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FILE 037 · VOL VI · You're Not on the List
Congress Had a Secret Bunker. Your Family Wasn't on the List.
Everyone has a door they would walk through without you.
Based on: The Greenbrier Congressional Bunker
Intake record
| Recovered from | Estate of a former employee of Forsythe Associates, Arlington, Virginia; one laminated badge and a sealed envelope |
|---|---|
| Contents | Employee badge (1961 to 1992), a typed evacuation roster (partial), a letter to his daughter |
| Finder | R. Callahan, daughter |
| Status | The bunker is now open for public tours. The letter has not been made public. |
Recovered file
For thirty years, the most exclusive hotel in America had a secret under its west wing.
The Greenbrier, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, is the kind of resort where presidents golf and debutantes dance. Between 1957 and 1962, while guests played tennis and took the mineral waters, the federal government quietly dug a bunker into the hillside beneath a new wing of the hotel. It was built to house all five hundred and thirty-five members of Congress, plus staff, after a nuclear attack on Washington. Eleven hundred beds, in dormitories of sixty. A decontamination chamber. A power plant. A hospital with an operating room. A broadcast studio, with a painted backdrop of the Capitol so that members could address what was left of the nation as if they were still in Washington. The largest of its four steel blast doors weighed twenty-eight tons. [1]
It was maintained for three decades by a small team of government employees posing as workers for a television repair company called Forsythe Associates. They fixed the hotel's televisions, which gave them a reason to be in every room. They lived in the town. They coached Little League. They never said a word. [1]
In 1992, a reporter for The Washington Post named Ted Gup revealed the bunker's existence. It was decommissioned soon after. Today you can buy a ticket and walk through it. [1]
What the tour does not dwell on is the list.
The rest of this file is sealed. The ending, the sources and the archivist's note unseal with the file.
Unseal File 037 ($2.99) · its volume · everything ($49.99)
Built on real, cited records. The stories are dramatized. Disclaimer · If you are in crisis in the U.S., call or text 988.