“Burn all documents” was the order six days after the Japanese surrender on 14 August 1945. The staff at the military centre, popularly known as PO Box 1142 or Post Office Box 1142, did as they were told. They destroyed all traces of their existence, donating only food supplies to charity. Sworn to silence, they held their tongues for a decade, two decades, six decades. Between 80 and 90 years old, they only came out and spoke in 2007, when the US government officially acknowledged their existence. Before that, it didn’t. What was happening at the centre was so secret that no one was allowed to know about it. Until 1946, the MIS-Y project interrogated Germany’s most valuable military prisoners, but even those involved in the MIS-Y project did not know that there was an even more secret section of the centre, called MIS-X, which was closed in August 1945.
Arnold Kohn was fluent in German and had extensive experience working with prisoners. In 1946, he was ordered to report to PO Box 1142 in Alexandria, Virginia. “I wasn’t sure what PO Box 1142 was, so I went to the post office and asked the postman. He mumbled and stammered a bit, but finally he just said, ‘Take the bus to Mount Vernon. Tell the driver to stop at PO Box 1142.’ The driver stopped. I got off and there was a path with a private entrance with a sign next to it: No Passage.”
He didn’t know where he was or what was waiting for him. He kept looking at the order sheet, as if he had to check whether he might have read it wrong. But no matter how many times he glanced at it, each time it read PO Box 1142. It wasn’t a mistake. He wished he’d gotten the usual order like everyone else, but he didn’t.
Somehow, when he got where he needed to go, he soon found himself in a very strange and mysterious place. He was surrounded by professors from the best universities who were also trained informants. He met soldiers who had escaped from captivity and reported what they had learned.
For a few weeks, Kohn was completely lost, but slowly it dawned on him that he was in a military camp, or rather, a secret interrogation centre. “It turned out that the main centre, which I thought was all this place encompassed, was only a quarter of the whole area.”
He tried to find out more about his new working environment, but all he heard was that you only find out information if you have to know it. But he had been in the army for a long time. He knew who he had to go to if he wanted to know a military secret. He made friends with the cooks and they explained to him over coffee what he wanted to know.
But they didn’t know everything either. Almost no one did. Even today, little is known about the operation of Post Office Box 1142, but it is true that on 15 May 1942, the US Department of the Interior allowed Defence to use Fort Hunt’s facilities during the war and for a year afterwards. There, a centre was built which, at its height, comprised as many as 87 temporary and permanent buildings, taking its name from its postal address, PO Box 1142.
MIS-Y
The Centre had three secret programmes. The MIS-Y interrogated important German prisoners. During the war, these were mainly pilots and submarine commanders and crews; after the war, scientists, engineers and other experts.
The Americans called their camp a “transition centre”, where prisoners are merely “processed” before being sent to a real military camp. The wording was important so that P.O. Box 1142 would not violate the 1929 Geneva Convention, which stipulated that the home country had to know where their national was being held, and so the Americans would have to tell the International Red Cross who they had in their hands. They did not do this, of course, although some prisoners were held for several weeks.
The Convention was thus undoubtedly violated, and the interrogation methods they adopted from the British were entirely consistent with it. The interrogators socialised and chatted with the prisoners. It was not difficult for them. Many were young Germans and Austrians who had fled the Nazi pogrom in 1933, so not only were they fluent in German, but they were also familiar with German culture and customs. For them, the only thing that was stressful was suddenly to find themselves face to face with the Nazis from whom they had fled and for whom they might have lost all their family members in the concentration camps.
Most of the interrogators did not have US citizenship either, but nothing was out of the ordinary in the centre, which was set among dense trees not far from the Pentagon. This was also realised by the local residents, who were constantly passed by buses with tinted windows so that uninvited eyes could not see who the guests they were taking to Fort Hunt were.
The Nazi prisoners were indeed guests there. The Americans decided that they would learn more from them if they were released with luxury and pampering after the stresses of war and combat. Many of the prisoners came from wealthy and aristocratic families, were generally educated, and found the respite from war quite rewarding.
“You have earned their trust. You told them: ‘The war is almost over and, guys, you are losing. You played chess with them. You took them shopping. Sooner or later they started talking,” George Weidinger recalled.
The prisoners of Post Office Box 1142 could never complain about the boredom that usually killed the spirit of the prisoners in other camps. They played table tennis with their interrogators, swam in the swimming pool and engaged in other sports.
“We got more information out of a German general by playing chess or ping-pong with him than we do today by torturing him”, interrogator Henry Kolm was horrified by modern interrogation techniques decades later. As a young physicist in those days, he had to look after Hitler’s military adviser Rudolf Hess.
The food was good and there was plenty of it. Sometimes the prisoners would change into civilian clothes and go to lunch with their interrogators in the city. They went to the cinema, they had as many cigarettes as they wanted, and there was also alcohol flowing in streams. The prisoners were given almost everything, ‘wine, women and music’, as one interrogator summed up the interrogations.
Underpants for women
At first, they were careful to keep the prisoners from socialising with each other, but then it dawned on them that they would find out more if they listened in on their conversations. Even those whose language had not been divorced from their leisurely life would talk to their colleagues, they expected.
They were placed in interrogation rooms, common and toilet areas and dormitories, and even hung from branches along paths where prisoners were allowed to walk. Those who were more attentive to details noticed that they were being eavesdropped on, and began to talk endlessly about food and women. This kept the Americans busy translating trivial things and gave them at least a little satisfaction.
Yet they have said much more than they thought they had revealed. The crew of a submarine was captured at the base. Based on the information provided by its members, the Americans compiled a booklet and distributed it to field commanders to help them fight the German submarines.
Then, for example, they found out that the German V-1 and V-2 rockets, which were used to bomb England, among other places, were made in Peenemünde. Soon afterwards, the Allies bombed it. In the course of the meeting, they also heard a great deal about the enemy’s military plans, its weapons, the technical details of its submarines and other things that could tip the scales of war in the Allies’ favour.
From 1942 to July 1945, 3,451 German prisoners enjoyed the hospitality of Post Office Box 1142, and their interrogators submitted more than 5,000 reports to the Army, Air Force and Navy by August 1945.
Decades later, when they were allowed to talk about it, interrogators recalled the terrible moral dilemma they faced when they learned that they had to equip the prisoners’ rooms with listening devices. George Frenkel proudly said that he never laid a hand on anyone during the interrogation. “We pulled information out of them in a battle of minds.”
One of the great minds who found himself in their company was the physicist Heinz Schlicke. By then the war was over and Schlicke was ready to talk, but his wife was in the part of Europe controlled by the Soviets.
What did the Americans do? Schlicke was valuable to them, so they sent his interrogator, John Gunther Dean, to Europe to find his wife and two young children. All three were brought to America, Schlicke’s tongue was loosened and his family made a new home across the pond.
For 23-year-old George Mandela, the job of interrogator was a gruelling one. Although he was a young scientist, he often had no idea what his cursed colleagues were talking about when they explained things to him, as when someone was telling him about enriched uranium and he was not clear why anyone would want to enrich uranium. Nevertheless, he took what he learned to the Pentagon.
The most important prisoner was certainly rocket engineer Werner von Braun, who built the V-2 bomb. He too was assigned a so-called “morale officer”, in charge of keeping his charges happy. Arno Mayer was in charge of von Braun’s good mood. He brought him newspapers and alcohol and took him shopping in Washington three times.
Although we would not credit them, the German prisoners were most eager to go shopping, and as if we would credit them, they were most eager to buy underwear for their wives. Arno Mayer told the size, the shop assistant showed the knickers. “The Germans looked at them with disgust. They didn’t want underwear made of nylon. They wanted woollen knickers, long, the kind that covered the legs,” he later recalled.
After the war, hundreds of scientists, military commanders and politicians flocked to Post Office Box 1142. The interrogators wanted to get information from them about the scientific advances the Germans had made during the war, but they also wanted them in their hands to prevent the Russians from getting hold of them and getting the information they wanted for themselves. Incidentally, they also learnt from the Germans something else about the Russians, such as from General Reinhard Gehlen, the head of Nazi intelligence on the Eastern Front.
Of all the prisoners who passed through the interrogators’ hands, only one died. Submarine commander Werner Henke was so afraid of being handed over to the British by the Americans that he tried to escape in June 1944. He was shot on the run.
MIS-X
The MIS-Y project was secret, but not nearly as secret as the MIS-X project. In it, the Americans, following the British example, trained their soldiers, especially airmen, how to evade capture, and tried to help those already behind the barbed wire of European camps escape.
Because they entered the war late, they did not have as much experience of it as the British, who left behind 40,000 soldiers after the Battle of Dunkirk in 1940 and had to march hundreds of kilometres to camps in Germany and Poland, where they worked as slaves in mines, factories and fields for the rest of the war. To help them to freedom, MI9, or the Ninth Branch of Military Intelligence, was set up. From this, the Americans set up MIS-X in February 1943, although the British were not very successful in their efforts.
In the most secret building of Post Office Box 1142, called the warehouse, they invented the most sophisticated devices for evading the enemy and escaping from the camps, when they were not, of course, counterfeiting foreign money, documents and the like. They made compasses which they inserted into buttons and sewed onto clothes. Around 5 million of these compasses landed on them. Shoe brushes and table tennis rackets were also in their range. They hollowed out the inside of the handles and hid money or a knife inside.
They drew maps of the areas over which their pilots flew, so that they could orientate themselves if they had to make an emergency landing or jump out of the plane and flee from the enemy. They were distributed on silk to all the members of the air units.
Sometimes they asked a factory for help. One factory made playing cards. They made sets of cards on which the outer paper layer could be peeled off. The silk on which the map was drawn was cut to the size of the playing cards and the pieces of silk were inserted between the inner and outer layers of the cards. Once the soldier had dismantled all the cards, he could use the pieces of silk to construct a normal map.
Miniature radio transmitters, made by one of the participating companies, were sent to the prisons. They were made up of four parts, each of which was inserted into a capsule by the company. The capsules were sent to a factory that made baseballs. There, they were inserted into the balls and sent to the prisoners to assemble a radio transmitter from all the pieces.
Board games where the pieces were kept in wooden boxes, such as chess, were also used for hiding. A miniature radio was hidden in the boxes and the playing pieces were turned into nails so that the prisoners could follow the BBC signal and find their own message in the news.
Opposite the warehouse was a dairy. There, selected airmen were trained in encryption so that if they were caught, they could send encrypted messages from the camp. The dairy also employed 14 cipher men. Many an Allied prisoner of war thus became a barbed-wire spy, reporting by coded messages what he had learned in prison or on his way there.
Initially, MIS-X members used Red Cross aid packages to communicate with the prisoners. In the camps, the prisoners received only one meal a day, so the Red Cross delivered basic survival food. Usually, one parcel per week per prisoner was allowed.
The problem was that the Americans never knew where the packages would end up, enriched with encrypted messages and escape devices such as hidden compasses, maps drawn on handkerchiefs, counterfeit money, radio transmitters and the like. At the same time, they had little concern that they would compromise the Red Cross and, if discovered, all its assistance would be declared a cover-up.
However, as the Red Cross itself was no longer able to supply the necessary quantities of food, they set up fake charities, such as the Prisoners of War Relief Foundation, and on top of that, fake relatives to whom the prisoners wrote. In this way, they were able to send parcels with secret contents, which not only helped the prisoners to plan their escapes, but also to bribe the German guards.
Helping or endangering prisoners?
Between 80 and 120 parcels were sent to German prisoner-of-war camps every day, as they had contacts with more than 60 camps, including Stalag Luft III in Poland, famous as the scene of the Great Escape. The Geneva Convention allowed prisoners to send 3 letters and 4 postcards each month. The encrypted letters and postcards were sent via Switzerland and Spain to a fictitious private address, from where they travelled to Post Office Box 1142, where they were decrypted.
Alternatively, the prisoners may have sent them to a real address, but the New York post office knew which addresses to exclude. These letters were sent to Bolling Air Force Base near Washington and from there to Post Office Box 1142. Once they were decrypted, they were forwarded on to the original addressee, without the addressee suspecting that the letter was in fact a secret message and had already been opened by one of the most secret agencies in the country.
The replies received by the prisoners also contained encrypted messages. For example, to warn them of the arrival of a parcel, but even then, the messages were invaluable to them because they lifted their spirits and filled them with faith that the war was turning in the Allies’ favour.
But they also endangered the prisoners by this kind of communication. The Geneva Convention stipulates that a prisoner shall no longer take part in combat. These prisoners were cooperating when they sent intelligence to freedom, so if they were discovered, they could rightly be accused of espionage and killed. This is one of the reasons why the MIS-X project had to be so highly classified.
The Americans and the British called this the Barbed Wire Front. In Stalag Lufte III, a group of prisoners was set up to compile coded reports. The captured officers were to question the new prisoners about what they had seen on their way from Germany to Poland and report back to the MIS-X.
The Americans also instructed their captured officers and soldiers to make contact with the guards, who were the best source of inside information. For example, they reported the location of a school for German officers on the outskirts of Frankfurt. It had been attacked by the British. They also sent messages about German troop movements, about new German weapons and about a system fault in a B-17 bomber.
Those who managed to escape from Stalag Lufta III, after being recaptured, reported what they saw in the open. But escape was almost always doomed to failure. Hitler ordered that all prisoner-of-war camps should be at least 1 600 kilometres from the Western Front, and the environment there was not hospitable. Nevertheless, by the beginning of 1943, the prisoners in Stalag Lufte III had begun digging three tunnels. Three were always dug, just in case the enemy discovered one. According to the plan, up to 250 prisoners were supposed to escape through it, but in the end 76 escaped with the help of the MIS-X. 73 were captured and 50 were executed.
The escapes were usually unsuccessful, but they caused great problems for the Germans. Internal security was the responsibility of 1.5 million German soldiers, or one tenth of the entire German military force. This meant that there were that many fewer of them on the battlefields, which was a liability to the Allies, but not to the Germans and the prisoners. During the war, the Germans captured 95,532 American soldiers. Of these, only 737 escaped, but there is no information on how many managed to evade capture because of their training in the MIS-X programme.
In reality, information on MIS-X is extremely scarce. Most of the documentation relating to it has been destroyed, and what survives and has been opened to the public is so scarce that it is impossible to make much out of it.
And what was the third secret programme in Mailbox 1142? The translation of captured documents, German newspapers, magazines and scientific journals to extract important information or to help interrogators.
Mailbox 1142 continued to boil until November 1946, when it was finally no longer needed. The army had demolished most of the buildings it had erected during the war, and by January 1948 only a handful remained. The secret interrogation base was turned into a park within the George Washington Memorial Park and now people enjoy picnics there.
