FWD from Wilfred at Cryogen.com: NSA abandons wondrous stuff

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It was sent with the following comments:
     "-- I'd love to have this place
     as a playpen :)
     
     -Wilfred
     Wilfred at Cryogen.com"
     

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Headline: NSA abandons wondrous stuff
Subhead: <box>Surprises: Astronomers who took over an abandoned spy base find remarkable, expensive and often incomprehensible stuff at every turn.

By Laura Sullivan
SUN NATIONAL STAFF

TRANSYLVANIA COUNTY, 
N.C. - Along the long, twisting road through the Pisgah National 
Forest, the first sign that something is out of the ordinary 
is a line of giant transformers. Then, around the bend, a barbed-wire 
fence, guard shack and surveillance cameras protect what looks 
like nothing more than another hill of trees and dense shrubbery. 

It is anything but. 

This is the entrance to one of the National Security Agency's 
former spy stations, a place shrouded in secrets and denials, 
the source of local lore that seems right out of "X-Files." 

What is inside that giant geodesic dome that looks like a golf 
ball? Where do the tunnels snaking beneath the 202-acre site 
lead? Why are the rugs welded to the floors of the windowless 
buildings? 

Few people have been beyond these gates, deep inside the Appalachian 
Mountains, 50 miles southwest of Asheville. 

The NSA abandoned the site to the U.S. Forest Service five years 
ago, leaving behind a deserted minicity in the middle of nowhere. 
Now, some of the secrets are being revealed. 

Last year, with the base boarded up and close to demolition, 
the property was transferred to a group of astronomers in exchange 
for a piece of land in western North Carolina. Over the past 
year, they have begun piecing together the site's past. 

"There 
are things on this site you will never see anywhere else," 
said site manager Jim Powers. "I've never had someone 
come here that wasn't blown away." 

The astronomers, who formed the Pisgah Astronomical Research 
Institute, were attracted by two 85-foot satellites dishes on 
the site - some of the largest in the country - which could be 
repositioned to catch deep-space radio signals and allow them 
to study the life and death of stars. 

When the group arrived in January 1999, they expected a basic, 
albeit large, government facility, but as the weeks passed they 
realized little about the site was what it appeared. 

As they began to install their computers, they found hundreds 
of miles of top-of-the-line cabling running under every floor. 
They discovered that the self-contained water and sewer treatment 
plant could handle tens of thousands of gallons of water at a 
time and the generator could produce 235 kilowatts of energy 
- powerful enough to light up a small city. 

In a basement room of one of the larger buildings, they found 
the entrance to a 1,200-foot tunnel system that connects two 
of the site's main buildings. 

Every inch of floor in more than four buildings was covered 
with two-by-two-foot squares of bleak brown carpet. When the 
astronomers tried to replace it, they discovered it was welded 
with tiny metal fibers to the floor. The result, they eventually 
realized, is that the rugs prevent the buildings from conducting 
static electricity. 

Even the regular lighting looks different, covered by sleek 
metal grids that prevent the light bulbs from giving off static 
interference. The few windows are bulletproof. 

But what fascinated the astronomers was the still-operable security 
system that, among other things, sounds an alarm in the main 
building any time the front perimeter is crossed. The group can 
watch on monitors as cars approach from miles away. 

Inside the site, the agency had taken further measures. One 
area is in a small, sunken river ravine surrounded by barbed 
wire and an additional guard post. Steps, with reflective metal 
paneling to shield the identity of those walking beneath, lead 
down a small hill and wind their way to two small buildings with 
conference rooms inside - both of which once emanated "white 
noise" to prevent electronic eavesdropping. 

What Powers and several others in the group find remarkable, 
though, is not just the expansive network of buildings and security, 
but the extraordinary cost of all they items they have found 
- items the agency discarded. 

He said the extensive fiber optic cabling that runs for miles 
under the floors and through the tunnel system is the most expensive 
on the market. 

When a state regulator came out to issue a permit for a massive 
underground storage tank with a double lining, the astronomers 
said he told them he wished he had a camera. He wanted to take 
a picture to show his co-workers because he had never seen a 
system so sophisticated. 

And the agency didn't just install one water tank; it installed 
two. In a basement room, beneath a system that pressurizes wells, 
is another system just like it. 

"You see this kind of thing everywhere here," Powers 
said. "They never have just one of something." 

Even most of the heavy bolt locks - which every door has - are 
covered by black boxes locked with padlocks. 

Despite the site's stark appearance, there are some human 
- and humorous - vestiges. A bright happy face is painted on 
the smallest of the four satellite dishes on the site, something 
one former employee said was done so that they could "smile 
back at the Russians." 

Inside the tunnels, too, are chalk drawings of animals and warriors 
resembling those found in caves thousands of years ago. 

Aside from the rustling of deer and the wild turkeys that run 
rampant across the hundreds of vacant parking spaces, everything 
about the place is now eerily quiet. 

Paperwork in the guard shack is held in place by a stapler though 
no one has been inside the small building in years. Security 
cameras still work and alarms all still sound, though no one 
is listening. 

When the agency withdrew in 1995, some of the 300 workers, especially 
those who grew up locally and got hired on as groundskeepers 
and mechanics, returned to the nearby towns, though many say 
they are still forbidden to talk about their work. 

Most of the others - the security officers, military personnel 
and cryptologists - left the area for their next Department of 
Defense post. 

The site dates back to the early 1960s, when a scaled-down version 
was carved out to support the space program. It was operated 
at first by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 
and scientists used the early satellite dishes to track the flights 
into outer space and kept the door open for school groups and 
visitors who wanted to learn more about space missions. 

But suddenly in 1981, the NSA took over from NASA. Local hikers 
and hunters who stumbled onto some of the agency's acreage 
would be suddenly surrounded by armed guards who appeared as 
if from nowhere to escort them out of the woods. Vans with darkened 
windows shuttled past the local coffee shops, fueling rumors. 

The agency's presence was hard on the local employees as 
well. 

Don Powell began working on the site in 1967 as a car mechanic 
and spent the next three decades learning the mechanics of every 
inch of the satellite dishes for the Defense Department. He also 
learned to avoid questions about his work and to lie to his neighbors. 

For 15 years people would approach him and the few other local 
workers, asking what was out there, what they did and, of course, 
what is that golf ball? 

"The kids would always ask, what's in [that] giant 
dome?" 

He would tell them it was "filled with chocolate pudding," 
he said. "I couldn't even tell my wife. I couldn't 
tell anyone." 

The 1995 closure appears to have caught the agency by surprise. 
It had recently cleared several more areas and laid the foundations 
for additional smaller satellite dishes that were never built. 
One newly built satellite dish, which one insider says was never 
turned on, was dismantled and shipped to England. 

The Forest Service tried unsuccessfully to engineer a land trade 
for three years, hampered by a site that posed many problems 
for the few interested parties - from the remote location to 
the expense of removing satellite dishes embedded 80 feet into 
the ground. 

The agency was about to return with a bulldozer when the astronomers 
group, headed by benefactor J. Donald Cline, a scientist and 
former computer executive, offered to buy and trade 375 acres 
along the French Broad River in North Carolina for the spy station. 

What made the site, shielded from interference in a natural 
bowl-shaped terrain, so perfect for the NSA made the site perfect 
for the astronomers as well. They plan to use the satellite dishes 
to read the characteristics of elements given off by dying stars. 

"This area is free of light pollution," Powers said, 
as he stood in the middle of a vast, empty parking lot. "It's 
also clean in terms of electromagnetic interference like cell 
phone towers or things that create electromagnetic noise. 

"And 
we can be sure there won't be any in the future because the 
Forest Service owns everything around here. ... It's easy 
to see why they liked this place." 

Recently, in one of a dozen large empty rooms in one of four 
mostly empty office buildings where the group decided to set 
up shop, four scientists stood around a portable panel of monitors 
and computers, watching the results of a test appear on a screen. 

"It's stardust," said the site's technical 
director, astronomer Charles Osborne. "This stuff is just 
floating around out there. It's the building blocks of life." 

In order to use the satellite dishes, they had to spend months 
trying to slow them down. Both of the 85-foot dishes swing on 
two axes, an extravagance the astronomers suspect allowed the 
agency to swing the face around swiftly to catch up with satellites 
orbiting Earth. The astronomers need the dishes to move no faster 
than the speed of Earth itself. 

But there is much on the site that the astronomers don't 
know what to do with, such as the paper-shredding building up 
on one hill, the large helicopter pad on top of another, and 
down in a valley of well-manicured grass, that giant golf ball, 
similar to those seen at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. 

Close up from the outside, the ball is a circle of triangles, 
no two identical, that feel like Gore-Tex to the touch. When 
one triangle at the bottom is pushed, several triangles around 
it gyrate, letting off a low grumbling sound of bending metal 
echoing throughout the ball. 

Inside, past a small door less than 4 feet tall, the ball glows 
white, lighted by the sunlight outside reflecting and bouncing 
inside from one triangle to another. 

In its center is a 40-foot satellite dish, cleaner and smoother 
than any of the others. It looks new, though it has been there 
for years. There are unusual numbered patterns on the dish's 
white panels, laid out like a cheat sheet to a jigsaw puzzle. 
The astronomers believe that the triangles vary in size as a 
clever way to minimize the effect of interference that comes 
from patterns. 

Enclosing the dish under such a surface, they speculate, would 
protect it from the weather, and prevent anyone else from seeing 
it or reading the direction it is pointed. 

For the astronomers, though, this curious dish is somewhat irrelevant. 
They need dishes with large faces, like the two bigger ones, 
to read the radio signals of stars millions of light-years from 
Earth. 

>From far above on the perfectly level, perfectly painted helicopter 
pad with a view of miles of mountains and green trees, Powers 
laughed at the differences between the previous owners and the 
astronomers, a group short on staff and scraping for funding. 
He studied the golf ball. 

"You'll go a long way before you find anything like 
that around anywhere else," he said. " ... But nothing 
about this place is what it seems." 






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