Mount Weather’s “Government-in-Waiting”
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:
“High-level Governmental sources, speaking in the promise of strictest
anonymity, told me [Pollock] that each of the Federal departments represented at
Mount Weather is headed by a single person on whom is conferred the rank of a
Cabinet-level official. Protocol even demands that subordinates address them as
‘Mr. Secretary.’ Each of the Mount Weather ‘Cabinet members’ is apparently
appointed by the White House and serves an indefinite term ... many through
several Administrations.... The facility attempts to duplicate the vital
functions of the Executive branch of the Administration.”
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 five Federal agencies (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.
Is there an alternative President and Vice President as well?
If so, who appoints them? Pollock says only this: “As might be expected, there
is also an Office of the Presidency at Mount Weather. The Federal Preparedness
Agency (precursor to FEMA) apparently appoints a special staff to the
Presidential section, which regularly receives top secret national security
estimates and raw data from each of the Federal departments and agencies.
What Do They Do At Mount Weather?
1) Collect Data on American Citizens
The 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.”
The subcommittee concluded that Mount Weather’s databases
“operate with few, if any, safeguards or guidelines.”
2) Store Necessary Information
The Progressive article detailed that “General Bray gave
Tunney’s subcommittee a list of the categories of files maintained at Mount
Weather: military installations, government facilities, communications,
transportation, energy and power, agriculture, manufacturing, wholesale and
retail services, manpower, financial, medical and educational institutions,
sanitary facilities, population, housing shelter, and stockpiles.” This massive
database fits cleanly into Mount Weather’s ultimate purpose as the command
center in the event of a national emergency.
3) Play War Games
This is the main daily activity of the approximately 240
people who work at Mount Weather. The games are intended to train the Mount
Weather bureaucracy to managing a wide range of problems associated with both
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. “All internal communications are
conducted by closed-circuit color television ... senior officers and ‘Cabinet
members’ have two consoles recessed in the walls of their office.”
Descriptions of the war games read a bit like a Ian Fleming
novel. 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.
4) Civil Crisis Management
Mount Weather personnel study more than war scenarios.
Domestic “crises” are also tracked and watched, and there have been times when
Mount Weather almost swung into action, as Pollock reported: “Officials who were
at Mount Weather during the 1960s say the complex was actually prepared to
assume certain governmental powers at the time of the 1961 Cuban missile crisis
and the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. The installation used the
tools of its ‘Civil Crisis Management’ program on a standby basis during the
1967 and 1968 urban riots and during a number of national antiwar
demonstrations, the sources said.”
In its 1974 Annual Report, the Federal Preparedness Agency
stated that “Studies conducted at Mount Weather involve the control and
management of domestic political unrest where there are material shortages (such
as food riots) or in strike situations where the FPA determines that there are
industrial disruptions and other domestic resource crises.”
The Mount Weather facility uses a vast array of resources to
continually monitor the American people. 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. “We
try to monitor situations and get to them before they become emergencies,”
Cronin said. “No expense is spared in the monitoring program.”
5) Maintain and Update the “Survivors List”
Using all the data generated by the war games and domestic
crisis scenarios, the facility continually maintains and updates a list of names
and addresses of people deemed to be “vital” to the survival of the nation, or
who can “assist essential and non-interruptible services.” In the 1976 article,
the “survivors list” contained 6,500 names, but even that was deemed to be low.
Who Pays for All This, and How Much?
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 nuclear attack, 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 use furniture, books, and other common household items.
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 “The government devoted at least $12 billion to civil defense
projects to protect the population from nuclear attack. But billions of dollars
more were secretly spent on vast underground complexes from which civilian and
military officials would run the government during a nuclear war.”
What is Mount Weather’s Ultimate Purpose?
What is Mount Weather’s Ultimate Purpose?
We have seen 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 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
sub-terran bases was designed to preserve our form of government during a
nuclear holocaust.
But Mount Weather is not simply a Cold War holdover. Information on command
and control strategies during national emergencies have largely been withheld
from the American public. Executive Order 11051, signed by President Kennedy on
October 2, 1962, states that “national preparedness must be achieved... as may
be required to deal with increases in international tension with limited war, or
with general war including attack upon the United States.”
However, Executive Order 11490, drafted by Gen. George A Lincoln (former
director for the Office of Emergency Preparedness, the FPA’s predecessor) and
signed by President Nixon in October 1969, tells a different story. EO 11490,
which superceded Kennedy’s EO 11051, begins, “Whereas our national security is
dependent upon our ability to assure continuity of government, at every level,
in any national emergency type situation that might conceivably confront the
nation...”
As researcher William Cooper points out, Nixon’s 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 not decide out of the goodness of its heart to
return power to Constitutional authority, the United States could experience an
honest-to-God coup d’etat posing as a national emergency.
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. As long as Mount Weather exists, these questions will remain.
Mount Weather’s Russian Twin
By Patricia Neill
Matrix Editor
Matrix Editor
On April 16, 1996, the New York Times reported on a mysterious military
base being constructed in Russia: “In a secret project reminiscent of the
chilliest days of the Cold War, Russia is building a mammoth underground
military complex in the Ural Mountains, Western officials and Russian witnesses
say. Hidden inside Yamantau mountain in the Beloretsk area of the southern
Urals, the project involved the creation of a huge complex, served by a
railroad, a highway, and thousands of workers.”
The New York Times article quotes Russian officials describing the
underground compound variously as a mining site, a repository for Russian
treasures, a food storage area, and a bunker for Russia’s leaders in case of
nuclear war.
It would seem that the Russian Parliament knows as little about Russian
underground bases as the Congress knows about Mount Weather in the United
States. “The (Russian) Defense Ministry declined to say whether Parliament has
been informed about the details of the project, like its purpose and cost,
saying only that it receives necessary military information,” according to the
New York Times.
“We can’t say with confidence what the purpose is, and the Russians are not
very interested in having us go in there,” a senior American official said in
Washington. “It is being built on a huge scale and involves a major investment
of resources. The investments are being made at a time when the Russians are
complaining they do not have the resources to do things pertaining to arms
control.”
Where’s the Money Coming From?
The construction of the vast underground complex in Russia may very well
become a cause of concern to the Clinton Administration. The issue of ultimate
purpose for the complex, whether defensive (as with Mount Weather) or offensive
(such as an underground weapons factory) is not the only issue Mr. Clinton has
to worry about.
The real cause for concern 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 to
Yeltsin 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.
Aviation Week and Space Technology reported that “It seems the nearly $30
billion a year spent on intelligence hasn’t answered the question of what the
Russians are up to at Yamantau Mountain in the Urals. The huge underground
complex being built there has been the object of U.S. interest since 1992. ‘We
don’t know exactly what it is,’ says Ashton Carter, the Pentagon’s international
security mogul. The facility is not operational, and the Russians have offered
‘nonspecific reassurances’ that it poses no threat to the U.S.”
U.S. law states that the Administration must certify to Congress that any
money sent to Russia is used to disarm its nuclear weapons. However, is that the
case? If the Russian parliament is complaining of a shortage of funds for
nuclear disarmament, then how can Russia afford to build the Yamantau complex?
Are the Russians building an underground city akin to Mount Weather with
American taxpayer’s money? Could American funds be subsidizing a Russian weapons
factory? Hopefully Congress will get a firm answer to these questions before
authorizing further funding to Russian military projects.
(c) Copyright 1996 ParaScope, Inc.
UNDERGROUND TUNNELS & BASES HOME PAGES
"Belief is the enemy."
-- John A. Keel, The Mothman Prophecies
-- John A. Keel, The Mothman Prophecies