in its history. Buried deep inside the bored-out heart of Colorado’s Cheyenne Mountain, and protected by 1,750 feet of granite, is NORAD’s citylike Operations Center, the principal node for America’s air, missile, and space early-warning system. Spread out over four and a half acres, it contains fifteen two- and three-story buildings, each with its own tunnel; a convenience store; a chapel; and even a restaurant, the Granite Inn.
To prevent a cave-in, the 115,000 bolts shoring up the walls are constantly checked and tightened. And to cushion the shock of a nuclear blast, the entire facility rests on more than 1,300 half-ton springs that allow the entire city and its 1,100 residents to sway up to a foot horizontally in any direction in the event of a nuclear explosion or an earthquake.
Since the enormous construction project was completed in 1965, the prime task of the center was to look outward across the seas and over the pole for threatening missiles and bombers. Its data comes from early-warning satellites in geostationary orbit and giant radar complexes around the country. Every day, technicians track more than 8,000 objects in near-Earth orbit, most of which is “space junk.” But since its start, the early-warning system has always been focused on what was coming in, not on what was already present in the country.
On the morning of September 11, Lt. Col. John Donovan, a forty-two-year-old missile officer, had not a hint of what was about to happen fifteen minutes after he went off duty. “We told the [next] crew it was pretty quiet,” he said. His boss, Command Director Jerry Hatley, an Army colonel, was partway down the mountain when he heard about the first attacks on the radio.
Also within the mountain was NORAD’s Air Warning Center. Caught by complete surprise as well, the group was in the middle of a twice-yearly exercise when the attacks began. “We were correlating our reports with what we were seeing up there, and it’s just disbelief,” said Air Force Lt. Col. William Glover, in charge of the Center at the time. As the devastation began, they closed the massive three-foot-thick, twenty-five-ton baffled steel doors, built a third of a mile into the mountain. Using hydraulic pressure, it took less than a minute to slam them shut.
Once sealed inside and surrounded by billions of dollars’ worth of the most sophisticated intelligence and early-warning equipment, tied into advanced spy satellites and building-size surveillance antennas, the nation’s guardians were left to watch the country undergo its worst attack in nearly two centuries on $300 television sets tuned in to CNN. To many, it was impossible to escape thoughts of Pearl Harbor.
“The blast doors were closed that morning for the first time in anger since this place was opened for operations in 1966,” said Canadian Air Force Brig. Gen. Jim Hunter, vice commander for the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center. “We did what we call buttoning up the mountain. We closed the blast doors and everybody that was in the mountain was going to stay for a while. I’ve never been in combat, and that morning was the first morning that I had ever really faced a real threat. . . . Once I realized we had those blast doors closed, I think they could have launched airliners at this mountain all day and we never would have felt the effects of it, because we have twenty-six hundred feet of granite above us.”
As the Bush administration’s shadow government began setting up at Mount Weather and Site R, senior congressional leaders were also looking for a place to hide, and the decision, say intelligence officials, was to fly them to Mount Weather.
For decades, Congress had their hideout, code-named Casper and later Greek Island, secretly attached to the five-star Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Completed in 1962, the 112,000-square-foot bunker, in the remote Allegheny Mountains five hours’ drive southwest of Washington,
To prevent a cave-in, the 115,000 bolts shoring up the walls are constantly checked and tightened. And to cushion the shock of a nuclear blast, the entire facility rests on more than 1,300 half-ton springs that allow the entire city and its 1,100 residents to sway up to a foot horizontally in any direction in the event of a nuclear explosion or an earthquake.
Since the enormous construction project was completed in 1965, the prime task of the center was to look outward across the seas and over the pole for threatening missiles and bombers. Its data comes from early-warning satellites in geostationary orbit and giant radar complexes around the country. Every day, technicians track more than 8,000 objects in near-Earth orbit, most of which is “space junk.” But since its start, the early-warning system has always been focused on what was coming in, not on what was already present in the country.
On the morning of September 11, Lt. Col. John Donovan, a forty-two-year-old missile officer, had not a hint of what was about to happen fifteen minutes after he went off duty. “We told the [next] crew it was pretty quiet,” he said. His boss, Command Director Jerry Hatley, an Army colonel, was partway down the mountain when he heard about the first attacks on the radio.
Also within the mountain was NORAD’s Air Warning Center. Caught by complete surprise as well, the group was in the middle of a twice-yearly exercise when the attacks began. “We were correlating our reports with what we were seeing up there, and it’s just disbelief,” said Air Force Lt. Col. William Glover, in charge of the Center at the time. As the devastation began, they closed the massive three-foot-thick, twenty-five-ton baffled steel doors, built a third of a mile into the mountain. Using hydraulic pressure, it took less than a minute to slam them shut.
Once sealed inside and surrounded by billions of dollars’ worth of the most sophisticated intelligence and early-warning equipment, tied into advanced spy satellites and building-size surveillance antennas, the nation’s guardians were left to watch the country undergo its worst attack in nearly two centuries on $300 television sets tuned in to CNN. To many, it was impossible to escape thoughts of Pearl Harbor.
“The blast doors were closed that morning for the first time in anger since this place was opened for operations in 1966,” said Canadian Air Force Brig. Gen. Jim Hunter, vice commander for the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center. “We did what we call buttoning up the mountain. We closed the blast doors and everybody that was in the mountain was going to stay for a while. I’ve never been in combat, and that morning was the first morning that I had ever really faced a real threat. . . . Once I realized we had those blast doors closed, I think they could have launched airliners at this mountain all day and we never would have felt the effects of it, because we have twenty-six hundred feet of granite above us.”
As the Bush administration’s shadow government began setting up at Mount Weather and Site R, senior congressional leaders were also looking for a place to hide, and the decision, say intelligence officials, was to fly them to Mount Weather.
For decades, Congress had their hideout, code-named Casper and later Greek Island, secretly attached to the five-star Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Completed in 1962, the 112,000-square-foot bunker, in the remote Allegheny Mountains five hours’ drive southwest of Washington,
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