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 ninety-two 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. Photographing, 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," Douglas Lea,
staff director of the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, said.
"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 purchased 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 associated 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, Transportation, 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," 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.
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