Natick’s Secret Role During World War II: Spy Work on Pegan Hill

During World War II, some secret stuff happened on the western slope of Pegan Hill in South Natick.

In 1942, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) set up nine young operatives in an old house on the historic site of a colonial-era farm. George Hanchett had built his home there in 1856 and operated a large dairy farm (Lookout Farm is now active in this area). That fall, the FBI surveyed the greater Boston area for an inconspicuous and noise-free location. The Pegan Hill location in South Natick was the ultimate choice, offering a high point (elevation of about 400 feet) for handling radio traffic to and from the Axis powers. It was all hush-hush—spying, secret agents, secret codes, and radio surveillance. The FBI sent eight men and one woman to create a highly secure listening post to intercept German radio traffic and play a role in counter-intelligence activities from 1942 to 1945. Agent Harry Arnold was in charge of mounting the antenna on four 40-foot poles in the field behind the house. High-quality radio equipment and recording devices were installed, along with a Teletype machine.

The rented house on the former Hanchett property sits today on the southern side of Sassamon Road. Single agents lived in the house, and married men lived nearby. It’s said that the agents enjoyed juicy treats from the large apple tree in the backyard.

We don’t have any declassified information about what happened at the listening post. However, local theorists like to believe that the Natick station received and transmitted critical information before the 1944 D-Day landing in Normandy and two days before the Japanese surrendered in 1945.

Before and during the war, the FBI was given extraordinary powers to place suspicious persons under close surveillance and create a network of secret wireless stations that monitored traffic between suspected potential saboteurs in America and their handlers abroad. The radio sites also monitored international communication channels used by Germany, Italy, and Japan, and they got involved in some “dirty tricks” that were part of counter-intelligence gambits.

There is some evidence that the Natick operators were actively involved in a counter-intelligence coup involving a German spy named Helmut Goldschmidt (codename “Peasant”) in Britain. Goldschmidt wanted to become a double agent working for the U. S., but he was thought to be unreliable, and so his identity was used to feed false information to the Germans. One FBI agent learned to imitate Goldschmidt’s radio transmission style to send deceptive messages.

Note: 30-year-old W. Mark Felt was the agent who supervised the Peasant Case. Six decades later, Felt revealed he was “Deep Throat,” journalist Bob Woodward’s Watergate source.

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Selected sources and additional reading:

Natick Historical Society collections.

Batvinis, Raymond J. Hoover’s Secret War Against Axis Spies: FBI Counterespionage during World War II. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2014.