008] The National Foreign Affairs Training Center was renamed as the George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center in a ceremony held on May 29, 2002. [ [http://isc.temple.edu/hist249/Remarks%20at%20Dedication%20Schultz%20Center.htm Secretary of State Colin L. Powell: Remarks at the Ceremony Renaming the National Foreign Affairs Training Center to the George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center, Arlington, Virginia, May 29, 2002] Accessed Jan. 17, 2008]

In January 2008, construction workers discovered an unexploded Civil War shell underneath Arlington Hall. The shell had a length of one foot and a diameter of five inches. Army bomb experts from Fort Belvoir were brought in to handle the munition. [ [http://www.connectionnewspapers.com/article.asp?paper=60&cat=104&article=93492 Schultz, D., "Civil War Munitions Found", The Connection Newspapers website, February 12, 2008] Accessed Feb. 15, 2008.]

Current uses

The National Park Service listed Arlington Hall on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988. [ [http://www.dhr.virginia.gov/registers/RegisterMasterList.pdf Virginia Department of Historic Resources list of properties on Virginia Landmarks Register and National Register of Historic Places] Accessed Jan. 18, 2008] The historic main building of the former girls school now serves as an administration building for the George P. Shultz Foreign Affairs Training Center. The western portion of Arlington Hall site presently houses the United States National Guard Readiness Center.

References

External links

* [http://www.nsa.gov/publications/publi00039.cfm NSA - Introductory History of VENONA]
* [http://www.fas.org/sgp/library/moynihan/appa7.html Moynihan Commssion Report on Government Secrecy, Appendix A, "The Cold War"] (1997)

Further reading

* Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, "KGB: The Inside Story" (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 373- 74.