"The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship "its nearest equivalent" is focused on a man who actually did something."

The Alternate White House

"In the best-selling 1962 book Seven Days in May, the Joint Chiefs of Staff plot a military coup against a US president about to sign a nuclear arms control agreement. The conspiracy involves an emergency exercise at a place called Mount Thunder, a secret bunker where government leaders would go in the event of a nuclear attack. Authors Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II provide rather detailed driving instructions to get to the fictional Mount Thunder, which closely match those used to drive to the real Mount Weather. Although the bunker at Mt. Weather did not become widely known until more than a decade later, the thinly disguised portrayal of the facility in Seven Days in May demonstrates that the fact of the existence and the location of the facility was already known by the early 1960s."

"Completed in 1958, the underground bunker includes a hospital, crematorium, dining and recreation areas, sleeping quarters, reservoirs of drinking and cooling water, an emergency power plant, and a radio and television studio which is part of the Emergency Braodcasting System. A series of side-tunnels accommodate a total of 20 office buildings, some of which are three stories tall. The East Tunnel includes a computer complex for directing emergency simulations and operations through the Contingency Impact Analysis System (CIAS) and the Resource Interruption Monitoring System (RIMS)." (I started working there in 1959 -- Hank)

Today Mt Weather is still there. It has been considerably expanded and is currently used exclusively for disaster operations with six major facilities including,

• National Processing Service Center Virginia
  
• Satellite Teleregistration Center
  
• Disaster Finance Office
  
• Disaster Information Systems Clearinghouse
  
• Disaster Personnel Operations Division
  
• Agency Logistics Center

The alternate White House is no longer located there.

In the late 50s, there were about 300 of us in the White House Army (Security) Communications Agency (WHACA) and I was the only Jew in the agency. There was also one Jew in the Secret Service attached to the White House. There were no blacks and no women (WACS) in the agency.

I also worked at what was sometimes referred to as Shangri-La, but more generally known as Camp David, which was the president's retreat and I worked at Mt Weather, which was code-named Camp Crystal and was the alternative White House. There was another alternate under construction when I was there and although assigned to presidential duty and there for several years I didn't stay long enough to see it finished.

"Located 70 miles from the White House in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland, Camp David was established in 1942 as a place for the President to relax and entertain. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted to escape the summer heat of Washington, D.C., and the higher altitude of the Camp provided cool breezes and good security. President Roosevelt called the Camp "Shangri-La" after the mountain kingdom in James Hilton's book Lost Horizon. It was renamed Camp David in 1953 by President Eisenhower in honor of his grandson."

(Here I am with a buddy of mine when stationed in France and on the right, on my French motorbike.)

While I was at Camp Crystal I installed their first single sideband radio communication's system, which at the time was state-of-the-art radio communications. I taught the others that technology and sometimes I also used some of the government radios on the ham bands.

I remember powering up an old Eldico 3,000 watt amplifer on 20 meters and the call letters I used was W3WTE. It was the license assigned to us then.

Actual crypto was voice secure over KO6 machines, which would have been pretty crude by today's standards and utilized a lot of mechanical rotators to alter the code which was then synthesized speech. That was part of my work also.

Sometimes the president relied on ham radio for back-up communications when traveling to foreign countries. We used code to disguise our communications and we used it mostly for security purposes.