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What Every Rabbit Knows, Dig Deep
As we've already discussed one of FEMA's prime duties over the past 30 years has been to construct and equip a vast network of underground bases and facilities throughout the United States and around the world.
And a place called Mount Weather is their base of operations for the carrying out of this massive project. Now few Americans are even aware of the existence of Mount Weather, a mysterious underground military base carved deep inside a mountain near the sleepy rural town of Bluemont, Virginia.
Located just 46 miles from Washington DC, Mount Weather, also known as the Western Virginia Office of Controlled Conflict Operations, is buried not just in hard granite, but in secrecy as well. In March 1976, The Progressive Magazine published an astonishing article entitled The Mysterious Mountain.
The author, Richard Pollock based his investigative report on Senate subcommittee hearings and upon "several off-the-recon interviews with officials formerly associated with Mourn Weather." His report, and a 1991 article in Time Magazine entitled Doomsday Hideaway, supply a few compelling hints about what is going on underground.
Ted Gup, writing for Time Magazine, describes the base as follows:
Warning signs, 10 foot-high chain link fences, razor wire, and armed guards protects the mountain's real secrets. Curious motorists and hikers on the Appalachian Trail are relieved of their sketching pads and cameras and sent on their way. Security is tight. The government has owned the site since 1903, and it has seen service as an artillery range, a hobo farm during the Depression, and a National Weather Bureau Facility. In 1936, the U.S. Bureau of Mines took control of the site and started digging. Mount Weather is virtually an underground city, according to former personnel interviewed by Pollock.
Buried deep inside the earth, Mount Weather is equipped with such amenities as: -private apartments and dormitories -streets and sidewalks -cafeterias and hospitals -a water purification system, power plant and general office buildings -a small lake fed by fresh water from underground springs -its own mass transit system-a TV communication system Mount Weather's purpose is to be the self-sustaining underground command center for the FEMA.
The facility is also the operational center of approximately 100 other Federal Relocation Centers, most of which are concentrated in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina. Together this network of underground facilities constitutes the backbone of America's "Continuity of Government" program. In the event of a disaster the President, his cabinet and the rest of the Executive Branch would be "relocated" to Mount Weather.
According to the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights hearings in 1975, Congress has almost no knowledge and no oversight, budgetary or otherwise, on Mount Weather. Retired Air Force General Leslie W. Bray, in his testimony to the subcommittee, said,
Apparently, this underground capital of the United States is a secret only to Congress and the US taxpayers that paid for it. The Russians know about it, as reported in Time Magazine:
The Russians attempted to buy real estate right next door, as a "country estate" for their embassy folks, but that deal was dead-ended by the State Department. Pollock's report, based on his interviews with former officials at Mount Weather, contains astounding information on the base's personnel. The underground city contains a parallel government-in-waiting:
Nine Federal departments are replicated within Mount Weather (Agriculture; Commerce; Health, Education & Welfare; Housing & Urban Development; Interior; Labor; State; Transportation; and Treasury) as well as at least six Federal agencies (Homeland Security, Federal Communications Commission, Selective Service, Federal Power Commission, Civil Service Commission, and the Veterans Administration). The Federal Reserve and the U.S. Post Office, both private corporations, also have offices in Mount Weather.
Pollock writes that the "cabinet members" are "apparently" appointed by the White House and serve an indefinite term, but that information cannot be confirmed, raising the further question of who holds the reins on this "back-up government." Furthermore, appointed Mount Weather officials hold their positions through several elected administrations, transcending the time their appointers spend in office.
Unlike other presidential nominees, these appointments are made without the public advice or consent of the Senate. A Senate Subcommittee in 1975 learned that the facility held dossiers on at least 100,000 Americans. Senator John Tunney later alleged that the Mount Weather computers can obtain millions of pieces of additional information on the personal lives of American citizens simply by tapping the data stored at any of the other ninety-six Federal Relocation Centers.
An article in the Progressive Magazine stated that,
This massive database fits cleanly into Mount Weather's ultimate purpose as the command center in the event of a national emergency. The main daily activity of the approximately 240 people who work at Mount Weather is to play disaster games. The games are intended to train the Mount Weather bureaucracy to managing a wide range of problems associated with disasters, war and domestic political crises.
Decisions are made in the "Situation Room," the base's nerve center, located in the core of Mount Weather. The Situation Room is the archetypal war room, with "charts, maps and whatever visuals may be needed" and "batteries of communications equipment connecting Mount Weather with the White House and 'Raven Rock', the underground Pentagon sixty miles north of Washington, as well as with almost every US military unit stationed around the globe," according to the Progressive article.
Every year there is a system-wide alert that "includes all military and civilian-run underground installations." The real, aboveground President and his Cabinet members are "relocated" to Mount Weather to observe the simulation. Post-mortems are conducted and the margins for error are calculated after the games. All the data is studied and documented.
In its 1974 Annual Report, FEMA stated that
The Mount Weather facility uses a vast array of resources to continually monitor the American people too. According to Daniel J. Cronin, former assistant director for the FPA, Reconnaissance satellites, local and state police intelligence reports, and Federal law enforcement agencies are just a few of the resources available to the FPA [now FEMA] for information gathering.
In the 1976 article, the "survivors list" contained 6,500 names, but even that was deemed to be low. Technological advances since then, coupled with the passing of the Patriot Act after 911 have now led to speculation that the "survivors list" contains over 130,000 names. At the same time tens of millions of dollars were being spent on maintaining and upgrading the complex to protect several hundred designated officials in the event of disaster, the US government drastically reduced its emphasis on war preparedness for US citizens.
A 1989 FEMA brochure entitled 'Are You Prepared?" suggests that citizens construct makeshift fallout shelters using used furniture, books, and other common household items. After 911 we were told to stock up on duct tape too. Officially, Mount Weather, and its budget, does not exist. FEMA refuses to answer inquiries about the facility; as FEMA spokesman Bob Blair told Time magazine, "I'll be glad to tell you all about it, but I'd have to kill you afterward."
We don't know how much Mount Weather has cost over the years, but of course, American taxpayers bear this burden as well. A Christian Science Monitor article entitled "Study Reveals US Has Spent $4 Trillion on Nukes Since '45" reports that,
Mount Weather contains an unelected, parallel "government-in-waiting" ready to take control of the United States upon word from the President or his successor. The facility also contains a massive database of information on U.S. citizens, which is operated with no safeguards or accountability. Ostensibly, this expensive hub of America's network of subterranean bases was designed to preserve our form of government during a nuclear | holocaust or other such cataclysmic event.
But Mount Weather is not simply a Cold War holdover. Information on command and control strategies during national emergencies has largely been withheld from the American public. Executive Order 11051, signed by President Kennedy in 1962, states that,
However, Executive Order 11490 tells a different story. EO 11490, which superseded Kennedy's EO 11051, begins,
As researcher William Cooper points out, this order makes no reference to "war," "imminent attack," or "general war." These quantifiers are replaced by an extremely vague "national emergency type situation" that "might conceivably" interfere with the workings of the national power structure.
Furthermore, there is no publicly known Executive Order outlining the restoration of the Constitution after a national emergency has ended. Unless the parallel government at Mount Weather does decide to return power to Constitutional authority, the United States could experience a coup d'etat posing as a national emergency. And remember too that a good case can be made that this is exactly what happened on September 11, 2001.
Like the enigmatic Area 51 in Nevada, the Federal government wants to keep the Mount Weather facility buried in secrecy. Public awareness of this place and its purpose would raise serious questions about who holds the reins of power in this country. The Constitution states that those reins lie in the hands of the people, but the very existence of Mount Weather indicates an entirely different reality. And far from Mount Weather being the only underground facility of the secret government, it is but one of hundreds! Let's take a few minutes and look at another one, Denver International Airport.
An African woman in colorful native garb; a Native American woman who's heritage the airport's art supposedly celebrates; a blonde girl with cupid bow lips, a Star of David on her chest and a bible in her hands. Each lay dead in open coffins for your viewing pleasure. A burning city, children sleeping on piles of bricks, a line of mourning women in rags with dead babies, limp in their arms. A huge, looming military figure in a gas mask brandishes a sword and machine gun. Part of an actual note written by a child interred in a Nazi death camp.
Strange words embedded in the floor with no explanation
about what they mean.
Welcome to Denver International Airport!
That's just the part you see up close, though. What you don't see
are 8 sub-basements, low- and high- frequency sounds that make
people sick, air vents jutting out of the surrounding ban-en acres
of fenced lots that have barbed wire along their tops -pointing in.
Whole buildings that were constructed below ground level and then
buried as is, the excuse being they were "built wrong". An entire
runway constructed, then buried under a layer of dirt and
"forgotten". The layers of workers and companies who were fired so
that no one would have a Big Picture. And workers even reported
seeing aliens working there.
Most of which sits unused. They say it's in case they need to do any future expansion. DIA is the 7th busiest airport in the US according to a 2002 Grain's Chicago Business report. The initial cost of DIA was to be 1.7 billion dollars but by the time they were done it cost about $4.8 billion. Words used to describe the DIA were "buried in technical problems", "poor project management", "overwhelming complexity" and "America's most inconvenient airport". It was built in a high wind area (Stapleton hadn't been) that causes it to be shut down or flights delayed often.
The extensive automated baggage system was so messed up, such a circus of errors that it was worse than unusable - it was an industry joke. Now let's look at some interesting facts about DIA. Even though the area is basically flat (with a stunning view of mountains all around, since it's in a valley), a large expense of time and money was taken to extensively lower some areas and raise others.
They moved 110 million cubic yards of earth around. This is about 1/3rd of the amount of earth they moved when they dug out the Panama Canal. The airport has a fiber optic communications core made of 5,300 miles of cable. That's longer than the Nile River. That's from New York City to Buenos Aires, Argentina. The airport also has 11,365 miles of copper cable communications network. The fueling system can pump 1,000 gallons of jet fuel per minute through a 28-mile network of pipes. There are six fuel holding tanks that each hold 2.73 million gallons of jet fuel.
This is somewhere in the "no one will ever need this much" range. Granite was imported from all over the world - Asia, Africa, Europe, North and South America - and used in making the main terminal floor. This is a seemingly ridiculous expense, especially when you're already over budget.
They say,
The huge, main terminal is Jeppesen Terminal, named after Elfrey Jeppesen, who was the first person to create maps specifically for aviation (the company is still in business today). This area is known as the "Great Hall"; it's said this is what the Masons name their meeting place. It is 900 feet by 210 feet. This is over 1.5 million square feet of space. All told, there is over 6 million square feet of public space at DIA. The airport brags that they have room to build another terminal and two more concourses and could serve 100 million passengers a year.
The airport flew 36 million in 2001. The only way to get to the other two concourses/terminals from the Great Hall, or vice versa, is via the airport's train system. There are more than 19 miles (30 km) of conveyor belt track, luggage transport cars and road in their own underground tunnels that move baggage and goods. They're so huge you can drive trucks through them, and some remain unused. The entire roof of DIA is made of 15 acres of Teflon-coated, woven fiberglass.
The same material is on the inside as a layer, also. The place looks like a bizarre scene out of "Dune", comprised of huge, spiked tent-like structures. The material reflects 90 of the sunlight and doesn't conduct heat. So you can't see into the place with radar or see heat signatures.
It's important at this point to understand some information from this report:
The DIA does push the "limit of complexity" because it was deliberately designed to be such a complex monster. It's not as if some engineering problem was posed and met like the Chunnel, the Petrova Towers in Malaysia, the Burj AI Arab hotel in Dubai or a hydroelectric dam. So why would the military care about the baggage problems the airport had?
If you believe what you are told in the papers, most of the problem was because the people who built the system weren't the ones that were awarded the contract to run the thing. Hardly any "engineering" snafu. Or did their billion dollar underground base not work out as well as they had hoped?
But when looked at from the vantage point of DIA being used in an emergency situation as the central hub to relocate hundreds of thousands of people from all around the United States into numerous underground installations, along with their personal effects, and on very short notice, another piece to the puzzle falls into place! So let's dig a little deeper into this. One of the earliest American underground facilities was built at Raven Rock in Pennsylvania.
The military refer to it as "Site R." It appears that "Section D" Raven Rock was picked because it is made of greenstone, a type of granite that is the fourth hardest rock on earth. Construction started in 1950, and engineers had completed a series of tunnels and a three-story building by 1953. Two more three-story buildings were completed by 1963. The complex lies 650 feet beneath the 1,529-foot-high summit of Raven Rock and can be entered through four portals.
The mountain has everything needed to survive a catastrophe: cars, some of the best dining in the Army, chemical suits, a fitness center, a medical facility, barbershop, legal services, a chapel, designated smoking areas and a convenience store. It has six 1,000-kilowatt generators and 35 miles of cable on 180 telephone poles. Remember that this is one of the early underground sites, and probably does not compare with some of the new underground cities that have been constructed in more recent years.
There are also persistent rumors that an underground city exists under the Enchantment Resort in Boynton Canyon in Sedona, Arizona. According to the Napa Sentinel, a secret underground installation is under construction near the Oakville Grade in Napa County, California, and is being used by the Government for direct satellite communication, the Continuity of Government (COG) program in case of nuclear attack or other disasters, and secure communication links with the outside world in case of disaster. Mysterious helicopter flights have been seen going into and out of the area.
Supposedly, the secret government site is replacing other installations and combining them into one underground center. Not all underground sites are shelters either. The Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Project took a first step in November 1993 when it started construction on the entrance pad for its Exploratory Studies Facility (ESF). This pad is the launching point for 14 miles of tunnels that will be drilled directly under Yucca Mountain. The tunnels will measure 24-30 feet in diameter for some and 16-18 feet in diameter for others
This project will eventually cover some 70 acres of surface and underground facilities. This DOE project will contain alcoves for experiments located along the tunnels. Skeptics have expressed doubts about the existence of extensive underground tunneling and cavitation. They always ask "Where is all the dirt?" (This method of asking a question to disprove an allegation is misleading and faulty logic at best by the way.)
Well, one of the new methods of tunneling that has been under study is "nuclear tunnel boring." U.S. Patent No. 3,693,731 dated Sept. 26, 1972 describes a method and apparatus for tunneling by melting. It says,
The melted rock is forced into cracks wherein heat is given up to the crack surfaces and freezes as a glass at some distance from the penetrator. This amazing boring device is capable of drilling at depths totally inaccessible with previous drilling techniques, even, according to the patent claims, down to 30,000 meters. Scientists and engineers at Los Alamos invented the nuclear tunnel boring machines. They named their new machine, the "Subterrene."
In 1975, A. A. Mathews, Inc did a cost comparison between the Subterrene and other tunneling methods. This report reveals that the initial experiments utilizing this technology were done in the early 1960s. This study reveals that the Subterrene performs its job rapidly and economically. The report states that the economy comes from,
In fact, a Los Alamos symposium held in Atlantic City in 1986 proposed the construction of a Subselene for tunnel melting for high-speed lunar subsurface transportation tunnels.
There are numerous witnesses who speak about a subterranean highway through America just like our own Interstate highway system, except it’s underground. It seems this underground highway uses trucks, cars, and buses driven by electric motors. (You wouldn't want gasoline fumes polluting tunnels.) They also mention another style of transport for freight and passengers that are linked together in a worldwide network called the "Sub-Global System." It has checkpoints at each country entry. There are shuttle tubes that "shoot" the trains at incredible speed using a maglev and vacuum method. They travel in excess of the speed of sound.
Engineers Robert Salter and Frank P. Davidson of MIT have both discussed and given papers on the Planetran concept for moving people rapidly underground. Salter describes the Planetran as an ultraspeed, electromagnetically propelled and levitated transportation system of the future. Such a system could carry passengers across the United States in less than an hour in a quiet, economical, fuel-conservative, and nonpolluting manner.
Planetran would require a tunnel over 2,500 miles in length, perhaps assembled from 100 25-mile long segments. Now, my story isn't about everything having to do with underground bases and rail systems, I'm just giving you an overview and, again, I've included a number of great books for you if you'd like to learn more about this.
But before we leave this subject let's take a look at who else has been digging in the dirt. Aviation Week and Space Technology recently reported that,
Starting in the Brezhnev period, Russia has been pursuing construction of a massive underground facility at Yamantau Mountain and the city of Mezhgorye (formerly the settlements ofBeloretsk-15 and Beloretsk-16).
Russia's 1997 federal budget lists the project as a closed territory containing installations of the Ministry of Defense. On April 16, 1996, the New York Times reported on a mysterious military base being constructed in Russia:
The complex, being built inside Yamantau Mountain by tens of thousands of workers, covers an area the size of the Washington DC area inside the Beltway. There are reportedly provisions for living inside the man-made caves. There is an underground warehouse for food and clothing, a shelter for the Russian national leadership in case of disaster. It is now known that the Soviet Union used secret underground bases in Eastern Europe to conceal nuclear missiles at the end of the Cold War, as an integral part of its nuclear war-fighting strategy.
In all, some 73 SS-23 missiles, packing a nuclear punch 365 times greater than the bomb that detonated over Hiroshima, were hidden by the Soviets in violation of the INF Treaty, which went into force in June 1988. If war had broken out those missiles would have given the Soviets an overwhelming strategic advantage against the United States, allowing them to decimate NATO forces in Europe in a surprise attack.
The last of these missiles will be destroyed by the government of Slovakia, under a grant from the United States. Today, Russia may be conducting deception on a far vaster scale beneath Yamantau Mountain, where it has dug out a gigantic underground military complex designed to withstand anything, including a sustained nuclear assault. A U.S. intelligence source was quoted as saying that the Yamantau complex is but one of some 200 secret deep underground sites in Russia, many of which have been significantly upgraded over the past six years at a cost of billions of dollars.
Since the end of the Cold War in 1991, U.S. intelligence sources believe the Russian government has pumped more than $6 billion into Yamantau alone, to construct a sprawling underground complex that spans some 400 square miles. In 1998, in a rare public comment, then-Commander of the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) Gen. Eugene Habinger, called Yamantau,
It is believed to be large enough to house 60,000 persons, with a special air filtration system designed to withstand a nuclear, chemical or biological attack. Enough food and water is believed to be stored at the site to sustain the entire underground population for months on end.
"The only potential use for this site is post-nuclear war or a comet hitting earth..." US Rep. Roscoe Bartlett. Bartlett is one of a handful of members of Congress who have closely followed the Yamantau project. In response to repeated U.S. inquiries, the Russian governor has provided no fewer than 12 separate and contradictor explanations for the site, none of them believed to be credible.
A 1997 Congressional Research Service report said that the vast sums invested to build the Yamantau Mountain complex "provide evidence of excessive military modernization in Russia." Russia is pouring money into this and other underground nuclear sites at the same time U.S. taxpayers have provided billions of dollars in aid to Russia to help dismantle nuclear warheads taken off line as a result of START I and START II.
The Russians have constructed two
entire cities over the site, known as Beloretsk 15 & 16, which are
closed to the public, each with 30,000 workers. No foreigner has
ever set foot near the site. A U.S. military attaché stationed in
Moscow was turned back when he attempted to visit the region a few
years ago.
In a U.S. satellite photograph of the Yamantau Mountain that was taken on Oct. 16, 1997, clearly recognizable signs of excavation can be seen at the areas marked Yamantau Mountain and Mezhgorye.
The two aboveground support cities, each housing 30,000 workers, located at Beloretsk and Tirlyanskiy can also be seen. The very little that is known publicly about the site comes from Soviet-era intelligence officers, who defected to Great Britain and the United States. In public testimony before a House Armed Services Subcommittee last October, KGB defector Col. Oleg Gordievsky said the KGB had maintained a separate, top-secret organization, known as Directorate 15, to build and maintain a network of underground command bunkers for the Soviet leadership - including the vast site beneath Yamantau Mountain.
Yamantau Mountain is so secret that only a handful of Russian government officials know about it, says Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., who speaks Russian and travels frequently to Russia, chairing a congressional working group that discusses strategic issues with counterparts from the Russian Duma.
Weldon got interested in Yamantau Mountain in 1995 when he saw a public report suggesting it was a vast mining project.
Weldon also met with Andrei Kokoshkin, a former deputy defense minister, in charge of President Yeltsin's National Security Council. Kokoshkin called it a public works project, and said there was nothing to worry about, since the Defense Ministry had no involvement in it. So I brought out a copy of the Defense Ministry's budget — it's only a few pages long — and showed him the line item for Mezhgorye. He smiled and said it must be for bridges, roads and schools. When I then asked if I could see it, he said that could only be arranged through Yeltsin.
The site was controlled directly by the president. Weldon then tried sending a 3-page letter to Yeltsin in Russian.
The cause for concern among many in the US is that the US is currently sending hundreds of millions of dollars to Russia, supposedly to help that country dismantle old nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the Russian parliament has been complaining that it cannot pay $250 million in back wages owed to its workers at the same time that it is spending money to comply with new strategic arms reduction treaties.
The following is an excerpt from an interview between Chris Ruddy and Col. Stanislav Lunev, a Russian military intelligence officer who defected in 1992. Col. Stanislav Lunev is the highest-ranking military intelligence officer ever to have defected from Russia.
"Until our planet will try to restore itself." Think about those words and don't let them leave your thoughts! And finally, no discussion of underground bases would be complete without mentioning Iraq. The reason is because after the United States and Russia, Iraq has the largest known, and suspected, underground base structure in the world.
Not only this, but the countries of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey hold the largest amount of known ancient underground cities in the world. According to military sources, the Pentagon picked northern Iraq as its first ground target for good reason. Intelligence information showed that Saddam and his immediate circle of Baath party leaders had already moved their offices and families to an underground city near the northern oil city of Kirkuk.
It is located between the three cities of Tepe Zardic north of Kirkuk, Taq south of Koi Sanjaq, and Chwarta north of Sulmeniyeh. Several intelligence reports place the secret city on the banks of the Lesser Zab River, protected from the east -- the border with Iran -- by the Dukan Dam and Iraq's largest artificial lake. Though many have heard about the vast number of underground bases and bunkers located throughout Iraq, less has bee publicized about Iraq's huge investment in underground cities.
For over 20 years and at a cost estimated to be in the billions of dollars, Saddam scoured Iraq for ancient underground cities for the purpose of expanding and provisioning them. From this past year we heard news out of Turkey about another discovery of an ancient underground city:
Also from Iran we hear: The underground cities of Cappadocia are worthy of a visit.
Let's take Derinkuyu for example. The one time home of up to 20,000 people, its 18 stories descend into the Anatolian plateau 50 kms south of Goreme. Stop and think about that for a while. A large, market town sized community digging a settlement out to guarantee themselves a degree of protection. There are 8 floors of tunnels open to the visitor and this is enough to give you an idea of the sensation of living in a labyrinth like this.
The ventilation shafts, circular and descending from the surface to the lower levels, bring home the scale of the enterprise while the massive circular doors - which were rolled across the passages and sealed from the inside - remind you of the motivation for moving underground in the first place. Derinkuyu is by no means the only such city you can visit here. There are actually 40 or so subterranean settlements in the area although only a few are open to the public. Kaymakli, 10 kilometers to the north of Derinkuyu, is smaller and less excavated but 5 levels are accessible and the experience is pretty much the same.
Far from being a war to unseat a dictator, or for oil, the present Iraqi war is about the United States possessing the largest number of underground bases in the world. And in a world about to suffer catastrophic events not seen in thousands of years, only those countries able to survive underground have any chance at surviving at all.
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