Ret. Maj. Arnold Kohn finally tells his story of the secret POW camp that changed the world.

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The secrets of Fort Hunt didn’t unlock easily for Arnold Kohn either. When he first reported for duty in 1946, just months after the end of WWII, simply reaching the base was a challenge.

“When I first got my orders, I was down in Louisiana,” Kohn recalls. “They told me to report to PO Box 1142 in Alexandria, Virginia.

“I wasn’t sure just what to do with PO Box 1142 so I went to the Post Office and spoke to the postmaster. He hemmed and hawed and finally said, ‘Take a bus to Mount Vernon and tell the driver to drop you off at PO Box 1142.’ The bus driver stopped. I got off and there was a little road with a private entrance that said, ‘No Trespassing.’ ”

At this point, Kohn was a seasoned first lieutenant, with broad experience born of assignments that had taken him all over Europe to North Africa. He received the assignment because he had extensive experience working POW camps and because he could speak German fluently.

Only he didn’t know just what his assignment was. His memoirs, which he has shared only with a small circle of family and close friends, illustrate how bizarre a situation he found himself in.

“We left our young hero bravely marching up a private road, somewhere in Virginia. Again and again, he anxiously checks his assignment orders. It is almost as if he needs to reassure himself that he hasn’t misread them. No, they still read that he is to report to PO Box 1142. There is no mistake. But he wonders why he never seems to get normal orders like everybody else.

“There must be some element of strangeness in him to account for all the out of the ordinary events that kept on befalling him – this person who was myself so long long ago. We almost get the feeling that if something really surprising were to again happen to him, we wouldn’t – so to speak – be very surprised. Though this fact, if one stops to think about it – that we wouldn’t be surprised by a surprise – is actually surprising in itself; and also a little sad.”

Observant by design and training, Arnold Kohn soon noticed a difference beyond Fort Hunt’s whisper-quiet secrecy. These men surrounding him weren’t regular enlisted men; they were Ivy League professors versed in intelligence. Among them were also soldiers who had escaped enemy capture to share key intel – which made Kohn glad he hadn’t volunteered his comparatively tame war stories. But just like the National Parks employees, he would have to unravel the enigmatic character of PO Box 1142 by doing his own reconnaissance. It took a few weeks.

“Behind the screen of trees was a prisoner of war camp, or rather a secret interrogation center,” Kohn writes. “The main post, which I had thought was all there was to the place, turned out to be less than a quarter of the whole area.

“Captured Personnel and Material Branch was known as the MIS-Y Section. When I tried to find out more about this interrogation center I was sternly told that this information came under the category of ‘need to know.’

“I had been in the army long enough by now to have learned how to find out military secrets. I went and asked the cooks in the mess hall; and over our coffee they told me all the really neat secret stuff.”

The neat stuff included tales of how Fort Hunt interrogations yielded the science needed to beat the U-boats’ sonar proof skin, to pick apart German defense technologies, and to strategically explore Germany and Japan’s sophistication in nuclear arms and other weapons.

Some such insights emerged from the second operation at work at Fort Hunt besides MIS-Y: MIS X. Dubbed an “escape innovation” workshop by some, MIS X allowed American and English POWs to communicate with radios slyly smuggled in care packages, or to escape altogether with the aid of devices like silk composite maps hidden in decks of playing cards that, when laid out, showed a route to freedom and a chance to relay vehicle flaws or new reconnaissance.

Of course, PO Box 1142 had a lot more secrets in store.