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From: Steve Douglass <webbfeat@arn.net> Date: Wed, 1 Apr 1998 09:16:37 -0800 |
The New York Times
Friday, March 20, 1998
Is That Base a C.I.A. School For Spies? Base? What Base?
By TIM WEINER
HERTFORD, N.C. -- Nine miles out of Hertford, a town as tranquil as an
old dog on a porch, the road ends at a sign that says Harvey Point
Defense Testing Activity.
Officially, Harvey Point is some sort of Pentagon post. But everybody
around Hertford says the official version is fiction. "We felt it was
a CIA base from the beginning," said Paul Gregory, the county manager.
In fact, Harvey Point is the place where, for the last 37 years, the
CIA has run secret paramilitary and counter-terrorism courses for
thousands of its officers and select foreigners -- most recently, the
Palestinian security forces, according to intelligence officials.
Established weeks after the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, this school for
spies has been shielded by secrecy, security fences and cypress trees
festooned with Spanish moss ever since.
But it makes its presence felt. Black helicopters thud over the
treetops at dusk ("They scare the soup out of you," said Deborah S.
Reed, the local register of deeds). Buses with blacked-out windows
roll by, ferrying mysterious passengers. Trucks haul in old limousines
and haul out bullet- riddled blackened hulks.
Then there are the bombs.
Harvey Point sets off powerful explosions to recreate terrorist acts.
Lots of powerful explosions. They resound for many miles around. In
Hertford dawn can break with a bone-rattling bang.
Some folks roll over and go back to bed. They know it's only the CIA
setting off bombs. But some never quite got used to it.
"The explosions would almost throw us out of bed at 7:30 on a Saturday
morning," said Gregory, who presides in the 18-century county
courthouse in Hertford, the seat of Perquimans County, population
11,000. "The explosions rattle the windows a little, but more than we
would like. One or two people said their houses shook so bad they had
cracks."
Word filtered out to Harvey Point a while back that some of the locals
were peeved. So the base commander, Roger L. Shields, invited Gregory,
the county commissioners and other local officials out for a chat.
"They were real nice folks," Gregory recalled. "They said they would
show us around the base. Well, they did NOT show us around the base.
But for the most part, they told us the truth as to what they gave us
and showed us. Basically, they explode things down there. They blow up
cars. They blow up safes. They blow stuff up. They try to reconstruct
an explosion that took place somewhere in the world."
The visitors asked flat-out if Harvey Point was a CIA base. No answer
came.
In a thank-you note to Shields, the Perquimans County commissioners
wrote: "When we hear an explosion from that general direction or feel
the ground shake due to the same, we will, from our experience, know,
in some degree, what it is for. We will now be able to explain to our
people why we have the Base and what it is doing for our Nation."
Over the last decade, the CIA has given counter-terrorism training to
more than 18,000 foreign intelligence officers from 50 different
countries, including Russia, Israel and Egypt, according to agency
officials. Some of that training took place abroad, not at Harvey
Point. The agency does not discuss its training installations -- ever.
Shock waves notwithstanding, Harvey Point is a good neighbor, Gregory
said. For one thing, the base employs more than 40 local people as
cooks and guards. All are sworn to secrecy, even to their families.
"My son works there as security, but he don't tell me nothing, and I
don't ask," said Julian Broughton, a retired sheriff known as "Little
Man," who says he has not visited the base since investigating the
death of a man found drowned in a fishing net many years ago.
The sign outside the guardhouse at Harvey Point used to say "U.S. Navy
Supply Center." The claim is noted with deep skepticism by Stan
Busteed, a retired Navy officer who lives nearby. "They have to live
under this damn-fool veil," Busteed said. "It's common knowledge that
this place doesn't exist."
All manner of aircraft fly into the base over Busteed's home, "but if
you ask them if there's an airstrip there, they'll deny it," he said.
In fact, Harvey Point boasts a 4,000-foot airstrip, a lodge, a gym, a
conference center and other amenities for traveling spies, in addition
to five different varieties of poisonous snakes, according to a handy
brochure it gives to visitors from CIA headquarters.
The base stands on 1,600 boggy acres surrounded by Albemarle Sound,
where Blackbeard the pirate once ruled. It has a spokesman who prefers
that his name not appear in print. "Our mission is to test
conventional ordnance and ballistics in a real-world environment," he
said. "The type of testing is where you get into the classified
things."
Pentagon records show that the Navy tried to build an enormous
seaplane out on the point in the mid-1950s. The jet, the Martin P6M
SeaMaster, was a big boondoggle. Three of the six test craft crashed.
In 1959, the project was abandoned. So was the base.
Then, in July 1961, as the Cold War reached a zenith, the base was
reborn as the Harvey Point Defense Testing Activity -- and disappeared
from the public record.
But at the Perquimans County courthouse (perhaps the only such place
in the old confederacy with a graven image of a Yankee -- Catfish
Hunter, who hails from Hertford and pitched for a Bronx ball club some
years back), the traces of Harvey Point stretch deep into the past.
The point was occupied in the 1670s by the Harvey family, Irish and
British emigres who produced many of North Carolina's first
politicians, including its first native-born governor, Thomas Harvey.
Harvey's grandson, known as Bold John Harvey, a local hero in
pre-Revolutionary days, was buried in a 20-ton tomb on the banks of
the point.
The courthouse books show that in 1942, four families living on the
point were evicted when the Navy seized it for an aircraft base. No
land records for the point exist after that. Officially, it has
disappeared, as ghostly as the Harveys, whose family graveyard remains
at the secret base. The last of their line, the governor's
great-great-great granddaughter, Emily Skinner, died in Hertford in
1946.
Perhaps it is best that the base retain some mystery, like the land
and the water around it. Blackbeard's booty is supposed to be buried
somewhere nearby, beneath the waters of the sound, which long ago took
Bold John Harvey away. The Harvey Point brochure says Bold John's tomb
was last seen, covered with barnacles, during a low tide in 1908.
Copyright 1998 The New York Times
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RELEVANCE OF THIS MESSAGE: Secret bases
Index: Connecticut (#2)
Index: CIA Spies & Spying (#1)
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Created: Apr 1, 1998