A Covert Chapter Opens For Fort Hunt Veterans

They spent hours talking about Nazi scientists who told Michel about microwave technology, U-boat engineering and other marvels that the young mechanical engineer coaxed out of them.

Michel also told Bies about his bunkmate, Mandel. One quick Google search turned up Mandel's smiling face. "He was right there, near us all along, teaching at George Washington University," Bies said of Mandel, who had immigrated from Berlin in 1937.

Mandel had kept his own family in the dark about his wartime exploits.

"I know my family wondered where the hell I was," he said. "I told them I was speaking to scientists, or something like that. They didn't know I was interrogating Nazis."

His past revisited him once, at a scientific conference in Paris. In passing, he locked eyes with another scientist, a man he had interrogated in a cramped cell years ago.

"He looked at me, and I heard him say to someone in German: 'That was my prison warden,' " Mandel said. The two men shook hands. The exchange was respectful and friendly, he said.

Not everyone at Fort Hunt was an interrogator. Some, such as Wayne Spivey, 86, of Marietta, Ga., were brought in to manage the massive flow of information that interrogators such as Michel and Mandel were getting.

"My mouth was always dropping open when we heard them talking and when we saw the information they got and the sketches of atoms and molecules and whatnot," Spivey said. "I was just one of three Southern boys there, walking around hearing German and Russian and Japanese."

So far, Bies has contacted about 15 veterans, and he tries to rush to their sides to capture their fading memories.

Bies hopes to stage a large reunion next year, with all of the veterans he can find. Then they can stand on the green fields of Fort Hunt, shake hands and embrace, as Michel and Mandel did last week and, at long last, talk.