Historic Photos of Vint Hill

Source/Credit: VINT HILL FARMS STATION HISTORIC DISTRICT SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT, Prepared by John Salmon, 2014, at the request and on behalf of Citizens for Fauquier County “CFFC”

SUMMARY
British prime minister Winston S. Churchill once observed that Russia was a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Similarly, the history of Vint Hill Farms Station remains in large part a mystery almost as difficult to decode as the messages the post was created to intercept. Because the station’s functions were classified as Top Secret throughout its lifespan (1942-1997), and because the relatively small quantity of records that have been declassified pertain largely to the World War II era, only three to five years of the station’s fifty-five-year existence can be described in any detail. A smattering of records have been released for the fifty years of the Cold War era, but they are generally unrelated to each other, and to attempt to tell the story of that period is akin to assembling a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle with only a few dozen pieces at hand.  Nevertheless, glimpses of Vint Hill’s story can be gleaned from the fragments that are available, and from the many buildings that survive to hint at the secret life of this nationally significant intercept station.

During World War II, Vint Hill Farms Station contributed importantly to the Allied effort, especially with regard to the planning for the invasion of Europe in 1944 (D-Day). As described in more detail below, it was a radio monitor at Vint Hill who first intercepted a vitally important encoded message from the Japanese ambassador to Germany, Oshima Hiroshi, as it was transmitted from Berlin to Japan. The message, which described the German coastal defenses in western France, also confirmed Allied suspicions about Nazi defensive strategies and troop dispositions and thereby affected D­ Day planning.

Allied leaders considered Oshima’s messages, which unbeknownst to him were intercepted and deciphered throughout the war, to be the best and most reliable indicators of German thinking. The importance of the Oshima intercepts, especially this one, is difficult to overstate. Oshima “reported [to Tokyo] everything he was told” by the German generals and Hitler, all of whom trusted him implicitly. Oshima died in 1975, never knowing that he had been the Allies’ best source of strategic information. At an international conference of cryptologists in 1978, one of them asked rhetorically, if the intercepts were so vital, why didn’t the war end sooner? He then answered his own  question: “It did end sooner.” And Vint Hill Farms Station played a crucial role in achieving that successful outcome.1

Throughout the United States, many military installations are being closed and altered for other uses. Vint Hill Farms Station is an increasingly rare, largely intact example of a post that represents an important aspect of the nation’s history during World War II and the Cold War. Although the period of significance encompasses the lifespan of the installation (1942-1997), most of the buildings were constructed by the end of the 1960s, slightly less than 50 years ago. The Vint Hills Farm Station Historic District is eligible for listing on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places from the period of its construction in 1942 to its closure in 1997. It is eligible under Criterion A, as an excellent example of an important site that represents the military history of the United States during the period of significance. It also qualifies for Criteria Consideration G because its period of significance ends within the past 50 years. The Vint Hill Farms Station Historic District retains the integrity of its historic location, association, setting, feeling, design, materials, and workmanship.

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1 Carl Boyd, Hitler’s Japanese Confidant: General Oshima Hiroshi and MAGIC Intelligence, I 94I -1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 122, 178-179.

HISTORY AND CONTEXT
Late Antebellum and Civil War Eras
In 1853, Virginia L.Brooks,a Mississippi resident, purchased a 729-acre farm in Fauquier County “known by the name of Vinthill” from Lucy Buckner. Buckner, as well as previous owners, had assembled the tract from several smaller ones over the decades. In 1860, Brooks sold the farm as well as an adjoining 206.25-acre parcel to Andrew Low, an Englishman who had settled in Fauquier County near his uncle and employer Charles Green. Green was a merchant who lived parttime in a grand summerhouse-The Lawn-just east across the line in Prince William County, and the community of Greenwich grew up around his property.2

When Low acquired the Vint Hill farm, the 206.25-acre tract had no buildings on it, while a house and other buildings valued at $500 stood on the 729.5-acre tract. The relatively low value for the buildings suggests that the existing dwelling probably was a small frame house. During the Civil War, remarkably, Low began constructing a larger house in the Italianate style that he completed in 1865. Although combat occurred around both Low’s and Green’sproperties during the war, their status as British subjects (Green allegedly flew the Union Jack prominently) may have spared their properties from depredations. The closest combat was a clash at Green’s nearby Grapewood Farm between Federal cavalry and Confederate Col. John S. Mosby with fifty of his Rangers on May 30, 1863. Part of the action likely occurred on the edge of Law’s Vint Hill farm.3

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2 Fauquier County. Deed Book 53, 1853-1854, Reel 23, pp. 10-11, Libnuy of Virginia (LVA).Richmond,
VA, deed recorded August 31, 1853; ibid., Deed Book 59, 1860-1866, Reel 26, pp. 87-88, deed recorded September 24. 1860 (Low hnd the 206.25-acre tract surveyed on July 30, 1860, and recorded the survey with the deed); Mark Swanson and Lisa D. O’Steen, Evaluation of Selected Historic Properties at Vint Hill Farms Station: Testing of Archaeological Site 44FQJ 37, Preparation of Civil War Context, and
Development of Cold War Context and Inventory (Plano.TX:Geo-Marine, Inc., 1995).14.
3 Auditor of Public Accounts.Land Tax Books. Fauquier County, 1860-1865, LVA. The 1861 land tax book values the buildings at $500; the ink in the 1862 book is so faded as to be unreadable; the books for 1863 and 1864 do not exist; the 1865 book values the buildings at $2,500. The map showing two buildings on Low’s property is in U.S. War Department, Atlas toAccompany the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, DC: U.S. Govenunent Printing Office, 1891-1895; reprint, Gettysburg,
PA:The National Historical Society, 1978), 130, plate 45, map 6. According to an unpublished manuscript prepared by Low’sdaughter-in-law about 1910 and cited in Swanson and O’Steen, Vint Hill Farms Station,
14.Low purchased the farm in 1859 and began constructing the new house immediately. an assertion that the records cited above do not appear to support. The sources for the Civil War actions are:KFS Historic Preservation Group, Vint Hill Farms Station, Warrenton, Fauquier County, Virginia, Phase I Cultural Resource Investigations Report (Philadelphia. PA: Kise Franks & Straw, Inc.• 1994).6; Swanson and
O’Steen, Vint Hill Farms Station, 15-29;Jeffiy D.Wert, Mosby ‘sRangers (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1990),64-65.

Reconstruction to 1942
With the coming of peace,Andrew Low added buildings around his newly completed house, in part to shelter his livestock and crops. In 1885-1888, he also built a house, named Silvermead, for his eldest son, Douglass M.Low, who was about to marry. Early in the twentieth century, Andrew Low decided to retire to the town of Haymarket He sold Vint HillinFebruary 1910 to 0.Johnston (first name not found), who in turn conveyed it to Martin L. Kohler, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in April 1911. InJuly of the same year, Kohler sold it to Mitchell Harrison, also of Philadelphia, who renamed it Vint Hill Farms. Harrison, aprincipal in the Harrison, Frazier,and Company sugar refinery, was a wealthy horseman who wished to own a country estate in Virginia and was especially interested in breeding high-grade Shorthorn, Berkshire, and Dorset cattle. He quickly expanded the number and types of buildings on the property, remodeling the house in the popular Colonial Revival style and adding a barncomplex northeast of the mansion. He also purchased Buckland Farm and Armstrong Farm, two adjoining properties, and soon focused on breeding Shorthorn cattle and Sharpshear sheep. By 1920, Vint Hill Farms was a showplace that included buildings from the Low era (the remodeled mansion, as well as a springhouse, icehouse, woodshed, dairy barn, hay barn, and Silvennead). Harrison constructed workers’ housing, blacksmith shop, workhorse and cattle barns, sheep and shearing barns,and a barn in which to hold livestock sales.4

After Harrison died suddenly in 1927, his son John K. M. Harrison operated the farm part time. The Great Depression effectively spelled the end of Vint Hill Farms as an agricultural concern. Harrison closed Buckland Farm in 1931, and Vint Hill itself languished until 1942, when renewed interest inthe place came from an unexpected quarter after America entered World War Il.s

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4 KFS, Vint Hill Farms Station, 1-8; Swanson and O’Stecn. Vint Hill Farms Station, 30; Fauquier County,
DeedBook 103, p. 308, deed written Jan. 21, 1910, recorded Feb.24, 1910,at county clerk’soffice;see also 0.Johnston to Keith & Richards, trustees, deed of tnist, Fauquier County, Deed Book 103, p.309, deed written Jan. 21, 1910, recorded Feb.24, 1910, at county clerk’s office; deed from Johnston to Kohler, Fauquier County, Deed Book 105,p. 239,deed written Apr. 5, 1911,recorded Apr. 13, 1911, at county clerk’soffice; Fauquier County, Deed Book 105, p.516, deedwritten July 8, 1911,recorded Aug. 15, 1911, at county clerk’s office; KFS, Vint Hill Farms Station, 8-9; Swanson and O’Steen. Vint Hill Farms Station, 15.
5 KFS, Vint Hill Farms Station,9.

World War ll
As the United States struggled to prepare for full engagement in the war, numerous military :functions were relocated from distant posts to the capital or its vicinity for security and convenience. The Signal Intelligence Service (SIS), which monitored the radio transmissions of foreign governments,was one of the agencies searching for a suitable location for its activities.

Encoded messages are as old as human diplomacy and warfare. So, too, are methods of decoding messages. Inthe United States as inother countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, letters gave way to telegrams and radio transmissions as the preferred methods of communicating among armed forces, diplomats, and governments. Complex codes, some enciphered and deciphered with the aid of machines, likewise became more sophisticated. Many of them yielded their secrets, however, to brilliant code clerks such as Herbert 0. Yardley, who the U.S. State Department hired in 1912. Yardley could break codes with stunning ease, and in 1917 he became head of Section Eight of Military Intelligence (MI-8) in the War Department. He deciphered Allied codes in Paris at the end of World War I and continued that work in an office in New York City (called the Black Chamber) after he returned to America In 1929, when President Herbert Hoover appointed Henry L. Stimson as Secretary of State, Yardley sent some intercepted Japanese telegrams to Stimson in the hope of impressing him with the importance of the Black Chamber’s work. The plan backfired dreadfully. Stimson, proclaiming that “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” ordered Yardley’s operation closed down. On October 31, 1929,the Black Chamber went out of business.6

The U.S.armed services, fortunately, had created their own small teams of cryptanalysts, as the code-breakers were called. Beginning in 1930, William F. Friedman directed the U.S. Army’steam, the Signal Intelligence Service, which focused on radio transmissions rather than telegrams as had the Black Chamber. Friedman established the Signal Intelligence School to train cryptanalysts. He also constructed intercept stations (the first one was at Battery Cove in Alexandria, Virginia) to monitor diplomatic messages emanating from Embassy Row in Washington. Friedman concentrated SIS on Japanese codes, which were exceedingly varied and complex-not to mention the difficulties with the language-because ofincreasing tensions between the U.S. and that country in the 1930s. In 1935, SIS broke Japan’s high-level diplomatic code generated by a machine called Cipher Machine Type A. Friedman named it Red. In 1938, the Japanese Foreign Office introduced another machine, B, that Friedman called Purple. At first its code seemed insoluble, but Friedman’ s ingenious team used fragmentary deciphered messages to build its own Purple machine, which accurately deciphered a Purple message the first time it was tested in September 1940.7

SIS operated in cramped quarters in the rear of the Munitions Building in Washington. To prevent breaches in American intelligence, couriers carried paper messages among departments in the city and around the country rather than risking radio transmissions. Hence the need, once the nation entered the war, to establish additional intercept stations close to Washington as well as to provide better facilities for SIS.8

The hunt for a new SIS headquarters and a close-in monitoring station site began immediately. Someone suggested Vint Hill Farms for the monitoring station, as it was close to Washington and near a rail line but isolated enough that security could be maintained easily. A party of SIS officers visited the farm in April 1942, and on their way back to Washington, while driving on present-day Arlington Boulevard, they noticed a girls’ school called Arlington Hall. Itwould make a perfect headquarters for SIS.  Soon, negotiations were widerway to secure both sites for Army use, including 721 acres of Vint Hill Fanns from the Harrison heirs.9

First Lieutenant Robert F. Pope arrived at Vint Hill Fanns in May 1942 to take charge
and oversee building alterations and new construction. He fowid that most of the existing buildings were in adequate condition for use. They included the main house as well as Silvermead, a worker’s cottage, three tenant houses, the barn complex, and a variety of outbuildings from the Low and Harrison eras. Most of them were retained except for the cottage, a riding-horse barn east of the main house, and portions of some outbuildings. New construction, as planned, included a mess hall, a garage, and eleven barracks east of the barn complex. The barns were converted over the next few months to house office space and, most important, the monitoring station itself.10

On April 14, the 2nd Signal Service Company, the operating arm of the SIS, had been reorganized as the 2nd Signal Service Battalion. On June 12, a detachment arrived at Vint Hill Farms and began erecting doublet antennas near the main house, which was designated Building 247. Just after midnight, the small monitoring station at Fort Hunt, in Fairfax County, Virginia, was closed down and its functions transferred to the monitoring station at Fort Hancock, New Jersey. Fort Hunt’s equipment and personnel were transferred to Vint Hill, and the first floor of Building 247 was used temporarily as the new monitoring station. On June 16,just after midnight, the new station began operating and was designated Monitoring Station 1. The machine shop and radio repair sections began using the first floor of the former carriage house, Building 240, which also was used to store excess equipment and parts.11

On July 1, 1942, Pope assumed formal command of the new post, designated Vint Hill Farms Station. Negotiations with the Harrison heirs were soon concluded, and the property was transferred to the Army on July 7. The next day, July 8, the 2nd Signal Service Battalion detachment that had been assigned to Fort Hancock arrived from New Jersey and set up operations on the sun porch of Building 247. 12

When America entered the war, the U.S. Army Signal School was located at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. It primarily trained enlisted men in cryptanalysis and linguistics. On March 10, 1942, the Army began training commissioned officers in the school’s Cryptographic Division. During the summer, however, authorities decided to move the school to Vint Hill. On October 5, approximately 42 officers and 239 enlisted men were transferred there and formed Company A (Provisional), soon redesignated Company B. The unit’s primary mission was to provide administrative support. At first it occupied buildings that had been moved to the post from a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp. Although Lieutenant Pope and his men had been laboring to make the existing buildings ready for the school and monitoring duties, they were not far enough advanced to house or train the personnel. For the next several months, the classroom space was so inadequate that the students were taught in shifts.13

Work on improving the station proceeded throughout the summer. Antennae were installed in fields, quarters and support buildings were constructed, and Silvermead became the home of the post commander (it filled that role until at least 1994).14

The school trained cryptanalysts not only in the principles of encoding and decoding messages, but also in the use of the SIGABA cryptodevice, the machine used by the U.S. armed forces. Remarkably, unlike Allied success in breaking the Purple code and the intricacies of the famous German ENIGMA machine, Japan and Germany never broke SIGABA. Vint Hill’s cryptanalysts were dispatched to the European and Pacific theaters after they graduated, and rendered essential aid to the Allied efforts in both locations.1s

Vint Hill’s greatest known wartime achievement, however, occurred late in the morning of November 10, 1943, while the enlisted men of the 2nd Signal Service Battalion sat by their radio receivers and monitored enemy channels, hoping to overhear a coded message. One of the soldiers, Leonard A. Mudloff, listened to a German channel while anticipating the approaching lunch hour. Then he heard a repeated transmission in Japanese:”‘Urgent message,’ ‘urgent message,’ ‘Berlin calling Tokyo.'” Lunch was forgotten as Mudloff concentrated on copying a long coded message from the Japanese Ambassador to Germany in Berlin (Oshima Hiroshi) to the Minister of Foreign Affairs back in Tokyo. His interception of this message would make a major contribution to Allied planning for D-Day, the invasion of Europe. As a reward for his accomplishment, Mudloff was promoted one grade.16

The message was enciphered in the Purple code. AJthough the code had been broken three years earlier, accurately deciphering and translating Purple messages was always difficult, since they usually were transmitted in sections that were deliberately out of order, and opportunities for making crucial errors crept in at every step of the tedious process of composition, encryption, transmission, decryption, and translation.

As Mudloff copied sections of the message, they were deciphered, translated, and assembled. At other stations scattered across the globe, other monitors were also recording parts of the transmission. Itwas not until December 9 that the complete message was deciphered. The Vint Hill Farms Station intercept draft, however, appears to have been the first to be delivered next morning, November 11, to General George C. Marshall at the Pentagon and Admiral William D. Leahy in the Map Room at the White House. It caused a sensation because the report not only described the German coastal fortifications in western France in detail but also explained the principles and strategies behind their construction, troop strengths and dispositions, and contingency plans. The timing could not have been better for the Allies. Although General Dwight D. Eisenhower had not yet been named Supreme Allied Commander, the planning for the
invasion of Europe, codenamed Operation OVERLORD, was well under way.17

Ambassador Oshima was uniquely qualified to analyze the German defenses. He possessed military as well as diplomatic expertise, spoke perfect German, was unusually gregarious and charming for a Japanese diplomat, and could converse and debate easily with Gennan generals about strategy. Oshima was a true believer in the Nazi cause and had an a clear understanding of German strategy and tactics. Between October 24 and November 3, 1943, Oshima had toured the defenses against Allied invasion along the western coast of France; the intercepted message was his report on the tour. Amid all of Oshima’s detailed observations, the most important one may have been the following general statement: “The Straits area [Calais, or Strait of Dover] is given first place in the German Army’s fortification scheme and troop dispositions, and Nonnandy and the Brittany peninsula come next in importance.” He had heard this not only from the German generals but also from Adolf Hitler himself. The statement confirmed Allied suspicions that the Gennans’ primary focus was on the area of Calais, not Nonnandy. It contributed to the decision to reinforce the German bias with several feints toward Calais (codenamed FORTITUDE), including the famous rubber tanks and phony landing craft subsequently planted in eastern England to mislead Luftwaffe observers. The intercepted message thereby contributed to the success of the D-Day landings by enabling the Allies to keep the German forces concentrated at Calais until it was too late to stop the invasion at Normandy. 18

Once the intercepted message was deciphered, it was transmitted to London as well as to the Pentagon and the White House. On Saturday, December 11, Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill asked that this translated message, and two others of “considerable importance,” “be presented to the President of the United States.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not read the Oshima message intercept until December 16, after he had returned from the Teheran Conference, but was likewise immediately impressed with its
s.1gm’flcance.19

On February 20, 1948, General Omar M. Bradley visited Vint Hill Farms Station and had lunch there with the officers and soldiers. He “expressed his gratitude for the information from the Japanese diplomatic intercepts which had been provided to him.” He also thanked the men and women of Vint Hill for serving “so silently and yet so magnificently. “20

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6 James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace:A Report on America ‘s Most Secret Agency (Boston, MA: Houghton Miffiin, 1982), 5-17.
7 Ibid., 27-35; Cnrl Boyd, Hitler’s Japanese Confidant: General Oshima Hiroshi and MAGIC Intelligence,
1941-1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 13.
8 Bamford, Puzzle Palace, 40-41.
9 INSCOM History Office, Fort Belvoir, VA, “Forty One and Strong: Arlington Hall Station,”Cryptologia (Oct. 1985), Vol. 9, No.4, p. 307; KFS, Vint Hill Farms Station, 10.
10KFS, Vint Hill Farms Station, 11.
11 John J. McMahon, ..Good-bye to the Fann,” JNSCOM Journal, Jul.-Aug. 1997, 19; Louis Kroh, “Vint Hill F811Il5 Station,”Cryptologia 23 (1999): 259; Untitled Historical Report File, “History of Operations, 12 June 1942-30 June 1944,” p. I, INSCOM History Office Files, Fl. Belvoir, VA.
12 Untitled Historical Report File, “History of Operations, 12 June 1942-30 June 1944,” p. I, INSCOM History Office Files, Ft. Belvoir, VA; KFS, Vint Hill Farms Station, 10-11; David P. Mowry, Cryptologic
Almanac, “Vint Hill Fanns Station: 1942-1945,” 1995?, p. l, available on Historical Publications, Cold War, Vint Hill, Web site, http://www.nsa.gov/applicntions/seacch/index.cfin?g=Vint%20Hjll, accessed March 30, 2012.
13 James L.Gilbert and John P. Finnegan, eds., Signals Intelligence in World War II: A Documentary History (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Anny, 1993), 69.
14 K.FS, Vint Hill Farms Station, 11.
is Mowrey, “Vint Hill Fanns Station: 1942-1945,” 1995?, pp.2-3.
16 Congressional Record, Vol. 140,No. 53, May 5, 1994, Extensions of Remarks, page E, from the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office, www.gpo.gov).
17 Kruh, VHFS,259.
18 Special Research History 059, “Selected Examples of Commendations and Related Correspondence
Highlighting the Achievements and Value of U.S.Signals Intelligence during World War II,” January IO, 1946, photocopy of typescript, National Cryptologic Museum Library, National Security Agency, Fort Meade, MD.
19 Ibid.
20 Boyd, Oshima Hiroshi, 179; Kruh, VHFS, 259.

Cold War (1946-1991)
On September 15, 1945, after World War II ended and as the Cold War began, SIS was reorganized as the U.S. Army Security Agency (ASA) and took control of all Army signals intelligence and communication resources worldwide. In November, the 2nd Signal Service Battalion, which had operated under the Signal Corps, was transferred to ASA. In March 1949,the cryptanalysis school was transferred from Vint Hill to Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. Over the next decade, as Vint Hill focused on monitoring the transmissions of the Soviet Union and its allies as well as on testing cryptodevices,many new buildings were constructed. They included, besides numerous quarters for the expanding garrison, a variety of specialized buildings for testing and storing equipment.21

During the Vietnam War, Vint Hill and other monitoring stations spied on Americans as well as on the Soviets. According to an individual who was stationed at the post between November 1967 and April 1968, “The assigned mission was to intercept Diplomatic Communications and intercept everything from Cuba. Also, during the Peace Rallies in D.C. we monitored (intercepted) everything we could from their radios & communications methods.” Vint Hill also eavesdropped on the Republican and Democratic national conventions during the war.22

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21 McMahon, “Good-bye to the Fann,” 1997, 19; Mowry, “Vint Hill Farms Station: 1942-1945,”(1995?) I, 3.
22 Cryplomc Web site http:f/cryptome.info/cia-warrcntonlcia-warrcnton. htm, accessed Mar. 7, 2013.

End of Cold War to Closure (1997)
In 1993, following the end of the Cold War, the Base Realignment and Closure Commission recommended that Vint Hill Farms Station be closed. The post1s monitoring functions ceased in November 1995. Over the next two years, the various support functions were shut down, and the formal closure ceremony was held on June 12, 1997.23

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23 McMahon, “Good-bye to the Fann,” 1997, 20; Mowry, “Vint Hill Farms Station: 1942-1945,”(1995?) 3; Kruh, VHFS,259.