Bunker spills secrets to public

The Greenbrier bunker was designed to hold more than 1,100 evacuees.
ORLANDO SENTINEL
WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W.Va. -- Tucked into the lush mountains of West Virginia, The Greenbrier resort for decades has served as a posh retreat for the Capitol Hill set, offering country-club amenities and plenty of privacy.
But for Congress, the remote villa once provided the ultimate in Cold War accommodations. A fallout shelter, carved into a hill alongside The Greenbrier, was America's "Plan B" for democracy until the site was exposed in 1992 after more than 30 years of secrecy.
Here, under its last code name Project Greek Island, Congress was to regroup and rebuild if the Soviets nuked the Capitol. There were decontamination showers for radiation and meeting rooms big enough to hold all 435 members of the House of Representatives.
Once the secret was revealed in a newspaper article, however, The Greenbrier was relieved of its Cold War duties, and the hotel began giving tours. The fallout shelter reopened to the public Sunday after two years of renovations.
Another strange chapter
The tours mark another strange chapter for The Greenbrier bunker, whose secret was long limited to the leadership of Congress, select members of the hotel staff, and covert operators who kept the facility up-to-date with food, medicine and communications.
The idea for a congressional bunker started with the administration of President Eisenhower. Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were building, and the president wanted key areas of government to continue in case of a nuclear attack.
So in 1956, leaders of the U.S. House and Senate sent a vague letter to Walter Tuohy, president of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Co., which owned The Greenbrier. Only two sentences long, it simply asked for help "on matters of vital importance to the Congress of the United States."
Everything about the bunker was hush-hush. A small team of operators, known as the Forsythe Associates, maintained the bunker, posing as the hotel's television-repair crew to keep the secret. The covert operators did such a convincing acting job, in fact, that employees said they still miss the crew, which also fixed their home televisions.
"They were great TV-repair guys," said Lynn Swann, resort spokeswoman.
Soon after, construction began in a field near the resort's main building. On its face, The Greenbrier was simply expanding its resort. But near the project was a sprawling fallout facility measuring two football fields in size, drilled 720 feet into a nearby hill.
Completed in 1961, The Greenbrier bunker was designed to hold more than 1,100 evacuees -- 535 members of the House and Senate, and staffers deemed essential to help with the rebuilding of the country. Inside were offices, debate halls and a broadcast studio to send messages to the masses.
Survivors would crowd together in community dormitories and cafeterias, and everyone would be given two pairs of the same camouflage uniform, said Linda Walls, who manages the bunker tours.
"People would be coming here with just the clothes on their backs," Walls said. The uniforms were intended to boost morale so that no one lawmaker appeared better dressed than another, she said.
Protecting the evacuees would be at least 3 feet of concrete, radiation detectors and massive blast doors weighing as much as 30 tons. Three massive generators would keep the facility going, and there was enough canned food to last the bunker about 60 days.
But because the facility was a fallout shelter and not a bomb shelter, secrecy was of vital importance. About 250 miles from Washington, The Greenbrier bunker would be safe from any attack on the capital.
A direct attack, however, would be devastating.
Lingering rumors
Still, there were always lingering rumors of a secret government facility on the site.
Robert Conte, historian for The Greenbrier, said the staff always suspected something suspicious was happening on the 6,500-acre resort, but few were tempted to leak the gossip to outsiders. The resort has been the biggest employer in Greenbrier County for generations, and Cold War fears magnified the need for secrecy.
"It was almost a social faux pas to bring it up," said Conte, who has worked for The Greenbrier since 1978 but wasn't sure the bunker existed until the staff was told just before The Washington Post published its expos & eacute;.
Still, not every secret died with the bunker's exposure. Walls said The Greenbrier is converting parts of the bunker to store backup files and intellectual property for interested companies. Who was doing the storing, however, would remain a mystery, she said.