The FBI played a critical role in Project 908: selection and analysis of locations throughout the United States for use during and after a crisis. Agreements were made with various businesses for leasing of space and resources for use by the U.S. government during the crisis period.
Survivable communications
Most of the money was used to design and build relocatable communications vans that would be activated if there was a threat of nuclear war. The rationale for relocatable vans was that the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon and the Alternate National Military Command Center located in the Raven Rock Mountain Complex were already targeted by the Soviet Union and therefore would not survive a nuclear strike. The same criticism could not be leveled at the Boeing E-4 aircraft that made up the National Emergency Airborne Command Posts, but the plan for relocatable communications vans went forward nevertheless. The government agency that was the strongest advocate for relocatable vans was the Defense Communications Agency, since renamed the Defense Information Systems Agency, whose responsibility it was to plan for continuity of military communications despite the possible loss of both land and satellite-based links. This necessitated the development of alternatives that would be independent of both land lines and land-based radio systems, and also satellites, all of which were thought to be possibly subject to destruction or impairment in an all-out war. The alternatives needed to be capable of being relocated, perhaps frequently, and set up rapidly in a new location when necessary. Since the facts of nuclear warfare also seemed to indicate that High Frequency Radio propagation might be disturbed by unfamiliar nuclear effects, this led to the consideration of exotic technologies such as troposcatter and meteor burst communication links. Such systems, while effective, used relatively small antennas and could indeed be transported efficiently and economically in relocatable vans.
Facilities
The Federal Reserve established Mount Pony under the NPO where billions of dollars in currency was stored in a hardened bunker. The cash was to be used to restart the economy east of the Mississippi River in case of a nuclear war. The facility also housed the central switching center for the Federal Reserve's Fedwire system until 1988 when all money was removed, switching was decentralized, and the site deactivated as an NPO facility.
Cover
The NPO was organized in the mid-1980s under a retired Army Lieutenant General, and funded in an initial amount of $2.7 billion in so-called black money. The NPO set up offices at 400 Army-Navy Drive in the Crystal City section of Arlington, Virginia. The NPO recruited communications specialists and retired military officers to do staff work. It was known as the Defense Mobilization Systems Planning Activity, a cover organization. A special security compartment named CHALIS was established for classified documents, which were distributed with a yellow stripe down the right border.
