Fort George G. Meade: The First 100 Years

The Move
It took five years for NSA to relocate a sizable number
of people to Fort Meade after the decision was made to
move, and even then the communications security (later
known as information assurance) part of the agency
did not leave Washington, D.C., until 1968, when the
building now known as the Frank B. Rowlett Building was
complete.
The first operations building, now known as the William
and Elizebeth Friedman Building, was constructed on
the unused western corner of the Fort Meade property,
facing Maryland Route 32. It was designed with 1.4
million square feet of space, making it the third largest
government building in the Washington area at that
time; only the Pentagon and the new State Department
building were larger. The total cost of the building was
$35 million, substantially overrunning the contract price
of just under $20 million.
The move to Fort Meade was handled in manageable
stages designed to avoid shutting down any one part
of operations for a long period of time. The schedule
met, at least in spirit, the July 1955 deadline to occupy a
new site. Four brick barracks buildings, just east of the
construction site, were built in 1954. The first "interim
move" took place in November 1954 and involved 149
Marine guards who would serve as the security force. Two
thousand additional personnel joined the Marines in 1955.
Electronic communications were inadequate between the
old and new facilities; to overcome this issue classified
material was couriered, by vehicle, back and forth from
Arlington Hall Station four times each day. Heat for the
buildings came from an old steam engine, brought in on
the old Baltimore, Washington, and Annapolis Railroad
tracks.
While the move to an Army post was rather routine
for the military workforce, it was an upheaval for the
civilians, most of whom lived in the District of Columbia
or the northern Virginia suburbs. They faced a difficult
commute on narrow and congested streets, although
the opening of the brand-new Baltimore-Washington
Parkway eased the traffic situation. For those who did
not own automobiles, one option was the Baltimore and
Ohio Railroad from Union Station to Laurel, connecting
to an inadequate railroad-operated shuttle bus to Fort
THE COLD WAR
By Betsy Rohaly Smoot
Meade. The trip on the early train averaged one hour
and twenty-three minutes from Union Station to NSA,
not including the time it took to get to the station. The
available commercial bus service to Laurel was not welltimed
to meet the Fort Meade shuttle.
Many employees, facing the possibility of this daunting
commute, moved to Maryland to be near the new
complex. NSA encouraged this by authorizing the move
as a “permanent change of station,” which meant that
the government would pay the moving expenses. The
“Meademobile,” a trailer parked at Arlington Hall Station,
was set up with information about real estate, schools,
churches, and shopping in the Fort Meade area. On
Saturdays a special bus ran from Virginia to Fort Meade
so that employees could take a look at the area.
First projections were that the relocation of the agency
might cause up to 30 percent of the workforce to leave,
but the agency’s strategies to ease the relocation worked.
The attrition rate was just slightly above what was
considered normal. The move was a success.
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(Left and below) NSA employees on Saturday bus trip to
view the new facility. c.1957.
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