Camp Peary

Coordinates: 37°20′N 76°40′W / 37.33°N 76.67°W / 37.33; -76.67
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

AFETA CAMP PEARY
AMSL
Runways
Direction Length and surface
05/23 5,018 feet (1,529 m) Asphalt
Source: Federal Aviation Administration[1]

Camp Peary is an approximately 9,000 acre U.S. military reservation in

The Point", located in Hertford, North Carolina
.

Camp Peary is named for Arctic explorer Rear Admiral

Robert E. Peary.[3] Porto Bello, the historic hunting lodge of Lord Dunmore, last royal governor of Virginia, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places
and is located on the grounds of Camp Peary.

Location

Comprising 9,275 acres (37.53 km2) of land, of which about 8,000 acres (32 km2) are unimproved or only partially improved. The 100 acres (40 hm2) Biglers Millpond occupies the site adjacent to the York River.

The majority of Camp Peary falls within York County, though a small portion of the reservation near Skimino Creek at the western edge is located in James City County.

World War II, relocations of residents

"Miss Never Sail": a wooden mock-up of a destroyer escort at Camp Peary used for training in 1945

During

freedmen after the American Civil War. It had been named for Confederate General John B. Magruder. A Civil War field hospital had occupied the site of Bigler's Mill near the York River. Although the graves in the church cemetery were not moved, many of the residents and the local Mount Gilead Baptist Church were relocated to the Grove community, located on U.S. Route 60 in adjacent James City County a few miles away, where a number of displaced residents from an area near Lackey known simply as "the Reservation" had earlier relocated under similar circumstances during World War I when what is now the Naval Weapons Station Yorktown
was created.

Seabee training

USMC directed fixed bayonet drill at Camp Peary NTC, VA in 1943.

At the outset of the War, the preliminary training of the Seabees had been carried out at Naval Training Stations across the country. That lasted a short period until boot training was consolidated at Camp Allen Virginia.

Naval Combat Demolition Units.[6] After June 1944 Seabee boot camp was moved to Camp Endicott, Quonset Point, Rhode Island.[5]

Base commander Capt. J.G. Ware had the idea to raise hogs on base so the recruits called the place Capt. Wares hog farm. Originally the hog yard was in the center of the camp, but the enlisted complained that the pigs were on high ground while they were in the mud. This got the hogs moved to a more obscure location, but still within the limits of the military reservation. A bulldozer was used for clearing the feed troughs and transporting slop from the galley to the hog yard.[7] Eventually the farming enterprise made the news and it is from this history that base derives "The Farm" moniker used today.

German prisoners-of-war

Camp Peary's mission changed when a new need presented itself to the Navy. A portion of the land became a detention center for

College of William and Mary
, a set of letters written by a clerk at the Camp.

Many of the former POWs stayed in Virginia and the United States after the war, and became naturalized as U.S. citizens.

Post-World War II use

Vacated by the Navy in 1946, Camp Peary became a Virginia state forestry and game reserve for five years. A reservoir that had been built on the upper reaches of Queen's Creek to supply the substantial fresh water needs of Camp Peary when it was a Seabee base was divested to the City of Williamsburg. The Waller Mill Reservoir formed the basis for the city's Waller Mill Park, although the park is located north of the city limits in York County. A portion of the abandoned Chesapeake and Ohio Railway spur from the Peninsula Extension main line just east of near Ewell Station to the base (also built during World War II) is now a recreational rail trail.

Then, in 1951, the U.S. Navy returned to the property, securing the portion north of the highway, which was State Route 168 at the time, and announced it closed to the public; it has been that way ever since. In June 1961, two months after the

Harvey Point
."

The Farm

Camp Peary is known as "The Farm", a training facility run by the

front companies, and are believed to have been used as rendition aircraft by the CIA under the guise of charter flights, have landed on this runway.[8]

Former CIA officer Bill Wagner attended a three-week interrogation course at The Farm in 1970. He claims it was the agency's "premier course", and that volunteers played the role of interrogation subjects in order to be guaranteed seats in future classes. Interrogators-in-training practiced techniques such as sleep deprivation, deliberately tainted food, and mock executions. According to Wagner, the course was dropped from the CIA training curriculum after the Watergate scandal, due to increased attention being paid to CIA practices.[9]

See also

Bibliography

  • Lindsay Moran, Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy, 2005
  • TJ Waters, Class 11: My Story Inside the CIA's First Post-9/11 Spy Class

References

  1. PDF
    , retrieved 2022-02-09
  2. ^ Miller, Greg (December 1, 2012). "DIA sending hundreds more spies overseas". The Washington Post.
  3. ^ Walker, Julian (July 27, 2009). "What's in a name? | Camp Peary, near Williamsburg". The Virginian-Pilot. Norfolk, Virginia. Retrieved June 3, 2019.
  4. ^ This week in Seabee History, Seabee Online Magazine, Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC) Attn: SEABEE Online, 1322 Patterson Ave., S.E., Bldg. 33, Suite 1000, Washington Navy Yard, DC 20374-5065[1]
  5. ^ a b U.S. Navy Seabee Museum facebook, Camp Peary, April 26, 2018 [2]
  6. ^ "Naval Combat Demolitions Units". SpecWarNet.net. Retrieved October 18, 2017.
  7. St. Petersburg Times
    . June 14, 1943.
  8. ^ Shane, Scott; Grey, Stephen; Williams, Margot (May 31, 2005). "C.I.A. Expanding Terror Battle Under Guise of Charter Flights". The New York Times.
  9. ISBN 0-87113-876-X
    .

External links
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