Man
Accidentally Uncovered A Secret Facility That Reveals Our Biggest Fear
By Cody
Mauro
Whether
it’s a dollar bill or a lost winter glove, finding something on the cold cement
of a parking garage floor isn’t likely to change your day all that
much. Still, every now and then, a seemingly worthless item can turn into
something so much more—just ask Garrett Graff.
A
historian and political author, Graff didn’t think much of the item
one of his work colleagues found on the floor of a parking garage. But upon
closer inspection, he saw something on the object that piqued his journalistic
curiosity. What followed was a life-changing, multi-year hunt into some of America’s
most deeply buried secrets…
“It was
a government ID for someone from the intelligence community.” Graff said,
“and he gave it to me since I write about that subject, and he’s like, ‘I
figure you can get this back to this guy.'” The friend, he noted, had found the
ID on a parking garage floor.
The
directions led him to a mountain peak just over 70 miles outside of Washington
D.C. There, at a peak known as Raven Rock, the road just… ended. It led to the
face of the mountain and then, nothing.
Graff
recalled everything else he saw once he made the trip out there. “You can see
very clearly these big concrete bunker doors,” he said. “This little guard
shack, chain-link fence, and then this set of concrete bunker doors beyond.”
What had he just found?
“It was
a facility that I had never heard of that wasn’t on any map,” Graff elaborated.
His inner historian and journalist totally freaking out, he started
researching what he’d found as soon as he could.
He
didn’t know it when he first stumbled upon the structure, but the directions
had led him to Raven Rock Mountain Complex, also known as ‘Site R’. To put it
more bluntly, he’d found a nuclear fallout shelter!
Graff’s
research turned up plenty of information on the United States government’s
nuclear war contingency plan—some of it comforting, some of it horrifying, and
all of it fascinating. For example…
The
Truman administration sanctioned construction on the bunker in 1951 once the
Cold War with the Soviet Union started warming up. They used a construction
team who’d carved out New York City subway tunnels to do the job. So how’d
they keep it secret?
Laborer
Gene Bowman—who was paid $1.35 per hour in 1951 to bore through the granite of
Raven Rock—put it this way: “They just said they were building a tunnel. Wasn’t
nobody interested in what they were doing.” Once dug, however, it didn’t look
like a simple tunnel.
In his
interview with NPR, Graff described the Raven Rock Complex as “a free-standing
city… built inside of this mountain.” Intended to be a “backup Pentagon,” Site
R boasted two 34-ton blast doors capable of thwarting nuclear bomb blows.
Beyond
the blast doors and inside the heart of the rock, 100,000 feet of office
provided all the room military officials would need to operate. Infirmaries,
cafeterias, and utility areas allowed for up to 1,400 of America’s V.I.P.s to
live somewhat comfortably—with a catch.
With the
president, his or her cabinet, officials, and military personnel inhabiting
the bunker, there was no room for spouses. This led to a famous exchange
between then-Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren and another official…
Handed
an ID badge for access to Raven Rock, Justice Warren realized there wasn’t one
for his wife. When told she wouldn’t be allowed in, the justice handed back the
ID and said, “you’ll have room for one more important official.”
But
believe it or not, Raven Rock wasn’t just a place for the elite and powerful to
hobnob as the world around them fell apart. As Graff discovered, officials set
up very specific operation plans for every federal branch—even the IRS and post
office.
Yep,
even in the case of nuclear destruction, the government wasn’t going to let
people off the tax hook so easily. The IRS had a post-bomb plan that covered
how to appropriately tax damaged—rather, vaporized—property.
And
where would people get money to pay taxes in an apocalyptic society? Uncle Sam
had a plan for that, too: officials stashed away publicly scorned $2 bills in
another bomb shelter to redistribute as currency.
Other
federal departments had assigned duties as well: the Parks Department would set
up refugee camps, the Department of Agriculture would divvy up rations, and the
post office was charged with finding out who died in the blast.
At
the time of the Cold War, a nuclear attack felt so imminent that Raven
Rock had been fully manned and operated 24 hours per day—up until
1992. Operations were picked up and modernized once more after the September 11
attacks in 2001. They again run 24/7.
Though
the ID card Graff received listed directions to only one secret bunker, his
research uncovered half a dozen or so other doomsday shelters (like one beneath
the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia here), each more or less the same in
function and design.
In
Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs lie another hidden doomsday bunker.
Like Raven Rock, this complex was built in the 1950s and served as “the command
post responsible for defending both Canada and the U.S. from air attacks,”
Graff said.
Cheyenne
Mountain had reservoirs of water and fuel, doctor’s offices, gyms, and even a
Subway sandwich joint. So in the event of a nuclear attack, whoever was working
the cash register at
the time earned a spot among the surviving elite.
Through
all of his research, though, Graff learned something unsettling. “If you’re
trying to preserve and restart the government after an attack,” he explained to
NPR, it “becomes this very existential question about what is America?”
As far
as Graff could tell, the bunkers provided a disturbing answer. “The civilian
population will be left to itself for weeks or months at a time,” he said, “and
a small number of senior government
officials will be spirited out to these bunkers.”
In other words, the government’s plot to
rebuild post-nuclear war America didn’t really include the people.
Preserving artifacts and the system of government took precedent, but in a time
of chaos, what else could be done?
Graff
dove deeper into his findings in a book he titled Raven Rock: The Story of
the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself — While the Rest of Us
Die. To think, his journey into some of the country’s biggest secrets
started with just a lost ID badge!
rrrrr
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