Franklin D. Roosevelt

You've heard of the Freemasons.  You may have heard of the Illuminati.  Secret societies are finding it harder to stay secret in our surveillance-saturated world.  In 1864, a former schoolteacher from middle-of-nowhere Michigan arrived in the nation's capital.  Justus Henry Rathbone sought to create a secret society that would heal the nation's divisions after the Civil War.  There was just one thing.  His not-so-secret society glowed in the national spotlight once presidents from Lincoln to FDR found out about it.

Legend tells of a beast that flies over Middletown, Maryland looking for prey to drag back to its lair on Catoctin Mountain. The creature, a half-bird half-reptile, had “huge wings, a long pointed tail, occasionally a horn, one eye in the middle of its forehead and, strangest of all, octopuslike tentacles that trailed behind it like streamers and retracted like a cat’s claws.” It came to be known as the Snallygaster and supposedly, it had a taste for human flesh…and a particular group of people above all others.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to begin your training as a World War II spy in the forests of Prince William County, Virginia.

On June 8, 1939, a royal train rolled into Track 20 at Union Station. The station had been cleaned and shined, the columns lining the track had a fresh coat of green and white paint, and a blue carpet was rolled out from the platform to the newly redecorated station reception room. The visitors arriving in Washington that day were King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, who made unprecedented history by becoming the first reigning British monarchs to ever set foot on American soil. Of the various activities that the King took part in during his stay, the irony of his visit to Mount Vernon was, quite possibly, the most intriguing.

Early in the 20th century, a modern, accessible, airport became a necessity for any major city, and Washington was no exception. However, while there was general agreement on the need for an air hub to serve the nation’s capital, the road – literally – to achieving that goal was fraught with delays and obstacles. It would take 12 years of debate and a president stepping in for the city to finally get the airport it so desperately needed.

On the morning of August 29, 1940, while the Battle of Britain raged in the skies overhead, a small group of men boarded an ocean liner and left the country with the nation’s most sensitive military secrets.

These men were not spies or Nazi sympathizers. They were among the United Kingdom’s foremost civilian and military scientists, and they were headed for Washington, D.C. in an attempt to turn the tide of the war, which at that point was going very heavily in favor of Nazi Germany.