Camp Peary

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. Camp Allen was replaced by Camp Bradford which in turn was replaced by Camp Peary. The initial Seabee recruits of WWII were men who built Boulder Dam, America's highways and New York City skyscrapers. At Naval Construction Training Center Peary, Seabees were taught basic military order, discipline, weaponry, stevedoring, and construction trades. The Camp opened in November 3rd of 1942 with the 36th CB the first to train there[4] while the first organized there was the 61st CB.[5] Another 100,000 men would go through the camp before training there ceased in June of 1944. During that period the Seabees established over 60 trade schools on the base. In June of 1943 the dynamite and demolition school opened. Some of its first graduates included the first six classes of Seabee volunteers for the 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.

Camp Peary's mission changed when a new need presented itself to the Navy. A portion of the land became a detention center for German prisoners of war in the United States (POWs). Many of them were Kriegsmarine crewmen from captured German U-boats and from ships the Germans thought lost at sea with crews presumed dead. It was important to keep the German authorities unaware of their capture, since knowledge that they had survived would mean that secret code books and Enigma machines thought lost at sea could also have been compromised. Learning that these men were being held as POWs, would almost certainly have caused the Germans to change the secret codes that had been broken by Allied codebreakers, thus, extra secrecy was necessary. 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.

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

Camp Peary is known as "The Farm", a training facility run by the Central Intelligence Agency for the purpose of training CIA's clandestine officers, as well as officers of other organizations specializing in clandestine activities, such as the Defense Intelligence Agency. The existence of this facility is widely known but has never been formally acknowledged by the U.S. government. Access to Camp Peary is strictly controlled, and visitors to the installation are escorted at all times. The portion of the original World War II Seabee base north of Interstate 64 has been closed to the public since 1951. However, the roads and many structures of Magruder and Bigler's Mill are 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. Flight records show that at least 11 aircraft that appear to be owned by CIA 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]