Reply #11: Funny you should mention that [View All]

This was not some abstract textbook plan but was practiced in concrete, thorough and elaborate detail. The Reagan administration assigned personnel to three teams, each named for a color, such as red and blue. Each team included an experienced leader, who could operate as a new White House chief of staff. The obvious candidates were people who had already served at a high level in the executive branch, preferable with experience in the national security apparatus. This was where Cheney and Rumsfeld came in since they had previously served as White House chief of staff in the Ford administration. Besides Cheney and Rumsfeld, who were regulars, other team leaders over the years included James Woolsey, later the director of Central Intelligence, and Kenneth Duberstein, who worked for a time as Reagan's real-life White House chief of staff.

Each time a team left Washington, it brought along a single member of Reagan's cabinet, who was designated to serve as the next American "president." Some of these cabinet members had little experience in national security; at various times, for example, the participants in the secret exercises included Reagan's first secretary of agriculture, John Block, and commerce secretary Malcolm Baldrige. What counted was not experience in foreign policy, but simply that the cabinet member was available to fly out of Washington with the team. It seems fair to conclude that some of these American "presidents" would have served as mere figureheads for their more experienced chiefs of staff, such as Cheney and Rumsfeld. Still, cabinet members were the ones who would issue orders (or in whose name the orders would be issued).

Reagan established his continuity of government program under a secret executive order. According to Robert McFarlane, who served for a time as Reagan's national security advisor, the president himself made the final decisions on who would head each of the special teams, such as Cheney and Rumsfeld. 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 authority to supervise some of these efforts, which were run by a new government agency with the bland name of 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 per year. Much of the money was used to buy advanced communications equipment that would enable the new teams to have secure conversations with American military commanders. In fact, the few details that came to light about the secret program were the result of allegations of waste and abuses in awarding these communications contracts to private companies and of the malfunctioning of equipment.

The exercises were usually timed to take place during a congressional recess, so that Cheney, one of the three team leaders, would miss as little work on Capitol Hill as possible. Although Cheney, Rumsfeld and the other team leaders took part in each exercise, the Reagan cabinet members playing the new "president" changed, depending on which cabinet official was free at a particular time. Once Attorney Ed Meese participated in an exercise that departed from Andrews Air Force Base in the predawn hours of Wednesday, June 18, 1986 ...

In addition to the designated White House chief of staff and his "president," each team would include representatives of the State and Defense Departments and the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as various domestic policy agencies. The idea was to practice running the entire federal government during a nuclear war. ...

~snip~

When George H. W. Bush was elected president in 1988, members of the secret Reagan program rejoiced, because the senior Bush had been closely involved with the effort from the start, wouldn't have to be initiated into the intricacies of the program and probably wouldn't reevaluate it. In fact, despite the dramatically improved climate in relations with Moscow, Bush continued these continuity of government exercises, with some minor modifications. Cheney dropped out as team leader after he was appointed secretary of defense. And after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet collapse, the justification and underlying premise for the exercise changed. A Soviet nuclear attack was no longer plausible, but the exercise continued with a different nightmare scenario: What if terrorists carrying nuclear weapons attacked the United States and killed the president and vice president? Finally, during the Clinton administration, it was decided that this scenario too seemed farfetched, so officials decided to abandon the program as an outdated legacy of the cold war. There was, it seemed, no longer any enemy in the world capable of attacking Washington and "decapitating" America's leadership.

There things stood until September 11, 2001, when the George W. Bush administration was jolted into reexamining the confident assumption of safety that had held sway when the program was phased out. Cheney and Rumsfeld were familiar with the Armageddon exercises of the Reagan era. They themselves practiced the old drills...