Arlington Hall

Arlington Hall (also called Arlington Hall Station) is a historic building in

Arlington, Virginia, originally a girls' school and later the headquarters of the United States Army's Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) cryptography effort during World War II. The site presently houses the George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center, and the Army National Guard's Herbert R. Temple Jr. Readiness Center. It is located on Arlington Boulevard (U.S. Route 50) between S. Glebe Road (State Route 120

) and S. George Mason Drive.

History

U.S. Army Signals Intelligence Service

personnel at Arlington Hall (c. 1943)

Arlington Hall was founded in 1927 as a private

Signals Intelligence Service.^[2]

During World War II, Arlington Hall was in many respects similar to

PURPLE) while Bletchley Park concentrated on European combatants. Initially work was on Japanese diplomatic codes as Japanese army codes were not solved until April 1943, but in September 1943 with success on the Army codes they were put under Solomon Kullback in a separate branch B-II, with other mainly diplomatic work under Frank Rowlett in B-III (which also had the Bombes and Rapid Analytical Machinery). The third branch B-I translated Japanese decrypts.^[3]

The Arlington Hall effort was comparable in influence to other Anglo-American

Second World War-era technological efforts, such as the cryptographic work at Bletchley Park, the Naval Communications Annex, development of sophisticated microwave radar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

(

Nagasaki in August 1945 to abruptly end the war and later initiated further 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 (Soviet Union's Committee for State Security) spy agency 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 classified and caveated 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 did not seem appropriate because the decrypted messages could not 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

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 was not revealed until its publication in a 1990 book co-authored by a high-level KGB defector.

Arlington Hall came under the aegis of the

San Antonio, Texas. When the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) was commissioned at Arlington Hall on January 1, 1977, INSCOM absorbed the functions of the Army Security Agency into its operations. INSCOM remained at Arlington Hall until the summer of 1989, when INSCOM relocated to Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Beginning in January 1963, Arlington Hall served as the premier facility of the newly created Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).^[4] In 1984, DIA departed Arlington Hall for their new headquarters on Joint Base Anacostia–Bolling (former Bolling Air Force Base), a move that was complete by December 1984.^[5]^[6]

Arlington Hall was also home in the late 1950s and early 1960s to the

Armed Services Technical Information Agency

(ASTIA) which disseminated classified research to defense contractors.

In 1989, the

George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center in a ceremony held on May 29, 2002, named for George P. Shultz, former Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of State.^[8]