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On the approach to the facility, along a twisting, narrow stretch of County Route 601, past Heart Trouble Lane, a flashing yellow warning light and a 10- m.p.h. speed limit provide the first hint that something unusual is around the bend. The compound is surrounded by a 10-ft.-high chain-link fence topped with six strands of barbed wire. Armed guards patrol the perimeter. Anyone straying past the entrance is temporarily relieved of cameras, asked to stay in the car and then shown the way out. Motorists who take an inordinate interest in the site are shadowed by security cars and watched through binoculars. Warning signs forbid the making of sketches or diagrams of the facility. Strangely enough, the airspace over the site is unrestricted -- probably because the most sensitive portion of the installation is underground. A TWA 727 jetliner crashed into the mountainside in 1974, killing 92 people and drawing unwanted attention to the site.
Despite the secrecy surrounding Mount Weather, an extensive review of county, state and federal documents, as well as interviews with more than 100 current and former officials, provides a tantalizing glimpse inside the installation. Mount Weather is a virtually self-contained facility. Aboveground, scattered across manicured lawns, are about a dozen buildings bristling with antennas and microwave relay systems. An on-site sewage- treatment plant, with a 90,000-gal.-a-day capacity, and two tanks holding 250,000 gal. of water could last some 200 people more than a month; underground ponds hold additional water supplies. Not far from the installation's entry gate are a control tower and a helicopter landing pad. The mountain's real secrets are not visible at ground level.
At the turn of the century, the site was a National Weather Bureau facility where balloons and box kites were sent up to observe weather conditions. In 1936 it came under the control of the U.S. Bureau of Mines, which began to dig an experimental mine into the mountain 250 ft. to 300 ft. below the surface along an east-west axis. The tunnel, which extended a scant quarter-mile and measured 7 ft. wide by 6 1/2 ft. high, provided the opening for what would later be expanded into an underground complex of offices and living quarters.
The precise genesis of the Mount Weather project remains uncertain, but it undoubtedly came in response to the Soviet Union's 1949 detonation of an atom bomb and the grave concern that event triggered in the U.S. Bellicose Soviet rhetoric, McCarthyite hectoring and, soon after, the Korean War persuaded senior U.S. officials in the early 1950s that provisions would have to be made to protect the country's leaders against a possible nuclear attack. Thus the search began for an impregnable site to which the President and other top officials could be spirited in case of a war emergency.