Raven Rock

The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself--While the Rest of Us Die

Garrett M. Graff

• Editorial: Simon & Schuster
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781476735450
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

Now a 6-part mini-series called Why the Rest of Us Die airing on VICE TV! The shocking truth about the government's secret plans to survive a catastrophic attack on US soil—even if the rest of us die—is "a frightening eye-opener" ( Kirkus Reviews ) that spans the dawn of the nuclear age to today, and "contains everything one could possibly want to know" ( The Wall Street Journal ). Every day in Washington, DC, the blue-and-gold first Helicopter Squadron, codenamed "MUSSEL, " flies over the Potomac River. As obvious as the Presidential motorcade, most people assume the squadron is a travel perk for VIPs. They're only half right: while the helicopters do provide transport, the unit exists to evacuate high-ranking officials in the event of a terrorist or nuclear attack on the capital. In the event of an attack, select officials would be whisked by helicopters to a ring of secret bunkers around Washington, even as ordinary citizens were left to fend for themselves. "In exploring the incredible lengths (and depths) that successive administrations have gone to in planning for the aftermath of a nuclear assault, Graff deftly weaves a tale of secrecy and paranoia" ( The New York Times Book Review ) with details "that read like they've been ripped from the pages of a pulp spy novel" ( Vice ). For more than sixty years, the US government has been developing secret Doomsday strategies to protect itself, and the multibillion-dollar Continuity of Government (COG) program takes numerous forms—from its potential to evacuate the Liberty Bell from Philadelphia to the plans to launch nuclear missiles from a Boeing-747 jet flying high over Nebraska. Garrett M. Graff sheds light on the inner workings of the 650-acre compound, called Raven Rock, just miles from Camp David, as well as dozens of other bunkers the government built for its top leaders during the Cold War, from the White House lawn to Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado to Palm Beach, Florida, and the secret plans that would have kicked in after a Cold War nuclear attack to round up foreigners and dissidents and nationalize industries. Equal parts a presidential, military, and cultural history, Raven Rock tracks the evolution of the government plan and the threats of global war from the dawn of the nuclear era through the War on Terror.

Chapter 1

PROJECT S-1

Harry S. Truman, just hours after assuming the most awesome position in the world, knew exactly what his war secretary’s obtuse note must mean. “I think it is very important that I should have a talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter,” Henry Stimson wrote. It must be, Truman knew, the new secret superweapon—the exact details of which were so classified that even as vice president he hadn’t been privy to them. Until then, Truman had known only that it was a weapon that would create a “terrific explosion.”

During his twelve years in office, FDR achieved many things as president, transforming a nation broken by the Great Depression into the most powerful economy and war-fighting machine the world had ever seen. Now it fell to his successor, a farmer-turned-haberdasher-turned-politician, to usher it all forward. At first glance, that was a tough order. Truman appeared a shadow of the elite, highly educated scion of a political dynasty who had led the country to the edge of victory in a two-theater world war.

Truman seemed about as ordinary a man as had ever occupied the White House. Had World War I not intervened, he likely would have remained content on his Missouri farm, an unremarked product of a simpler century, born in 1884, when the nation’s hottest defense debate was whether to retain a wooden navy. By the time Woodrow Wilson rallied the U.S. into the “Great War” in 1917, Truman was thirty-three, two years older than the Selective Service’s age limit. His eyes failed every branch’s medical fitness requirements. And yet he volunteered anyway, setting off with the locally organized 129th Field Artillery, where his popularity and prior National Guard service led to a captainship. His unit, Battery D, performed admirably—even bravely at times—in battle on the stalemated Western Front. Nearly half the unit was killed or wounded. When Truman sailed back to the United States after the Allied victory, he did so full of newfound confidence, ambition, and a worldliness unsatisfied by crops and fieldwork. Back in Kansas City, he ran for county office backed by the local political machine and established a reputation as an honest, hardworking administrator. In 1934, he was elected to the U.S. Senate.

Though his first years in Washington were unmemorable, the outbreak of the war in 1941 established Truman as Congress’s defense watchdog, leading the Senate Select Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. Within months it came to be simply known as the Truman Committee. Traveling the country, he tirelessly led skilled investigators into every corner of the rapidly expanding military budget—except one. Then, in mid-1943, Truman’s committee uncovered a massive, secret spending operation that funneled millions of dollars into industrial efforts in Tennessee and the American Southwest, none of which seemed to be producing anything. When Senator Truman called Stimson to investigate, the secretary of war demurred. “That’s a matter which I know all about personally, and I am the only one of the group of two or three men in the whole world who know about it,” Stimson said. “It’s part of a very important secret development.”

Now that Truman had unexpectedly become president, he was on the inside. He would finally find out the answer to his earlier questions. The answer to the mystery would forever transform the office for all of his successors.

• • •

The wartime vice presidency that Truman assumed in 1945 was an office in transition, as the nation realized the potential importance of its second in command. To Truman, the primary perk was the official car that picked him up in the morning at his $120-a-month apartment on Connecticut Avenue to take him up to the Capitol, where he spent much of his time in the Senate’s small vice presidential office. He became the first vice president to be given a military aide, choosing his longtime friend from Battery D, Harry Vaughan. A few days into Truman’s new role, he noticed a young man sitting outside his office. For hours, the man sat patiently as the staff went about their day. Finally, Truman asked Vaughan, “Who is that young fellow who’s been out here? Does he want to see me?”

Vaughan explained that the man was Secret Service—and so, it turned out, was the other nice young man who rode in the official car’s front passenger seat with Truman in the morning. Truman was shocked. He had assumed the passenger was one of the driver’s friends hitching a lift to work.

Apparently, Vaughan and the treasury secretary had discussed the incongruity of having a hundred Secret Service agents protect President Roosevelt even as Vice President Truman walked freely and unguarded through the capital. So, just a few days later, a detail of three agents—including the man outside his office and the one in the limo—began escorting the vice president around Washington as well.

Truman didn’t take well to the new level of supervision. One day in April, he’d left his Secret Service detail behind and snuck away to Sam Rayburn’s private hideaway office, where powerful lawmakers gathered for drinks and camaraderie. There, a message awaited him: Tell no one, but get to the White House as soon as possible. His driver raced him up Pennsylvania Avenue, still without any protection. Truman thought the president urgently needed to see him—an odd conclusion, given that the two had only met twice in the three months he’d been serving as vice president. Upon his arrival at the White House, Truman was ushered into the private quarters and found First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. She explained that FDR had suffered a stroke in Warm Springs, Georgia: “Harry, the President is dead.” It was just eighty-nine days into the new term.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” he said, after some time, as he struggled to wrap his mind around the announcement.

Eleanor countered quickly: “Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now.”

The leadership began to assemble in the Cabinet Room in the West Wing. Nine members of the cabinet and assorted congressional leaders like Speaker Rayburn, as well as Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, and Truman’s wife, Bess, and daughter, Margaret. All stood waiting. As the transfer of power unfolded, one realization stood out to Truman. “We were in the final days of the greatest war in history,” he later wrote. “In that war, the United States had created military forces so enormous as to defy description, yet now, when the nation’s greatest leader in that war lay dead, and a simple ceremony was about to acknowledge the presence of his successor in the nation’s greatest office, only two uniforms were present.”

No one else noticed the military’s absence, but Truman thought it a remarkable testament to American democracy that no one asked the country’s powerful military leaders whom they supported as their next leader. “The very fact that no thought was given to it demonstrates convincingly how firmly the concept of supremacy of the civil authority is accepted in our land,” Truman observed. The peaceful transition of civilian power represented a grand tradition in U.S. politics—the Continuity of Government from one leader to another, the continuity of an idea larger than any single officeholder.

Le roi est mort, vive le roi!

The president was dead, long live the president.

Truman raised his right hand and began the oath. Everyone around him was silent, except his wife. She’d been crying almost from the moment she heard the news.

• • •

The following days were a whirlwind. There was a war to win, first and foremost, but also a thousand administrative details as the presidency changed hands. The White House staff faced a huge adjustment to the new commander-in-chief, too. It had been more than a dozen years since a president who could move freely himself had occupied the White House. Soon after taking office, Truman needed to go to his bank, and without warning walked out the door toward the Hamilton National Bank two blocks away. The Secret Service and D.C. police raced to catch up, and a massive lunchtime traffic jam paralyzed downtown. The incident taught Truman that the president of the United States didn’t go anywhere without warning and that the presidency, particularly under wartime security policies, erected huge literal and figurative walls between him and his fellow citizens.

Until the outbreak of World War II, the White House was just like any other D.C. government building: Tourists and passersby could walk right through the gates and inside. As late as the early 1910s, White House visitors could sit at the president’s desk if he was absent. That quickly changed on December 7, 1941. Within hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Mike Reilly, the agent in charge of FDR’s Secret Service detail, began hunting for an armored limousine for the president. The only suitable vehicle he could find was a 1928 Cadillac 341A Town Sedan that had belonged to Al Capone, sitting in a government impound lot years after the Treasury Department had seized it. Reilly had agents wash and prep the car in time for Roosevelt to ride in it to Congress to deliver his “Day of Infamy” speech. The president used Capone’s car until the Secret Service fitted steel armor to his regular limo, equipping a 9,000-pound Lincoln behemoth with flashing lights, running boards, and grab handles for Secret Service agents.^I

A new automobile was only part of the new protective bubble around the president. The treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau—who supervised the Secret Service—spent much of December 7 peering out the White House windows for German bombers. Though his suggestions for the placement of sandbags and machine gun emplacements at the building’s entrances were denied, all staff members were issued gas masks—Roosevelt’s was attached to his wheelchair—and the White House architect, Lorenzo Winslow, began creating the building’s first bomb shelter.

Two bunkers, in fact, were readied for the president. Workers added thick concrete walls to a forty-foot-by-forty-foot area of the basement under the East Wing, creating a two-room safe area that, theoretically, could protect up to 100 staffers. Accessible from two entrances—one in the East Wing and the other in the garden outside—it had food rations, water, medical supplies, and was built to withstand a hit by a 500-pound bomb. Workers also dug a sloped tunnel to the neighboring Treasury Building, so FDR could speed down the ramp in his wheelchair to the Treasury’s basement, where a thick granite foundation and series of vaults provided even more protection and a spacious ten-room shelter, complete with carpeting and a kitchen.

The Secret Service eventually had the Army place antiaircraft guns atop nearby government buildings, although those weapons were initially in such short supply that some were merely realistic wooden replicas. A detachment from the Chemical Warfare Service was permanently stationed at the White House to defend against gas attacks. Weekly drills began practicing repelling an air raid on the White House; the D.C. police would close off four blocks around the building, an infantry battalion from Fort Myer would deploy to defend against parachutists, an engineer battalion would muster near the grounds with bulldozers to rescue anyone caught in a demolished building, and the D.C. Fire Department dispatched four fire engines. The president, depending on his location, would evacuate to the White House shelter, the neighboring Treasury Building, or to one of ten secret buildings in D.C. and Maryland.

Though Washington escaped an enemy attack during the war and the antiaircraft guns and gas masks eventually disappeared, the presidency never returned to its prewar levels of openness. In part, that was because by the time Truman tried to go to the bank, a new weapon was being readied in the U.S. arsenal—a weapon that would reshape the presidency forever.^II

• • •

Twelve days after Truman became president, he met with Stimson on April 25. An elderly seventy-two, the secretary still preferred to be called “Colonel,” his designated rank from the Great War. He explained to Truman that he was responsible for almost every detail of what was known as S-1, aka the Manhattan Project, and presented Truman with a short memo, the first sentence of which left little doubt of its seriousness: “Within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city.”

Stimson then introduced General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, to provide further background and context. “This is a big project,” Groves said. It was perhaps the day’s only understatement. The secret effort was the biggest the government had ever undertaken, totaling nearly $2 billion in spending and involving 200,000 workers—many of whom lived in secret government cities in places like Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Los Alamos, New Mexico. As the project advanced, a thicker and thicker cloak of secrecy surrounded the Manhattan research to secure it from leaks and spies. Mail from workers was censored, scientists were trailed by friendly surveillance teams, and staff traveled between facilities under pseudonyms—Groves himself was known simply as “99.” As he and Stimson reported this to Truman, they saved the biggest news for last: It had all worked. The secrecy, the science, the engineering all led, by April 1945, to within a hairsbreadth of a workable device.

Stimson also added a warning, the import of which none of the men fully understood at the time. The United States and Great Britain had collaborated on the superweapon, but their monopoly on the technology would inevitably end. Only one nation could likely break it in the near term: Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. Outside the Oval Office, World War II was quickly coming to an end. That very same day, Soviets advancing from the east and Americans advancing from the west united at the Elbe River in Germany. Five days later, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin Führerbunker.

The only dilemma Truman faced, it seemed, was a moral one. He began to contemplate the destruction this kind of modern war could cause. When the Allied powers, led by Winston Churchill, Stalin, and Truman, gathered in Potsdam, Germany, to plot the war’s final moves and shape the world that came after, Truman looked out the window of the presidential plane, the Sacred Cow, as it flew toward Berlin, passing over cities leveled by the Allied bombing. Sitting in his special observation seat, Truman became the first—and only—president to view firsthand the effects of aerial bombing on civilian targets. The destruction left him shaken. “Those two cities, viewed from the air, appeared to be completely destroyed,” he later wrote. “I could not see a single house that was left standing.” Churchill, who spent part of his time in Potsdam touring Hitler’s headquarters and the bunker where he died, thought darkly: “This is what would have happened to us if they had won the war. We would have been in that bunker.”

That same day—Monday, July 16—in the New Mexico desert the most fearsome weapon of all time became a reality. At 5:29 a.m. local time, 5,500 miles from Berlin, the first atomic bomb exploded at Alamogordo Air Force Base. George Kistiakowsky, who had helped lead development of the bomb and would go on to play a key role as a presidential science advisor in the Eisenhower administration, initially hugged lead scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and then, more soberly, said, “I’m sure that at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the earth’s existence—the last human will see what we saw.” That evening, Stimson carried a coded telegram to Truman in Berlin: OPERATED ON THIS MORNING. DIAGNOSIS NOT YET COMPLETE, BUT RESULTS SEEM SATISFACTORY AND ALREADY EXCEED EXPECTATIONS.

Truman had already made the decision to use the bomb. His goal was to forestall a land invasion of Japan, extending the war, and likely costing millions of lives. In part, Truman’s resolve stemmed from how the world’s views of targeting civilian populations had shifted radically over the course of the war. The 1937 Japanese bombardment of Shanghai caused outrage across much of the world, but by 1945 civilian targets were considered fair game for the Allies—massive bombardments and firebombings of Hamburg, Dresden, and later, Tokyo, Nagoya, Yokohama, Osaka, and Kobe caused little outcry from the public. General Curtis LeMay, the head of the Army Air Forces in the Pacific, had so embraced the mass bombardments, in fact, that war planners in Washington had been genuinely concerned by the spring of 1945 that there might not be a Japanese city left intact on which to demonstrate the new atomic bomb.

Tr...

Índice

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Project S-1
• Chapter 2: Mr. Rance
• Chapter 3: Campbell
• Chapter 4: The Beard Lot Project
• Chapter 5: Apple Jack Alert
• Chapter 6: The Spirit of Camp David
• Chapter 7: The New Frontier
• Chapter 8: Cuban Missile Crisis
• Chapter 9: Angel is Airborne
• Chapter 10: The Tyler Precedent
• Chapter 11: The Madman Theory
• Chapter 12: Mount Pony
• Chapter 13: The Unlikely Hawk
• Chapter 14: War Games
• Chapter 15: Designated Survivor
• Chapter 16: Nine Naught Eight
• Chapter 17: 9/11
• Chapter 18: The Days After
• Chapter 19: Doomsday Prepping
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Photo Credits
• Copyright