Meet Your Guides

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For more than twenty years, Chris Hill has been researching the hidden national-security history of the Catoctin–South Mountain corridor.

His approach comes from a career spent solving hard problems with data. He began as a contractor supporting the U.S. Intelligence Community and Defense Industrial Base, working in surveillance, reconnaissance, imagery, GEOINT, and analytics. He later carried that experience into the commercial technology sector, working with leading data, AI, and cybersecurity companies to find threats, patterns, and answers buried in large volumes of information.

He applied the same method to the mountains around him: terrain first, then people, then connections, using primary sources, maps, archival records, and fieldwork.

OSS training grounds. Camp Ritchie. Fort Ritchie. Pine Grove Furnace. PO Box 1142. Camp David. Raven Rock.   Too many important national-security sites concentrated in one landscape to treat as separate stories.   That research led to Mountain Spies and now forms the basis of his forthcoming book, Plain Sight: The Secret Corridor.

Every tour begins with the same question: Why here?

Short speaker bio version:  

Chris Hill spent his career solving hard problems with data as a contractor supporting the U.S. Intelligence Community and Defense Industrial Base, working in ISR, imagery, GEOINT, and analytics. For more than twenty years, he has applied that same analyst’s approach to the hidden national-security history of the Catoctin–South Mountain corridor—terrain first, then people, then connections. That research led to Mountain Spies and now forms the basis of his forthcoming book, Plain Sight: The Secret Corridor. His work connects the region’s World War II and Cold War intelligence history through one central question: Why here?

I’m Christopher Price, a historical interpreter and tour guide with Mountain Spies, a U.S. Army veteran, and a retired CIA officer with 26 years of intelligence experience.

My career began with imagery. In the Army, I studied aerial photography, radar and infrared imagery, and satellite reconnaissance. I spent more than a year monitoring North Korean military activity before moving to Washington, D.C., where I applied those same skills against the Russian military.

I joined the CIA in 1999 as the field of geospatial intelligence was rapidly evolving. Over the course of my career, I combined imagery analysis, Geographic Information Systems, and structured analytic methods to examine subjects ranging from global military capabilities and counterterrorism to humanitarian crises and public health. I trained analysts, worked with foreign liaison partners, traveled to war zones and high-risk assignments, and supported clandestine operations with geospatial and analytic expertise.

Across all of those missions, one principle remained constant: geography matters.

Terrain shapes movement, concealment, access, observation, communications, security, and ultimately the choices available to people operating within it. That lesson became immediately familiar when I began studying the Catoctin–South Mountain corridor.

Here, the landscape itself helps explain why the region became so important during World War II and the Cold War. The mountains provided the isolation, terrain, proximity to Washington, and operational flexibility needed to train intelligence officers, paramilitary personnel, interrogators, counterintelligence specialists, and others whose work helped build the modern American intelligence system.

That is what drew me to Mountain Spies. The history here is not simply a collection of secret places. It is the story of how people used a particular landscape to solve difficult national-security problems—and how many of the ideas, methods, and disciplines developed by those who came before us remained recognizable throughout my own intelligence career.

I am proud to help tell that story.