Camp Peary

Camp Peary is a closed government installation on the York River in York County, Virginia, near Williamsburg. It was built in the Second World War as a training center for the Seabees, the Navy's construction battalions, and has been since 1952 the Defense Department's Armed Forces Experimental Training Activity, a facility that local residents have long taken to be one of the Central Intelligence Agency's main training camps.¹²

Seabee training center

By August 1942 the Navy judged its Seabee camps Allen, Bradford and Endicott too small for the expanding force, and it decided "to build a new camp on the York River, near Williamsburg, Va., to house 50,000 men. This vast training activity was officially established on November 4, 1942, and was called Camp Peary in honor of Rear Admiral Robert E. Peary, CEC officer of polar-expedition fame." The camp covered about 11,000 acres, with an administrative area, four regimental areas of ten battalions each and an officers' training area. Through 1943 and the first half of 1944 Seabee recruits received their primary training there before technical training at Camp Endicott; officer training moved to Camp Peary when the Naval Construction Training Center at Norfolk was disestablished.¹

Special stevedoring battalions, recruited from the country's steamship and stevedore companies, trained at a stevedore school at the camp on a mock Liberty ship built on dry ground; the mock-up was later moved to Davisville. A demolition unit practiced landing operations at the camp, and many of the construction detachments sent to relieve or reinforce battalions in the field were formed there. "Due to decreases in recruiting, Camp Peary was abandoned as a Seabee training center on June 10, 1944," and all Seabee training passed to Camp Endicott.¹

Armed Forces Experimental Training Activity

Camp Peary reopened in 1952. Press inquiries were for years referred among Defense Department offices until a spokesman read a statement, "or something similar": "The unit there is the Armed Forces Experimental Training Facility. It was established 22 January 1952. Its mission is to provide DoD-designated classified and closed training facilities to develop prototype training programs for military and civilian elements of the federal government." An environmental impact report dated April 1993 gave its area as about 9,275 acres, 8,000 of them unimproved or partly improved, and described its principal function as "a training and exercise facility to the combined Armed Forces," requiring "an austere environment for all Administration and Training Facilities." A new 9 million dollar training school was finished in February 1991, and a 5.2 million dollar, 105-room dormitory was planned at Powell Lake near the river. Construction and major maintenance over five years came to more than 15.7 million dollars, including 943,000 dollars to repave its restricted-access airport, with the work overseen by the Atlantic Division of the Naval Facilities Engineering Command.²

The Associated Press reported in 1994 that Camp Peary, "referred to on area maps as a Navy or a Defense Department installation," "for years has been accepted by locals as one of the CIA's main training camps." Its security chief and spokesman, Philip R. Houston, answered a written request for comment: "We appreciate your interest in Camp Peary, but hope you understand that due to the classified nature of our role in national defense, we cannot be more forthcoming with details of our mission."²

Yuri Nosenko

John D. Marks placed the confinement of the Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko, from April 1964 to October 1967, in a specially constructed cell at Camp Peary, on the judgment of James Jesus Angleton and the defector Anatoliy Golitsyn that Nosenko was a false defector sent to mislead the Warren Commission.³ John Clement Hart, a CIA officer who had retired in 1972 and studied the Nosenko case from mid-June to late December 1976, testified to the House Select Committee on Assassinations on September 15, 1978, as the Agency's official representative, on guidance from Director of Central Intelligence Stansfield Turner, that Nosenko "remained in solitary confinement, under constant visual observation, until, if my memory serves me correctly, August 1967. There was a change of the location, but that bore no particular significance because he was treated approximately the same way in both locations."⁴

Hart testified that the conditions were modeled on the confinement of the American professor Frederick Barghoorn in Moscow in 1963: the original plan for the cell provided no heat, a boarded window and "one 60-watt bulb burning all night," with rising at six and bed at ten, and a diet of weak tea, porridge, watery soup and macaroni. Nosenko "was incarcerated for 1,277 days, on only 292 days was he in part questioned"; for 77 percent of the time "he was left entirely unoccupied." On August 23, 1966, Director Richard Helms "set a limit of 60 days" to resolve the case; in September 1966 he refused a proposal to interrogate Nosenko under sodium amytal, and a second polygraph series followed from October 19 to 28, 1966. Hart read to the committee a document, mostly in the handwriting of the deputy chief of the Soviet Bloc Division, on the aims of the 1966 polygraphs: "To gain more insight into points of detail which we could use in fabricating an ostensible Nosenko confession, insofar as we could make one consistent and believable even to the Soviets, a confession would be useful in any eventual disposal of Nosenko." Helms then took the case from the Soviet Bloc Division and the Counterintelligence Staff and gave it to his deputy, Admiral Rufus Taylor, who brought in the Office of Security.⁴ Its officer Bruce Solie re-examined the case and concluded that the defection was genuine.³