Camp Peary

Camp Peary is an approximately 9,000 acre military reservation in York County near Williamsburg, Virginia. Officially referred to as an Armed Forces Experimental Training Activity (AFETA) under the auspices of the Department of Defense, Camp Perry is widely believed^[who?] to host the covert CIA training facility known as "The Farm". Camp Perry has a sister facility, "The Point", located in Hertford, North Carolina.

Porto Bello, the historic hunting lodge of Lord Dunmore, last royal governor of Virginia, is listed on the National Register of Historic Placesl and is located on the grounds of Camp Peary.

Location

Comprising 9,275 acres (38 km²) of land, of which about 8,000 acres (32 km²) are unimproved or only partially improved. The 100 acre (400,000 m²) Biglers Millpond occupies the site adjacent to the York River. It has been closed to the public since 1951, and as of 2007 access still is highly restricted.

The majority of Camp Peary falls within in 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

During World War II, beginning in 1942, the U.S. Navy took over a large area on the north side of the Virginia Peninsula in York County, Virginia which became known as Camp Peary, initially for use as a Seabee training base. The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (C&O) extended a spur track from its Richmond-Newport News main line tracks to the site from nearby Williamsburg and established Magruder Station near the former unincorporated town of Magruder. There is information about life at the Camp and the German PoWs in the Herman Recht papers held by the College of William and Mary, a set of letters written by a clerk at the Camp.

As part of the process of converting the property to a military reservation, all residents of the entire towns of Magruder and Bigler's Mill had to vacate. The town of Magruder was a traditionally African-American community established for 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

The first World War II Seabee recruits were the men who helped build Boulder Dam, America's highways and New York City skyscrapers. At Naval Construction Training Centers and Advanced Base Depots established on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, Seabees were taught military discipline and the use of light arms.

At the outset of the War, the preliminary training of the Seabees had been carried out at various Naval Training Stations throughout the country. In Virginia, after completing three weeks of boot training at Camp Allen, and later its successor, Camp Peary, the Seabees were formed into construction battalions or other types of construction units. Soon, however, another mission had been identified for Camp Peary. All preliminary and advanced specialized training for Seabees was changed to be conducted at Camp Allen and Camp Bradford at Norfolk, Virginia, where both were an integral part of the Naval Operating Base.

German prisoners-of-war

The mission of Camp Peary changed as the war progressed and a new need presented itself to the U.S. Navy. It became a stockade for special German prisoners-of-war (POWs).

The POWs kept at Camp Peary were not just an ordinary sort, but rather, many came from captured German submarine and ship crews which the Germans had thought lost at sea with crews presumed dead. It was important for Nazi authorities to be unaware of their capture, since that also meant secret code books thought lost at sea may also have been compromised. Thus, extra secrecy was necessary.

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

Turned loose by the Navy in 1946, Camp Peary became a Virginia state forestry and game reserve for five years. A reservoir which 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 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 Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Navy announced it was officially opening a new facility at Harvey Point base, in Hertford, North Carolina. A spokesman said that all four branches of the military would conduct "testing and evaluation of various classified materials and equipment" at the new site. He added that some of the training "now being done at Camp Peary, Va., will be transferred to Harvey Point""

Camp Peary and areas near it were the primary setting for a 2007 novel by David Baldacci titled Simple Genius in which, as Baldacci admits, he took certain liberties with the details of place and specific activities of the area.

The Farm

Camp Peary later became well known as "The Farm", a training facility for the Central Intelligence Agency, although this has never been formally acknowledged by the U.S. government. The portion of the original World War II Seabee base which is north of Interstate 64 has remained closed to the public since 1951. However, the roads and many structures of Magruder and Bigler's Mill are apparently still there and many are occupied. An airport with a 5,000-foot (1,500 m) runway was added to the facility near the site of Bigler's Mill.

Former CIA officer Bill Wagner attended a three week long interrogation course at The Farm in 1970. He claims that 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.^[1]

In 1972, the Virginia Gazette newspaper of Williamsburg reported that CIA officers were trained as assassins on base. The CIA replied that it was nonsense. "None of its people," the agency said, "had ever been trained or used as assassins."

References

^ Mark Bowden (2004). "The Dark Art of Interrogation". Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts. Atlantic Monthly Press. p. 103. ISBN 0-87113-876-X. {{cite book}}: External link in |chapter= (help)

External links

37°20′N 76°40′W / 37.33°N 76.67°W / 37.33; -76.67

[1] Mark Bowden (2004). "The Dark Art of Interrogation". Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts. Atlantic Monthly Press. p. 103. ISBN 0-87113-876-X. {{cite book}}: External link in |chapter= (help)

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