Season One Research Files
Episode Twenty
7:00pm-8:00pm
UNDERGROUND DETENTION FACILITIES
There are several instances of such underground facilities attributed to foreign countries holding Prisoners of War. Since the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975, sources have claimed as recently as 1988 that American POWs were being held in an underground prison, next to the Hanoi tomb of Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. But Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) officials say there is no credible evidence that such a prison ever existed. The DIA told reporters that the water table in the Vietnamese capital is too high to permit such a facility to be built.
There is also speculation that Lt. Commander Michael Scott Speicher, the American F-18 Navy pilot shot down in 1991 on the first day of the Gulf War, is still alive in captivity in Baghdad. Intelligence reports from foreign governments state that Speicher is being held in an underground detention facility, either directly under the Iraqi Intelligence Headquarters or in the area of Salman Park where all sorts of military and covert training have been observed. Nothing has been confirmed.
A former prisoner recounted his transfer with forty-seven other detainees in November 1987 to the Syrian city of Tadmor. Supposedly they had all been held in an underground detention facility in Damascus. That underground prison was run by Military Interrogation, a branch of one the internal security forces in Syria called Military Intelligence.
The non-prison underground setting is used in the United States. Under the aegis of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a top-secret underground fortress was built during the early 1950s at a cost of more than $1 billion. The Facility, as it is known, is a sort of nuclear winter White House beneath the solid granite of Mount Weather in Bluemont, Virginia, situated forty-five miles west of Washington. It has been described as an "underground city," complete with roads and a battery-powered subway. It boasts office buildings and hospitals, private apartments and dormitories, and a power plant and artificial lake illuminated by fluorescent light. In the event of a major nuclear or other catastrophe, surviving officials could run the country from The Facility, as well as from FEMA's underground command center in Olney, Maryland and up to fifty regional bunkers throughout the nation. There's even an underground Pentagon more than six hundred feet below solid granite just north of Camp David.
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