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Mount Weather is a top-security underground installation an hour's drive from Washington DC. It has its own leaders, police, fire department - and laws. A cold war relic, it has been given a new lease of life since 9/11. And no one who's been inside has ever talked. Tom Vanderbilt reports

'Actually, you may want to just put those down a minute," Tim Brown is telling me, as I peer through binoculars at a cluster of buildings and antennae on a distant ridge. "The locals might get a bit nervous." A Ford F-150 cruises by, and the two men inside regard us casually as they pass.

We are sitting, hazards blinking, in Brown's BMW on a rural road in Virginia's Facquier County, a horsey enclave an hour west of Washington DC. The object of our attention is Mount Weather, officially the Emergency Operations Centre of the Federal Emergency Management Authority (Fema); and, less officially, a massive underground complex originally built to house governmental officials in the event of a full-scale nuclear exchange. Today, as the Bush administration wages its war on terror, Mount Weather is believed to house a "shadow government" made up of senior Washington officials on temporary assignment.

Following the collapse of the USSR, Mount Weather seemed like an expensive cold-war relic. Then came September 11. News reports noted that "top leaders of Congress were taken to the safety of a secure government facility 75 miles west of Washington"; another reported "a traffic jam of limos carrying Washington and government license plates." As the phrase "undisclosed location" entered the vernacular, Mount Weather, and a handful of similar installations, flickered back to life. Just two months ago, a disaster-simulation exercise called Forward Challenge '06 sent thousands of federal workers to Mount Weather and other sites.

Mount Weather is not hard to find. From the White House, we take Route 66 west until it meets Highway 50. Fifty miles later, we turn off on Route 601, a small two-lane rural feeder that snakes up a ridge. That road seems to be going nowhere until suddenly, at the crest, we come into a clearing, bounded by two lines of tall, shiny, razor-wired fencing, marked with faded signs that say: "US Property. No Trespassing." Behind sits a grouping of white aluminium sheds and a few cars.

We have arrived at the edge of the known republic. What lies beyond is obscured by Appalachian scrub and the inky black of government classification. No one has ever been allowed to tour the underground complex at Mount Weather and tell of what they saw. Occupying 500 acres of Blue Ridge real estate, it functions like a rump principality, with its own leaders, its own police and fire departments, and its own set of laws.

Mount Weather is more easily viewed from outer space than down the block. Earlier in the afternoon, I had been looking at grainy 1m-resolution aerial images of Mount Weather assembled by Brown, a national security researcher and aerial imagery expert. He pointed to small notches on the side of a hill (tunnel entrances), helipads, and a series of "military-style above-ground soft support housing". The mountain straddles the two entrances, he noted. "It's something like 200ft of shelter on top of you at the highest point."

Just driving round the perimeter of Mount Weather, you can see the traces of recent work. "See how they've obscured this," he says, pointing to the black sheeting threaded through a length of fence. "You used to be able to see the helipad through that fence." He gestures towards the new entrance. "Look at the truck barriers. When you turned, there'd be no time to build up speed. They got smart."

The changes to its exterior landscape - not to mention the gossip among local residents - are just one sign that that something very important has been going on at Mount Weather, a level of activity not seen here since the days when Eisenhower and his advisers trooped out here during drills. For some, this is a sign of prudent planning in a world where the security calculus has been for ever altered; for others, it is the symbol of an administration with a predilection towards exercising power in secret. As we pull away from Mount Weather, Brown says, "I wouldn't want to be driving a rental truck and have it break down in front of the gate."

Mount Weather first caught the American imagination on December 1 1974, when a Dulles-bound TransWorld Airlines 727, struggling through heavy rains and 50mph winds, crashed into the top of the mountain, less than a mile and a half from the site. The crash briefly severed the underground line linking to the Emergency Broadcast System, and teletype machines in news offices across the country began spitting out garbled transmissions.

The story might have died there. With Vietnam and Watergate in the air, however, the words "secret government facility" did not exactly induce a frisson of patriotic glee. The Progressive, in 1976, published an article, entitled The Mysterious Mountain, which said Mount Weather, a place little known even to Congress, was home not only to a replica mini-government, but to files on at least 100,000 Americans. In 1991, Time published the fullest exposé, describing (based on conversations with retired engineers) a sprawling underground complex bristling with mainframe computers, air circulation pumps, and a television/radio studio for post-nuclear presidential broadcasts.

What information has emerged about Mount Weather has always been rather sketchy. At some point in the 1950s, however, it seems that a drilling experiment into the mountain's rugged foundations of Precambrian basalt was turned into an exercise in underground city building, with the army corps hollowing out of the "hard and tight" rock a complex of tunnels and rooms with roofs reinforced by iron bolts.

The base formed part of a "federal relocation arc", an archipelago of hardened underground facilities, each linked by a dedicated communications system and equipped with amenities ranging from showers to wash off nuclear fallout to filtration systems capable of sucking air clean down to the micron level. The sites, staffed by "molies", were spartan steel-and-concrete expanses, subterranean seats of power: the president could repair to Mount Weather; Congress had its secret bunker under the Greenbrier Hotel in Virginia; the Federal Reserve had a bunker in Culpepper, Virginia; the Pentagon was given a rocky redoubt called Site R in the mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania; while the nation's air defences were run out of Norad's (North American Aerospace Defence Command) Cheyenne Mountain facility. "The nuclear age has dictated that these men carry out their responsibilities inside a solid granite mountain," wrote the defence command.

Mount Weather's secrecy was never absolute. In the 1957 novel Seven Days in May, the authors referred to a shadowy facility called Mount Thunder, all but revealing its location. Driving around those Blue Ridge byways today, a curious mixture of secrecy and openness still prevails. On Route 601, an Adopt-a-Highway sign is sponsored by employees of the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Centre. But pull off toward the entrance of that facility, and things get a bit strange. Looking for the home of a local resident, I hail an exiting Mount Weather employee. As we begin to chat, cars side by side, I suddenly hear a strange, siren-like sound and notice that a black SUV has loomed into my rear-view. The occupant, wearing sunglasses, hastily points me in the right direction.

This contradictory world of sunshine and shadow is at one with the parallel nature of the facility itself. On the one hand, it is, as Fema describes it, "a hub of emergency response activity providing Fema and other government agencies space for offices, training, conferencing, operations and storage". Less discussed is Mount Weather's obliquely assumed status as one of the key "undisclosed locations" of the Bush administration. "Look, there are two Mount Weathers - there's the Fema one and the Mount Weather one," says John Weisman, a writer of military and spy thrillers and a neighbour of the facility. "I wouldn't be at all surprised if [the vice-president, Dick] Cheney had been here before, and if [the secretary of defence, Donald] Rumsfeld had been here before, because they were part of some hugely sensitive stuff that was going on in the 1980s."

Weisman is referring to a series of classified programmes, described by the journalist James Mann in The Rise of the Vulcans, in which Cheney and Rumsfeld were said to be "leading figures". According to Mann, the resurgence of tensions with the Soviet Union during the Reagan administration lent new urgency to "continuity of government" programmes. With a secret executive order, and an "action officer" in the form of Oliver North, top officials pondered such constitutional quandaries as whether it would be necessary to reconstitute Congress following a nuclear attack (the answer was no).

On September 11 2001, Mann writes, the long-dormant plan was activated, and any number of top officials - possibly including Cheney himself - were shuttled to Mount Weather.

Residents on the mountain did not need to read the newspapers to discern that something was going on there. Joe Davitt, a retired civil servant who lives in a small A-frame house a mile or so away, told me that on September 11 2001 his wife was returning home from Florida. At the bottom of the hill, he says, she was stopped by state troopers, who asked for identification. At the facility itself, he says, "The Mount Weather guards were not only armed, they had their guns in firing position." John Staelin, a member of the Clarke County Board of Supervisors, says that on September 11, the county's 911 line received a call from an agitated local woman. "She said, 'I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, but the whole mountain opened up and Air Force One flew in and it closed right up. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.' So they said, 'Yes, ma'am.' "

Whatever else, Mount Weather makes for an interesting neighbour. "My God," says Davitt, as we sit on his back porch, "they put a plough up there at the first forecast of snow. They've always been good at keeping the road ploughed."

"We call our house ground zero," says Weisman. "This mountain has its interesting moments, between the helicopter flights and the people coming and going." Where for years "Mount Weather was nothing but a sleepy little byway", Weisman complains that the post-9/11 security adjustments have only served to draw attention to the facility. "It now says, 'Boy, am I important!' "

The local people are, by and large, perfectly happy to talk about Mount Weather. Sometimes, however, a veil of secrecy descends. When I asked about Mount Weather at the Daily Grind coffee shop in nearby Berryville, a woman smiled nervously and told me one woman she knew saw "missiles" being taken there. I was forwarded an email from a mountain resident (with the .mil domain that suggests a military background) that contained complaints about late-night helicopter flights, as well as recent episodes of nocturnal machine-gun fire and even a "massive explosion" that had shaken the house. My email seeking further comment received an immediate, terse response demanding that the sender not be associated with the story.

Inquiries to Fema yield little more light. "There's been a general upgrade of security at all federal installations around the country, and Mount Weather is one of them," says spokesman Don Jacks. "I answered your question in a very general way. We're not going to talk about Mount Weather, period. It's not that I can't, we just don't."

A request to talk to Reynolds Hoover, the director of Fema's Office of National Security Coordination, dies on the vine. And forget about James Looney, Fema chief at Mount Weather. "To talk to Mr Looney you would have to talk about Mount Weather," Jacks reminds me. "And we don't talk about Mount Weather."

One afternoon, I went to have lunch with Jim Wink at the Horseshoe Curve, a saloon tucked away near the hamlet of Pine Grove. It has been the unofficial canteen of Mount Weather for as long as anyone can remember. "I've seen Seabees [members of the US Navy Construction Battalions] come out of the tunnels at the end of the day and come down to the bar for a few beers," says Weisman. A Comanche pickup in the parking lot has a bumper sticker that says Terrorist Hunting Permit.

"I checked you out last night," Wink says by way of introduction. "So did Ray." He's talking about Ray Derby, a former Mount Weather employee whom I had visited the night before, who has suddenly appeared today. Wink, an Irish-blooded South Philadelphian with a tight smile and a steely, penetrating stare, does not seem like a man of whom you would like to run afoul. A retired counterterrorism expert with stints in the CIA, the Secret Service and any number of other agencies, he seems to have been in every place in the world at the most politically sensitive time. He was one of the last several hundred US personnel in Vietnam in April 1975, until he heard the song White Christmas - a coded message to get out of the country.

His office is filled with memorabilia culled from the more occluded arenas of US foreign policy; there is a plaque signed by the team tracking the Shining Path leader, Abimael Guzman, in Peru; a collection of Wink's identity cards from various intelligences agencies around the world (he's wearing sunglasses in most of them); and, among other souvenirs, a photograph of the slain drug lord Pablo Escobar. "There's your richest man in the world," he says, handing me a snapshot of a bloated, blank-eyed corpse. "He did not die a good death."

There's a Vets for North sticker on one wall, and, on another, one that says: "Even My Dog is Conservative."

Wink came to Mount Weather in the 1980s. "I needed a training facility and they offered a great deal up here."

When he came with the Secret Service one day to the Curve for a beer, he met his future wife, Tracee, whose grandfather had owned the bar. "Cheney and Rumsfeld, they've been here," he says, gesturing to the bar. "And Ollie. We all worked here together years ago. She can even tell you what they drank." His eyes shift toward his wife, behind the bar. "When I used to run exercises we'd bring 1,000 people," he says. "Most of the things we did, they didn't let 'em off the post." He talks vaguely of one training exercise. "We had to do the psychology of being locked up," he says. "We started with submarines."

There have been curious visitors to Mount Weather from the start, he says, including the Russians. "The State Department, in their infinite lack of wisdom, allowed the Russians to have a R&R center on the river here, right below Mount Weather." The Curve, which sits off an entrance to the Appalachian Trail, attracts wayward visitors. "One hiker came in and said he was hiking all the facilities. Said you could get closer that way. He was trying to find out a little too much."

Local people, Wink says, like to help Mount Weather maintain its low profile. "They won't talk about it," he says. "As a matter of fact," he says, fixing his eyes on me, "you might meet a local cop if you ask too many questions about it. Many of the men around here served in the second world war," he continues. "Consequently they don't discuss those things."

I had encountered a similar line of thinking the night before from Derby, a long-time federal emergency coordinator and civil defence officer who is now retired and living in nearby Winchester. "All the employees of Mount Weather have always been told, rightly so, that no matter what someone asks you, just don't say if it's true or not true. Just ignore the question. You'll get that if you ask," says Derby, a chain-smoker with neatly Brylcreemed hair who drinks what he calls "martoonis" out of a tumbler. His office, in the upstairs of his split-level suburban home, is filled with various presidential commendations, as well as a photograph of what looks like a emergency conference room.

"I designed that," he says, peering through a dense curl of cigarette smoke, "but I can't tell you where it is".

Source: The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1859632,00.html

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One of America's top scientists has said that the world has already entered a state of dangerous climate change. In his first broadcast interview as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, John Holdren told the BBC that the climate was changing much faster than predicted.

"We are not talking anymore about what climate models say might happen in the future.

"We are experiencing dangerous human disruption of the global climate and we're going to experience more," Professor Holdren said.

He emphasised the seriousness of the melting Greenland ice cap, saying that without drastic action the world would experience more heatwaves, wild fires and floods.

He added that if the current pace of change continued, a catastrophic sea level rise of 4m (13ft) this century was within the realm of possibility; much higher than previous forecasts.

To put this in perspective, Professor Holdren pointed out that the melting of the Greenland ice cap, alone, could increase world-wide sea levels by 7m (23ft), swamping many cities.

He blamed President Bush not only for refusing to cut emissions, but also for failing to live up to his rhetoric on harnessing technology to tackle climate change.

"We are not starting to address climate change with the technology we have in hand, and we are not accelerating our investment in energy technology research and development," Professor Holdren observed.

He said research undertaken by Harvard University revealed that US government spending on energy research had not increased since 2001. In order to make any progress, funding for climate technology needed to multiply by three or four times, Professor Holdren warned.

Last year, the UK's Prime Minister, Tony Blair, held a science conference to determine the threshold of dangerous climate change. Delegates concluded that to be relatively certain of keeping the rise below 2C (3.6F), CO2 levels in the atmosphere should not exceed 400 parts per million (ppm) and the highest prudent limit should be 450 ppm.

In October, at an international conference in Mexico, UK environment and energy ministers will try to persuade colleagues from the top 20 most polluting nations to agree on a CO2 stabilisation level.

Professor Holdren expressed doubt that progress could be achieved because if the US administration agreed that there was a need to limit CO2, this would inevitably lead to mandatory caps. President Bush has already rejected that option.

For more than a year, the BBC has invited the US government to give its view on safe levels of CO2. Our request is repeatedly passed between the White House office of the Council on Environmental Quality and the office of the US chief scientist.

To date, we have received no response to questions on this issue that Tony Blair calls the most important in the world. Professor Holdren called on the US Government to back the UK position.

John Holdren, in addition to his presidency of the AAAS, is director of the Woods Hole Research Center, and the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard University.

Source: BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5303574.stm

Scientists claiming to have evidence of life after death and the powers of telepathy triggered a furious row at Britain’s premier science festival yesterday. Organisers of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (the BA) were accused of lending credibility to maverick theories on the paranormal by allowing the highly controversial research to be aired unchallenged.

Leading members of the science establishment criticised the BA’s decision to showcase papers purporting to demonstrate telepathy and the survival of human consciousness after someone dies. They said that such ideas, which are widely rejected by experts, had no place in the festival without challenge from sceptics.

The disputed session featured research from Rupert Sheldrake, an independent biologist who is funded by Trinity College, Cambridge, that claims to have found evidence that some people know telepathically who is calling them before they answer the telephone.

Other presentations came from Peter Fenwick, a doctor who thinks deathbed visions suggest that consciousness survives when people die, and from Deborah Delanoy of the University of Hertfordshire, whose work suggests that people can affect the bodies of others by thinking about them.

Critics including Lord Winston and Sir Walter Bodmer, both former presidents of the BA, expressed particular alarm that the three speakers were allowed to hold a promotional press conference. Some said telepathy has already been found wanting in experiments, and had no place at a scientific meeting.

“Work in this field is a complete waste of time,” said Peter Atkins, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford. “Although it is politically incorrect to dismiss ideas out of hand, in this case there is absolutely no reason to suppose that telepathy is anything more than a charlatan’s fantasy. ”

Other scientists said that while discussion of the subject was acceptable, the panel’s lack of balance was like inviting creationists to address the prestigious meeting without an opposing view from evolutionary biologists. Several members of the BA said that they would raise the matter with its ruling council.

Sir Walter, a geneticist and cancer researcher, said: “I’m amazed that the BA has allowed it to happen in this way. You have got to be careful not to suppress ideas, even if they are beyond the pale, but it’s quite inappropriate to have a session like that without putting forward a more convincing view. It’s extremely important in cases like this, especially for the BA which represents science and which people expect to believe, to provide a proper balancing counter-argument.”

Lord Winston, the fertility specialist, said: “It is perfectly reasonable to have a session like this, but it should be robustly challenged by scientists who work in accredited psychological fields. It’s something the BA should consider, whether a session like this should go unchallenged by regular scientists.”

Richard Wiseman, Professor of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, who is a sceptical researcher of the paranormal, said: “The issue is about controversy and balance in science. This is not a balanced panel. Whether paranormal phenomena are a reality is an intellectual discussion. But it is the principle that is important. If the issue was race and intelligence, and you had three people saying one race are less intelligent than another, that would be outrageous.”

Chris French, Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, a sceptic of the paranormal, joined a panel discussion, but did not present a paper or attend the press briefing.

The event was organised by the Scientific and Medical Network, an organisation with about 3,000 members dedicated to “exploring the interface of science, medicine and spirituality”. The Royal Society, Britain’s national academy of science, said it “lies far from the scientific mainstream and the list of speakers reflect this”.

Helen Haste, chairwoman of the BA’s programme organising committee, said that all three speakers have proper academic credentials and that though their work is controversial, it is conducted in a rigorous, scholarly fashion. Professor French’s presence at the panel discussion would allow for sceptical dissent to be heard, though it was unfortunate he was not at the press event, she said. “We feel at the BA that we should be open to discussions or debates that are seen as valid by people inside the scientific community, as long as they are addressed in acceptable ways. These seem to be phenomena that are commonly experienced but have not been subjected particularly effectively to scientific investigation. It is a legitimate area of research. I do think it’s appropriate at a festival like this to have people who are serious about their approach and experimental methods.”

The BA, which celebrates its 175th anniversary this year, is a charity that seeks to advance public understanding, accessibility and accountability of the sciences and engineering. Its annual meeting, which is being held this year at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, has often caused controversy, most notably in 1860 when Thomas Huxley championed Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution against Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford.

When asked whether he thought that he was descended from apes on his mother’s or father’s side, Huxley responded: “I would rather be descended from an ape than a bishop.”

"We need the opposing view"

Lord Winston, fertility specialist and former president of the BA:

“I know of no serious, properly done studies which make me feel that this is anything other than nonsense. It is perfectly reasonable to have a session like this, but it should be robustly challenged by scientists who work in accredited psychological fields.”

Richard Wiseman, Professor of Psychology, University of Hertfordshire:

“Whether paranormal phenomena are a reality is mainly an intellectual discussion. But it is the principle that is important. If the issue was race and intelligence, and you had three people saying one race is less intelligent than another, that would be be outrageous. If there is not a consensus within science then there should be balance.”

Sir Walter Bodmer, geneticist and President of Hertford College, Oxford:

“I’m amazed that the BA has allowed it to happen in this way. You have got to be careful not to suppress ideas, even if they are beyond the pale, but it’s quite inappropriate to have a session like that without putting forward a more convincing view. It’s extremely important in cases like this, especially for the BA, which represents science and which people expect to believe, to provide a proper counter-argument.”

Professor Peter Atkins, Fellow and Tutor in Physical Chemisty, Oxford University:

“Although it is politically incorrect to dismiss ideas out of hand, in this case there is absolutely no reason to suppose that telepathy is anything more than a charlatan’s fantasy. If telepathy were a real phenomenon, evolution and natural selection would have developed it into a serious ability. That has not occurred in this case, neither speaker has a reputation for reliability, and it is extraordinary that the BA should consider them worth a platform.”

A Royal Society spokesman:

“The Scientific and Medical Network, which is organising this session, lies far from the scientific mainstream and the list of speakers reflects this. I hope that the audience attending the session will expose the speakers’ presentations to similarly robust scrutiny.”

Source: The Times Online
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,172-2344804,00.html