A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, or so the Bard claimed. I am not sure. Names have intrinsic power all their own. The world has been busy while we have drifted down the placid brown Potomac this last week, from the old secret installation at Fort Hunt to Germany, and the […]

War Department Identity Card issued to “Hans Holbein,” the cover name of Major General Reinhard Gehlen At the end of World War II, The Navy and Army each operated airfields on the narrow strip of flat land along the Anacostia River across from the Capital in Washington. It was a matter of efficiency; each service […]

(Left to right: Harry F. Guggenheim, Dr. Robert Goddard, Charles Lindbergh) The most impressive of the Long Island Gold Coast Mansions was Castle Gould, built by railroad heir Howard Gould at Sand Point, Long Island. It was the turn of the century before this brave new one. The turreted castle was intended to be an […]

By November of 1946, the last German prisoner had left Fort Hunt. The Bogus Russian Major cleared out his office in the magazine of Battery Sheridan, and the combined Army/Navy Intelligence group closed down their operation. The land was returned the land to the National Park Service. All of the buildings connected with the Interrogation […]

Original PAPERCLIP team at Fort Bliss, TX, 1946 Last year, the papers associated with the deliberations of the British War Cabinet revealed that attitudes about punishing the Nazi leadership were hardening as early as 1942, when the notion of actually having them in custody was still perlously close to a hallucination. Winston Churchill was an […]

(AP) General Ulrich Kessler does some light reading on U-234, 1945 Unterseeboot 234 (U-234) was a Type XB submarine, configured by the German Navy to carry loads of mines for covert emplacement in the approaches to Allied ports. She was big and slow, which were not useful qualities in the last days of the Reich. […]

It is back-to-school today for the students of Northern Virginia, and the Beltway is a mess. Surely this is premature, I think. It is tranquil here, high above the swimming pool at Big Pink. This aberration has nothing to do with the changing of the season. It is a problem generated purely by the human […]

Fort Hunt was wired for sound. The camp code-named “PO Box 1142” was located on the property, up a dirt road off the Parkway with a sign on the gate that read “No Trespassing.” The camp itself was screened by rows of trees from the manicured highway; it was a nest of complexes, each hidden […]

Battery Sheridan, Fort Hunt Park It is a fine highway that rolls down along the Potomac from the old colonial city of Alexandria to Mount Vernon. It is the road to George Washington’s estate, and for that reason it is an attractive, well-manicured four-lane Parkway, administered not by the Federal Highway Administration, but by the […]

I did not get in the pool until late. I was the fourth resident of Big Pink to take the plunge. It had been a gray day, dank, and not inviting. There had been a late afternoon business affair in Ballston, at the lovely Willow bar and restaurant. The Willow replaced an earlier watering hole […]