PO Box 1142 | WW2
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This is True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you'll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. You'll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?

I'm Rhianna Needs, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios. Some of the stories are pretty hair-raising. Some of them you read and go, wait a minute, this would make a really good novel. Actually, it wouldn't make a good novel because it's just too realistic. P.O. Box 1142. May the 1st, 1945. The North Atlantic Ocean.

A few meters underwater, German submarine U-234 is sailing west, manned by a crew of 12. Having embarked from Nazi-occupied Norway a few weeks prior, the journey has, so far, gone to plan. That night, though, the submarine's communications go dark. Both of the Nazis' transmitter stations, Goliath and Nauen, have stopped responding.

Despite the confusion, the crew continue their journey. They had enough fuel to last for six months. Then, on May the 4th, the ship's radio clicks back to life. But it's not their German comrades they hear. It's the Americans.

The Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, is dead. Admiral Karl Dönitz is the new head of state. The crew can hardly believe what they're hearing. Growing suspicious, they conclude that it must be a hoax. So they continued on. A few days later, the submarine surfaces to pick up a better signal.

Immediately, they hear an order from Admiral Dönitz himself. Surrender to the Allied forces. Still unconvinced, the crew radio another Nazi submarine who confirm the news. The war is over. Germany has surrendered. The men aboard U-234 begin to panic.

Because this was no typical U-boat mission. It was a pretty significant group of people that were on the ship. Including a general, one Ulrich Kessler, a judge advocate, and several scientists and engineers.

Perhaps more significant, though, was the cargo they were carrying. Disassembled and placed throughout the sub, for example, was a radio-guided glide bomb and a complete Messerschmitt Me 62 fighter jet. It was far superior to any of the Allied airplanes at the time. But not only that.

Loaded into the subsea mine chutes were some 50 lead cubes containing... "1100 pounds of uranium, enriched uranium." ...the key component of a nuclear weapon. The submarine's scheduled destination? Tokyo.

The Germans decided that every single thing that they had that they thought would be valuable to the Japanese, they put on the submarine. And they also had experts who could explain what was on here. General Kessler argued they should head to Argentina, escape altogether. But even in defeat, the submarine's captain wanted to follow orders and surrender. But to whom? The Russians were out of the question.

The British didn't seem much better. But then there were the Americans. Seeing they were the furthest from the Russians, both geographically and ideologically, the captain set a course for the eastern seaboard of the United States. They found an American destroyer. They surrendered to them. After arriving on American soil, the crew vanished, along with the enriched uranium.

Known only to a handful of people at the time, both the crew and its cargo were transferred to two top-secret military bases across the United States. The uranium went to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a nuclear diffusion plant which was part of the now infamous Manhattan Project. And the crew? They went somewhere that's still practically unheard of, even today.

It was top secret for so long. And so they got a lot of really pretty amazing information from these folks. Its name? Fort Hunt. Better known as P.O. Box 1142. They never called it Fort Hunt. No one who was there ever said Fort Hunt. The people who were there were sworn to secrecy. In this episode of True Spies, you'll hear all about Fort Hunt, a.k.a. P.O. Box 1142.

the military base that became one of the most secretive centers in U.S. intelligence history. What's fascinating is the people who were in all of these sections, nobody else had a clue what they were doing. Providing critical intel to the Allies through the Second World War, including compiling the Red Book.

probably one of the most important documents in the entire war. A base that processed hundreds of the Nazis' elite officers and scientists before disappearing without a trace shortly after the war's end. All the facilities that were built are also gone. You would never, ever, ever know that anything like this had happened in World War II.

Nestled on the Potomac River, some 11 miles south of Washington, D.C., lies a public park. While typically punctuated by volleyball courts and picnicking families,

The park does have one peculiarity, dating from the Spanish-American War of 1898. Gun emplacements that were there from around 1900. Once part of George Washington's estate, the park has long since been owned by the National Park Service. It was obsolete, and so it sat there without a whole lot of things going on from most of the 20th century. This is Robert Sutton...

the National Park Service's chief historian for many years. While there was little else of note to see at the park, tours of the derelict gun batteries were still in demand. But by the 2000s, Robert's colleagues were beginning to hear rumors that this park, Fort Hunt, had a far richer history than anyone knew of.

Something to do with World War II. So the park would have tours of the fort, and they'd get toward the end and they'd say, you know, we're beginning to piece together some information about what happened here during World War II. And we would really like to find someone who was here during that time, the tour guides would add. For years, no one had anything to say. But then, in 2005... One of these tours, this couple...

said, "You know what? We had a neighbor who was here, and we think he might be able to talk to him." One of the park rangers tracks down the man, one Fred Mischel, now living in Kentucky. Now, it took a while before he could arrange it, and he knew the reason was because every single person who was stationed at Fort Hunt was sworn to secrecy. They were told that they were going to take the story of what happened there to the grave.

By the 2000s, however, much of U.S. intelligence's wartime activities had technically been declassified, albeit, unsurprisingly, with little publicity. Hidden away in the vast expanses of the National Archives, the intelligence was almost impenetrable in scale and density. Using Fred Michel's name, though, a National Park ranger finds his file, presenting it to him

Fred agrees to talk. At the end of his oral history interview, they said, well, do you know anybody else who might be useful? Oh, yes, he replies. Here are a few other guys I worked with at Fort Hunt. So they started tracking down people. And by the end, the Park Service was able to interview about 65 of the people who were stationed at Fort Hunt. As it turned out, the rumors were true.

Fort Hunt was much more than a derelict gun battery. Just turned out to be an absolutely amazing story. Have you ever thought about investing but don't know where to start? Think it's only something millionaires can do?

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With the United States thrust into the Second World War following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, American intelligence officials realized they had a problem. Their intelligence gathering apparatus was really pretty bad. Scrambling for expertise and resources, the U.S. sent a delegation to the country they regarded as having some of the best spies in the world.

Great Britain. To study what they were doing, they spent six months there. On their return, the American delegation had several key recommendations. One was setting up an interrogation center for prisoners of war. Another, the analysis of captured enemy intel. The Germans were very, very fastidious record keepers. And so the documents that were captured, there literally were tons and tons and tons of

Meanwhile, an escape and evasion program should be formalized to aid both American POWs and downed pilots behind enemy lines.

And Fort Hunt was there. It really wasn't used. It was very close to the Pentagon, very close to Washington, D.C. It was actually a perfect location. And so they decided on Fort Hunt as the place where this should happen. The U.S. government signs a deal with the National Park Service. They could use the site under a cooperative agreement for the duration of World War II plus one year.

In just six weeks, over 100 barracks were built, ringed by barbed wire and watchtowers. Passers-by knew nothing about the site, which offered no clues to its name nor function. Even those stationed there rarely knew its actual name. It was always called Post Office Box 1142, for where the mail was delivered in Alexandria.

Despite the innocuous setting, the sheer number of blacked-out vehicles entering and exiting the compound suggested it was significant. But at first, the US military struggled to hire the right personnel for the base. They knew who they wanted: native German speakers who understood the nuances of the language. But in early 1942, many of these individuals were barred from serving.

For example, one of the people who just became a very, very good friend of mine, unfortunately just passed away at age 100, Paul Fairbrook, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he went down to try to join the Marines. Who turned Paul away, as did the Navy and the Army. But the Army said, you know, at some point you might be able to join or we might draft you. The reason we can't do it now is because you're an enemy alien.

In other words, a citizen of a country with whom America was at war. Native German speakers were usually exactly that: Germans. But soon, that designation ceased to apply. Eventually, the military said, "Look, Germany has decided that these people are no longer citizens." And so that was the opening that allowed them to become U.S. citizens and to join the army.

The likes of Paul Fairbrook, a German immigrant to America in the 1930s, was seemingly perfect for Fort Hunt. Not only did they understand the language, they understood a lot of the nuances of the language and the culture. Before they were stationed there, though, they needed to get through training. Many of them went through Camp Ritchie. And their instinct bore fruit.

It turned out master interrogators like Guy Stern, the hero of our true spy story, The Ritchie Boys. Be sure to listen back to that if you'd like to know more. Unsurprisingly, captured Nazi officers were often arrogant and uncooperative, especially to younger soldiers, many of whom would go on to make up the personnel at Fort Hunt. It was essential that Camp Ritchie prepared them for this.

They would have American soldiers, German American soldiers, dressed up in Nazi German uniforms, and they would become the actors for interrogations. And these actors would try and trip up the trainee interrogators any way they could.

One example, which I think is great, one of these actors, first of all, he refused to give his name or any information. And that sort of flustered the trainee. But then he started talking about this thing called a goulash cannon. To those clued up on their German military lingo, this was a common idiom for field kitchen. But to those without such knowledge...

This sounded like nothing more than a beef stew gun, i.e. nonsense. Well, as the interrogation went on, it got further and further into this goulash canone, goulash is running down the mountain and everything. Fed up, the trainee interrogator snapped. Ignoring protocol, he began shouting at the mock German captive. The interrogation fell to pieces.

They would do things like that to try to frustrate the trainees, and some of them actually couldn't deal with it. Nearly 50% of trainees washed out, never even made it to Fort Hunt. Those who did were the elite. What's more, most of them were Jewish.

had escaped from Germany or Austria. - And before long, these Jewish refugees had graduated from Camp Ritchie and were interrogating Nazi officers at Fort Hunt. By early 1942, German U-boats were hunting along America's Eastern seaboard, even sinking allied vessels within sight of land. The Americans in turn destroyed or captured a few U-boats themselves.

The surviving sailors creating a steady stream of German POWs to the U.S. mainland. POWs that needed to be processed and debriefed. Including one Captain Henke. One of the most decorated U-boat captains there was. He had sunk like 20-some ships and I don't remember how many tons of stuff. And not only that...

The British had broadcast accusations that Henke was a war criminal, having reportedly shot survivors of SS Ceramic, a British passenger ship Henke's U-boat had torpedoed. He was very arrogant. In fact, he was so arrogant, he believed, as the Nazis did, that the Aryan race was superior. But he also believed that Hitler was inferior, and he was afraid that they would lose because he thought that the Nazi hierarchy was inferior.

And now this avowed Nazi was faced with the interrogators of Fort Hunt, mostly German Jewish refugees. They got some information from him. Not least on some recent German naval innovations, including a much more sophisticated radar system and a new 37mm anti-aircraft flak gun, almost twice the size of its predecessor.

To get him to talk some more, the interrogators threatened to hand Henke over to the British, a tactic that became a classic technique at Fort Hunt. Threatening to turn captives over to those they most feared often helped elicit crucial tactical, technical and psychological details of the German war machine.

Despite having no intention of ever doing so, Fort Hunt personnel would even threaten to hand detainees over to the Soviets. And that worked very well. But in Henke's case, the technique soon backfired.

He was afraid that if he was turned over to the British, he would be considered a war criminal and would be hanged. And he actually eventually essentially committed suicide by in mid daylight going out and scaling one of the fences and he was shot by one of the guards. Henke was an outlier though, the only recorded death of an inmate at Fort Hunt throughout its history.

While the treatment of captives could involve threats, that was usually a last resort.

The interrogators soon found that a softer approach was far more effective. It was not a retreat, but their rooms were relatively comfortable. They generally had free reign of the area. They had different activities. They could play ping pong, they could play pool, they could go swimming. They could even play horseshoe, a game where horseshoes are thrown toward a pole some 40 feet away.

That kind of surprised me because if you've seen horseshoes, they're big, heavy iron things. And I would be nervous if I gave a German a horseshoe and said, here, throw this. And if a captive offered up especially good intelligence, they were rewarded even further. They might take them into a fancy steak dinner in town or a movie. Or, in the case of one general, a high-end Washington, D.C. brothel.

During that excursion, though, his handler was met with an unwelcome sight. It was raided by the local police. Knowing that a Nazi general was currently in the building on his accord, the Fort Hunt officer's heart skipped. This is going to be a real mess. But while clearing the rooms...

the police are met with an even bigger problem it turned out there were also a lot of senators and and a congressman there seeing the potential fallout they could cause the police simply walked out they realized it would be a bigger mess in fact the subject of brothels became a significant source of intelligence on the men held at Fort Hunt

The Germans had an official brothel program. With the establishments numbered and licensed, German soldiers were even handed brothel cards. So, for example, there might be brothel number five and they would have different women there. So if a soldier or a sailor went there, he had to keep a card with where he went and who he was with.

Learning of this, the intelligence personnel at Fort Hunt spotted an opportunity. First of all, if they were interrogating somebody and they said, oh, I see that you saw Marie at brothel number four. How was that? And they go, well, if these guys already know that, they probably know everything. So I might as well just tell them everything I know. And it often worked for another reason.

If a soldier was married or was afraid his mother would find out, he didn't want anybody to know that. So that could be a tool that they could use to try to get information because they already felt guilty. In one instance, this guilt elicited critical intelligence from a German officer. Getting drunk one night, the soldier could hide his remorse no more. Relenting, he told his captors everything they wanted to know.

- Exactly where the 10th Panzer Division had been and to his knowledge, where it was going to be. - Cabling the information to forward units in Europe, the Allies bombed the division almost completely out of the war. Fort Hunt's interrogators honed several other techniques to get their captives to talk. One saw them wear a similar rank to the Nazi officer being questioned, a tactic learned from the British.

The British learned that when you're interrogating prisoners, you have a lot more success if the interrogator is either at or like one rank below the person you're interrogating. And so they used that at Fort Hunt. So many of the soldiers who were there were young. You know, they were like private first class or something, or maybe a sergeant. But when they were interrogating a major, they would put the major badges on.

Another tactic involved recruiting informers or "stool pigeons" among the detainees. One example was a fellow by the name of Count Maximilian Korth. An Austrian aristocrat, Count Korth's father had been imprisoned by the Nazis following the Anschluss.

He didn't like Hitler, he didn't like what was going on. He came to them and said that he'd be interested in doing what he could to help. And as the second in command on a German U-boat, Koreth had the bona fides necessary to get his comrades to talk. And so he roomed with a number of German U-boat prisoners, and he was very, very effective in getting information out of them. Including on the Nazis' new T-5 acoustic torpedo.

The prisoner got really excited, his voice went up, and he started describing it in great detail. The torpedo honed in on the sound of propellers, rendering even inaccurate launches a danger to its targets. All of this was gold to the Allies, knowing what military innovations the Germans were bringing to the battlefield and how they could potentially foil them. In some cases, though,

Captives refused to play ball, flatly denying knowledge of just about anything. Unbeknownst to them, however, the men at Fort Hunt had a backup plan. They would have hidden microphones to eavesdrop on conversations of these German prisoners.

Which proved particularly useful when uncooperative detainees returned from interrogations. For example, one German pilot, he said, you know, he's just a regular pilot, no big deal. When he got back to his room, however... Told his roommate, he says, you know, I told them I'm just a pilot. Actually, I'm a very high-ranking pilot. But now I have to make sure that they think that I'm a low-ranking pilot.

And not only that... We said I lied about where this particular manufacturing plant was. I said I didn't know where it was. I knew exactly where it was. I said there were 10,000 people who worked there. Actually, there were 20,000 people. In line with the secrecy surrounding Fort Hunt, the eavesdropping unit was stationed in its own building, codenamed the Honeysuckle. Usually there were 12 soldiers listening in on conversations. If there was something significant, they would make a transcript of the conversation.

Occasionally though, the Allies didn't need to do anything to glean important information. Sometimes, it came to them.

A very high-ranking mechanic in the Luftwaffe, they put him out of the army because they found out that his ancestors were Jewish, but they allowed him to work in a Junker airplane factory. And one day, he decided to steal a brand-new Junker mid-range bomber and fly it to an American base, and he landed it. I think he didn't know how to drop the landing gear because he did a belly landing at this American base in Luxembourg.

They said, here, how would you like to have a brand new airplane and all the specs for it? Thanked for his efforts, the Luftwaffe mechanic ended up working with the Americans at Fort Hunt. There, he informed on captured pilots' conversations and ultimately even interrogated some himself. But German POWs weren't the only focus at Fort Hunt.

aiding and abetting American captives, formed a whole other unit in the operation. Hello, True Spies listener. This episode is made possible with the support of June's Journey, a riveting little caper of a game which you can play right now on your phone. Since you're listening to this show, it's safe to assume you love a good mystery, some compelling detective work, and

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By early 1944, American airman Lawrence Dennis had been a POW at Stalag Luft 17B in Austria for several months, his B-17 bomber having been shot down over Norway. Arriving at the camp,

Dennis was shocked by how reasonably he and his fellow airmen were treated. One thing that Goering did that actually was positive, I hate to say it, but he convinced Hitler that prison camps for American flyers or Allied flyers, they should treat them much better than other prison camps. And the reason was that he said, if they know that we're treating them well, probably they will treat our pilots well also.

And this fairer treatment even extended to allowing POWs to receive mail. One day, Dennis received a letter from an old school friend, one Irma Watkins. Reading the letter, it seemingly contained nothing of note, which is why it got through the camp's screening process in the first place. What the Germans didn't know, though, was that among the Allied POWs throughout the Stalag Luft camps,

a huge cryptography program was underway, all coordinated thousands of miles away at Fort Hunt. Knowing how to read the code, Dennis's letter from a high school sweetheart had a very different message. The code read, "General Eisenhower planning for your welfare and safety. Sit tight and await orders."

When we talked to people who actually had been in these camps, they said one of the most valuable things that they did was by sending these messages, they realized that the Americans were doing everything they could to have their backs. And if nothing else, it was a tremendous morale booster. But encrypted letters of support weren't all these POWs were getting from P.O. Box 1142.

People at Fort Hunt who were writing letters to prisoners in camps, what they'd do is they'd say, you know, something's coming, look out for this package that's coming, and the package would be sent from some bogus organization. These packages contained everything from ping pong paddles and packs of cards to cribbage boards and chess sets, but stuffed inside these were the real gifts.

German money, maps, radios, and even, in some instances, pistols. So if anyone tried to escape from one of these camps... While known as the Escape and Evasion Unit, or MIS-X to those stationed there, its work was top secret, even by Fort Hunt standards. In fact, to others at the base, all that was known about the unit was the name of its building,

The Creamery. Nobody else had a clue what they were doing. They really were very, very independent. While the escape and evasion units work may have been highly classified, ironically, many of its letters and parcels went to Stalag Luft 3, the German POW camp later immortalized in the Hollywood film The Great Escape.

But it wasn't just the messages and packages into these camps that were important. The Creamery wanted to know what their captured comrades knew. After all, they were on the ground and often had months, if not years, of fighting experience.

In one instance, an American POW wrote back that the Air Force needed to change the design on the B-17 bomber's forward hatch. It often jammed, he wrote, making ejecting dangerous or impossible in case of an emergency. Meanwhile, other captives relayed back what they had seen of enemy troop movements and even of any obvious changes in morale among their German captors.

all through the cryptographic system formulated and run from Fort Hunt.

Also, for pilots and members of bombers and so forth, they would give them packets so that if they were shot down, they could hopefully escape capture. So they'd have maps, they would have water purifying tablets, they would have fish hooks so that hopefully they could avoid capture. And that, of course, was the most desirable thing. They would give them directions. If you're shot down, where do you go? Well, you try to head toward the Pyrenees. And if you get through the Pyrenees into Spain, you're a lot better off. If you can make it all the way to Gibraltar, you're even better off.

Back at Fort Hunt, alongside the incoming letters from American POWs in Europe, the base was flooded with other mail. There literally were tons and tons and tons of captured German documents. This all fed into the Military Intelligence Research Section. MIRS, and their job was to translate and evaluate these captured German documents. All to compile a crucial document.

Officially, it was called the Order of Battle of the German Army. To those at Fort Hunt, though, it went by a different name.

affectionately called the Red Book because it had a red cover. Detailing every single division of the German army, their commanders and primary functions, the book became one of the most important sources of military intelligence the Allies had on their enemy. And it was extremely helpful when the Allies were planning their attack on D-Day in Normandy.

Each man in MIRS had a specialty. Robert Sutton's friend, Paul Fairbrook, was focused on the German high command. And not long after the failed attempt on Hitler's life on the 20th of July 1944, Paul noticed something odd. He looked at the org chart for the hierarchy and he saw a new box for a morale officer.

Mentioning it to his superior, Paul gets permission to investigate further. One thing that was wonderful, I think, about that program and other programs is the people were so motivated that they required almost no supervision at all. Tracking down more intel, Paul comes to a striking conclusion. This morale officer was really anything but, instead ensuring the loyalty of everyone around the Fuhrer.

One of Hitler's main concerns, and he thought actually his main concern, was his safety. And he thought that was at least as significant, if not more significant, than fighting the war after the assassination attempt.

In other words, the German High Command was devolving into a paranoid fight for survival, instead of commanding its forces properly in the field. "One very significant piece of news." Indeed, by early 1945, the German forces had almost completely collapsed. But even after VE Day on May 8th, many of the personnel at Fort Hunt weren't finished.

with hundreds of thousands of Nazi soldiers to process. The interrogating expertise of these men was invaluable. Some of the men actually went to Europe. Including Major Paul Kubala, who ended up debriefing perhaps the most significant Nazi to fall into Allied hands. He actually became the handler early on and the first interrogator of Goering. And he actually wrote several reports about Goering

Several Fort Hunt personnel even went to Nuremberg, working as translators for the likes of Göring, chief of the Luftwaffe High Command and Hitler's longtime number two. As the war ended, though, P.O. Box 1142 became a facility of quite a different dimension. Whereas previously it had interrogated Nazi captives to help defeat the Germans,

Soon it was interrogating them to help defeat a new enemy, the Soviet Union. And significant to that were some of the passengers of German submarine U-234, which included a general by the name of Kessler.

In particular, the Messerschmitt jet that was disassembled and placed on board U-234, Kessler's U-boat. Kessler told them everything.

detailing just how advanced this new plane was. German, you know, the capabilities that they had, their abilities with aircraft, rockets and so forth, was far superior to anything that the Allies had at the time. And that became one of the important parts of Fort Hunt. So much so that one of the scientists from U-234 was recruited by the Americans at the base, Dr. Hein Schleich.

who was an expert in radio waves. One of the first of 1,800 Nazi scientists invited to work for the Americans under Operation Paperclip, Schleich lived in the United States for the rest of his life. Under the program, he helped develop the infrared technology still used in stealth aircraft today.

You put all these things together and I think had the potential and I think it actually was very useful to the Americans as the Cold War started to heat up. For Robert Sutton, the most significant name to pass through Fort Hunt was not a scientist nor a soldier, but a diplomat.

Gustav Hilger. He was the attaché, essentially the ambassador from Germany to Russia until Operation Barbarossa. He had a lot of very valuable information about the Soviet Union. Even Joseph Stalin had recognized the importance of Hilger, remarking that German heads of state and German ambassadors to Moscow came and went, but Gustav Hilger remained.

And one thing that he said that became part of the program, the United States program, he said psychologically, the people in Russia are very unhappy with their lot in life. A unit tasked with waging psychological warfare could be highly effective, Hilgar argued, in fomenting unrest behind the Iron Curtain. And so the CIA essentially did that, developed a whole psychology section dealing with the Soviet Union.

What's more, the agency hired Hilgar himself. He also worked for a time within the Galen organization, the West German intelligence network sponsored by the Americans and run by former Nazi general Reinhard Galen. You can hear all about that in True Spy's two-part special on the life of Galen, who was also stationed at Fort Hunt for several months following the war.

It's also thought that Wernher von Braun, architect of the Nazis' V-2 rocket program, may have gone through Fort Hunt under Operation Paperclip. The father, really, of the American rocket space program. Even today, some of his files are redacted, which is not surprising to historians like Robert, given the compromised nature of many of the men hired through Operation Paperclip via bases like Fort Hunt.

Von Braun, after he died, we found out that he had been a member of the SS. It also turns out that the places where they were building the rockets, they were underground facilities in the middle of Germany. And the people who worked on building these rockets were prisoners from concentration camps. He knew about that.

Not only did he know that, but he actually saw them. He was very familiar that they were the ones who were working there. It was the most horrible conditions you could imagine. They'd work underground for days on end. The death rate was appalling.

Gustav Hilger, the German ambassador to the Soviet Union, hired at Fort Hunt by the CIA, was no less implicated in Nazi war crimes. Hilger, it's not clear whether he was complicit or whether he allowed Jews in Italy to be held as prisoners there. He certainly didn't do anything to try to stop it. So whether he was complicit or not,

it or whether he simply allowed the treatment of Jews in Italy, he certainly did not do anything to try to stop it. And that, I think, is something that became clear a little bit later on that he had a dark side as well. But as Operation Paperclip ramped up, Fort Hunt wound down. With the Second World War over, the U.S. government had a deal to honor.

Over that period, nearly 3,500 Nazi soldiers, sailors and scientists passed through the camp, a fact the U.S. authorities were adamant no one could know anything about.

It was top secret for so long, and the people who were there were sworn to secrecy. All the facilities that the army built there are also gone. You would never, ever, ever know that anything like this had happened in World War II. Except, that is, if not for the work of men like Robert Sutton, work that culminated in a public reunion of the men stationed at Fort Hunt.

aka P.O. Box 1142, in 2007. The Park Service erected a monument to this operation and a flagpole, and that's how you would know that this happened at Fort Hunt. For Robert Sutton, who met many of the men stationed at Fort Hunt, the significance of the base lies in the soldiers who were stationed there.

Most of them, in fact, that we talked to who were at Fort Hunt had escaped from Germany or Austria in the 1930s. And I think that's one of the really wonderful stories that we have. A story which, if the men had had it their way, may never have come to light. I'm Rhianna Meads. Join us next time for another dangerous liaison with true spies.

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