Greenbrier Bunker

Greenbrier Bunker lies beneath the Greenbrier resort at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. In the late 1950s the federal government asked the resort to help create a secret relocation center for Congress, and the underground facility went up between 1959 and 1962, at the same time as an above-ground addition called the West Virginia Wing. The program was known as Project Greek Island, and earlier as Project Casper.

The builders dug it cut-and-cover style and put the excavated earth to use, spreading it into a golf course expansion and into fill for a runway extension at the local airfield, so nothing gave the project away. Inside were a dormitory, a kitchen, a hospital and a broadcast center for members of Congress, with changeable seasonal backdrops so a broadcast could pass for one made in Washington, D.C. The largest room, the Exhibit Hall, measures 89 by 186 feet, with two smaller auditoriums beside it: one seating about 470 people, enough for the House of Representatives, and one seating about 130, suited to a temporary Senate.

The bunker was folded into the hotel's public spaces. Rooms that guests used for business meetings were in fact a disguised work area for Congress, behind four hidden blast doors, the largest weighing more than 28 short tons. Government workers posed as hotel staff under a dummy company, saying their job was to look after the hotel's televisions. Calls from the bunker were routed through the hotel switchboard so they would appear to come from the hotel.

The secret held until The Washington Post revealed it in 1992, and the government decommissioned the bunker right after. The facility was never used as an emergency location, not even during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was later renovated, has been used for private-sector data storage and is again presented as an attraction where visitors can tour the declassified spaces. One of the original blast doors can now be seen openly beside the entrance to the Exhibit Hall.