Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 3, 1993 TAG: 9301030049
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PATRICK K. LACKEY LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: CARROLLTON LENGTH: Long
HIS SECRET LIFE BENEATH MOUNTAIN WAS HIDDEN FROM ALL
WHEN HE RETIRED from the federal government, Leo Bourassa opened a fishing resort on Smith Mountain Lake. But until this year, few knew of his past as a secret agent and as overseer of the mountain hideout where the country's leaders would wait out a nuclear war.
As a high school boy in New Hampshire during the Great Depression, J. Leo Bourassa used to cut a 10-by-10-foot hole in the ice over a rock quarry pond and dive through it from a tree jutting out of a granite cliff 75 feet up.
"It was fun, a thrill," recalled Bourassa recently from his Carrollton home, just across the James River from Newport News. "The other kids did it, so I did it."
Bourassa had no idea, of course, that his simple, crazy act would lead to his becoming a circus diver, plunging 100 feet into a tank 8 feet deep, three times a day for $10 a splash, big bucks in those hard times. He was saving money for college.
And what he really didn't know was that one day federal spy recruiters would look at his military record, see that he used to dive from tall towers into tiny tanks, and conclude that this young man could handle pressure.
One thing led to another, and Bourassa ended up managing one of this country's most secret facilities, a hole in a mountain eight miles west of the Northern Virginia village of Berryville in Clarke County, a hole that might have become the new national capital, if nuclear bombs had turned low-lying Washington, D.C., into a lake.
The hole, once an experimental mine tunnel and then a weather station, was bored into super-dense rock, 48 miles west of the capital. The code name for the hole was Mount Weather. Run by the U.S. Office of Emergency Planning, it was 300 feet underground and covered 200,000 square feet, according to documents in the National Archives.
In case of a nuclear attack, the highest federal officials, including the president, might flee there by helicopter and run the country from there, using the latest communications equipment.
When they arrived, Bourassa would ensure that only the several hundred high-ranking officials with special passes got in, and after they were in, he would, as director of the site, be sure that all their needs were met.
He had that job during the hottest years of the Cold War, from 1958 to 1968. If the need arose, he said recently, he would have kept out the president's wife - Mamie Eisenhower or Jackie Kennedy or Lady Bird Johnson - because she didn't have a pass.
The rules, written by President Eisenhower, stated: no spouses allowed. Emotions would be running high, and everyone would have to be treated equally, Bourassa said, to prevent a revolt.
Another of the spouses that would have been excluded, even as nuclear weapons rained from the skies, would have been Bourassa's wife, Hester. She and their four pre-teen daughters would have been on their own, at their home two miles away.
Bourassa never talked about Mount Weather - never even spoke the name to his wife or friends - until this past August, after documents about the facility became public through the National Archives and Time Magazine did a cover story titled "The Doomsday Plan . . . How the U.S. government secretly prepared to save the president and survive World War III."
Suddenly Bourassa was on "The Larry King Show." Suddenly he was free to discuss his service to his country.
A secret life
Working 12-hour days underground at Mount Weather, never seeing the winter sun except for weekends, Bouurassa had thought the unthinkable and planned for a nuclear holocaust.
He watched all the films of nuclear blasts he could get. "How do you know what you are fighting," he asked, "if you can't see it?"
From 1968 until October 1990, Bourassa remained on call to rush to Mount Weather in case of imminent nuclear attack.
Mount Weather remains operational. The beeps you hear on the radio during emergency tests come from that hole in the mountain, Bourassa said.
The facility should remain operable, he added, until the last nuclear bombs are gone, even ours.
Bourassa came to Smith Mountain Lake in 1968 and built the Cedar Key fishing resort on 400 acres he owned near Huddleston. He helped organize the Smith Mountain Lake Association and was a leader in the fight to stop the flow of polluted water into the lake from Roanoke's sewage treatment plant.
Once, when then-Roanoke City Manager Julian Hirst insisted that the lake's water was clean enough to drink, Bourassa filled a jar and brought it to him. The murky water had toilet paper floating in it. Hirst declined a sip.
The fight to clean up the lake led to Bourassa's appointment to the state Water Control Board in 1973. He was on the board until 1985.
Bourassa and his wife sold Cedar Key in 1983. They moved to the Hampton Roads area five years ago to be closer to two of their daughters.
Recently, from his glassed-in porch on Chuckatuck Creek, in clear view of the James River and Newport News, Bourassa discussed living a life secret even from his wife, and thinking every day about a possible nuclear holocaust. He entertained the horrible thoughts most Americans tried to bury deep inside their minds.
Hester said she accepted early in her marriage that there were things she might never learn from her husband.
During World War II, he served four years with the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency.
To this day, Leo has not told Hester what he did during those years, often behind enemy lines. "The goal was to win this war at all costs, to let nothing stand in the way," he said. "All I say is, `We were successful.' "
Through the OSS, Bourassa said, he came to know then-Gen. Eisenhower, who later recruited him to run Mount Weather.
Hester, now 78, never pried, she said, never tried to trick her husband into revealing more about whatever he did.
"I knew it was secret, none of my business, really," she said. "People at parties used to try to get it out of me." But she didn't know much, and what she knew she didn't say.
Occupation: "Bum"
When the family lived near Mount Weather, the back of their home was set into a mountain, but the front was mainly glass. Bourassa, who believed the chance of a nuclear war was about 1 in 4, placed 200 concrete blocks by their house and instructed his wife to stack them in front of the windows in case of a nuclear alert.
"I told him he was crazy," she said smiling. "They weighed about 12 pounds."
Many of the 200 people on the Mount Weather staff were from the Berryville area, but they were sworn to secrecy. Still, residents knew that some kind of secret government facility lay under the mountain and that the road to it was the first to be cleared after every snow.
Once at a dentist's office, Bourassa put on the admissions form that his job was "bum." The dentist said, "Oh, you mean you work on the mountain."
Bourassa's title at Mount Weather was "chief, special facilities planning, office of emergency planning." The congratulatory letters he received on retirement make it clear he did something important very well, but they give no hint what it was, and Mount Weather is not specifically mentioned.
How much did Bourassa worry about a war breaking out and about his family dying? For that matter, it was not known whether even Mount Weather would survive a direct nuclear hit, and it was assumed the Soviets knew of the facility's location despite the heavy secrecy.
"There is a point of no return," Bourassa said. "You can worry yourself sick about something, and you become useless to what you are trying to do. You thought about it, but you had to put first things first for the survival of the nation, hoping you had done everything you could to help out your family.
"You get dedicated, and it is something bigger than you are."
Eisenhower had occasional cabinet meetings at Mount Weather, Bourassa said. "He wanted to get the Cabinet to understand that this was a serious business."
Bourassa said he called only one full alert. On Nov. 9, 1965, when a power failure darkened most of the Northeast, he initially feared there had been a surgical nuclear strike somewhere on the East Coast.
One nagging question was answered that day: How many of the staff members would report to duty, leaving their families behind?
Eighty percent did, Bourassa said.