Mountain Spies Tour

The Mountain Spies Tour explores the hidden role of the Catoctin and South Mountain region in the birth of American intelligence during World War II and its evolution through the Cold War. This quiet mountain corridor—just miles from Washington, D.C.—became a proving ground for espionage, interrogation, covert operations, and continuity-of-government planning.

Guests visit key locations connected to Camp David, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie, resort communities that quietly housed operatives and interrogators, and later Cold War sites that institutionalized intelligence and national survival planning.

The tour focuses on people, tradecraft, geography, and moral complexity—how immigrants, refugees, academics, and soldiers were mobilized as an intelligence advantage, and how wartime improvisation became a permanent national security system.

This is not a battlefield tour. It is a story of quiet places doing extraordinary work and how these mountains helped shape the modern American intelligence state