#secrethistory

Massive antenna system at Navy's former Skaggs Island station.

This California Marsh Once Spied on the Soviet Navy

A top-secret military spy station operated for decades just west of Vallejo, Calif., staffed by Navy cryptologists who could intercept Soviet radio communications from thousands of miles away. Now hardly any trace of the Skaggs Island base remains and the site off State Route 37, on the north edge of San Pablo Bay, has returned to marshland.

Secretive, secure and self-contained, the U.S Naval Security Group Activity station handled communications and intelligence-gathering work for the Navy and the National Security Agency. The base, located about 25 straight-line miles from San Francisco on 3,310 acres purchased by the Navy in 1941, operated through World War II and the Cold War and was finally decommissioned in 1993.

The station’s huge Wullenweber antenna system, nicknamed the “elephant cage,” was similar to several other systems operated by the U.S. military throughout the Pacific. With a range of several thousand miles, “basically there was no corner of the Pacific Ocean that could not be listened to,” according to an Engineering Radio magazine article.

The antenna system looked like a series of tall, circular wire fences reaching several stories in height. The Skaggs Island station’s mission was to monitor Soviet naval activity throughout the North Pacific. Besides the high-tech eavesdropping, members of the station’s “Classic Bullseye” division were able to pinpoint locations of Russian surface ships and submarines.

“For us, being able to track their fleet was a requirement to protect the country against a surprise,” U.S. naval analyst, physicist and author Norman Friedman said in a 2014 San Diego Union-Tribune article. “Now that most people you don’t like use satellite communications, this is not the way to do it.”

The Soviets had a similar system, known as Krug, during the Cold War. Both the U.S. and Russia got the initial technology from Germany after World War II.

Monitoring by the Skaggs Island station went beyond the Cold War era. In American Cryptology During the Cold War, 1945-1989, author Thomas R. Johnson states that the base was concentrating on Soviet naval communications in 1945 and since 1944 had been training personnel to be Russian linguists – despite the official designation of the USSR as an ally at the time. Johnson’s book had been designated top secret but was approved for release by the NSA in 2007.

“Even though they were an ally they were not treated as a normal ally. They had spies all over the United States at pretty high levels. It started during World War II and continued for many years,” says cryptology historian Ralph Simpson, scheduled to discuss “Crypto Wars” Aug. 13 at Mare Island as part of the Mare Island Historic Park Foundation’s speaker series.

The Skaggs Island base, with a staff of up to 400, consisted of 150 buildings that housed administrative offices, gatehouses, a bowling alley, movie theater, library, gymnasium, chapel, bar and exchange, post office, public works department, power plant, fire station, hobby shop, barracks and rows of single-story homes. Also on the grounds were a pool, tennis courts, baseball field, gas station and a 125-foot-tall water tower visible for miles. A gray Navy bus brought children of base personnel to and from schools in nearby Sonoma.

Over the years, the Navy declined to comment publicly on the important cryptographic activity on the base. Its stated purpose was to serve as a communications relay center for the Pacific Fleet and beyond, assist with any large-scale search and rescue operations off the Pacific Coast, and conduct communications-related research.

After the station was closed in 1993, local police and fire departments used some buildings for training purposes. So did Navy SEALS, getting their forced-entry “breacher” qualifications by blowing holes in walls. The abandoned base also was targeted by vandals who ignored no-trespassing signs and broke windows, battered open doors and sprayed walls of many buildings with graffiti. There also were reports of methamphetamine labs at the site.

In a 2014 San Francisco Estuary magazine article, Wendy Eliot of the Sonoma Land Trust described Skaggs Island as “a scary place for a while. It was the Wild West, with lots of things happening under cover of darkness.” By 2013 all of the remaining, dilapidated structures were demolished.

Skaggs Island was part of 10,000 acres of marshland between Vallejo and Novato that in 1878 became the property of U.S. Sen. John Percival Jones of Nevada, a British immigrant who became a wealthy Comstock Lode silver baron. The island, surrounded by a network of four narrow sloughs, was first called Camp 6, one of a string of work camps.

Jones hired Chinese laborers, jobless following completion of the Central Pacific Railroad project, to hand-build levees and drainage ditches. It was slow going, and clamshell dredgers and tractors eventually were used to complete the muddy work. According to one story, recounted by Arthur Dawson in his Sonoma Baylands Oral History Project, one of the tractors sank into the mud and disappeared. By the 1920s the land several feet below sea level was finally protected by dykes and planted in salt-tolerant oat hay.

Skaggs Island was named after Safeway stores founder Marion Barton Skaggs who invested in the area during the Great Depression. The Navy paid Skaggs $53 an acre for three-quarters of the 4,390-acre island in 1941, but used only 60 acres for its operations. Most of the island remained farmland, with private ownership of the acreage not acquired by the Navy and with much of the Navy land leased out.

In 2011, Skaggs Island became part of the extensive San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge, which was created in 1974 to protect migratory shorebirds and other waterfowl, and some endangered or threatened species of birds and mice. The transfer met the goals of environmentalists intent on restoring wetlands that had been wiped out through development over the years.

Brendan Riley

First Published July 14,2023

Vallejo and other Solano County communities are treasure troves of early-day California history. My Solano Chronicles column, running every other Sunday, highlights various aspects of that history. If you have local stories or photos to share, email me at [email protected] or message me on Facebook.

Current photo shows circular outline of the former antenna location.

Skaggs Island map.

Aerial photo shows Navy's Skaggs Island station prior to its demolition.

Abandoned homes, now torn down, at Navy's Skaggs Island station.

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