Everything about Arlington Hall totally explained
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 100-acre 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.
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 didn't seem appropriate because the decrypted messages couldn't 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 wasn't 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..
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. 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.
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.
Current uses
The
National Park Service listed Arlington Hall on the
National Register of Historic Places in
1988. 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.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Arlington Hall'.
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