A Visit to Vint Hill Farms Station
Squeezin' Out a Livin' With the Eavesdropping Dairymen
Vint Hill Farms in the flesh is a three dimensional, real life version of what one of the artificial intelligence art creation demons would spit out in response to a prompt like “bucolic Virginia countryside farm.” That’s what’s there, of course, white clapboard buildings, barns and silos set amidst fields of cut hay still arranged in bales in Northern Virginia.
The recorded land deeds for this plot go back to 1772, but during World War II and for the entirety of the Cold War, the US Government owned this land, which was officially operated by the Army Security Agency. In 1997, the Army owned portion was closed and turned private, this is where I visited.
This is the non-secret part of the facilty up by Warrenton.
Vint Hill is now the home of “The Cold War Museum,” a barn full of funky relics from that time in American History; chunks of the Berlin Wall, old stereoscopes for photo-interpretation, East German Army uniforms, the booster for a rocket. This past Sunday, November 5, I drove from my home in Charlottesville, Virginia, to Vint Hill to take in the history of this once secret spot.
Part of it is still run by CIA as The “Warrenton Training Center" which a 2002 Brookings Institution report listed as having an “active nuclear weapons, weapons-related or naval nuclear propulsion mission.” This is called “Site B” It’s also an active superfund site due to chemical pits that released trichloroethylene into the nearby residential water wells.
This part of Virginia is no stranger to secret little enclaves tucked up in the hills; Vint Hill was part of the same Continuity of Government program as Mount Weather, which is about a forty five minute drive away (helicopters make it closer) and far enough from DC to avoid the initial nuclear strike. In the event of a nuclear catastrophe, Vint Hill would’ve been the zombie headquarters of the post-apocalyptic National Security Agency.
I’ve written about Mount Weather in The Hunt for Tom Clancy before, you can read that here.
I’ve also written about the weird stuff tucked up in the hills around Charlottesville and Orange County before as well; Tom Clancy’s novel The Teeth of the Tiger concerns a covert assassin academy ensconsed in a mountain estate next to J Edgar Hoover’s blackmail files; you can read that one here.
And lately, as I’ve also written up for The Hunt for Tom Clancy, I’ve been spending time down in the University of Virginia’s special collections library, going through the archives of Frank Wisner, the Dean of Dirty Tricks in the early Cold War.
These all factor into the Visit to Vint Hill; Frank Wisner, chief of covert operations for CIA in the early days, on very good terms with Admiral Strauss of the Manhattan project, was a man who wielded an enormous amount of money and power in the post war era, and he weilded it secretly while being an very visible member of the Georgetown set. Wisner was also a Woodbury Forest School graduate—you pass signs for it about forty minutes before you reach Vint Hill.