Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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
(00:24):
back to the show. My name is Matt. Our compatriot
Knoll 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
(00:45):
half minutes to midnight. Um, 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 coal wristwatch or your smartphone or Greenwich mean or
any of that. We're talking about the time kept by
(01:06):
the infamous doomsday clock, and 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,
(01:29):
either with technology, with weapons 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
(01:50):
we are to survive on this planet. Originally it started
in nineteen seven, which would make two thousand seventeen the
fiftieth anniverse street of the doomsday clock, and for the
last two years from twenty fifteen, the minute hand of
the doomsday clock State said at three minutes before the hour,
(02:11):
three minutes before midnight, the closest it had been to
midnight since the early nineteen eighties. This year it inch
just a bit closer 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
(02:32):
of disaster must be taken very soon. Wise public officials
should act immediately, guiding humanity away from the brink. If
they do not, wise citizens must step forward and lead
the way. Scary stuff, right, Yeah, but hold on, this
is not at the end of the episode. This is
just the beginning. Today's episode is not just about the
(02:52):
looming possibility of national or global catastrophe. It's more about
what happens afterwards. It happens if a biological, chemical, 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,
(03:13):
if it is reduced to ruins, 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,
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
(03:35):
to ensure that the government continues despite human laws, as
it might sustain. The specifics of this are are shrouded
in mystery, but one intrepid journalist too to call back
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
(04:00):
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,
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 Graff,
(04:20):
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
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
(04:42):
Government Plans the COG plans. These are the secret plans
that were developed UH in the wake of World War
Two and continue up to the present day that deal
with 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,
(05:05):
how succession and military control would pass down through the
ranks of the government onto where US government officials would
be evacuated, 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
(05:30):
scale natural disaster. Now, the title of the book comes
from Raven Rock, which is the 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,
(05:52):
and Raven Rock was built. One of more than a
hundred bunkers and location facilities around the 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,
(06:16):
which is the Presidential Bunker where the U. S Cabinet
would go and where congressional leaders and the Supreme Court
would go. And then No Rad the Cheyenne Mountain Bunker
in Colorado's Springs that's home to the North American Air
Defense System UH and probably best known to some of
(06:36):
the listeners here from the Matthew Broderick movie War Games.
So these three bunkers, the sort of 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
(07:00):
can row a boat on the on these reservoirs, and
the police departments, fire departments, medical facilities, you know, everything
that you would need in order to have uh. You know,
thousands of people live for weeks or even months at
a time underground. The No Rad Bunker even has a
(07:23):
subway fast food franchise inside, so even after Armageddon, you
wouldn't be without your five dollar 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
(07:47):
a hundred bases. What what were 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,
(08:08):
what I've written about for much of my career, is
how technology transforms institutions 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
(08:30):
specific institution. Because what you had was up until the
nineteen forties, it didn't 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
(08:51):
the dedication of the Hoover Dan his motor cab got
lost in the canyons outside Las Vegas, and the President
of the United States disappeared for the afternoon. No one
knew where he was, where he might pop up next,
or when he might return. And as late as January
when Harry Truman took office, the vice president had no
(09:13):
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 arrival of nuclear
weapons began to compress government decision making time and required
the whereabouts of the president and the communications capability capability
(09:38):
around the president to be much more robust than it
ever had been before. Moreover, what you 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
(09:59):
charge if everyone in Washington was dead? Or if you
had the warning to evacuate people, where 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,
(10:21):
it became too dangerous to be underground at all, and
we began to look at contingency 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
(10:42):
B night watch planes, these converted seven forty seven's that
stand alert and have 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
(11:03):
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, 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.
(11:28):
And they only need a very short runway to be
called out right like twenty 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
(11:49):
have they ever been used for any reason since this
has been a program. Well, 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
(12:10):
on September eleventh, you had these plans activated across the country,
and so you had 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.
(12:33):
These facilities had been sitting idle for much of the nineties,
and 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
(12:55):
want to spoil too much, but let's say the the president,
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 unassuming black briefcase and
(13:16):
a sealed index card has to do with the nuclear
war in the United States? Yeah? So this is 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,
(13:40):
but all of these majestic toys that we think of
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
(14:02):
we have in our popular culture and uh, you know,
popular mythology, the idea that there's a big red button
or red telephone somewhere that the president would use to
launch nuclear war, the reality is much more pedestrian. This
military aid would walk up with this black briefcase. Uh.
(14:23):
It's filled not with some sort of super duper fancy computer.
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
(14:45):
type of nuclear war that you would order. And then
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,
filed by the n s A, and crack it open
(15:05):
and it would have a list of code words that
he would read to the military national command authorities, the
nuclear launch authority, 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
(15:27):
power would pass right on down through the national command
authorities and the presidential line of succession to the vice
president and on downward to ensure that there would always
be someone in charge of launching nuclear war. And in fact,
during the Cold War, we kept in place another airborne
(15:48):
command post. I've already mentioned the presidential airborne command post.
We've we kept in place another nuclear command post known
as looking Glass. These planes that flew also of Omaha, Nebraska,
three planes a day, twenty four hours a day from
the early nineteen sixties until the early nineteen nineties. One
(16:09):
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, 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,
(16:33):
technological progress outpace legislative processing of that progress. Um, 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
(16:54):
it's understandable not to have a antagonistic foreign power no
the game plan. But one of the more disturbing things
seems to be this, how do we know whether these
plans would actually work? And if we do, to what
degree do we have a degree of certitude here? So
(17:14):
it's a great question, and I think that the answer is, Uh,
these plans, as detailed as they were 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.
(17:34):
I mean, you have in any emergency, you know, they
carefully well written plans interacting with the 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
(17:55):
of these doomsday scenarios doomsday plans during the Cold War,
I mean from every department and government and the military.
You know, the Cabinet, Congress, and 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
(18:20):
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 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 especial emergency passes when
(18:44):
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, 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
(19:05):
room in this case for yet another important person in government,
because I'm not going to do this. And he handed
back his path and never would have evacuated. 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
(19:28):
designated helicopter that would have dropped out of the Washington
sky and picked him up wherever he was and evacuated
him 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
(19:49):
to my family and get on it and disappear like
they're crazy. And that's that's a completely understandable and very
human impulse, you know that 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.
(20:12):
Of course, we can fully understand any uh let's say
a high level government official like a senator, right or
the Speaker of the House uh 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
(20:34):
it also seems to lead to a slippery situation for
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
(20:54):
or out in the irradiated waste or whatever the alarm
is situation would be. How has the how has the
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 utilitarian
(21:16):
function of a person on an individual basis? Yeah, And
and it's a great, I mean philosophical question. I 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
(21:39):
who would get to survive nuclear war. It was to
ensure that the basic and most important functions of government
were preserved through the worst catastrophes imaginable and so what
this was an entirely foreseeable challenge that has dogged these
(21:59):
in work agency plans literally going back to the first
large scale government evacuation drill in nineteen fifty four, the
Operation Alert. 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
(22:21):
to Mount Weather that bunker that I'm previously mentioned in Berryville, Virginia,
and 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
(22:41):
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, for reasons that we just discussed, you know,
it wasn't part of these plans to in lewd families.
And so one of the only exceptions to that was
(23:05):
during the Congress built its own evacuation bunker at the
Green Dryer, this luxury West this luxury resort in West
Virginia that they buried a massive bunker underneath, and it
would have held the members of Congress and the staff
(23:26):
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 could be used to house families and relatives
if they were evacuated also, but you know the truth
(23:49):
of the matter was that there was no room inside
the bunker doors for the families. So you you could
evacuate with your uh husband or wife if he was
if he or 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
(24:13):
adjacent to it is arguably, uh even more dangerous place
to be, especially if that location is disclosed. Yes, I
don't know whether you're better off being uh evacuated uh
and then being close to the bunker, or being evacuated
(24:34):
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
tale involved in in the public discovery of this bunker,
which we will explore after a word from our sponsor
(25:05):
and we have returned. There was a a little bit
of a teaser here for the the famous bunker at
the Greenbrier, Virginia Resort, and a few years ago, relatively recently. Actually,
most of the American public and probably most of the
(25:25):
international public, learned of this through an article in the
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
(25:51):
be some kind of c O G plan, right, but
very few people ever knew a nuts and Olds 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 an
(26:14):
enormous amount 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 Graphic, it could even be just a large scale
(26:35):
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 are sort of
(26:58):
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 tactical secrecy
(27:21):
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 is the larger, more strategic ones, Uh, you know,
(27:43):
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 spent on these programs
because they are spread across so many different, uh, different programs,
(28:06):
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 of these facilities.
(28:29):
I mean, they're they're almost all still in existence today. Um,
you know, actually right now or even 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, there's
(28:51):
this larger question that we just don't really know how
these plans would work it in in 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,
(29:13):
which I 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,
(29:37):
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
(30:01):
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 membership
if large, large numbers of members of the House of Representatives,
for instance, are killed or incapacitated, which means that Congress
(30:25):
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 are problems
(30:50):
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, a very
(31:12):
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 argue
(31:35):
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
at great length in the book. There are examples of
(32:00):
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 housing in the country, all of the all
of the manufacturing in the country, and administering it and
(32:22):
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 At ge
that from the President saying you know, I'm I'm going
to be the czar of manufacturing in the event of
(32:43):
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
like Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld actually participated in these
(33:05):
plans in the nineteen eighties under a program that was
then known as the Presidential Successor Support System the PS three,
And even though they were private citizens, they would have
been designated in advance as effectively white House chiefs of staff,
so that if a president was killed and evacuated and
(33:27):
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 U. S. Military
UM And we don't know again Leather sort of similar
plans exist today, and I think those are areas where
(33:50):
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 fascinating
things that I found in the book was this thing
(34:11):
called Project nine 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 a way
to protect the civilian population of the United States. It
(34:35):
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 how
the US civilian population could survive. And so through the
nineteen eighties, this uh secret nine not eight project saw
(35:00):
FBI agents traverse you know, most of the country and
figure out where civilian populations could be evacuated into rural regions,
and to map things like hotels and elementary schools and
bowling alleys and food warehouses even in suburban and rural
(35:21):
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 evacuate
most of the population of Connecticut up into Vermont and
you know, house them in places like the chapel at
(35:41):
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 to
pull pull together the rees sources for fallout shelters. Um
(36:03):
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
gotten six crackers a day, a hundred and twenty five
calories apiece, and that would have been your diet inside
(36:26):
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.
It's really funny. There are all these YouTube videos of people.
You can buy these tins of crackers, uh still on
(36:46):
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 they don't appear or to taste that good. Now,
truth be told, I don't think they ever were supposed
to taste that good, But certainly fifty years of aging
(37:08):
has not helped them very much. Oh, not like a
fine wine. Uh. 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. So you heard it here, folks. Uh,
(37:28):
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
(37:49):
something that really hits on a UM. I guess it
hits on a pivotal point in the conversation, which is
that currently, uh, the U s population has an estimated
one point four million people, right and Uh, one of
(38:11):
the one of the I guess thematically. One of the
threads I'm noticing 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,
(38:31):
you know that it is a 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?
(38:54):
Like FEMA for instance. Yeah, So FEMA is the agency
that runs all of these plans, 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 people don't understand the
(39:16):
fact that FEMA, it is the agency that 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
(39:38):
it had developed all of this 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
(40:00):
and today a large percentage of 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,
(40:20):
and in many ways the plans today are a little
bit different than they were 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
(40:43):
much more focused around a devolution 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 in but then leave
most of the rest of those three d and twenty
(41:04):
four million people alive and untouched, but leaderless. And so
that's why today all of these facilities 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
(41:26):
and then in a slightly earlier attack 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
(41:48):
would still be still be around, untouched 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 president c actually
(42:09):
encompasses several hundred people, and so you have, you know,
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, people long and some
(42:33):
of those people are by design outside of Washington, 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,
(42:55):
the top federal prosecutor in Chicago, and people like the
the manager of the Department of Energy Savannah River Operations
Center outside of Savannah, who would suddenly announce themselves as
the leaders of the United States. Oh man, this is
(43:15):
heavy stuff, you guys, and uh, I feel like 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
(43:36):
not fallen while we're on an add break. One 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 to um align
(44:02):
as secession for leadership right a line of succession for leadership.
Then there's there's this amazing question, would someone who, let's say,
lives on the other side of the country or lives
in the Midwest, would they acknowledge the rise of a
(44:24):
Savannah based organization of people who survived or 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 worry about organizationally
would be the acceptance of authority. And I'm wondering if
(44:45):
there are, if there are any plans to do that,
because if it's already I mean this 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 you that has a large amount
of gun ownership and tension already before bomb drops. What
(45:08):
what if any plans do we know of involving Are
there any plans that we know of that involve 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
(45:31):
up with a couple of different phases of 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
(45:56):
and these bunkers would have really oversee a 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
(46:17):
some period of time while the national government, 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
(46:40):
they built regional command regional government bunkers all over 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, you know, effectively a temporary government that
(47:04):
could carry over until the national government was ready to
reassert control over the whole country. So when a lot
of these plans were originating 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
(47:27):
in all of the different ways uh that they existed.
And there were some plans that were put in place
even before like let's say, a new attack was confirmed.
There were plans in place to round up subversives on
US soil, and it was called Plans C. And I
(47:48):
was I was wondering if you could go over what
that is and then perhaps what a contemporary version of
that looks like yeah. So we talked a little bit
about the president's nuclear football, the Black eastcase 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, the emergency
(48:14):
briefcase that followed him wherever he went. That would have
contained plans to suspend habeas corpus, to the suspensivil liberties,
to declare martial law across the country, and to round
up more than ten thousands suspected subversives and foreign agents
(48:37):
who lived across the United States that FBI Director Jager
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. The subversive list in its sort of existing
(49:00):
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 the in
(49:27):
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 declaration of
(49:49):
martial law, and you know, things like habeas corpus withdrawn
until something more like peacetime was able to be re establed. Washed.
It's fascinating, and it's also there's a one question that
we keep seeing come up which concerns private industry. We
(50:11):
touched a little bit on the 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.
(50:32):
You know, everything from everything, Yeah, 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
(50:52):
those a fat or are they legitimately on par with
some of the professional the States 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
(51:12):
prepping and things like the modern versions of these threats,
like the electromagnetic pulse that 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
(51:36):
government planning, where private citizens, you know, have built and
maintained their own fallout shelters, 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
(52:00):
for their own executives. Um, you know Iron Mountain. Uh.
The what we think of 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
(52:22):
kind of special clearance to learn about a lot of
this stuff, I'm assuming, 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
(52:43):
all good old fashioned journalistic and uh archival digging um,
interviewing people who have been parts of these plans over
the years, that you know, cross referencing old documents, be
classified documents. UH. But there were certainly some details that
I kept out of the book that I did learn
(53:07):
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 might be used
during these evacuations. But I think the bigger problem is
not the secrecy of these plans. It's the lack of
(53:27):
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 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
(53:51):
extensive journalistic effort. We we know that this took I mean,
I'm just imagining leafing through the f A. 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.
(54:14):
I'll let you do the honors, all right, Garrett. I'm
just extrapolating here, but it feels like the ultimate continuity
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,
and he pushes us more into the space world. So
(54:36):
I think that there is no shortage of opportunities outside
of this planet to help preserve the life on this planet.
That is a fantastic There is a poetic answer, Mr Graph.
We are concluding our interview with Mr Garrett M. Graff,
the author of Raven Rock, the story of the U. S.
(54:56):
Government secret plan to save itself while the rest of
us die. He has written other books including The Threat Matrix,
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 overall, where can
they go to find more information? Well, the books are
(55:17):
all available from Amazon or any of your great independent
local bookstores. Uh. And then you can always check out
my website at Garrett Graph dot com or my Twitter
Vermont g MG. Great. And if you want to write
to Mr Graph, send him those tweets. And if you
want to write to both of us, hey, you can
(55:39):
find us. We are a conspiracy stuff on Twitter and
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of that stuff, our best ideas always come from you.
You can send us a good old fashioned email. We
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