The Quiet Zone Read online

  The extent of the spy work was further revealed in 2013 by the NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Sugar Grove’s telescopes collected “1.8 million contact events, 500,000 mobile events, and 150,000 SMS events per day,” as reported in the Intercept. It was a surveillance system enabled by the National Radio Quiet Zone and overseen by its civilian administrator, who operated out of a humble basement office in Green Bank.

  ON WOODY’S OFFICE WALL, a topographical map showed the unique physical landscape around Green Bank and Sugar Grove. Both towns were surrounded by a noise-canceling ring of mountains, although Sugar Grove sat in something resembling a deep cereal bowl while Green Bank rested on a turkey platter. The difference was purposeful. Green Bank’s telescopes measured radio waves bouncing in from every angle, so they needed longer sight lines. Sugar Grove’s telescopes primarily intercepted overhead satellite communications.

  “I can’t comment on what Sugar Grove does,” Woody repeatedly told me—which was, in itself, a way of commenting on the secretiveness of Sugar Grove’s activities.

  I noticed a hat on Woody’s shelf bearing the initials NAVIOCOM, which stood for Navy Information Operations Command. It came from Sugar Grove. Next to it was a military “challenge coin”—typically only given to members of the military or during official military visits—bearing an image of a 150-foot-wide dish at Sugar Grove. It was a gift from Sugar Grove, underscoring how integral Woody was to that facility’s operations. Since 1984, the Quiet Zone administrator in Green Bank had commented on Sugar Grove’s behalf to the FCC and National Telecommunications and Information Administration for all unclassified assignments, both federal and civil. (Before 1984, only Sugar Grove could comment on federal applications in the Quiet Zone.) Sugar Grove still ran its own propagation analyses based on data forwarded from Woody, as well as processed all classified radio frequency assignments that required security clearances. Sugar Grove provided Green Bank with equipment and other technical resources to assist processing of all other applications.

  Publicly, the Department of Defense rarely flexed its muscle with regard to the Quiet Zone, but its presence occasionally became visible. In the 1990s, when Jay Lockman was the observatory’s site director, he opposed a proposal from municipal officials about forty-five miles away in Augusta County, Virginia, who wanted to install emergency communications equipment that would have interfered with the telescopes. Augusta officials said their fire department was unable to respond to 911 calls and law enforcement couldn’t call for backup from radio “dead zones.” The dispute ramped up, and the Augusta County Board of Supervisors asked its congressman to draft legislation that would reduce the scope of the Quiet Zone. Lockman brought the issue to Senator Byrd, who relayed it to the Department of Defense. The Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense responded by letter that “potential interference could develop and adversely affect the relay of sensitive intelligence information from our Sugar Grove facility if the FCC suggestions and existing National Radio Quiet Zone procedures are not followed. The Department does not look favorably on potential congressional relaxation of the procedures for the National Radio Quiet Zone.” Only then did Augusta County back down and agree to comply with the Quiet Zone restrictions. Sugar Grove was like the bigger, stronger brother protecting its kid sibling in Green Bank.

  A new picture was coming into focus. The astronomy observatory was something of a cover for the less publicized reason for a Quiet Zone: spy work.

  “Those guys don’t like to fly high on the radar, right?” Anthony Beasley, director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, later told me of the NSA. “Let’s say you have a radio quiet zone, and I want to do some stuff in this radio quiet zone and I don’t really want anyone to know what I’m doing or observing. So over here [in Green Bank], I have a partner who is observing all kinds of stuff all the time in different frequencies and is trying to keep this whole area quiet. They’re the perfect partner for me, because if they’re keeping everything quiet, then I get it quiet by default . . . They [Sugar Grove] have a certain mission. They don’t necessarily want people to know what frequencies they’re looking at or what they’re interested in. The way to maintain that kind of anonymity is to have someone else stand in front of it for you.”

  That is to say, Green Bank stood in front of Sugar Grove.

  Chapter Five

  “Spook Stuff”

  WEST VIRGINIA HAS A RICH HISTORY in conspiracy and the paranormal. The town of Flatwoods is known for a 1952 UFO landing. Point Pleasant holds an annual festival celebrating the legend of Mothman, a human-size winged creature that inspired a movie starring Richard Gere. There have been sightings of a devilish, farm animal–eating Wampus Cat; a shrieking, wolflike Sheepsquatch; and a tall, headless being with white skin known as the Grafton Monster. And then there’s Green Bank’s mysterious astronomy observatory.

  The proximity of Green Bank to Sugar Grove fueled wild conspiracies about a secret entanglement between the observatory and the military station, with the scientists wrapped up in something more than just science. Some of the rumors seemed to have a glimmer of truth.

  An often-repeated speculation was that Green Bank’s telescopes stood guard over an underground fortress that linked to Sugar Grove through the region’s elaborate cave network. In fact, more than one hundred miles of caves ran under Pocahontas and neighboring Pendleton County, the site of Sugar Grove. And the government had surveyed the area’s caves for potential use in the 1940s and 1950s, considering possible bunker sites all along Route 220 between the two towns, according to the book Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself—While the Rest of Us Die, by Garrett M. Graff. In 1947, at the start of the Cold War, a New Yorker staff writer journeyed into Pendleton County’s Trout Cave with the chief of research for the Army Map Service, which was looking for caves that might be suitable as fallout shelters. A half mile in, a member of the party noted, “This might even make a good office for the President.” (Trout Cave would remain primarily occupied by bats. In 2008, the entrance was gated off to reduce disturbances.)

  Furthering the intrigue, the government did secretly build at least one massive nuclear bunker in the Quiet Zone. In the 1950s, unbeknownst to anyone without the highest security clearances, President Eisenhower proposed that Congress build itself a fallout shelter in case of an attack from the Soviet Union. In 1956, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and House Speaker Sam Rayburn authorized construction of a $14 million ($135 million in today’s dollars) bunker capable of holding 1,100 people beneath the Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs, about sixty miles south of Green Bank and at the southern edge of the National Radio Quiet Zone.

  The project was top secret, but it’s hard to keep a 112,544-square-foot bunker secret, especially underneath a luxury resort. A man who helped pour the bunker’s concrete later told the Washington Post, “You could pretty well look and see the way they was setting it up there that they wasn’t building it to keep the rain off of them. I mean a fool would have known.”

  After the bunker was revealed in the Post in 1992, a few Green Bankers began wondering when they might finally learn the truth about their astronomy observatory.

  “Of course,” said Bob Sheets, the observatory’s neighbor, “there’s always been a sentiment among people in the community and from around the state that there’s something going on over here—that there’s something buried under the mountain, that there’s subterranean tunnels all under here, spook stuff. And that’s because of the bleed-over from Sugar Grove, because they really do do spook stuff. And then you throw in the fact that the congressional bunker was built down at the Greenbrier, and you’ve got fruitful turf for conspiracy theorists.”

  Locals speculated that Green Bank’s telescopes were anything and everything from a front for CIA operations to a cover for missile silos. After all, was it just for the sake of science that the facility operated as a self-contained village with its own water tower, airport runway, re
sidential village, machine shop, and independent plumbing and electrical system backed by diesel generators that could supply power for weeks? “I could tell you what I know, but I’d have to kill you,” David Jonese, the county sheriff from 2008 to 2016, said to me with a smirk over dinner in Green Bank. He rattled on about a clandestine facility behind the observatory and a shady nexus with Sugar Grove. He sounded like the police chief from Stranger Things trying to figure out what in God’s name was actually happening at his town’s government facility.

  A former mayor said the telescopes likely did a “little spying” on foreign countries. A woman said the observatory could “zap” your home to kill its WiFi. A retired state police officer repeatedly called the observatory to ask about the alien held captive in a secret dungeon on site. The observatory once got a call from a mother asking why her television was flashing a message that read “NRAO,” which she presumed was a signal from the telescope. Someone had to break it to her that the acronym stood for “Not Rated—Adults Only,” which had appeared because her son was trying to watch porn. People blamed the weather on the observatory, saying scientists could make it rain on command. One resident accused the observatory of sucking radio waves out of the atmosphere, which was the real reason for no cellphone service. Visitors regularly asked, “Are you listening to the voice of God?”

  Observatory staff sometimes played along with the more comical conspiracies. Anthony Minter, head of telescope science operations, was once asked by a tourist if any extraterrestrial beings were kept on site. Minter replied, “Did you ever consider that there were fifty other areas before Area 51?” The tourist’s jaw hung slack as Minter walked away. Another time, Minter got a call from a man in Tennessee asking if the observatory was emitting radiation or “death rays” toward his state as he’d been “knocked unconscious” several times recently. Minter responded, “I don’t think so, since West Virginia isn’t scheduled to play Tennessee this year.”

  A high schooler told me that an observatory elevator went down fifteen floors to a sixty-mile-long tunnel that connected to the Greenbrier’s bunker. For evidence of something suspicious, I was pointed toward the trefoil radiation symbol and the words “Fallout Shelter” at the base of the 140-foot telescope, completed in 1965. Inquiring about it, I was told that the basement had eighteen-inch-thick concrete walls to support the telescope’s 2,500-ton dish, which rested upon a massive ball bearing 17.5 feet in diameter; it was the world’s largest polar-aligned telescope. The walls were also thick enough to qualify the basement as a nuclear bunker. During the height of the Cold War, a couple of handheld Geiger counters were kept inside, along with a stash of food and water.

  Over at Sugar Grove, meanwhile, what was the point of that multimillion-dollar underground “operations building”? It was more than half the size of the Greenbrier bunker, with two-foot-thick concrete walls—ostensibly to prevent radio frequency interference, but conveniently suitable for a fallout shelter. Could it really be a nuclear shelter? Part of the rumored subterranean city?

  “Have you heard of the secret White House?” Ken Kellermann of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory once asked me.

  “You mean the Greenbrier?” I said.

  “Wasn’t so secret, was it?” he said.

  “Yeah, the locals say they knew about it.”

  “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” Kellermann said.

  “Like where the real secret White House was?”

  “You’re catching on,” he said. “Why would they have done that?”

  “It was a decoy for the real secret White House?”

  “And where do you think that could be?”

  “Not in Sugar Grove?”

  He shrugged.

  Comments like that sent the conspiratorial side of my brain into overdrive. I began hunting for evidence that might support such theories. In reality, I learned with astonishment, the entire region was essentially a government-classified nuclear fallout safety area. In the 1980s, the federal government’s official crisis relocation plan drew up a scheme for residents of Washington, D.C., to flee two hundred miles to Elkins, West Virginia—the nearest city to Green Bank—in the event of a nuclear strike against the United States. People were to wait out the holocaust in the hills of Appalachia. “In many ways,” Graff writes in Raven Rock, “after many decades, many billions of dollars, and countless advances in technology, the federal government’s basic plan to escape a catastrophe in Washington remains the same today as it was during that first Operation ALERT during the Eisenhower administration: Run away and hide in the Appalachian Mountains across Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia.” Operation ALERT was an annual defense drill from 1954 to 1961 that tested government and civilian readiness for World War III.

  The residents of Pocahontas County were a step ahead of the government’s plans. I was already encountering a strong survivalist mindset. “We always laugh that we can’t wait for the apocalypse, because we’ll be good!” said Jonese. The thinking was that if one could survive here—drinking untreated well water, eating hunted meat and foraged plants, hours from cell service, highways, or a Walmart—then one could survive long after civilization had collapsed in cities. Because a decent-size grocery store was at least an hour away, many people had months of food stocked in their fridge, freezer, and pantry.

  The prepper mentality went even deeper. At Trent’s, I once met a man named David Warner who told me that he safeguarded about fifty pounds of gold in a nearby cave reachable only by crawling through a hole, crossing a subterranean creek, and ascending a set of dirt stairs to reach an underground lair. His cave held “rifles, shotguns, and semiautomatics,” a solar-powered generator, two diesel generators, twenty gallons of gasoline, “just about every tool you can think of,” gas masks, and enough food for twenty people to survive for two years—enough for him and his wife, their four children and their spouses, and their ten grandchildren. He saw no need to own a cellphone, but he was looking into buying a radiation suit. “I’m ready for everything but nuclear war,” Warner said, “but I hope it doesn’t come to that. I have faith in President Trump.”

  It’s easy to laugh off such doomsdayers—at least until an earthquake hits, a pandemic starts, or another disaster strikes. In 2013, the British Royal Academy of Engineering predicted a 50 percent chance that a solar superstorm will occur before 2063, causing mass power outages and disrupting global communications—that is, wiping out cell service and WiFi, turning Earth into a global Quiet Zone. Green Bankers liked to think they’d be ready.

  ALL THE SPECULATION and intrigue sent me on something of a conspiracy tour of Appalachia, going inside the decommissioned congressional bunker at the Greenbrier (tickets cost thirty-nine dollars a person) and sneaking a glimpse of Sugar Grove’s still-active spy scopes from a ridge outside of town. While I ogled at the highly classified site, Jenna stayed in the car—this was not turning into her best summer vacation.

  We drove into the village of Sugar Grove. It was little more than a T-intersection flanked by a Methodist church and Bowers Store, which had a single gas pump in front and a pasture out back. We peeked inside, though we weren’t sure the store was open because the lights were off and it was July 4. A dozen rifles were scattered across a glass counter. Ammo was stacked next to vegetable oil. Dusty antiques packed the floor-to-ceiling shelves.

  I suddenly realized an old man was sitting behind the counter, practically blending in with the menagerie of taxidermy on the walls and shelves—deer heads, a fox, an owl, a muskrat with ears so disheveled they looked like late-autumn leaves. It was John Bowers, the proprietor, born down the street in 1929. He invited us to look around. We were particularly intrigued by what appeared to be an antique post office facade for sale, but this turned out to be Sugar Grove’s actual post office. Bowers’s son was the postmaster.

  Jenna inquired about a bathroom, and Bowers showed her across the street and into the church, where there was a toilet in the basement. When they returned, I ask
ed Bowers if he also delivered sermons there on Sundays. “I’m not the pastor,” he said, “but if you two want to get married, I’ll take your fifty dollars and marry you.” We laughed awkwardly. We’d been dating for six months. Marriage wasn’t yet a topic.

  Jenna bought a bag of Gibble’s brand Cheese Puffys. The price tag said $3.19 but Bowers charged $3.00. Behind us, a bicyclist in full-on racing gear—black tights, colorful jersey, leather gloves—bought two packs of Twizzlers and a soda, which also came to $3.00. Everything was rounded to the dollar. For the hour or so that we lingered in the store, one other person came inside, and it was Bowers’s grandson. The place felt desolate.

  After a while, I realized the cyclist had never left. He was still standing out front, casually sipping his soda and occasionally glancing in at us, which felt odd. For one, I didn’t see many bicyclists in Appalachia, much less any decked out in colorful spandex. For another, what hard-core cyclist stops for an hour to drink soda? Jenna and I both felt we were being monitored. Perhaps it was paranoia from all the conspiracies we’d been hearing, but it also seemed to make sense, because we stood in the shadow of a major spy facility. Of course, regardless of whether that was actually a government minder, we were probably being less watched than ever. Google and Amazon normally monitored our every move through our online habits, tracking our locations throughout the day based on where Jenna used her smartphone or where I logged on to WiFi, divining our intentions from our internet activities and selling that data to advertisers. Such surveillance was less possible due to the Quiet Zone, which, in turn, made it an ideal place to conduct spy work. It was almost comically perverse: the last great radio quiet place in America was being used to monitor the radio noise blaring everywhere else.