facility is equipped with its own crematorium, known as a “pathological waste incinerator.”
During the Cold War, Mount Weather also contained a “Bomb Alarm System,” a huge electronic map of the United States in a special room that would display glowing red lights wherever nuclear explosions had taken place. The map was part of an elaborate system, consisting of a network of sensors mounted on telephone poles near ninety-nine cities and military bases around the country. The devices would detect the pressure, heat, and intense thermal flash of a nuclear blast and send a signal to the Bomb Alarm. By 2001, the system had been upgraded and modified through the use of early-warning satellites.
An especially appealing factor to the Bush officials was that Mount Weather was not only secure from nuclear explosions, it was also invulnerable to crashing passenger jets. In a bizarre accident on December 1, 1974, a TWA Boeing 727 jet plowed into the fog-wrapped hill, killing all ninety-two persons on board but leaving the command center untouched.
Not far from Mount Weather is Mount Pony, which until the late 1990s was the underground bunker for the Federal Reserve Board. Located just east of Culpeper, Virginia, it was where the nation’s money supply would be managed in case of national emergency. Built of one-foot-thick, steel-reinforced concrete, with lead-lined shutters in the windows, the facility is covered by up to four feet of dirt and surrounded by barbed-wire fences and a guard post. Inside the building is a giant 23,500-square-foot vault, which until 1988 held several billion dollars, shrink-wrapped on pallets nine feet high, that were to be used to jump-start a ruined economy. The building also contained a cold-storage area for maintaining highly radioactive bodies and seven computers that would control the transfer of all American electronic funds. But by September 11, 2001, Mount Pony had been converted to a video and audio storage facility for the Library of Congress.
The other key location for the shadow government, and what, say intelligence officials, would become a principal hiding place for Vice President Dick Cheney, is “Site R”—a highly secret and well-protected military command post at Raven Rock Mountain on the Maryland–Pennsylvania border. Located ten miles west of Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, a speck on the map with a Main Street lined with dusty antique shops, pizzerias, and vacant storefronts, the mysterious facility is hidden behind a forest of trees from those passing by on State Route 16.
First opened in 1951 and nicknamed the “Underground Pentagon,” the official name for Site R is the Alternate Joint Communications Center. Only about seven miles from Camp David, the facility also doubles, like Mount Weather, as a heavily fortified emergency presidential bunker. Aboveground is a sprawling, porcupine-like antenna farm, satellite dishes, and a helipad. But deep inside the hard greenstone granite mountain is a secret world of five buildings each three stories tall, computer-filled caverns, and a subterranean water reservoir.
Within hours of the attacks on September 11, local residents saw a sudden increase in activity around the Raven Rock facility. Commandos quickly joined the military guards surrounding the facility. Five helicopters landed on the helipad, a convoy of SUVs with black-tinted windows sped up Harbaugh Valley Road to the main gate, and tan buses began laboring up the steep, two-lane road to the heavily guarded, unmarked service entrance. Among those early to arrive was Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the Pentagon’s second in command.
“We don’t even have to turn on the news. We hear planes and we know right away what is going on,” said local resident Jerre Snider. “When they hid the Vice President, well, we knew where he was.”
Two thousand miles to the west, another mammoth underground command center was going to war conditions for the first time
During the Cold War, Mount Weather also contained a “Bomb Alarm System,” a huge electronic map of the United States in a special room that would display glowing red lights wherever nuclear explosions had taken place. The map was part of an elaborate system, consisting of a network of sensors mounted on telephone poles near ninety-nine cities and military bases around the country. The devices would detect the pressure, heat, and intense thermal flash of a nuclear blast and send a signal to the Bomb Alarm. By 2001, the system had been upgraded and modified through the use of early-warning satellites.
An especially appealing factor to the Bush officials was that Mount Weather was not only secure from nuclear explosions, it was also invulnerable to crashing passenger jets. In a bizarre accident on December 1, 1974, a TWA Boeing 727 jet plowed into the fog-wrapped hill, killing all ninety-two persons on board but leaving the command center untouched.
Not far from Mount Weather is Mount Pony, which until the late 1990s was the underground bunker for the Federal Reserve Board. Located just east of Culpeper, Virginia, it was where the nation’s money supply would be managed in case of national emergency. Built of one-foot-thick, steel-reinforced concrete, with lead-lined shutters in the windows, the facility is covered by up to four feet of dirt and surrounded by barbed-wire fences and a guard post. Inside the building is a giant 23,500-square-foot vault, which until 1988 held several billion dollars, shrink-wrapped on pallets nine feet high, that were to be used to jump-start a ruined economy. The building also contained a cold-storage area for maintaining highly radioactive bodies and seven computers that would control the transfer of all American electronic funds. But by September 11, 2001, Mount Pony had been converted to a video and audio storage facility for the Library of Congress.
The other key location for the shadow government, and what, say intelligence officials, would become a principal hiding place for Vice President Dick Cheney, is “Site R”—a highly secret and well-protected military command post at Raven Rock Mountain on the Maryland–Pennsylvania border. Located ten miles west of Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, a speck on the map with a Main Street lined with dusty antique shops, pizzerias, and vacant storefronts, the mysterious facility is hidden behind a forest of trees from those passing by on State Route 16.
First opened in 1951 and nicknamed the “Underground Pentagon,” the official name for Site R is the Alternate Joint Communications Center. Only about seven miles from Camp David, the facility also doubles, like Mount Weather, as a heavily fortified emergency presidential bunker. Aboveground is a sprawling, porcupine-like antenna farm, satellite dishes, and a helipad. But deep inside the hard greenstone granite mountain is a secret world of five buildings each three stories tall, computer-filled caverns, and a subterranean water reservoir.
Within hours of the attacks on September 11, local residents saw a sudden increase in activity around the Raven Rock facility. Commandos quickly joined the military guards surrounding the facility. Five helicopters landed on the helipad, a convoy of SUVs with black-tinted windows sped up Harbaugh Valley Road to the main gate, and tan buses began laboring up the steep, two-lane road to the heavily guarded, unmarked service entrance. Among those early to arrive was Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the Pentagon’s second in command.
“We don’t even have to turn on the news. We hear planes and we know right away what is going on,” said local resident Jerre Snider. “When they hid the Vice President, well, we knew where he was.”
Two thousand miles to the west, another mammoth underground command center was going to war conditions for the first time
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