January 17, 2023 • 56 mins
The rumors are true -- the US government has multiple, highly-fortified shelters and compounds dotting the American landscape, staffed and fully prepared to protect the President and other federal or state officials from widespread disease, natural disasters, nuclear war and more. But how do these things get built? Where are they and -- perhaps most importantly -- what happens to everyone else when the bombs hit? Join the guys as they interview Garrett M. Graff, the author of "Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself — While the Rest of Us Die."
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This classic episode is one for the ages. True story.
After we spent a number of years talking about all
the top secret government installations across the country, we decided
to get with an expert named Garrett Graff, who wrote
(00:21):
an amazing book about this and and you don't know.
I I gotta say this one sticks with me because
this guy definitely did his homework. Yeah. He also has
a doozy of a book title, which is the collection
of set homework called Raven Rock, the story of the U. S.
Government's secret plan to save itself while the rest of
us die. So let that kind of prime you for
(00:43):
what's to come. Enjoy from UFOs to psychic powers and
government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can
turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want
you to know. Welcome back to the show. My name
(01:10):
is Matt. Our compatriot Knell is still with us in
spirit and will be returning shortly. Uh they call me Ben,
you are you? And that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. Matt. As we record this episode,
it is two and a half minutes to midnight. Um,
(01:32):
I don't know, man, I think it's something like three
something like that, maybe Eastern Standard time, Matt, But it's
two and a half minutes to midnight. If we're not
talking about the time on your local wristwatch or your
smartphone or Greenwich mean or any of that. We're talking
about the time kept by the infamous Doomsday clock, and
(01:54):
two and a half minutes to midnight is a very
bad time. Indeed. Oh yeah, it may sound like some
kind of diabolical comic book Mad Scientists Invention the Doomsday Clock,
but it's very much a real thing, and it's uh,
it's designed to warn the public about how close we
are to destroying our planet, either with technology, with weapons
(02:17):
that we've created, or perhaps you know, by some biological means,
by some means that the Earth designed. Yeah, this, uh,
this metaphor is is meticulously maintained, and it's meant to
function as a reminder of the perils we must address
as a species if we are to survive on this planet.
Originally it started in nineteen seven, which would make two
(02:42):
thousand seventeen the fiftieth anniversary of the Doomsday Clock, and
for the last two years from twenty six and twenty fifteen,
the minute hand of the Doomsday clock state set at
three minutes before the hour, three minutes before midnight, the
closest it had been to midnight since the early night
teen eighties. This year it inch just a bit closer
(03:04):
to armageddon. And just some of the warnings that the
group gives that puts out this doomsday clock. They said,
the probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the
actions needed to reduce the risks of disaster must be
taken very soon. Wise, public officials should act immediately, guiding
humanity away from the brink. If they do not, wise
(03:26):
citizens must step forward and lead the way. Scary stuff, right, Yeah,
but hold on is not at the end of the episode.
This is just the beginning. Today's episode is not just
about the looming possibility of national or global catastrophe. It's
more about what happens afterwards. What happens if a biological, chemical,
(03:46):
or nuclear threat devastates your country. What happens if the
capital of your country is raised to the ground. Uh
in Here in the US, if Washington, d C. Is attacked,
if it is reduced to ruin, where does the US
go next? And what does the United States become? So
that's where all of the important people are right, and this,
(04:09):
as it turns out, has been the subject of enormous
financial and strategic effort for decades. It's work conducted largely
in secret, and that secret is necessary to a degree
to ensure that the government continues despite human lass as
it might sustain. The specifics of this are are shrouded
in mystery. But one intrepid journalist too to call back
(04:32):
to the quotation used earlier, one why citizen uh has
stepped forward has pulled back, in part the curtain of
national security to reveal the elaborate, amazing, and at times
disturbing plans of the U. S. Government post disaster. And
today we are very fortunate to have this journalist with
us on our show. So everyone please welcome Mr Garrett Graff,
(04:55):
the author of Raven Rock, the story of the U. S.
Government's secret plan to save itself while the rest of
us die. I mean that is a title, Mr Graf.
Thank you so much for being on the show with us. Oh,
it's my pleasure. I'm excited to be talking with you
guys today. Excellent, excellent. So first things first, I think
a lot of the audience members are asking what what
(05:17):
is Raven Rock? And could you tell us a little
bit about how you discovered it. So this book traces
the history of what is known as the Continuity of
Government Plans, the COG plans. These are the secret plans
that were developed in the wake of World War Two
and continue up to the present day that deal with
(05:39):
how the US government would survive a nuclear attack and
rebuild afterwards. Sort of everything from who would be in
charge in the minutes and hours after an attack, how
succession and military control would pass down through the ranks
of the government, onto where US government officials would be evacuated,
(06:01):
and what the role of various government agencies would be
in rebuilding the country after a devastating attack, whether it's nuclear, biological, chemical, terrorist,
or even a large scale natural disaster. Now, the title
of the book comes from Raven Rock, which is the
(06:24):
Pentagon Bunker, the backup Pentagon. This hollowed out mountain in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania,
just over the Maryland line from Camp David, the President's
weekend get away, and Raven Rock was built one of
more than a hundred bunkers and relocation facilities around the
(06:46):
capital during the Cold War that would have housed the
emergency wing of the US government and Raven Rock, one
of the three biggest of these facilities, along with Mount
Weather in Virginia, which is the Presidential Bunker where the
U S Cabinet would go and where congressional leaders and
(07:07):
the Supreme Court would go. And then No RAD the
Cheyenne Mountain Bunker in Colorado Springs that's home to the
North American Air Defense System UH and probably best known
to some of the listeners here from the Matthew Roderick
movie War Games. So these three bunkers, the sort of
(07:29):
crown jewels of the US government's doomsday enterprise are are
literally hollowed out mountains. I mean they have free standing
buildings inside of the massive reservoirs for drinking water. Um.
You know, you can row a boat on the on
these reservoirs, and the police departments, fire departments, medical facilities,
(07:54):
you know, everything that you would need in order to
have uh. You know, found if people live for weeks
or even months at a time underground. The No RAD
Bunker even has a subway fast food franchise inside, so
even after Armageddon, you wouldn't be without your five dollar
(08:15):
foot long Thank goodness, we have our collective priorities in
order here. Um, this one thing that's really fascinating here
is uh that you mentioned that this this is an
example of more than a hundred bases. What what we're
(08:37):
what was the impetus to create these bases? And and
what were some of these strategies for ensued ensuring c
o G in the past. So there were two things
that really drove the invention of this. I mean, what
I like to write about, what I've written about for
much of my career, is how technology transforms institutions, and
(09:00):
and what this book really ends up being. And I
didn't understand this when I started writing this book, was
this is how nuclear weapons have transformed the presidency, how
one specific technology has transformed one specific institution. Because what
you had was, up until the nineteen forties, it didn't
(09:23):
particularly matter minute to minute where the President of the
United States or the Vice President of the United States was.
You know, as late as nineteen thirty five, FDR. When
he was driving back from the dedication of the Hoover Dam,
his motor cade got lost in the canyons outside Las Vegas,
and the President of the United States disappeared for the afternoon.
(09:45):
No one knew where he was, where he might pop
up next, or when he might return. And as late
as January nineteen, when Harry Truman took office, the vice
president had no Secret Service protection. I mean, as long
as you could get in touch with a vice president
in a couple of hours or you know, by the
next day, that was all that really mattered. But the
(10:08):
arrival of nuclear weapons began to compress government decision making
time and required the whereabouts of the president and the
communications capability capability around the president to be much more
robust than it ever had been before. Moreover, what you
(10:28):
began to have with nuclear weapons was the possibility that
entire cities could disappear in an instant, and so you
began to have to have contingency plans for what would
happen if something happened to the capitol. I mean, who
would be in charge if everyone in Washington was dead,
or if you had the warning to evacuate people, where
(10:50):
could they go? I mean it wasn't enough that you
could sort of run out of the White House and
run down the street and you'd be safe. I mean
you needed to be miles away. You needed to be
buried literally inside of a mountain. Or in later iterations
of these plant plans, they became too dangerous to be
underground at all, and we began to look at contingency
(11:11):
plans that would put the president or military decision makers
up into airborne command posts. I mean, this is the
system that still largely exists today, is this network of
presidential doomsday planes, the E four B night watch planes,
these converted seven forty seven's that stand alert and have
(11:34):
stood alert for more than thirty years now, ready to
evacuate the president wherever he is and and fly with
him for three days above the United States where he
could lead nuclear war from the sky. I mean, you
were joking at the beginning of the show that you know,
we're sitting here two and a half minutes to midnight. Well,
(11:54):
we're also sitting here at this exact minute as we're talking.
One of these planes is on the runway at off
at Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska. It's engines are turning,
and it's fully staffed, ready to evacuate in the event
of a threat on the president. Wow. And they only
need a very short runway to be called out right,
(12:17):
like fifty minutes something like that. Yeah, So that I
mean that plane right now as we're sitting here talking,
it could be launched and in the air in as
little as twelve to fifteen minutes, ready to rendezvous with
the President wherever he may be. Have have they ever
been used for any reason since this has been a program. Well,
(12:41):
so it's an interesting question because we have seen it
come close to being activated in a number of crises,
like the Cuban missile crisis, but it's really only been
used on September eleventh. And on September eleventh, you had
these plans activated across the country, and so you had
(13:01):
evacuation helicopters clatter into the west lawn of the capital
and evacuate congressional leaders to Mount Weather. Helicopters evacuated government
leaders from the Pentagon while it was still burning and
took them up to Raven Rock Um. These facilities had
been sitting idle for much of the nine nineties, and
(13:22):
then it was sort of all restarted in a hurry
in the wake of eleven, just quickly to stay on
the technology and how it's evolved. Uh, do you watch
House of Cards at all? Yes? Yep, Okay, so you've
been watching this season. There's one scene I don't want
to spoil too much, but let's say the the president
(13:45):
whoever that might be, uh, in the middle of the night,
goes down and gets what appears to be a black
briefcase that you know has some power associated with it. Um,
can you talk about what an unassumed black briefcase and
a sealed index card has to do with the nuclear
war in the United States? Yeah, so this is uh,
(14:08):
the nuclear football. I mean, these are this is the
black briefcase that has followed the President of the United
States around for more than fifty years now, carried by
a military aid. And we and we forget about this often,
but all of these majestic toys that we think of
(14:28):
as the modern imperial presidency, air Force one, marine one,
the armored motorcaids are effectively just tools, fancy toys to
ensure that the President of the United States, wherever he is,
is able to launch nuclear weapons. And as much as
we have in our popular culture and uh, you know,
(14:50):
popular mythology, the idea that there's a big red button
or red telephone somewhere that the president would use to
launch the nuclear war, the reality is much more pedestrian.
This military aid would walk up with this black briefcase. Uh.
It's filled not with some sort of super duper fancy computer.
(15:11):
It's filled with binders of papers as effectively a as
one military aid called it, a Denny's menu of nuclear war.
You could sort of point at different options for different
levels of strike, different targets, different countries. And that's the
type of nuclear war that you would order. And then
(15:32):
the President would get out his h what's known as
the biscuit, which is this sealed identification card that he
carries with him, this secret card with secret code words, uh,
sealed by the n s A, and crack it open
and it would have a list of code words that
(15:52):
he would read to the military national command authorities, the
nuclear launch authority be and it would identify him as
the President of the United States. And if that disappeared,
I mean, if the if the President was dead or incapacitated,
that power would pass right on down through the national
(16:16):
command authorities and the presidential line of succession to vice
president and on downward to ensure that there would always
be someone in charge of launching nuclear war. And and
in fact, during the Cold War, we kept in place
another airborne command post. I've already mentioned the presidential Airborne
Command Post. We've we kept in place another nuclear command
(16:40):
post known as Looking Glass. These planes that flew also
out of Omaha, Nebraska, three planes a day, twenty four
hours a day from the early nineteen sixties until the
early nineteen nineties. One of these planes was always up
in the air ready to command our nuclear forces with
a general or other senior military commander on board. WHOA,
(17:04):
and we know what. I really appreciate that you said, Uh,
we were You cited the crucial and dynamic role and
disruptive role the technology plays with institutions because we do
often see uh, technological progress outpace legislative processing of that progress. Um.
(17:25):
And it leads us to one of the most disturbing
pieces of the puzzle here, not necessarily the the secrecy involved,
although that is disturbing, and while it is disappointing, it's
it's understandable not to have a antagonistic foreign power, no
the game plan, But one of the more disturbing things
(17:46):
seems to be this, how do we know whether these
plans would actually work? And and if we do, to
what degree do we have a degree of certitude here?
So it's a great Ston, and I think that the
answer is, uh, these plans, as detailed as they were
(18:06):
through the Cold War probably would have never worked, or
at least would have not worked in the way that
they were intended. And part of the reason for that
is basic human psychology. I mean, you have in any emergency,
you know, they carefully well written plans interacting with the
(18:27):
way that humans react to unfolding events. And part of
the challenge with these plans throughout the Cold War were
there were thousands of U. S. Government personnel who would
have been part of these doomsday scenarios doomsday plans during
the Cold War, I mean people from every department and
government and the military, you know, the cabinet, Congress, and
(18:50):
so on and so forth. But there was no contingency
for any of those staff or personnel's families, their spouses,
their children, their relatives, and so at key moments of
tension during the Cold War, you often had people struggle
with saying, you know, well, I'm not going to evacuate
(19:13):
if my family can't evacuate. Earl Warren, when he was
Chief Justice of the United States of the Supreme Court,
he he was handed one of these special evacuation passes,
the special emergency passes when he took over the Supreme Court,
and he looked at it, and he looked at the
guy from the Emergency Preparedness Office and he said, well,
(19:37):
I don't see a pass here for Mrs Warren. And
the planner said, well, you know, sir, you're one of
the most important people in the US government. And he said, well,
you know, I guess you'll have room in this case
for yet another important person in government, because I'm not
going to do this. And he handed back his pass
(19:58):
and never would have evacuated at it. And even as
late as the Obama administration, I mean even just in
the last couple of years. Um. I talked to an
official who was part of these plans, just within the
last couple of years, and he there was a designated
helicopter that would have dropped out of the Washington sky
and picked him up wherever he was and evacuated him
(20:19):
to one of these bunkers. And he said, you know,
I have two young daughters, and if they think that
if that helicopter lands on my daughter's soccer field on
a Saturday morning, that I'm just going to wave goodbye
to my family and get on it and disappear like
they're crazy. And that's that's a completely understandable and very
(20:41):
human impulse. You know. That's something that I think in
the in the in the modern mainstream public understanding, uh,
it seems to be responsible for a couple of conflicting emotions.
Of course, we can fully understand and any uh, let's
(21:01):
say a high level government official like a senator, right
or the Speaker of the House saying on a human level,
I will not go to a bunker to ensure my
life without also rescuing my children or my spouse. But
it also seems to lead to a slippery situation for
(21:23):
the public when they would say, well, why can these
officials take their families to a safe place while you know,
John Q Public and Jan Q Public and their two
point five kids are are stuck out in the cold
or out in the irradiated waste, or whatever the alarm
of situation would be. How has the how has the
(21:46):
government or how have these strategic plans approached the idea
of including official family members? Are they are they including
those family members or is it still simply the utility
are in function of a person on an individual basis? Yeah,
and and it's a great I mean philosophical question. I
(22:09):
mean it's a you know, it's a question about humanity.
It's a question about our you know, small d democratic
process in our government. Here. Um, you know that the
goal of these programs was never to create an elite
body who would get to survive nuclear war. It was
to ensure that the basic and most important functions of
(22:32):
government were preserved through the worst catastrophes imaginable. And so
what this was an entirely foreseeable challenge that has dogged
these emergency plans literally going back to the first large
scale government evacuation drill in nineteen fifty four, the Operation Alert.
(22:53):
In the summer of nineteen fifty four, Dwight Eisenhower ran
the first large scale evacuation drill of the United States government,
and all of his cabinet secretaries retreated to Mount Weather
that bunker that I'm previously mentioned in Berryville, Virginia, and
(23:13):
all of their secretaries evacuated as well. And I found
this news story about how the wives of the cabinet
sat at home and played cards through the afternoon in
what was described as a very chilly atmosphere as they
realized that their husbands would be evacuating without them in
the event of a nuclear war. But this challenge, you know,
(23:38):
for reasons that we just discussed, you know that it
wasn't part of these plans to include families. And so
one of the only exceptions to that was during the
Congress built its own evacuation bunker at the Green Drier,
this luxury West this luxury resort in West Virginia that
(24:03):
they buried a massive bunker underneath and it would have
held the members of Congress and the staff UH to
keep Congress running. And then later when they realized that
members of Congress weren't going to evacuate without their families,
they did set up rooms adjacent to the bunker that
(24:25):
could be used to house families and relatives if they
were evacuated also. But you know, the truth of the
matter was that there was no room inside the bunker
doors for the families. So you you could evacuate with
your husband or wife if he was if he or
(24:46):
she was a senator or representative, but you would still
be living outside of the bunker rather than inside and
outside of a bunker unprotected but directly adjacent to it
is arguably UH even more dangerous place to be, especially
if that location is disclosed. Yes, I don't know whether
(25:09):
you're better off being uh evacuated uh and then being
close to the bunker, or being evacuated and or taking
your own chances elsewhere away from a bunker. Yes, this
is an important question. And I am so glad that
you mentioned uh the Greenbrier bunker, because there's a tail
(25:34):
involved in in the public discovery of this bunker, which
we will explore after a word from our sponsor. And
we have returned. There was a a little bit of
(25:56):
a teaser here for the the famous bunk at the Greenbrier,
Virginia Resort, and a few years ago, relatively recently actually,
most of the American public and probably most of the
international public learned of this through an article in the
(26:16):
Washington Post. This and you know, our show was still
extant at this time, and this this blew our minds
because you know, a lot of people may be tangentially
aware or maybe aware on some level that there must
(26:37):
be some kind of c O G plan, right, but
very few people ever knew a nuts and bolts example
or a real world example. And what we're leading up
to with this question is when when it was discovered,
right when when Greenbrier was discovered, it instantly lost in
(26:59):
annoy or misamount of strategic value, and it ties into
some of the I would argue necessary secrecy here and
now in the present day, we know most governments obsessively
prepare for the possibility of a national catastrophe, as as
you said, Mr graff It it could even be just
(27:19):
a large scale natural disaster. But now the public is
asking how much do we know or not know about
these specifics of these plans, and how much should we know?
I mean, let's go out on a limb and admit
that this is by a large finance, by taxpayer dollars.
Good point. Yeah, it's it's a tough question because there
(27:42):
are sort of several different layers to it. The first
is I, even as someone writing about this, agree that
there is a level of secrecy that you necessarily need
to provide for a set of these plans to to work.
I mean that what I would refer to as the
(28:05):
tactical secrecy as necessary. You know what the exact communications
and defensive capabilities of specific vehicles or facilities are, exactly
where someone would be evacuated to which facility. The secondary
questions though, Uh, this's the larger, more strategic ones. Uh,
(28:28):
you know, how these policies would work, how these programs
would work, how they're funded. I think that there's much
less of a need for secrecy around there. But some
of this is also you know, I don't think that
the government really does know how much it's spending on
these programs because they are spread across so many different uh,
(28:51):
different programs, different classified budgets, different agencies. Uh. You know,
the best I could generally come up with is that
we're spending about two billion dollars a year on the
operation of these plans. I'm not talking about the the
construction of the facilities, or the construction of the planes
or anything like that, just really the maintenance and operation
(29:13):
of these facilities. I mean, they're they're almost all still
in existence today. Um. You know, actually right now, Raven
Rock that the title of the book, the Bunker in
Pennsylvania is getting a big communications upgrade done by Century Link, uh,
sort of right now in the summer of Similarly, though,
(29:37):
there's this larger question that we just don't really know
how these plans would work in an actuality on a
day to day basis and an hour by hour basis.
I mean, we don't really know who would be in charge,
uh in certain instances and entirely foreseeable instances. Also, which
(29:59):
I've think is the troubling part is they're there are
problems that we won't know until these plans are activated
for the first time. Uh you know, who actually shows up,
who actually will be evacuated, um without their families. But
there's also another set of problems with these plans that
we do know could exist, and we haven't debated those,
(30:23):
we haven't discussed those, and I don't think that there's
any real need for secrecy Let me give you a
couple of examples here. Uh, you know, just a couple
of weeks ago, we had the tragic shooting at the
congressional softball game. Well, that raised again this issue of
(30:46):
congresses continuity in Congress his own succession planning, which it
has largely ignored ever since nine eleven, that their Congress
still has no good mechanism to quickly replace its members
it if large large numbers of members of the House
of Representatives, for instance, are killed or incapacitated, which means
(31:09):
that Congress would be left on the sidelines for months.
On the low end, I mean potentially you know, six, nine,
twelve months without an operating Congress in the event of
an emergency. We also don't know uh some big questions
and some big answers about the presidential succession um. There
(31:34):
are problems that we are well aware of with the
twenty five Amendment, which guides presidential succession um, including the
very active constitutional debate about whether the Speaker of the
House or the President pro tem of the Senate can
legally become president of the United States. There's in fact,
(31:57):
a very good argument put forth by James Madison, the
man who actually wrote the Constitution UH, that says that
members of the legislative branch can't participate in the executive branch.
And so there is an entirely foreseeable scenario where in
some sort of emergency, both Paul Ryan and Rex Tillerson
(32:20):
argue over who gets to be president of the United States. Moreover,
we don't really know, uh what what are the secret
plans that we don't know about? Uh? And and that's
where I think some of the biggest problems are UM.
Throughout the Cold War, and I explained some of these
(32:40):
at great length In the book, there are examples of
secret plans that one administration or another has created that
would have deputized business leaders as sort of dictatorial czars
in the event of an emergency, I mean, seizing all
of the how zing in the country, all of the
(33:03):
all of the manufacturing in the country, and administering it
and setting wages and setting prices. Um. We don't know
whether those similar plans exist today. I mean, does Mark
Zuckerberg have a piece of paper or Jeff emelt Ge
that from the President saying you know, I'm I'm going
(33:24):
to be the czar of manufacturing in the event of
a major national emergency. We don't know whether there are
plans for private citizens to sweep into government roles as
there were during the during the Cold War. UM people
(33:44):
like Dick Cheney or Donald Runsfeld actually participated in these
plans in the nineteen eighties under a program that was
then known as the Presidential Successor Support System the p
S three and and though they were private citizens, they
would have been designated in advance as effectively White House
(34:07):
chiefs of staff, so that if a president was killed
and evacuated and the successors were evacuated to one of
these bunkers, you would find Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld
or another former high ranking government official like that, waiting
in the bunker to tell you how to run the
US military um. And we don't know again whether sort
(34:29):
of similar plans exist today. And I think those are
areas where we should be able to have a robust
public debate in peacetime about what those plans could actually entail.
So when we're getting into the private sector here and
how they function alongside governmental plans. One of the really
(34:54):
fascinating things that I found in the book was this
thing called Project nine ought eight. Could you could you
tell us about what that is and what that could
have been? So nine not eight was part of a
you know, decades long effort to try to figure out
(35:15):
a way to protect the civilian population of the United States.
It got harder and harder as missiles multiplied and bombs
got stronger and faster, But the goal was it was
really to evacuate the urban cities and to figure out
(35:35):
how the US civilian population could survive. And so through
the nineteen eighties, this uh secret nine not eight project
saw FBI agents traverse you know, most of the country
and figure out where civilian populations could be evacuated into
(35:56):
rural regions, and to map things like hotels and elementary
schools and bowling alleys and food warehouses even in suburban
and rural parts of America, to figure out where urban
residents could be successfully evacuated and housed. I live in Vermont,
and these plans include sort of these wacky ideas to
(36:19):
evacuate most of the population of Connecticut up into Vermont
and you know, house them in places like the Chapel
at Middlebury College or the field House at Middlebury College.
And you know, they knew precisely how many people would
be housed in each of these facilities, and that we
spent millions of dollars mapping these and figuring out how
(36:42):
to pull pull together the resources for fallout shelters. Um
Nibisco at one point manufactured something like a hundred and
sixty million tons of something that was known as the
survival biscuit, this cracker that you would have been fed
in fallout shelters during the Cold War. You would have
(37:04):
gotten six crackers a day, a hundred and twenty five
calories apiece, and that would have been your diet inside
a fallout shelter for the two weeks that everyone was
expected to live inside, and if anyone is interested, you
can find people opening and eating those in the contemporary time.
(37:24):
It's really funny. They are all of these YouTube videos
of people. You can buy these tins of crackers uh
still on eBay and you know, military surplus stores and
things like that, Army Navy stores, and you can buy them,
and there are these videos of people opening them and uh,
and they don't appear to taste that good. Now, truth
(37:48):
be told, I don't think they ever were supposed to
taste that good, but certainly fifty years of aging has
not helped them very much like a fine wine. You know.
I appreciate hearing that because that is one of the
questions one of our listeners had. They said to ask
Garrett Graff where we can get those nibiscos survival biscuits.
(38:11):
So you heard it here, folks. Uh. The author himself says,
the confirms that you can find it military surplus stores
and at eBay. Uh. This this question about, you know,
the evacuation for civilians, for non governmental officials, non high
ranking military members. Um. This is something that really hits
(38:37):
on a Um, I guess it hits on a pivotal
point in the conversation, which is that currently, uh, the
US population has an estimated one point for million people, right,
and uh, one of the one of the I guess
(38:58):
thematically one of the reads i'nnoticing in a lot of
questions our audience members have sent us is they're asking
what happens to the common person? You know, to UM,
to Jane and John Doe, do they and Matt and
Ben and Garrett. Uh, you know that it is a
(39:18):
pertinent question. And earlier you had said, you know that
these these plans became increasingly difficult as technology evolved and
as the population increased. Do we know if there are
large scale contingency plans? And if so, do we know
which agencies would oversee those? Like FEMA, for instance. Yeah,
(39:41):
So FEMA is the agency that runs all of these plans. Uh.
And it has existed in many different forms since the
nineteen fifties. Uh, but the modern evolution of it is FEMA.
And and in in a weird way that most we
don't understand, the fact that FEMA is the agency that
(40:06):
oversees these plans is actually uh, what it is supposed
to do um. The fact that it also responds to
natural disasters hurricanes, tornadoes, floods is really an ancillary benefit
of the fact that it had developed all of this
(40:26):
response capability to nuclear war and that you know, nuclear
war thankfully doesn't come along all that frequently. So they
started to deploy these resources and these tools and these
stockpiles to help alleviate the suffering in natural disasters. But
FEMA still runs these plans today. A large percentage of
(40:48):
FEMA's budget is known as the as what the black budget,
classified budget. You know, whole floors of FEMA's headquarters in
Washington are sealed off from other employees because they run
these continuity of government programs. And in many ways, the
plans today are a little bit different than they were
(41:11):
during the Cold War because while the Cold War plans,
the expectation in many ways was some sort of large
scale attack on Washington and the entire rest of the country,
today the plans are much more focused around a devolution
(41:31):
of power outside of Washington. I mean, the modern threats, uh,
you know, North Korea, Iran, rogue states, terrorist groups make
it much more likely that actually something would happen to Washington.
But then leave most of the rest of those three
d and twenty four million people alive and untouched, but leaderless.
(41:55):
And so that's why today all of these facilities are
are fully staffed twenty four hours a day. They don't
rely on evacuation and warning in the same way that
they did, uh. And it was really the combination of
both nine eleven and then in a slightly earlier attack
(42:16):
in the by a doomsday cult in Tokyo that released
sarin gas in the subways there that led the government
to realize, wow, you know, something could happen just to
the capital, just to our leadership, and the whole rest
of the country would still be still be around, untouched
(42:38):
and needing leaders And so that part of what many
people don't understand about the presidency today also is that
the president isn't just the person that we elect on
the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. The
presidency actually encompasses several hundred people, and so you have
(43:00):
the people in that that direct line of succession, the
Vice President, the Speaker of the House, the President pro Tempo,
the Senate, and then all down through the cabinet. But
then also each of those Cabinet secretaries has their own
line of succession. Uh, you know, twenty people long, and
some of those people are by design outside of Washington,
(43:23):
d C. So that in the event that something did
happen to the capital, you would still be able to
have people step into those cabinet roles, but it would
be sort of an odd assortment of people like the
U N Ambassador, the U. S Attorney for the Northern
District of Illinois, the top federal prosecutor in Chicago, and
(43:44):
people like the manager of the Department of Energies Savannah
River Operations Center outside of Savannah, who would suddenly announce
themselves as the leaders of the United States. Oh man,
this is heavy stuff, you guys, And I feel like
(44:04):
we're gonna we need to take another quick break and
hear a word from our sponsor, and they get right
back into it, and we have returned, assuming that civilization
has not fallen while we're on an add break. One
(44:29):
thing that's one thing that's fascinating here about this discussion
is if we if we do a little bit of
a thought exercise and we imagine a nation um devolving,
as you said, Mr Graff, in this devolution into um
align US secession for leadership right a line of succession
(44:51):
for leadership. Then there's there's this amazing question, would someone who,
let say, lives on the other side of the country
or lives in the Midwest, would they acknowledge the rise
of a Savannah based organization of people who survived or
(45:15):
officials or government that survived the catastrophe saying this is
now the leadership of the US, because it seems like
one of the big things people would have to uh
worry about organizationally would be the acceptance of authority. And
I'm wondering if there are, if there are any plans
to do that, because if it's already, I mean, this
(45:38):
is a country that does have a large amount of
um I guess self governments or autonomy and it's in
its DNA, and this is a country that has a
large amount of gun ownership and tension already before bomb drops.
What what if any plans uh do we know of
(45:58):
involving uh? Are there any plans that we know of
that involved making the population a cohesive whole. So you've
caught right to the heart of one of the conundrums
that the government really did struggle with, and the idea. Actually,
they came up with a couple of different phases of
(46:21):
this as a response. The first was, in addition to
all of these bunkers around the capitol itself, FEMA built
a series of regional bunkers around the country, eight of
them UH in places like Maynard, Massachusetts and Denton, Texas
in UH. And these bunkers would have really overseen a
(46:47):
regional government, uh, you know, a half dozen states perhaps
at a time. In the idea was that that the
federal government would devolve to these regional bunkers for and
regional governments for some period of time while the national government,
(47:09):
the federal government itself was reconstituted and rebuilt, but that
for all intents and purposes, the major decisions would be
being made out of these regional bunkers with these regional governments.
The UK actually came up with a relatively similar system
where they built regional command regional government bunkers all over
(47:31):
the country. And the thinking again being that it would
take a little bit of time to restore the total
power of the federal government, and so they wanted to
you know, have in place, at you know, effectively a
temporary government that could carry over until the national government
(47:54):
was ready to reassert control over the whole country. So
when a lot of these plans were original nading post
World War Two, and then as we get into the
Cold War and it reaches its heights, the the known enemy,
the known known enemy, I guess of the United States
were the Communists in all of the different ways that
(48:17):
they existed. And there were some plans that were put
in place even before, like let's say, a nuke attack
was confirmed. There were plans in place to round up
subversives on US soil, and it was called Plans C.
And I was won. I was wondering if you could
go over what that is and then perhaps what a
(48:39):
contemporary version of that looks like. Yeah, So we talked
a little bit about the president's nuclear football, the black
briefcase that follows him around. A lot of people don't
know that through much of the Cold War, the Attorney
General was also followed around by basically the Attorney General's football,
(49:00):
the emergency briefcase that followed him wherever he went. That
would have contained plans to suspend habeas corpus, to the
suspensive liberties, to declare martial law across the country, and
to round up more than ten thousand suspected subversives and
(49:23):
foreign agents who lived across the United States that FBI
director jag Or Hoover kept tabs on, and he wanted
them swept up in the opening minutes, opening hours of
an attack on the country. So these plans existed through
most of the Cold War. UH. The subversive list in
(49:45):
its sort of existing current form was sort of wound
down UH in the post Watergate era. But we have
every reason to believe that some version of these draft plans, this,
these draft executive orders, these this draft legislation, even this
draft subversives list, probably still exists today. And that in
(50:12):
the in the remarks of in the event, in the
wake of events like nine eleven, you saw officials admit
that effectively, if things had gotten worse, they would have
just declared martial law. That any sort of large scale
catastrophe would come with this suspension of civil liberties, the
(50:35):
declaration of martial law, and you know, things like habeas
corpus withdrawn until something more like peacetime was able to
be re established. It's fascinating, and it's also there's a
one question that we keep seeing come up, which concerns
(50:57):
a private industry. We touched a little bit on the
ideas of czars right and the devolution of normally state
powers to private entities. But one thing that a lot
of people have been asking us about are the rise
of privately owned bunkers, you know, everything from everything, yeah,
(51:21):
everything from the small um, the small family bunker, to
the larger I think there are even some renovated former
missile silos that people have sold on real estate here,
And I guess one of the questions that we have
is are those on Are those a fat or are
they legitimately on par with some of the professional the
(51:46):
state's sponsored bunkers. M hm, so they're They're definitely at
some level of modern fat. I mean part of this
challenge of worrying about doomsday thing and things like the
modern versions of these threats like the electromagnetic pulse that
(52:07):
could wipe out electrical grids in the event of a
high altitude nuclear explosion. But at the same time, we've
seen this straight through all of the Cold War and
the history of continuity of government planning, where private citizens
you know, have built and maintained their own fallout shelters,
(52:29):
built and maintained their own bunkers, and a lot through
the Cold War, a lot of private companies actually had
their own bunkers. Companies like IBM or or A T
and T were very tightly integrated into these government plans
and so kept their own bunkers for their own executives. Um,
you know, Iron Mountain. Uh. The what we think of
(52:53):
now is sort of a record's retention business really grew
out of people in private companies beginning to want to
have their own nuclear bunkers underground. M M all right,
So you must have gotten some kind of special clearance
to learn about a lot of this stuff. I'm assuming,
(53:14):
and hey, you don't have to tell us about a Garrett.
It's cool. But you're wondering if if you learned anything
that you couldn't include in the book for national security reasons.
So I I didn't have any special clearance for this.
You know, this was all good old fashioned journalistic and
UH archival digging, um, interviewing people who have been parts
(53:39):
of these plans over the years, that you know, cross
referencing old documents, be classified documents. But there were certainly
some details that I kept out of the book that
I did learn that fell into the category that I
discussed of what I described as tactical secrecy, I mean
the exact capabilities of specific facilities or specific vehicles that
(54:05):
might be used during these evacuations. But I think the
bigger problem is not the secrecy of these plans. It's
the lack of transparency of these plans. And so you know,
I certainly dug as much as I could, but I
think there's a lot more digging to do, and I
hope we'll learn a lot more about these plans over
(54:26):
the months and years ahead. Fantastic, Mr Graph. We want
to again thank you on behalf of our listeners so
much for your time and even more so for all
of the extensive journalistic effort. We we know that this took.
I mean, I'm just imagining leafing through the f O.
(54:47):
I uh, the Freedom of Information Act request alone has
to be very time consuming. And as we end the
episode today, we would like to close on a final question, Matt.
I'll let you do the honors, all right, Garrett. I'm
just extrapolating here, but it feels like the ultimate continuity
(55:08):
of government in in what forty fifty, maybe a hundred years,
is going to be Mars. What say you, I think
you know. That's certainly what Elon musk Is is arguing,
is he pushes us more into the space world. So
I think that there is no shortage of opportunities outside
(55:29):
of this planet to help preserve the life on this planet.
That is a fantastic There is a poetic answer, Mr Graph,
and we are concluding our interview with Mr Garrett M. Graff,
the author of Raven Rock, the story of the U. S.
Government's secret plan to save itself while the rest of
us die. He has written other books including The Threat Matrix,
(55:50):
The FBI at War, angel Is Airborne, and The First Campaign,
Mr Graph. If people would like to learn more about
not just Raven Rock, but your work for all, where
can they go to find more information? Well, the books
are all available from Amazon or any of your great
independent local bookstores. Uh. And then you can always check
(56:11):
out my website at Garrett Graph dot com or my
Twitter Vermont g MG. Great. And that's the end of
this classic episode. If you have any thoughts or questions
about this episode, you can get into contact with us
in a number of different ways. One of the best
is to give us a call. Our number is one
(56:32):
eight three three st d w y t K. If
you don't want to do that, you can send us
a good old fashioned email. We are conspiracy at i
heeart radio dot com. Stuff they don't want you to
know is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
This classic episode is one for the ages. True story.
After we spent a number of years talking about all
the top secret government installations across the country, we decided
to get with an expert named Garrett Graff, who wrote
(00:21):
an amazing book about this and and you don't know.
I I gotta say this one sticks with me because
this guy definitely did his homework. Yeah. He also has
a doozy of a book title, which is the collection
of set homework called Raven Rock, the story of the U. S.
Government's secret plan to save itself while the rest of
us die. So let that kind of prime you for
(00:43):
what's to come. Enjoy from UFOs to psychic powers and
government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can
turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want
you to know. Welcome back to the show. My name
(01:10):
is Matt. Our compatriot Knell is still with us in
spirit and will be returning shortly. Uh they call me Ben,
you are you? And that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. Matt. As we record this episode,
it is two and a half minutes to midnight. Um,
(01:32):
I don't know, man, I think it's something like three
something like that, maybe Eastern Standard time, Matt, But it's
two and a half minutes to midnight. If we're not
talking about the time on your local wristwatch or your
smartphone or Greenwich mean or any of that. We're talking
about the time kept by the infamous Doomsday clock, and
(01:54):
two and a half minutes to midnight is a very
bad time. Indeed. Oh yeah, it may sound like some
kind of diabolical comic book Mad Scientists Invention the Doomsday Clock,
but it's very much a real thing, and it's uh,
it's designed to warn the public about how close we
are to destroying our planet, either with technology, with weapons
(02:17):
that we've created, or perhaps you know, by some biological means,
by some means that the Earth designed. Yeah, this, uh,
this metaphor is is meticulously maintained, and it's meant to
function as a reminder of the perils we must address
as a species if we are to survive on this planet.
Originally it started in nineteen seven, which would make two
(02:42):
thousand seventeen the fiftieth anniversary of the Doomsday Clock, and
for the last two years from twenty six and twenty fifteen,
the minute hand of the Doomsday clock state set at
three minutes before the hour, three minutes before midnight, the
closest it had been to midnight since the early night
teen eighties. This year it inch just a bit closer
(03:04):
to armageddon. And just some of the warnings that the
group gives that puts out this doomsday clock. They said,
the probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the
actions needed to reduce the risks of disaster must be
taken very soon. Wise, public officials should act immediately, guiding
humanity away from the brink. If they do not, wise
(03:26):
citizens must step forward and lead the way. Scary stuff, right, Yeah,
but hold on is not at the end of the episode.
This is just the beginning. Today's episode is not just
about the looming possibility of national or global catastrophe. It's
more about what happens afterwards. What happens if a biological, chemical,
(03:46):
or nuclear threat devastates your country. What happens if the
capital of your country is raised to the ground. Uh
in Here in the US, if Washington, d C. Is attacked,
if it is reduced to ruin, where does the US
go next? And what does the United States become? So
that's where all of the important people are right, and this,
(04:09):
as it turns out, has been the subject of enormous
financial and strategic effort for decades. It's work conducted largely
in secret, and that secret is necessary to a degree
to ensure that the government continues despite human lass as
it might sustain. The specifics of this are are shrouded
in mystery. But one intrepid journalist too to call back
(04:32):
to the quotation used earlier, one why citizen uh has
stepped forward has pulled back, in part the curtain of
national security to reveal the elaborate, amazing, and at times
disturbing plans of the U. S. Government post disaster. And
today we are very fortunate to have this journalist with
us on our show. So everyone please welcome Mr Garrett Graff,
(04:55):
the author of Raven Rock, the story of the U. S.
Government's secret plan to save itself while the rest of
us die. I mean that is a title, Mr Graf.
Thank you so much for being on the show with us. Oh,
it's my pleasure. I'm excited to be talking with you
guys today. Excellent, excellent. So first things first, I think
a lot of the audience members are asking what what
(05:17):
is Raven Rock? And could you tell us a little
bit about how you discovered it. So this book traces
the history of what is known as the Continuity of
Government Plans, the COG plans. These are the secret plans
that were developed in the wake of World War Two
and continue up to the present day that deal with
(05:39):
how the US government would survive a nuclear attack and
rebuild afterwards. Sort of everything from who would be in
charge in the minutes and hours after an attack, how
succession and military control would pass down through the ranks
of the government, onto where US government officials would be evacuated,
(06:01):
and what the role of various government agencies would be
in rebuilding the country after a devastating attack, whether it's nuclear, biological, chemical, terrorist,
or even a large scale natural disaster. Now, the title
of the book comes from Raven Rock, which is the
(06:24):
Pentagon Bunker, the backup Pentagon. This hollowed out mountain in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania,
just over the Maryland line from Camp David, the President's
weekend get away, and Raven Rock was built one of
more than a hundred bunkers and relocation facilities around the
(06:46):
capital during the Cold War that would have housed the
emergency wing of the US government and Raven Rock, one
of the three biggest of these facilities, along with Mount
Weather in Virginia, which is the Presidential Bunker where the
U S Cabinet would go and where congressional leaders and
(07:07):
the Supreme Court would go. And then No RAD the
Cheyenne Mountain Bunker in Colorado Springs that's home to the
North American Air Defense System UH and probably best known
to some of the listeners here from the Matthew Roderick
movie War Games. So these three bunkers, the sort of
(07:29):
crown jewels of the US government's doomsday enterprise are are
literally hollowed out mountains. I mean they have free standing
buildings inside of the massive reservoirs for drinking water. Um.
You know, you can row a boat on the on
these reservoirs, and the police departments, fire departments, medical facilities,
(07:54):
you know, everything that you would need in order to
have uh. You know, found if people live for weeks
or even months at a time underground. The No RAD
Bunker even has a subway fast food franchise inside, so
even after Armageddon, you wouldn't be without your five dollar
(08:15):
foot long Thank goodness, we have our collective priorities in
order here. Um, this one thing that's really fascinating here
is uh that you mentioned that this this is an
example of more than a hundred bases. What what we're
(08:37):
what was the impetus to create these bases? And and
what were some of these strategies for ensued ensuring c
o G in the past. So there were two things
that really drove the invention of this. I mean, what
I like to write about, what I've written about for
much of my career, is how technology transforms institutions, and
(09:00):
and what this book really ends up being. And I
didn't understand this when I started writing this book, was
this is how nuclear weapons have transformed the presidency, how
one specific technology has transformed one specific institution. Because what
you had was, up until the nineteen forties, it didn't
(09:23):
particularly matter minute to minute where the President of the
United States or the Vice President of the United States was.
You know, as late as nineteen thirty five, FDR. When
he was driving back from the dedication of the Hoover Dam,
his motor cade got lost in the canyons outside Las Vegas,
and the President of the United States disappeared for the afternoon.
(09:45):
No one knew where he was, where he might pop
up next, or when he might return. And as late
as January nineteen, when Harry Truman took office, the vice
president had no Secret Service protection. I mean, as long
as you could get in touch with a vice president
in a couple of hours or you know, by the
next day, that was all that really mattered. But the
(10:08):
arrival of nuclear weapons began to compress government decision making
time and required the whereabouts of the president and the
communications capability capability around the president to be much more
robust than it ever had been before. Moreover, what you
(10:28):
began to have with nuclear weapons was the possibility that
entire cities could disappear in an instant, and so you
began to have to have contingency plans for what would
happen if something happened to the capitol. I mean, who
would be in charge if everyone in Washington was dead,
or if you had the warning to evacuate people, where
(10:50):
could they go? I mean it wasn't enough that you
could sort of run out of the White House and
run down the street and you'd be safe. I mean
you needed to be miles away. You needed to be
buried literally inside of a mountain. Or in later iterations
of these plant plans, they became too dangerous to be
underground at all, and we began to look at contingency
(11:11):
plans that would put the president or military decision makers
up into airborne command posts. I mean, this is the
system that still largely exists today, is this network of
presidential doomsday planes, the E four B night watch planes,
these converted seven forty seven's that stand alert and have
(11:34):
stood alert for more than thirty years now, ready to
evacuate the president wherever he is and and fly with
him for three days above the United States where he
could lead nuclear war from the sky. I mean, you
were joking at the beginning of the show that you know,
we're sitting here two and a half minutes to midnight. Well,
(11:54):
we're also sitting here at this exact minute as we're talking.
One of these planes is on the runway at off
at Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska. It's engines are turning,
and it's fully staffed, ready to evacuate in the event
of a threat on the president. Wow. And they only
need a very short runway to be called out right,
(12:17):
like fifty minutes something like that. Yeah, So that I
mean that plane right now as we're sitting here talking,
it could be launched and in the air in as
little as twelve to fifteen minutes, ready to rendezvous with
the President wherever he may be. Have have they ever
been used for any reason since this has been a program. Well,
(12:41):
so it's an interesting question because we have seen it
come close to being activated in a number of crises,
like the Cuban missile crisis, but it's really only been
used on September eleventh. And on September eleventh, you had
these plans activated across the country, and so you had
(13:01):
evacuation helicopters clatter into the west lawn of the capital
and evacuate congressional leaders to Mount Weather. Helicopters evacuated government
leaders from the Pentagon while it was still burning and
took them up to Raven Rock Um. These facilities had
been sitting idle for much of the nine nineties, and
(13:22):
then it was sort of all restarted in a hurry
in the wake of eleven, just quickly to stay on
the technology and how it's evolved. Uh, do you watch
House of Cards at all? Yes? Yep, Okay, so you've
been watching this season. There's one scene I don't want
to spoil too much, but let's say the the president
(13:45):
whoever that might be, uh, in the middle of the night,
goes down and gets what appears to be a black
briefcase that you know has some power associated with it. Um,
can you talk about what an unassumed black briefcase and
a sealed index card has to do with the nuclear
war in the United States? Yeah, so this is uh,
(14:08):
the nuclear football. I mean, these are this is the
black briefcase that has followed the President of the United
States around for more than fifty years now, carried by
a military aid. And we and we forget about this often,
but all of these majestic toys that we think of
(14:28):
as the modern imperial presidency, air Force one, marine one,
the armored motorcaids are effectively just tools, fancy toys to
ensure that the President of the United States, wherever he is,
is able to launch nuclear weapons. And as much as
we have in our popular culture and uh, you know,
(14:50):
popular mythology, the idea that there's a big red button
or red telephone somewhere that the president would use to
launch the nuclear war, the reality is much more pedestrian.
This military aid would walk up with this black briefcase. Uh.
It's filled not with some sort of super duper fancy computer.
(15:11):
It's filled with binders of papers as effectively a as
one military aid called it, a Denny's menu of nuclear war.
You could sort of point at different options for different
levels of strike, different targets, different countries. And that's the
type of nuclear war that you would order. And then
(15:32):
the President would get out his h what's known as
the biscuit, which is this sealed identification card that he
carries with him, this secret card with secret code words, uh,
sealed by the n s A, and crack it open
and it would have a list of code words that
(15:52):
he would read to the military national command authorities, the
nuclear launch authority be and it would identify him as
the President of the United States. And if that disappeared,
I mean, if the if the President was dead or incapacitated,
that power would pass right on down through the national
(16:16):
command authorities and the presidential line of succession to vice
president and on downward to ensure that there would always
be someone in charge of launching nuclear war. And and
in fact, during the Cold War, we kept in place
another airborne command post. I've already mentioned the presidential Airborne
Command Post. We've we kept in place another nuclear command
(16:40):
post known as Looking Glass. These planes that flew also
out of Omaha, Nebraska, three planes a day, twenty four
hours a day from the early nineteen sixties until the
early nineteen nineties. One of these planes was always up
in the air ready to command our nuclear forces with
a general or other senior military commander on board. WHOA,
(17:04):
and we know what. I really appreciate that you said, Uh,
we were You cited the crucial and dynamic role and
disruptive role the technology plays with institutions because we do
often see uh, technological progress outpace legislative processing of that progress. Um.
(17:25):
And it leads us to one of the most disturbing
pieces of the puzzle here, not necessarily the the secrecy involved,
although that is disturbing, and while it is disappointing, it's
it's understandable not to have a antagonistic foreign power, no
the game plan, But one of the more disturbing things
(17:46):
seems to be this, how do we know whether these
plans would actually work? And and if we do, to
what degree do we have a degree of certitude here?
So it's a great Ston, and I think that the
answer is, uh, these plans, as detailed as they were
(18:06):
through the Cold War probably would have never worked, or
at least would have not worked in the way that
they were intended. And part of the reason for that
is basic human psychology. I mean, you have in any emergency,
you know, they carefully well written plans interacting with the
(18:27):
way that humans react to unfolding events. And part of
the challenge with these plans throughout the Cold War were
there were thousands of U. S. Government personnel who would
have been part of these doomsday scenarios doomsday plans during
the Cold War, I mean people from every department and
government and the military, you know, the cabinet, Congress, and
(18:50):
so on and so forth. But there was no contingency
for any of those staff or personnel's families, their spouses,
their children, their relatives, and so at key moments of
tension during the Cold War, you often had people struggle
with saying, you know, well, I'm not going to evacuate
(19:13):
if my family can't evacuate. Earl Warren, when he was
Chief Justice of the United States of the Supreme Court,
he he was handed one of these special evacuation passes,
the special emergency passes when he took over the Supreme Court,
and he looked at it, and he looked at the
guy from the Emergency Preparedness Office and he said, well,
(19:37):
I don't see a pass here for Mrs Warren. And
the planner said, well, you know, sir, you're one of
the most important people in the US government. And he said, well,
you know, I guess you'll have room in this case
for yet another important person in government, because I'm not
going to do this. And he handed back his pass
(19:58):
and never would have evacuated at it. And even as
late as the Obama administration, I mean even just in
the last couple of years. Um. I talked to an
official who was part of these plans, just within the
last couple of years, and he there was a designated
helicopter that would have dropped out of the Washington sky
and picked him up wherever he was and evacuated him
(20:19):
to one of these bunkers. And he said, you know,
I have two young daughters, and if they think that
if that helicopter lands on my daughter's soccer field on
a Saturday morning, that I'm just going to wave goodbye
to my family and get on it and disappear like
they're crazy. And that's that's a completely understandable and very
(20:41):
human impulse. You know. That's something that I think in
the in the in the modern mainstream public understanding, uh,
it seems to be responsible for a couple of conflicting emotions.
Of course, we can fully understand and any uh, let's
(21:01):
say a high level government official like a senator, right
or the Speaker of the House saying on a human level,
I will not go to a bunker to ensure my
life without also rescuing my children or my spouse. But
it also seems to lead to a slippery situation for
(21:23):
the public when they would say, well, why can these
officials take their families to a safe place while you know,
John Q Public and Jan Q Public and their two
point five kids are are stuck out in the cold
or out in the irradiated waste, or whatever the alarm
of situation would be. How has the how has the
(21:46):
government or how have these strategic plans approached the idea
of including official family members? Are they are they including
those family members or is it still simply the utility
are in function of a person on an individual basis? Yeah,
and and it's a great I mean philosophical question. I
(22:09):
mean it's a you know, it's a question about humanity.
It's a question about our you know, small d democratic
process in our government. Here. Um, you know that the
goal of these programs was never to create an elite
body who would get to survive nuclear war. It was
to ensure that the basic and most important functions of
(22:32):
government were preserved through the worst catastrophes imaginable. And so
what this was an entirely foreseeable challenge that has dogged
these emergency plans literally going back to the first large
scale government evacuation drill in nineteen fifty four, the Operation Alert.
(22:53):
In the summer of nineteen fifty four, Dwight Eisenhower ran
the first large scale evacuation drill of the United States government,
and all of his cabinet secretaries retreated to Mount Weather
that bunker that I'm previously mentioned in Berryville, Virginia, and
(23:13):
all of their secretaries evacuated as well. And I found
this news story about how the wives of the cabinet
sat at home and played cards through the afternoon in
what was described as a very chilly atmosphere as they
realized that their husbands would be evacuating without them in
the event of a nuclear war. But this challenge, you know,
(23:38):
for reasons that we just discussed, you know that it
wasn't part of these plans to include families. And so
one of the only exceptions to that was during the
Congress built its own evacuation bunker at the Green Drier,
this luxury West this luxury resort in West Virginia that
(24:03):
they buried a massive bunker underneath and it would have
held the members of Congress and the staff UH to
keep Congress running. And then later when they realized that
members of Congress weren't going to evacuate without their families,
they did set up rooms adjacent to the bunker that
(24:25):
could be used to house families and relatives if they
were evacuated also. But you know, the truth of the
matter was that there was no room inside the bunker
doors for the families. So you you could evacuate with
your husband or wife if he was if he or
(24:46):
she was a senator or representative, but you would still
be living outside of the bunker rather than inside and
outside of a bunker unprotected but directly adjacent to it
is arguably UH even more dangerous place to be, especially
if that location is disclosed. Yes, I don't know whether
(25:09):
you're better off being uh evacuated uh and then being
close to the bunker, or being evacuated and or taking
your own chances elsewhere away from a bunker. Yes, this
is an important question. And I am so glad that
you mentioned uh the Greenbrier bunker, because there's a tail
(25:34):
involved in in the public discovery of this bunker, which
we will explore after a word from our sponsor. And
we have returned. There was a a little bit of
(25:56):
a teaser here for the the famous bunk at the Greenbrier,
Virginia Resort, and a few years ago, relatively recently actually,
most of the American public and probably most of the
international public learned of this through an article in the
(26:16):
Washington Post. This and you know, our show was still
extant at this time, and this this blew our minds
because you know, a lot of people may be tangentially
aware or maybe aware on some level that there must
(26:37):
be some kind of c O G plan, right, but
very few people ever knew a nuts and bolts example
or a real world example. And what we're leading up
to with this question is when when it was discovered,
right when when Greenbrier was discovered, it instantly lost in
(26:59):
annoy or misamount of strategic value, and it ties into
some of the I would argue necessary secrecy here and
now in the present day, we know most governments obsessively
prepare for the possibility of a national catastrophe, as as
you said, Mr graff It it could even be just
(27:19):
a large scale natural disaster. But now the public is
asking how much do we know or not know about
these specifics of these plans, and how much should we know?
I mean, let's go out on a limb and admit
that this is by a large finance, by taxpayer dollars.
Good point. Yeah, it's it's a tough question because there
(27:42):
are sort of several different layers to it. The first
is I, even as someone writing about this, agree that
there is a level of secrecy that you necessarily need
to provide for a set of these plans to to work.
I mean that what I would refer to as the
(28:05):
tactical secrecy as necessary. You know what the exact communications
and defensive capabilities of specific vehicles or facilities are, exactly
where someone would be evacuated to which facility. The secondary
questions though, Uh, this's the larger, more strategic ones. Uh,
(28:28):
you know, how these policies would work, how these programs
would work, how they're funded. I think that there's much
less of a need for secrecy around there. But some
of this is also you know, I don't think that
the government really does know how much it's spending on
these programs because they are spread across so many different uh,
(28:51):
different programs, different classified budgets, different agencies. Uh. You know,
the best I could generally come up with is that
we're spending about two billion dollars a year on the
operation of these plans. I'm not talking about the the
construction of the facilities, or the construction of the planes
or anything like that, just really the maintenance and operation
(29:13):
of these facilities. I mean, they're they're almost all still
in existence today. Um. You know, actually right now, Raven
Rock that the title of the book, the Bunker in
Pennsylvania is getting a big communications upgrade done by Century Link, uh,
sort of right now in the summer of Similarly, though,
(29:37):
there's this larger question that we just don't really know
how these plans would work in an actuality on a
day to day basis and an hour by hour basis.
I mean, we don't really know who would be in charge,
uh in certain instances and entirely foreseeable instances. Also, which
(29:59):
I've think is the troubling part is they're there are
problems that we won't know until these plans are activated
for the first time. Uh you know, who actually shows up,
who actually will be evacuated, um without their families. But
there's also another set of problems with these plans that
we do know could exist, and we haven't debated those,
(30:23):
we haven't discussed those, and I don't think that there's
any real need for secrecy Let me give you a
couple of examples here. Uh, you know, just a couple
of weeks ago, we had the tragic shooting at the
congressional softball game. Well, that raised again this issue of
(30:46):
congresses continuity in Congress his own succession planning, which it
has largely ignored ever since nine eleven, that their Congress
still has no good mechanism to quickly replace its members
it if large large numbers of members of the House
of Representatives, for instance, are killed or incapacitated, which means
(31:09):
that Congress would be left on the sidelines for months.
On the low end, I mean potentially you know, six, nine,
twelve months without an operating Congress in the event of
an emergency. We also don't know uh some big questions
and some big answers about the presidential succession um. There
(31:34):
are problems that we are well aware of with the
twenty five Amendment, which guides presidential succession um, including the
very active constitutional debate about whether the Speaker of the
House or the President pro tem of the Senate can
legally become president of the United States. There's in fact,
(31:57):
a very good argument put forth by James Madison, the
man who actually wrote the Constitution UH, that says that
members of the legislative branch can't participate in the executive branch.
And so there is an entirely foreseeable scenario where in
some sort of emergency, both Paul Ryan and Rex Tillerson
(32:20):
argue over who gets to be president of the United States. Moreover,
we don't really know, uh what what are the secret
plans that we don't know about? Uh? And and that's
where I think some of the biggest problems are UM.
Throughout the Cold War, and I explained some of these
(32:40):
at great length In the book, there are examples of
secret plans that one administration or another has created that
would have deputized business leaders as sort of dictatorial czars
in the event of an emergency, I mean, seizing all
of the how zing in the country, all of the
(33:03):
all of the manufacturing in the country, and administering it
and setting wages and setting prices. Um. We don't know
whether those similar plans exist today. I mean, does Mark
Zuckerberg have a piece of paper or Jeff emelt Ge
that from the President saying you know, I'm I'm going
(33:24):
to be the czar of manufacturing in the event of
a major national emergency. We don't know whether there are
plans for private citizens to sweep into government roles as
there were during the during the Cold War. UM people
(33:44):
like Dick Cheney or Donald Runsfeld actually participated in these
plans in the nineteen eighties under a program that was
then known as the Presidential Successor Support System the p
S three and and though they were private citizens, they
would have been designated in advance as effectively White House
(34:07):
chiefs of staff, so that if a president was killed
and evacuated and the successors were evacuated to one of
these bunkers, you would find Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld
or another former high ranking government official like that, waiting
in the bunker to tell you how to run the
US military um. And we don't know again whether sort
(34:29):
of similar plans exist today. And I think those are
areas where we should be able to have a robust
public debate in peacetime about what those plans could actually entail.
So when we're getting into the private sector here and
how they function alongside governmental plans. One of the really
(34:54):
fascinating things that I found in the book was this
thing called Project nine ought eight. Could you could you
tell us about what that is and what that could
have been? So nine not eight was part of a
you know, decades long effort to try to figure out
(35:15):
a way to protect the civilian population of the United States.
It got harder and harder as missiles multiplied and bombs
got stronger and faster, But the goal was it was
really to evacuate the urban cities and to figure out
(35:35):
how the US civilian population could survive. And so through
the nineteen eighties, this uh secret nine not eight project
saw FBI agents traverse you know, most of the country
and figure out where civilian populations could be evacuated into
(35:56):
rural regions, and to map things like hotels and elementary
schools and bowling alleys and food warehouses even in suburban
and rural parts of America, to figure out where urban
residents could be successfully evacuated and housed. I live in Vermont,
and these plans include sort of these wacky ideas to
(36:19):
evacuate most of the population of Connecticut up into Vermont
and you know, house them in places like the Chapel
at Middlebury College or the field House at Middlebury College.
And you know, they knew precisely how many people would
be housed in each of these facilities, and that we
spent millions of dollars mapping these and figuring out how
(36:42):
to pull pull together the resources for fallout shelters. Um
Nibisco at one point manufactured something like a hundred and
sixty million tons of something that was known as the
survival biscuit, this cracker that you would have been fed
in fallout shelters during the Cold War. You would have
(37:04):
gotten six crackers a day, a hundred and twenty five
calories apiece, and that would have been your diet inside
a fallout shelter for the two weeks that everyone was
expected to live inside, and if anyone is interested, you
can find people opening and eating those in the contemporary time.
(37:24):
It's really funny. They are all of these YouTube videos
of people. You can buy these tins of crackers uh
still on eBay and you know, military surplus stores and
things like that, Army Navy stores, and you can buy them,
and there are these videos of people opening them and uh,
and they don't appear to taste that good. Now, truth
(37:48):
be told, I don't think they ever were supposed to
taste that good, but certainly fifty years of aging has
not helped them very much like a fine wine. You know.
I appreciate hearing that because that is one of the
questions one of our listeners had. They said to ask
Garrett Graff where we can get those nibiscos survival biscuits.
(38:11):
So you heard it here, folks. Uh. The author himself says,
the confirms that you can find it military surplus stores
and at eBay. Uh. This this question about, you know,
the evacuation for civilians, for non governmental officials, non high
ranking military members. Um. This is something that really hits
(38:37):
on a Um, I guess it hits on a pivotal
point in the conversation, which is that currently, uh, the
US population has an estimated one point for million people, right,
and uh, one of the one of the I guess
(38:58):
thematically one of the reads i'nnoticing in a lot of
questions our audience members have sent us is they're asking
what happens to the common person? You know, to UM,
to Jane and John Doe, do they and Matt and
Ben and Garrett. Uh, you know that it is a
(39:18):
pertinent question. And earlier you had said, you know that
these these plans became increasingly difficult as technology evolved and
as the population increased. Do we know if there are
large scale contingency plans? And if so, do we know
which agencies would oversee those? Like FEMA, for instance. Yeah,
(39:41):
So FEMA is the agency that runs all of these plans. Uh.
And it has existed in many different forms since the
nineteen fifties. Uh, but the modern evolution of it is FEMA.
And and in in a weird way that most we
don't understand, the fact that FEMA is the agency that
(40:06):
oversees these plans is actually uh, what it is supposed
to do um. The fact that it also responds to
natural disasters hurricanes, tornadoes, floods is really an ancillary benefit
of the fact that it had developed all of this
(40:26):
response capability to nuclear war and that you know, nuclear
war thankfully doesn't come along all that frequently. So they
started to deploy these resources and these tools and these
stockpiles to help alleviate the suffering in natural disasters. But
FEMA still runs these plans today. A large percentage of
(40:48):
FEMA's budget is known as the as what the black budget,
classified budget. You know, whole floors of FEMA's headquarters in
Washington are sealed off from other employees because they run
these continuity of government programs. And in many ways, the
plans today are a little bit different than they were
(41:11):
during the Cold War because while the Cold War plans,
the expectation in many ways was some sort of large
scale attack on Washington and the entire rest of the country,
today the plans are much more focused around a devolution
(41:31):
of power outside of Washington. I mean, the modern threats, uh,
you know, North Korea, Iran, rogue states, terrorist groups make
it much more likely that actually something would happen to Washington.
But then leave most of the rest of those three
d and twenty four million people alive and untouched, but leaderless.
(41:55):
And so that's why today all of these facilities are
are fully staffed twenty four hours a day. They don't
rely on evacuation and warning in the same way that
they did, uh. And it was really the combination of
both nine eleven and then in a slightly earlier attack
(42:16):
in the by a doomsday cult in Tokyo that released
sarin gas in the subways there that led the government
to realize, wow, you know, something could happen just to
the capital, just to our leadership, and the whole rest
of the country would still be still be around, untouched
(42:38):
and needing leaders And so that part of what many
people don't understand about the presidency today also is that
the president isn't just the person that we elect on
the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. The
presidency actually encompasses several hundred people, and so you have
(43:00):
the people in that that direct line of succession, the
Vice President, the Speaker of the House, the President pro Tempo,
the Senate, and then all down through the cabinet. But
then also each of those Cabinet secretaries has their own
line of succession. Uh, you know, twenty people long, and
some of those people are by design outside of Washington,
(43:23):
d C. So that in the event that something did
happen to the capital, you would still be able to
have people step into those cabinet roles, but it would
be sort of an odd assortment of people like the
U N Ambassador, the U. S Attorney for the Northern
District of Illinois, the top federal prosecutor in Chicago, and
(43:44):
people like the manager of the Department of Energies Savannah
River Operations Center outside of Savannah, who would suddenly announce
themselves as the leaders of the United States. Oh man,
this is heavy stuff, you guys, And I feel like
(44:04):
we're gonna we need to take another quick break and
hear a word from our sponsor, and they get right
back into it, and we have returned, assuming that civilization
has not fallen while we're on an add break. One
(44:29):
thing that's one thing that's fascinating here about this discussion
is if we if we do a little bit of
a thought exercise and we imagine a nation um devolving,
as you said, Mr Graff, in this devolution into um
align US secession for leadership right a line of succession
(44:51):
for leadership. Then there's there's this amazing question, would someone who,
let say, lives on the other side of the country
or lives in the Midwest, would they acknowledge the rise
of a Savannah based organization of people who survived or
(45:15):
officials or government that survived the catastrophe saying this is
now the leadership of the US, because it seems like
one of the big things people would have to uh
worry about organizationally would be the acceptance of authority. And
I'm wondering if there are, if there are any plans
to do that, because if it's already, I mean, this
(45:38):
is a country that does have a large amount of
um I guess self governments or autonomy and it's in
its DNA, and this is a country that has a
large amount of gun ownership and tension already before bomb drops.
What what if any plans uh do we know of
(45:58):
involving uh? Are there any plans that we know of
that involved making the population a cohesive whole. So you've
caught right to the heart of one of the conundrums
that the government really did struggle with, and the idea. Actually,
they came up with a couple of different phases of
(46:21):
this as a response. The first was, in addition to
all of these bunkers around the capitol itself, FEMA built
a series of regional bunkers around the country, eight of
them UH in places like Maynard, Massachusetts and Denton, Texas
in UH. And these bunkers would have really overseen a
(46:47):
regional government, uh, you know, a half dozen states perhaps
at a time. In the idea was that that the
federal government would devolve to these regional bunkers for and
regional governments for some period of time while the national government,
(47:09):
the federal government itself was reconstituted and rebuilt, but that
for all intents and purposes, the major decisions would be
being made out of these regional bunkers with these regional governments.
The UK actually came up with a relatively similar system
where they built regional command regional government bunkers all over
(47:31):
the country. And the thinking again being that it would
take a little bit of time to restore the total
power of the federal government, and so they wanted to
you know, have in place, at you know, effectively a
temporary government that could carry over until the national government
(47:54):
was ready to reassert control over the whole country. So
when a lot of these plans were original nading post
World War Two, and then as we get into the
Cold War and it reaches its heights, the the known enemy,
the known known enemy, I guess of the United States
were the Communists in all of the different ways that
(48:17):
they existed. And there were some plans that were put
in place even before, like let's say, a nuke attack
was confirmed. There were plans in place to round up
subversives on US soil, and it was called Plans C.
And I was won. I was wondering if you could
go over what that is and then perhaps what a
(48:39):
contemporary version of that looks like. Yeah, So we talked
a little bit about the president's nuclear football, the black
briefcase that follows him around. A lot of people don't
know that through much of the Cold War, the Attorney
General was also followed around by basically the Attorney General's football,
(49:00):
the emergency briefcase that followed him wherever he went. That
would have contained plans to suspend habeas corpus, to the
suspensive liberties, to declare martial law across the country, and
to round up more than ten thousand suspected subversives and
(49:23):
foreign agents who lived across the United States that FBI
director jag Or Hoover kept tabs on, and he wanted
them swept up in the opening minutes, opening hours of
an attack on the country. So these plans existed through
most of the Cold War. UH. The subversive list in
(49:45):
its sort of existing current form was sort of wound
down UH in the post Watergate era. But we have
every reason to believe that some version of these draft plans, this,
these draft executive orders, these this draft legislation, even this
draft subversives list, probably still exists today. And that in
(50:12):
the in the remarks of in the event, in the
wake of events like nine eleven, you saw officials admit
that effectively, if things had gotten worse, they would have
just declared martial law. That any sort of large scale
catastrophe would come with this suspension of civil liberties, the
(50:35):
declaration of martial law, and you know, things like habeas
corpus withdrawn until something more like peacetime was able to
be re established. It's fascinating, and it's also there's a
one question that we keep seeing come up, which concerns
(50:57):
a private industry. We touched a little bit on the
ideas of czars right and the devolution of normally state
powers to private entities. But one thing that a lot
of people have been asking us about are the rise
of privately owned bunkers, you know, everything from everything, yeah,
(51:21):
everything from the small um, the small family bunker, to
the larger I think there are even some renovated former
missile silos that people have sold on real estate here,
And I guess one of the questions that we have
is are those on Are those a fat or are
they legitimately on par with some of the professional the
(51:46):
state's sponsored bunkers. M hm, so they're They're definitely at
some level of modern fat. I mean part of this
challenge of worrying about doomsday thing and things like the
modern versions of these threats like the electromagnetic pulse that
(52:07):
could wipe out electrical grids in the event of a
high altitude nuclear explosion. But at the same time, we've
seen this straight through all of the Cold War and
the history of continuity of government planning, where private citizens
you know, have built and maintained their own fallout shelters,
(52:29):
built and maintained their own bunkers, and a lot through
the Cold War, a lot of private companies actually had
their own bunkers. Companies like IBM or or A T
and T were very tightly integrated into these government plans
and so kept their own bunkers for their own executives. Um,
you know, Iron Mountain. Uh. The what we think of
(52:53):
now is sort of a record's retention business really grew
out of people in private companies beginning to want to
have their own nuclear bunkers underground. M M all right,
So you must have gotten some kind of special clearance
to learn about a lot of this stuff. I'm assuming,
(53:14):
and hey, you don't have to tell us about a Garrett.
It's cool. But you're wondering if if you learned anything
that you couldn't include in the book for national security reasons.
So I I didn't have any special clearance for this.
You know, this was all good old fashioned journalistic and
UH archival digging, um, interviewing people who have been parts
(53:39):
of these plans over the years, that you know, cross
referencing old documents, be classified documents. But there were certainly
some details that I kept out of the book that
I did learn that fell into the category that I
discussed of what I described as tactical secrecy, I mean
the exact capabilities of specific facilities or specific vehicles that
(54:05):
might be used during these evacuations. But I think the
bigger problem is not the secrecy of these plans. It's
the lack of transparency of these plans. And so you know,
I certainly dug as much as I could, but I
think there's a lot more digging to do, and I
hope we'll learn a lot more about these plans over
(54:26):
the months and years ahead. Fantastic, Mr Graph. We want
to again thank you on behalf of our listeners so
much for your time and even more so for all
of the extensive journalistic effort. We we know that this took.
I mean, I'm just imagining leafing through the f O.
(54:47):
I uh, the Freedom of Information Act request alone has
to be very time consuming. And as we end the
episode today, we would like to close on a final question, Matt.
I'll let you do the honors, all right, Garrett. I'm
just extrapolating here, but it feels like the ultimate continuity
(55:08):
of government in in what forty fifty, maybe a hundred years,
is going to be Mars. What say you, I think
you know. That's certainly what Elon musk Is is arguing,
is he pushes us more into the space world. So
I think that there is no shortage of opportunities outside
(55:29):
of this planet to help preserve the life on this planet.
That is a fantastic There is a poetic answer, Mr Graph,
and we are concluding our interview with Mr Garrett M. Graff,
the author of Raven Rock, the story of the U. S.
Government's secret plan to save itself while the rest of
us die. He has written other books including The Threat Matrix,
(55:50):
The FBI at War, angel Is Airborne, and The First Campaign,
Mr Graph. If people would like to learn more about
not just Raven Rock, but your work for all, where
can they go to find more information? Well, the books
are all available from Amazon or any of your great
independent local bookstores. Uh. And then you can always check
(56:11):
out my website at Garrett Graph dot com or my
Twitter Vermont g MG. Great. And that's the end of
this classic episode. If you have any thoughts or questions
about this episode, you can get into contact with us
in a number of different ways. One of the best
is to give us a call. Our number is one
(56:32):
eight three three st d w y t K. If
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