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The Armageddon
Plan
During the Reagan era Dick Cheney and
Donald Rumsfeld were key players in a clandestine
program designed to set aside the legal lines of
succession and immediately install a new "President" in
the event that a nuclear attack killed the country's
leaders. The program helps explain the behavior of the
Bush Administration on and after 9/11
by James Mann
Atlantic Monthly - March 2004 |
At least once a year
during the 1980s Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld
vanished. Cheney was working diligently on Capitol Hill,
as a congressman rising through the ranks of the
Republican leadership. Rumsfeld, who had served as
Gerald Ford's Secretary of Defense, was a hard-driving
business executive in the Chicago area—where, as the
head of G. D. Searle & Co., he dedicated time and energy
to the success of such commercial products as Nutra-Sweet,
Equal, and Metamucil. Yet for periods of three or four
days at a time no one in Congress knew where Cheney was,
nor could anyone at Searle locate Rumsfeld. Even their
wives were in the dark; they were handed only a
mysterious Washington phone number to use in case of
emergency.
 After
leaving their day jobs Cheney and Rumsfeld usually made
their way to Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington.
From there, in the middle of the night, each man—joined
by a team of forty to sixty federal officials and one
member of Ronald Reagan's Cabinet—slipped away to some
remote location in the United States, such as a disused
military base or an underground bunker. A convoy of
lead-lined trucks carrying sophisticated communications
equipment and other gear would head to each of the
locations.
Rumsfeld and Cheney were principal actors in one of the
most highly classified programs of the Reagan
Administration. Under it U.S. officials furtively
carried out detailed planning exercises for keeping the
federal government running during and after a nuclear
war with the Soviet Union. The program called for
setting aside the legal rules for presidential
succession in some circumstances, in favor of a secret
procedure for putting in place a new "President" and his
staff. The idea was to concentrate on speed, to preserve
"continuity of government," and to avoid cumbersome
procedures; the speaker of the House, the president pro
tempore of the Senate, and the rest of Congress would
play a greatly diminished role.
The inspiration for this program came from within the
Administration itself, not from Cheney or Rumsfeld;
except for a brief stint Rumsfeld served as Middle East
envoy, neither of them ever held office in the Reagan
Administration. Nevertheless, they were leading figures
in the program.
A few details about the effort have come to light over
the years, but nothing about the way it worked or the
central roles played by Cheney and Rumsfeld. The program
is of particular interest today because it helps to
explain the thinking and behavior of the second Bush
Administration in the hours, days, and months after the
terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Vice President
Cheney urged President Bush to stay out of Washington
for the rest of that day; Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld
ordered his deputy Paul Wolfowitz to get out of town;
Cheney himself began to move from Washington to a series
of "undisclosed locations"; and other federal officials
were later sent to work outside the capital, to ensure
the continuity of government in case of further attacks.
All these actions had their roots in the Reagan
Administration's clandestine planning exercises.
The U.S. government considered the possibility of a
nuclear war with the Soviet Union more seriously during
the early Reagan years than at any other time since the
Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Reagan had spoken in his
1980 campaign about the need for civil-defense programs
to help the United States survive a nuclear exchange,
and once in office he not only moved to boost civil
defense but also approved a new defense-policy document
that included plans for waging a protracted nuclear war
against the Soviet Union. The exercises in which Cheney
and Rumsfeld participated were a hidden component of
these more public efforts to prepare for nuclear war.
The premise of the secret exercises was that in case of
a nuclear attack on Washington, the United States needed
to act swiftly to avoid "decapitation"—that is, a break
in civilian leadership. A core element of the Reagan
Administration's strategy for fighting a nuclear war
would be to decapitate the Soviet leadership by striking
at top political and military officials and their
communications lines; the Administration wanted to make
sure that the Soviets couldn't do to America what U.S.
nuclear strategists were planning to do to the Soviet
Union.
Under the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations the U.S.
government had built large underground installations at
Mount Weather, in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, and
near Camp David, along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border,
each of which could serve as a military command post for
the President in time of war. Yet a crucial problem
remained: what might happen if the President couldn't
make it to one of those bunkers in time.
 The
Constitution makes the Vice President the successor if
the President dies or is incapacitated, but it
establishes no order of succession beyond that. Federal
law, most recently the Presidential Succession Act of
1947, establishes further details. If the Vice President
dies or cannot serve, then the speaker of the House of
Representatives becomes President. After him in the line
of succession come the president pro tempore of the
Senate (typically the longest-serving member of the
majority party) and then the members of the Cabinet, in
the order in which their posts were created—starting
with the Secretary of State and moving to the Secretary
of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, and so on.
The Reagan Administration, however, worried that this
procedure might not meet the split-second needs of an
all-out war with the Soviet Union. What if a nuclear
attack killed both the President and the Vice President,
and maybe the speaker of the House, too? Who would run
the country if it was too hard to track down the next
living person in line under the Succession Act? What
civilian leader could immediately give U.S. military
commanders the orders to respond to an attack, and how
would that leader communicate with the military? In a
continuing nuclear exchange, who would have the
authority to reach an agreement with the Soviet
leadership to bring the war to an end?
The outline of the plan was simple. Once the United
States was (or believed itself about to be) under
nuclear attack, three teams would be sent from
Washington to three different locations around the
United States. Each team would be prepared to assume
leadership of the country, and would include a Cabinet
member who was prepared to become President. If the
Soviet Union were somehow to locate one of the teams and
hit it with a nuclear weapon, the second team or, if
necessary, the third could take over.
This was not some abstract textbook plan; it was
practiced in concrete and elaborate detail. Each team
was named for a color—"red" or "blue," for example—and
each had an experienced executive who could operate as a
new White House chief of staff. The obvious candidates
were people who had served at high levels in the
executive branch, preferably with the national-security
apparatus. Cheney and Rumsfeld had each served as White
House chief of staff in the Ford Administration. Other
team leaders over the years included James Woolsey,
later the director of the CIA, and Kenneth Duberstein,
who served for a time as Reagan's actual White House
chief of staff.
As for the Cabinet members on each team, some had little
experience in national security; at various times, for
example, participants in the secret exercises included
John Block, Reagan's first Secretary of Agriculture, and
Malcolm Baldrige, the Secretary of Commerce. What
counted was not experience in foreign policy but,
rather, that the Cabinet member was available. It seems
fair to conclude that some of these "Presidents" would
have been mere figureheads for a more experienced chief
of staff, such as Cheney or Rumsfeld. Still, the Cabinet
members were the ones who would issue orders, or in
whose name the orders would be issued.
One of the questions studied in these exercises was what
concrete steps a team might take to establish its
credibility. What might be done to demonstrate to the
American public, to U.S. allies, and to the Soviet
leadership that "President" John Block or "President"
Malcolm Baldrige was now running the country, and that
he should be treated as the legitimate leader of the
United States? One option was to have the new
"President" order an American submarine up from the
depths to the surface of the ocean—since the power to
surface a submarine would be a clear sign that he was
now in full control of U.S. military forces. This
standard—control of the military—is one of the tests the
U.S. government uses in deciding whether to deal with a
foreign leader after a coup d'état.
 "One
of the awkward questions we faced," one participant in
the planning of the program explains, "was whether to
reconstitute Congress after a nuclear attack. It was
decided that no, it would be easier to operate without
them." For one thing, it was felt that reconvening
Congress, and replacing members who had been killed,
would take too long. Moreover, if Congress did
reconvene, it might elect a new speaker of the House,
whose claim to the presidency might have greater
legitimacy than that of a Secretary of Agriculture or
Commerce who had been set up as President under Reagan's
secret program. The election of a new House speaker
would not only take time but also create the potential
for confusion. The Reagan Administration's primary goal
was to set up a chain of command that could respond to
the urgent minute-by-minute demands of a nuclear war,
when there might be no time to swear in a new President
under the regular process of succession, and when a new
President would not have the time to appoint a new
staff. The Administration, however, chose to establish
this process without going to Congress for the
legislation that would have given it constitutional
legitimacy.
Ronald Reagan established the continuity-of-government
program with a secret executive order. According to
Robert McFarlane, who served for a time as Reagan's
National Security Adviser, the President himself made
the final decision about who would head each of the
three teams. Within Reagan's National Security Council
the "action officer" for the secret program was Oliver
North, later the central figure in the Iran-contra
scandal. Vice President George H.W. Bush was given the
authority to supervise some of these efforts, which were
run by a new government agency with a bland name: the
National Program Office. It had its own building in the
Washington area, run by a two-star general, and a secret
budget adding up to hundreds of millions of dollars a
year. Much of this money was spent on advanced
communications equipment that would enable the teams to
have secure conversations with U.S. military commanders.
In fact, the few details that have previously come to
light about the secret program, primarily from a 1991
CNN investigative report, stemmed from allegations of
waste and abuses in awarding contracts to private
companies, and claims that this equipment malfunctioned.
The exercises were usually scheduled during a
congressional recess, so that Cheney would miss as
little work on Capitol Hill as possible. Although
Cheney, Rumsfeld, and one other team leader took part in
each exercise, the Cabinet members changed depending on
who was available at a particular time. (Once, Attorney
General Ed Meese participated in an exercise that
departed from Andrews in the pre-dawn hours of June 18,
1986—the day after Chief Justice Warren Burger resigned.
One official remembers looking at Meese and thinking,
"First a Supreme Court resignation, and now America's in
a nuclear war. You're having a bad day.")
In addition to the designated White House chief of staff
and his President, each team included representatives
from the Departments of State and Defense and the
Central Intelligence Agency, and also from various
domestic-policy agencies. The idea was to practice
running the entire federal government with a skeletal
crew during a nuclear war. At one point there was talk
of bringing in the governors of Virginia and Maryland
and the mayor of the District of Columbia, but the idea
was discarded because they didn't have the necessary
security clearance.
The exercises were designed to be stressful.
Participants gathered in haste, moved and worked in the
early-morning hours, lived in Army-base conditions, and
dined on early, particularly unappetizing versions of
the military's dry, mass-produced MREs (meals ready to
eat). An entire exercise lasted close to two weeks, but
each team took part for only three or four days. One
team would leave Washington, run through its drills, and
then—as if it were on the verge of being "nuked"—hand
off to the next team.
The plans were carried out with elaborate deception,
designed to prevent Soviet reconnaissance satellites
from detecting where in the United States the teams were
going. Thus the teams were sent out in the middle of the
night, and changed locations from one exercise to the
next. Decoy convoys were sometimes dispatched along with
the genuine convoys carrying the communications gear.
The underlying logic was that the Soviets could not
possibly target all the makeshift locations around the
United States where the Reagan teams might operate.
The capstone to all these efforts to stay mobile was a
special airplane, the National Emergency Airborne
Command Post, a modified Boeing 747 based at Andrews and
specially outfitted with a conference room and advanced
communications gear. In it a President could remain in
the air and run the country during a nuclear showdown.
In one exercise a team of officials stayed aloft in this
plane for three days straight, cruising up and down the
coasts and back and forth across the country, refueling
in the air.
When George H.W. Bush was elected President, in 1988,
members of the secret Reagan program rejoiced; having
been closely involved with the effort from the start,
Bush wouldn't need to be initiated into its intricacies
and probably wouldn't re-evaluate it. In fact, despite
dramatically improved relations with Moscow, Bush did
continue the exercises, with some minor modifications.
Cheney was appointed Secretary of Defense and dropped
out as a team leader.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet
collapse, the rationale for the exercises changed. A
Soviet nuclear attack was obviously no longer
plausible—but what if terrorists carrying nuclear
weapons attacked the United States and killed the
President and the Vice President? Finally, during the
early Clinton years, it was decided that this scenario
was farfetched and outdated, a mere legacy of the Cold
War. It seemed that no enemy in the world was still
capable of decapitating America's leadership, and the
program was abandoned.
There things stood until September 11, 2001, when Cheney
and Rumsfeld suddenly began to act out parts of a script
they had rehearsed years before. Operating from the
underground shelter beneath the White House, called the
Presidential Emergency Operations Center, Cheney told
Bush to delay a planned flight back from Florida to
Washington. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld instructed a
reluctant Wolfowitz to get out of town to the safety of
one of the underground bunkers, which had been built to
survive nuclear attack. Cheney also ordered House
Speaker Dennis Hastert, other congressional leaders, and
several Cabinet members (including Agriculture Secretary
Ann Veneman and Interior Secretary Gale Norton)
evacuated to one of these secure facilities away from
the capital. Explaining these actions a few days later,
Cheney vaguely told NBC's Tim Russert, "We did a lot of
planning during the Cold War with respect to the
possibility of a nuclear incident." He did not mention
the Reagan Administration program or the secret drills
in which he and Rumsfeld had regularly practiced running
the country.
Their participation in the extra-constitutional
continuity-of-government exercises, remarkable in its
own right, also demonstrates a broad, underlying truth
about these two men. For three decades, from the Ford
Administration onward, even when they were out of the
executive branch of government, they were never far
away. They stayed in touch with defense, military, and
intelligence officials, who regularly called upon them.
They were, in a sense, a part of the permanent hidden
national-security apparatus of the United
States—inhabitants of a world in which Presidents come
and go, but America keeps on fighting.
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