I’ve mentioned several times before the extremely localized nature of many geo-oddities. Often I’ve used my very own hometown of Arlington County, Virginia as an ongoing proxy.
So I created a bicycle ride over the weekend that highlighted a specific theme that I’ve not discussed before. Being located so close to the nation’s capital, Arlington County has been a hotbed of spies, espionage, and various cat-and-mouse games between the United States and the former Soviet Union (and now Russia).
A little Interubes sleuthing uncovered a few of the more noteworthy events and places in Arlington. The amount of activity that occurred behind the scenes amazed me. Even so, I’m sure most of it remains hidden and only a tiny portion ever made it into public view. Naturally I had to visit some of the known locations in person, and readers can too. I produced a map that begins and ends at the Ballston Metro Station. The complete route is about 10 miles (16 km).
All photos are my own unless otherwise labeled.
The Early Cold War
Arlington Hall began as a girls’ school in the 1920’s. However, a ready-made facility with easy access to the Pentagon sounded really attractive to the government a little later. So the military seized and closed the school during the Second World War as vital to the American war effort.
It became Arlington Hall Station, a headquarters of the US Army’s Signal Intelligence Service. There, cryptologists focused on cracking Japanese codes. Then the Army decided to retain the property after the war because of an emerging new threat, the Cold War. Eventually the operation became part of the newly-formed National Security Agency.
Soviet efforts to penetrate Arlington Hall began almost immediately, and succeeded.
“The secrets were held from everyone except the Russians… 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.”
Many of the Arlington Hall workers lived in the adjacent garden apartments of Buckingham and the single family homes of the Arlington Forest neighborhood. Soviet spies flocked there too.
An off-premise Officers Club sat at the old Henderson Estate, now the site of the Lubber Run Community Center (map). Officials feared inebriated officers might say things that should remain silent so they moved the club onto campus. That didn’t halt the flow of sensitive information from deeply-embedded moles though.
Cryptology operations moved to more secure facilities in the 1980’s. One part of the Arlington Hall campus now hosts the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute and the other holds the US Army National Guard Readiness Center. That was the official word, anyway.
There were also rumors of Soviet and/or East German operations coordinated from a condominium building at 1515 S. Arlington Ridge Road (Street View). I had no idea whether that was true or not, although Arlington Ridge Road did make an appearance on Twelve Mile Circle in a completely different context a few years ago.
Aldrich Ames
Aldrich Ames is serving a lifelong prison sentence at the Allenwood high security prison in Pennsylvania, as he has done for the last two decades. He served as a counterintelligence officer in the Central Intelligence Agency for more than 30 years before his final exposure and arrest in 1994. His job focused on targeting people who worked at the Soviet Embassy to see if he could convert them into moles. Behind the scenes, he sold information about the identity of Soviet spies who then promptly faced execution or simply disappeared.
“The CIA and FBI learned that Russian officials who had been recruited by them were being arrested and executed. These human sources had provided critical intelligence information about the USSR, which was used by U.S. policy makers in determining U.S. foreign policy. Following analytical reviews and receipt of information about Ames’s unexplained wealth, the FBI opened an investigation in May 1993.”
The FBI arrested Ames at his Arlington home, at 2512 N Randolph Street.
The Arlington County property records noted ownership by Aldrich H. & Rosario C. Ames. The Federal government seized Ames’ property and sold it in 1995.
Robert Hanssen
Robert Hanssen worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation until his 2001 arrest. He now serves a life sentence at Florence ADMAX prison in South Carolina. Like Ames, Hanssen sold secrets primarily for greed, and he exposed informants buried deep within the Soviet military system. Hanssen used a number of “dead drops,” or inconspicuous places where he could leave documents and receive payments. At least one of those secret hiding spots was located in Arlington.
I used to take my children to the Long Branch Nature Center when they were younger (map). Little did I suspect that it had a hidden historical past. There, under the edge of a wooden outdoor amphitheater (photo), Russian agents left a paper bag filled with $50,000 in cash for Hanssen. The FBI was already on Hanssen’s tail at that point and watched the location for several days. Hanssen never showed-up although officials captured him at another dead drop a little later. Upon arrest he reportedly exclaimed, “What took you so long?“
Operation Ghost Stories
Just when everyone thought the Cold War ended long ago, it reemerged from the underground in 2010, resurfaced by the FBI’s Operation Ghost Stories. As the FBI stated,
“Our agents and analysts watched the deep-cover operatives as they established themselves in the U.S. (some by using stolen identities) and went about leading seemingly normal lives—getting married, buying homes, raising children, and assimilating into American society… The SVR was in it for the long haul. The illegals were content to wait decades to obtain their objective, which was to develop sources of information in U.S. policymaking circles.”
The ten Russian deep undercover agents that were arrested — including two who lived in Arlington — were not convicted of any crime. They returned to Russia as part of a prisoner exchange; of spies traded for spies. Both sides continued the cloak-and-dagger.
The FBI released a large compendium of documents from their investigation in 2011 including a video of an actual drop taking place in an unnamed Arlington park. It included a bag containing $5,000. There was speculation about the actual location at the time. It could have been one of several Arlington locations because of the lack of visual clues in the video, although most signs pointed to Glencarlyn Park (map). Fittingly, that would be less than a mile from Hanssen’s dead drop. I looked around and couldn’t find an exact match although the bridges there were constructed in a similar manner (photo). I’ll keep looking.
Maybe I’ll find a bag of cash.
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