-Caveat Lector-
"In 1975, Sen. John Tunney (D-Calif.) charged that Mount Weather
held dossiers on 100,000 or more Americans. A sophisticated computer
system gives the installation access to detailed information on the lives
of virtually every American citizen, Tunney claimed.
"Mount Weather personnel stonewalled question after question in two
Senate hearings.
"I don't understand what they're trying to hide out there," said
Douglas
Lea, staff director of the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights.
"Mount Weather remains closed to us."
"Tunney complained, 'Mount Weather is out of control.' "
MOUNT WEATHER:
FALLOUT SHELTER OF THE RULING CLASS
In the best-selling 1962 spy thriller SEVEN DAYS IN MAY, the
Joint Chiefs of Staff plot to overthrow the U.S. president. Their
conspiracy centers on a place called Mount Thunder, a secret
subterranean command post where government leaders would go in
the event of a nuclear attack.
On December 1, 1974, a TWA Boeing 727 jet crashed into a
fog-shrouded mountain in northern Virginia and burned, killing
all 92 persons aboard. Near the wreckage was a fenced government
reserve identified as Mount Weather.
Mount Weather is a real place; eighty-five acres located
forty-five miles west of Washington and 1,725 feet above sea
level, near the town of Bluemont, Virginia. In the event of all-
out war, an elite of civilian and military leaders are to be
taken to Mount Weather's cavernous underground shelter to become
the nucleus of a postwar American society. The government has a
secret list of those persons it plans to save.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) runs Mount
Weather. When it has to talk about the place, which is rare, it
calls it the "special facility." Its more common name comes from
a weather station that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had
maintained on the mountain.
The authors of SEVEN DAYS IN MAY, Fletcher Knebel and
Charles W. Bailey II, were Washington journalists who learned a
lot about the then-quite-secret post. Few readers of Knebel and
Bailey's fiction could have imagined how close to the truth it
was. The novel gives detailed highway directions from Washington:
"... the Chrysler wheeled onto Route 50, heading away from
Washington ... In the jungle of neon lights and access roads at
Seven Corners, Corwin saw Scott bear right onto Route 7, the main
road to Leesburg. The two cars moved slowly through Falls Church
before the traffic began to thin out and speed up.... At the fork
west of Leesburg, Scott bore right on Route 9, heading toward
Charles Town.... They began to climb toward the Blue Ridge, the
eastern rim of the Shenandoah Valley.... West of Hillboro, where
the road crossed the Blue Ridge before dropping into the valley
....Scott turned left. Corwin followed him onto a black macadam
road that ran straight along the spine of the ridge.
"...Because of his White House job, Corwin knew something
about this road that few other Americans did. Virginia 120
appeared to be nothing more than a better-than-average Blue Ridge
byway, but it ran past Mount Thunder, where an underground
installation provided one of the several bases from which the
President could run the nation in the event of a nuclear attack
on Washington."
Knebel and Bailey disguised the directions slightly. You
continue on Route 7 west of Leesburg, turning left on Route 601
just west of Bluemont. It's Virginia Route 601 that runs right
up to the gates of Mount Weather. Residents have long known
there is something funny about that road; it is always the first
road cleared after a snowstorm.
At one point, the government asked the local paper not to
print any articles about the facility. But it is all but
impossible to keep such a place secret. The Appalachian Trail
runs right by Mount Weather, and hikers can get close enough to
see signs and flashing lights. One sign reads: "All persons and
vehicles entering hereon are liable to search. Potographing,
making notes, drawings, maps or graphic representations of this
area or its activities are prohibited." In the late 1960s an
unidentified hippie is supposed to have stumbled upon the
facility and sketched it from a tree. His drawing turned up in
the QUICKSILVER TIMES, an underground newspaper in Washington.
Residents also tell of the time a hunt club chased a fox
onto the site and triggered an alarm. The club had to go to the
main gate to get the dogs back.
After the TWA crash, a spokesman "politely declined to
comment on what Mt. Weather was used for, how many people work
there, or how long it has been in its current use," the
WASHINGTON POST reported. The POST published a picture of the
facility, citing far-fetched speculation that Mount Weather's
radio antennas may have interfered with the jet's radar and
caused the disaster.
You don't get into Mount Weather without an invitation. The
entrance is said to be like the door to a bank vault, only
thicker, set into a mountain made out of the toughest granite in
the East. It is guarded around the clock.
Mount Weather got more unsolicited publicity in 1975.
Senator John Tunney (D-Calif.) charged that Mount Weather held
dossiers on 100,000 or more Americans. A sophisticated computer
system gives the installation access to detailed information on
the lives of virtually every American citizen, Tunney claimed.
Mount Weather personnel stonewalled question after question in
two Senate hearings.
"I don't understand what they're trying to hide out there,"
said Douglas Lea, staff director of the Senate Subcommittee on
Constitutional Rights. "Mount Weather is just closed up to us."
Tunney complained that Mount Weather was "out of control."
Mount Weather has been owned by the government since 1903,
when the site was purchsed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Calvin Coolidge talked about building a summer White House there.
In World War I it was an artillery range, and during the
Depression it was a workfarm for hobos. Mount Weather as an
alternate capital seems to have been the idea of Millard F.
Caldwell, former governor of Florida.
There is a fallout shelter under the East Wing of the White
House. No one believes it offers any real protection from a
nuclear attack on Washington, however. FEMA has elaborate plans
for getting the president and other key officials out of
Washington should there be a nuclear attack.
In that event, the president is supposed to board a Boeing
747 National Emergency Airborne Command Post ("Kneecap"). That
is presumed to be safer than any point on the ground. The
president's plane can be refueled in the air from other planes
and may be able to stay airborne for as long as three days. Then
its engine will conk out for lack of oil. That is where Mount
Weather comes in.
Government geologists selected the site because it has some
of the most impregnable rock in the United States. The shelter
was started in the Truman administration, and it took years to
tunnel into the mountain.
There is a whole chain of shelters for leaders and critical
personnel. The Federal Relocation Arc, a system of ninety-six
shelters for specific U.S. Government agencies, sweeps through
North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and
Pennsylvania. A duplicate of the Pentagon is located at a site
called Raven Rock in Maryland. The administrative center of the
whole system, and the place where the top civilians would go, is
Mount Weather.
Mount Weather is much more than a fallout shelter; it is a
troglodytic Levittown. In the mid-1970s Richard Pollack, a
writer for PROGRESSIVE magazine, interviewed a number of persons
who had been associaed with Mount Weather. According to them,
Mount Weather is an underground city with roads, sidewalks, and a
battery-powered subway. A spring-fed artificial lake gleams in
the fluorescent light. There are office buildings, cafeterias,
and hospitals. Large dormitories are furnished with bunks or
"hot cots" -- hammocks intended to be occupied in three
eight-hour shifts. There are private apartments as well. Mount
Weather has its own waterworks, food storage, and power plant. A
"bubble-shaped pod" in the East Tunnel houses one of the most
powerful computers in the world.
The Situation Room, a circular chamber, would be a nerve
center in the time of war. The Mount Weather folks set great
store by visual aids and retain artists and cartographers at all
times.
A futuristic color videophone system is the basic means of
communication within Mount Weather's subterranean world. "All
important staff meetings were conducted via color television as
far back as 1958, long before it was generally available to the
public," one former staffer bragged.
The most surprising of Pollack's revelations is that Mount
Weather has a working back-up of U.S. Government EVEN NOW.
Undisclosed persons there duplicate the responsibilities of our
elected leaders, making Mount Weather an eerie doppelganger of
the United States.
An Office of the Presidency is ensconced in an underground
wing known as the White House. The elected president or survivor
closest in the chain of command would make his way there and take
over the reins. Until then, a staffer appointed by FEMA would be
carrying out duties said to simulate those of the real president.
Installed at Mount Weather are nine federal departments,
their very names ironic in the context: Agriculture, Commerce,
Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development,
Interior, Labor, State, Transporation, and the Treasury.
Miniature versions of the Selective Service, the Veteran's
Administration, the Federal Communications Commission, the Post
Office, the Civil Service Commission, the Federal Power
Commission, and the Federal Reserve are there, too.
"High-level government sources, speaking under the promise
of strict anonymity, told me that each of the federal departments
represented at Mount Weather is headed by a single person on who
is conferred Cabinet-level official status," Pollack reported.
"Protocol even demands that subordinates address them as 'Mr.
Secretary.' Each of the Mount Weather 'Cabinet members' is
apparently appointed by the White House and serves an indefinite
term. Many of the 'secretaries' have held their positions
through several administrations."
What do all these people DO? Twice a month, Mount Weather
stages a war game to train its personnel and explore various dire
scenarios. Once a year they pull out all the stops and have a
super drill in which REAL Cabinet members and White House
staffers fly in from Washington.
General Leslie Bray, director of the Federal Preparedness
Agency, FEMA's predecessor, told the Senate that Mount Weather
has extensive files on "military installations, government
facilities, communications, transportation, energy and power,
agriculture, manufacturing, wholesale and retail services,
manpower, financial, medical and educational institutions,
sanitary facilities, population, housing shelter, and
stockpiles."
Additional information is kept in safekeeping at other
shelters in the Federal Relocation Arc.
There is a body of opinion that considers Mount Weather
obsolete. Mount Weather is a non-movable target, and a very
strategic one if the relocation works. The "toughest granite in
the East" may have offered some protection in Eisenhower's time,
but multiple strikes could blast the mountain away. It was
reported that the TWA jet crash knocked out power at Mount
Weather for two and a half hours. What would a bomb do?
The Soviet Union knows exactly where Mount Weather is -- and
almost certainly knew long before the Western press did. The
Soviets tried to buy an estate near Mount Weather as a "vacation
retreat" for embassy employees. The State Department stopped the
sale.
The Survivor List
In 1975 General Bray told the Senate that the Mount Weather
survivor list had sixty-five hundred names on it. Who might be
included?
The president, of course, provide he survives his Kneecap
command. The vice-president and Cabinet members are on the list
because they take part in the annual dry runs. Beyond that,
little is known and the few existing accounts conflict.
For instance, what about Congress? General Bray said that
his responsibilities included the executive branch only, not
Congress or the Supreme Court.
But in an interview in 1976, Senator Hubert Humphrey
insisted that he had visited the shelter as vice-president and
seen "a nice little chamber, rostrum and all," for postnuclear
sessions of Congress.
Furthermore, Earl Warren is said to have been invited when
he was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Warren refused
because he was not allowed to take his wife. The protocol for
ordering persons to Mount Weather specifies that messages not be
left with family members answering the phone.
The vast majority of the persons on the list are believed to
be ranking bureaucrats from the nine federal agencies with
branches at Mount Weather. Pollack said he heard stories that
some construction workers were on the list "because, the Mount
Weather analysts reasoned, excavation work for mass graves would
be needed immediately in the aftermath of a thermonuclear war."
General Bray admitted that some others such as telephone company
technicians are included.
Each person on the survival list has an ID card with a
photo. The card reads: THE PERSON DESCRIBED ON THIS CARD HAS
ESSENTIAL EMERGENCY DUTIES WITH THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. REQUEST
FULL ASSISTANCE AND UNRESTRICTED MOVEMENT BE AFFORDED THE PERSON
TO WHOM THIS CARD IS ISSUED.
Copyright (c) 1998 TOTSE
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