For 30 years, the United States government maintained a fully operational secret nuclear bunker beneath the most famous luxury resort in America — and the entire town of White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia agreed to pretend it wasn’t there.
In Episode 6 of Just Killing Time, we go 720 feet underground into Project Greek Island — a 112,544 square foot Cold War relocation facility built to house every single member of Congress while the rest of the country burned. Behind a door marked “Danger: High Voltage Keep Out,” a 28-ton blast door. Beyond that: 1,100 assigned beds, 18 dormitories, a 400-seat cafeteria with fake windows, a decontamination shower, a TV studio with a seasonal Capitol backdrop, and a “pathological waste incinerator” that was in fact a crematorium.
We trace the story from a Kansas boy stuck in Nebraska quicksand in 1919 — a young Dwight Eisenhower on the Transcontinental Motor Convoy — through the Interstate Highway System (whose first completed section was, of course, in Kansas) and into the hillside behind The Greenbrier. We meet Forsythe Associates, the fake TV repair company staffed by Pentagon-cleared intelligence operatives who maintained the bunker for three decades. We sit with the moment the bunker was completed — six days before the Cuban Missile Crisis — and was deemed too dangerous to use. And we follow reporter Ted Gup’s tape recorder onto the hotel manager’s desk in 1992, and Katharine Graham’s response when the White House asked her not to publish: “Don’t worry. We’ll do what we believe is right.”
Somewhere in America right now, there is almost certainly another one. A normal member of Congress, as the Washington Post’s Bill Arkin put it, “knows nothing.”
This is a standalone episode. A boy from Abilene. A grid of Kansas roads running to the horizon. And a bunker under a ballroom that was built for a war that never came.
Sources include: The Nuclear Museum, Civil Defense Museum, The Washington Post, National Archives, Eisenhower Presidential Library, Federal Highway Administration, and Kansas Geological Survey. Full citations on YouTube.
Runtime: approximately 65 minutes • Category: True Crime / History / Conspiracy • Explicit: Clean
If you’ve ever felt like the official story just doesn’t add up, you’re in the right place. Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton unravels true crime cases and the conspiracies lurking beneath them — one uncomfortable truth at a time.