Instead, the decision was made to leave Vice President Cheney in the White House while President Bush hopscotched around the country. Though reporters were told of a supposed call to the White House threatening Air Force One—the reason for President Bush’s odyssey—later it was concluded that no such call or threat ever took place. “They’ve been unsuccessful in trying to track down whether there was such a call,” one administration official told the Associated Press. CBS News reported the call “simply never happened,” and
The Washington Post
headlined its article on the subject: “White House Drops Claim of Threat to Bush.”
The post-apocalyptic plan for what became known as COG was originally drafted during the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s. It was a Top Secret blueprint for preserving the federal government following a devastating nuclear attack. “We would have to run this country as one big camp—severely regimented,” Eisenhower instructed his advisors. This would be done by the imposition of martial law and the suspension of many civil liberties.
At the same time, Eisenhower initiated a major, but highly secret, series of construction projects designed to be emergency command centers for senior administration, military, and congressional officials. Other presidential command posts were created in aircraft, ships at sea, and even in tractor-trailers.
Most amazing was Eisenhower’s creation of an entirely secret government made up of private citizens and several cabinet officers. They would run the country in the event that the top leadership in Washington was not able to escape to one of the emergency command posts. This outside government-in-waiting—which changed form over the years—lasted at least until the early 1990s and may still be in effect. But because of the enormous secrecy surrounding the program over the decades, few details about it have ever come to light.
In 1958, Eisenhower designated eight private citizens around the country to somehow find their way to the center of power after a nuclear attack and take over one of the emergency functions of government. One of those was Aksel Nielsen, fifty-seven, the Danish-born head of the Title Guaranty Company of Denver and an old fishing friend of Eisenhower. Shortly after March 6, 1958, he was handed a letter signed by Eisenhower on White House stationery and stamped “Secret.”
“It is always possible that the United States might need suddenly to mobilize resources for a maximum national effort,” read the letter. “Although it is my devout hope that this will never happen, the national interest requires that against that possibility we achieve and maintain a high state of readiness. I am delighted to know of your willingness to serve as Administrator of the Emergency Housing Agency in the event that a national emergency would compel its formation, and, accordingly, I hereby appoint you such Administrator effective upon activation of the agency. . . . In the event of an emergency, as soon as you have assured yourself, by any means at your disposal, that an Emergency Housing Agency has been activated, you shall immediately assume active direction of that agency and its function. This letter will constitute your authority.”
Others who received similar letters were Dr. George Pierce Baker, a professor at Harvard Business School; Harold Boeschenstein, the president of Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corporation; John Ed. Warren, senior vice president of the First National City Bank of New York; and Frank Pace, Jr., president of General Dynamics Corporation. Two cabinet officers, James T. Mitchell, Secretary of Labor, and Ezra Taft Benson, Secretary of Agriculture, also received appointment letters. Ironically, Theodore Koop, the vice president of CBS at the time, was secretly designated the administrator of the Emergency Censorship Agency. His letter still remained classified in 2004.
In an enormous oversight, the Eisenhower White House failed to pass on details of their secret government to the incoming Kennedy administration, which discovered it by accident. What Kennedy did after that is still a mystery.
But during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, following the attempt on his life soon after he took office, the issue of how to run the country if the senior leadership was “decapitated” was again revived. To help resolve this problem, a plan known as the Presidential Successor Support System was developed—again in absolute secrecy. Once more, unelected private citizens from around the country and several cabinet officers were called upon to take command. But now, one of them would even assume the role of president.
Given overall responsibility for the secret government was Vice President George H. W. Bush, with Lt. Col. Oliver North, a key player in the Iran-contra scandal, as the National Security Council action officer. The operation was hidden under the cover name “National Program Office” and was run by a two-star general from a nondescript Washington office building. Among the key players in the shadow government were Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and James Woolsey.
At the time, Cheney was a congressman from Wyoming; Rumsfeld was CEO of G. D. Searle & Co., which produced such products as Metamucil and Nutra-Sweet; and Woolsey was a lawyer in private practice. Except for Rumsfeld’s brief stint as a Middle East envoy, none held a full-time position within the Reagan administration. Nevertheless, they all had high-level national security experience—Cheney served as White House Chief of Staff under President Gerald Ford, Rumsfeld was a former congressman and also served as Ford’s Chief of Staff and later as Secretary of Defense, and Woolsey was Undersecretary of the Navy in the late 1970s.
Unlike Eisenhower, who had one team of private citizens and several cabinet officers, Reagan’s shadow government was made up of three teams, each with a cabinet officer who would become president. In the lead-up to war or national emergency, or as soon after an attack as possible, each team would fly to a secure location somewhere within the United States. Each would be named after a color—such as the Red, Blue, or Green Team—and one would be predesignated as the lead group with the others as backups.
A key objective of the lead team was to get to the “doomsday plane,” the National Emergency Airborne Command Post, which at the time was a modified Boeing 707. Code-named “Night Watch,” the heavily protected aircraft could be refueled while airborne and stay aloft for days, where it would function as a flying war room, directing the battle as well as the country from 40,000 feet.
Team members included representatives from the CIA and other government departments. They would lead various national emergency functions, such as intelligence, defense, transportation, or medical services. Among those designated as emergency presidents during Reagan’s years were Secretary of Agriculture John Block and Secretary of Commerce Malcolm Baldrige.
The existence of the secret government was so closely held that Congress was completely bypassed. Rather than through legislation, it was created by Top Secret presidential fiat. In fact, Congress would have no role in the new wartime administration. “One of the awkward questions we faced,” said one of the participants, “was whether to reconstitute Congress after a nuclear attack. It was decided that no, it would be easier to operate without them.” When George H. W. Bush was elected president, he continued the program, but with the Cold War over, President Bill Clinton decided to end it.
Shortly after taking off in Air Force One, however, Bush made his decision to reinitiate part of the plan. So secret was the decision that no one in Congress—and only Vice President Cheney and a very few within the executive branch—were notified of the establishment of an invisible shadow government. Not even Majority Leader Dennis Hastert or Senator Robert C. Byrd (D–W. Va.), the president pro tempore of the Senate, the officials who were by law the first and second in line of succession after the vice president, were informed.
Within a few hours of the decision, the first steps were taken. According to intelligence officers, nearly one hundred officials, some very senior, quietly began disappearing from Washington and turning up at the two key “doomsday” sites in Virginia and Pennsylvania. They were forbidden from telling even their spouses where they were going.
The Virginia site was located eight miles from the sleepy hamlet of Berryville, on a snaking stretch of County Route 601 deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Although originally code-named “High Point,” President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first chief executive to visit the facility, referred to it simply as “the hideout.” It was there, during a “doomsday” rehearsal in May 1960, that Eisenhower first read Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s speech denouncing his administration for sending a U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union. The lying and cover-up by Eisenhower that followed, in an attempt to conceal his role in the intelligence disaster, became the biggest scandal of his presidency.
Today this bunker is known as the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center and is operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It is about forty-eight miles—twenty minutes by helicopter—from downtown Washington. Completed in 1958, the year following the Soviet Union’s successful launch of its Sputnik satellite, it cost more than a billion dollars. To protect the 600,000-square-foot command post from powerful blasts, the entire complex rests on a series of giant, nuclear-shock-absorbing steel springs; roof areas are reinforced with 21,000 iron bolts pounded eight to ten feet into the rock.
The high plateau that became Mount Weather gained initial fame as the place where wireless telegraphy was born. In 1868, a Massachusetts dentist, Mahlon Loomus, attached a kite and wire to a telegraph key and flew it into a building cloud at the same time a colleague, nine miles away on another high ground, did the same thing. With both kites in the cloud, an electrostatic charge formed between them, linking the two telegraph keys. At the turn of the century, the U.S. Weather Bureau set up a small meteorological research observatory there, thus giving the mound its name. Later, following presidential approval, the hunk of granite was turned into a presidential command center.
On September 11, 2001, entrance to the secret seat of government was made through a guillotine gate and five-foot-thick, ten-foot-tall, twenty-foot-wide blast doors that weighed thirty-four tons. Like a small city, the underground world is made up of an emergency power plant, dormitory space for several thousand people, a hospital, radio and television studios, storage tanks capable of holding 500,000 gallons of water, and even a reservoir for fresh water. A series of side tunnels accommodates a total of twenty office buildings, some of which are three stories tall. Other tunnels accommodate computer complexes that maintain redundant electronic databases for the continuity of government. For those who die in the strange cement bunker, the 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.