Abandoned Chopmist Hill WWII Listening Station | Rhode Island History

In this tiny little state we had a great big military secret: arguably the most powerful radio listening station in United States, capable of picking up German tank communications in North Africa and Japanese movements the Pacific, among many others. Welcome to the Chopmist Hill Listening Station.

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Before we jump right into this you’re probably wondering, what is a Listening Station? In simple terms, it’s a station with A BUNCH of radio equipment used to intercept enemy radio transmitter communications. Highly important things like spy locations, troop movements, and attack plans.

1940. That’s when these listening stations began popping up around the United States as part of the FCC’s new Radio Intelligence Division, which monitored radio transmissions for national security in the lead up to and during WWII. The RID was basically a detective agency that worked with the U.S. Army, Navy, FBI and State Department. Its business was counter-radio-espionage - NICE. You think THAT sounds cool? Hold up it gets cooler and warmer.

In the fall of 1940, a year before Pearl Harbor, the RID sent radio technician Thomas B. Cave to find a hilltop in southern New England that could serve as one of 13 listening posts to detect radio transmissions from German spies in the United States.

He checked out a few spots, but then Tommy Boy found Chopmist Hill here in Scituate Rhode Island. Specifically, a 183 acre farm with a 14 room farmhouse. This exact house, actually. He figured this would be a good spot since at the time, there were no power lines or other factors that would interfere with radio signals.

Once it was up and running, operators discovered that due to some geographic and atmospheric anomalies along with their equipment, Chopmist Hill in Scituate was able to pull in radio signals, even weak ones, from around the world.

A Providence Journal article published after the war in 1945 and with permission from the FCC, revealed that the Scituate station could receive messages sent by the enemy which no other secret station anywhere could pick up.

This station kept tabs on 400 enemy transmitting stations on the air every day, and code messages were recorded on discs sent to Washington’s “black chamber” for decoding.

How good was this station? Oh, it was GOOD.

Operators here were able to pinpoint the location of ANY transmission in the US within 15 minutes.

In one test that the RID ran, it set up a fake German spy transmission by hanging a wire outside a window at the Pentagon and tapping some Morse code. Scituate Rhode Island reported a spy in the pentagon within SEVEN MINUTES.

Reportedly, one of the reasons there was almost no sabotage inside the United States during WWII was that Chopmist Hill was able to pick up and pinpoint the location of EVERY radio transmitter that German agents set up.

"Patrolling the ether", a very sci-fi term, was what this search through the airwaves was called, as operators constantly located axis forces at home and abroad.

Over and over again one phrase repeated by Pentagon officials about the endless data that kept coming in was “We want it from Scituate. we don’t want it from any place other than Scituate.”

This little farmhouse in Rhode Island quickly became legendary in the intelligence community, with some postwar reports going as far as saying that Chopmist Hill Won World War II.
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Видео Abandoned Chopmist Hill WWII Listening Station | Rhode Island History канала Jason Allard