Hackers Underworld 2: Forbidden Knowledge/Hackers Underworld 2: Forbidden Knowledge.iso/UFO/WEATHER.TXT

Text File | 1989-08-08 | 14KB | 238 lines

                         MOUNT WEATHER

     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 i