- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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:
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- ...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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- The Survivor List
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Each person on the survival list has an ID card with
a photo. The card reads:
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- 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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