Western Maryland Railway Sued the CIA

Cumberland's Western Maryland Railway station, built in 1913.

You never know what you'll unearth in the Central Intelligence Agency's Electronic Reading Room. Click here, for example, to reach a PDF of a 30 November 1948 memo from the CIA general counsel's office authorizing payment for a "negotiated settlement of tort claim" filed by the Western Maryland Railway.

The memo references an 8 November 1948 conversation between the counsel and a "Mr. Aaron" and says the payment was approved by the "EXEC for A&M," probably meaning -- if other memos in the Reading Room are any guide -- the Executive for Administration & Management. Totally not the spies, in other words, but the spies' accountants and admins. Their Moneypennys.

Apparently on a need-to-know basis is the name of the memo's author (redacted), whether "Mr. Aaron" is a railway official or a CIA colleague, what dollar amount was agreed upon and, most intriguingly, why the Cumberland-based railroad sued the barely year-old agency in the first place.

I will try to find out more from the CIA, but please note, in the name of limiting expectations, that this memo was not cleared for public release until November 2001, about 52 years after it was written. Should I find out anything, I will update this post -- and not in code, either.

In the meantime, my best guess is that it has something to do with Fort Ritchie in Washington County, about which we'll talk much more in a future post. It was the site of much U.S. intelligence activity during and immediately after World War II, and had been selected in part because it was fed by a spur of the Western Maryland Railway. 

In 1983, a historian writing about a vintage locomotive summarized the railroad's wartime service:

In the late 1930s, as the political situation in Europe worsened and war appeared imminent, the road put itself in high gear, and by the beginning of World War II freight of all kinds was flowing to the port of Baltimore. Long, heavy freights ran through Hagerstown day and night, often one just behind the other, and many wartime journeys were made to and from Baltimore-Hagerstown behind the #202 when it hauled as many as eighteen cars – including Pullmans filled with service personnel coming to nearby Fort Ritchie. (Long 6)

Though the CIA wasn't created by President Truman until 1947, espionage had of course been a major part of the U.S. war effort, and the new agency inherited a number of projects, personnel and facilities previously run by its predecessors -- including Fort Ritchie, subject of many documents in the Reading Room. 

Who knows? Maybe CIA inherited some unpaid bills, too.

Sources: 

Central Intelligence Agency, Office of the General Counsel. "Claim by Western Maryland Railway Company." 30 Nov. 1948. PDF document created 12 Dec. 2016. Accessed 24 Sept. 2021 via CIA Electronic Reading Room, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp57-00384r001300080150-6. 


Long, Eleanor C. “Western Maryland Railway Steam Locomotive #202, Washington County, Maryland.” National Register of Historic Places Inventory: Nomination Form. 30 Sept. 1983. Downloaded 24 Sept. 2021 from the Maryland Historical Trust website, https://mht.maryland.gov/secure/medusa/PDF/Washington/WA-HAG-145.pdf.   


 

 

 

 



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