Major White House Security Upgrade: Trump Rebuilds Command Bunker

The moment news was released about President Trump tearing down the East Wing of the White House to build a grand new state ballroom, I asked myself: “What about the PEOC underneath?”

The Presidential Emergency Operations Center, or the bunker, as some call it, was secretly built as a bomb shelter and underground secure facility for the president and staff right after the attack on Pearl Harbor at the start of WWII.

The East Wing White House extension was built over it, partly as cover for the submarine-like bunker, reportedly 100 feet below ground level. Since it was built, it has evolved from just a bomb shelter into a highly secure and hardened facility with a small living space and secure command center boasting classified, encrypted communications to the outside world — the PEOC.

The complex also reportedly had a secure evacuation route, allowing the president to be taken clandestinely from the White House grounds to another location.

With the dated 1940s-era underground facilities quickly dismantled during the East Wing demolition in October, we may now have some information on what will replace them.

After decades of secrecy, the PEOC was first openly discussed when Vice President Dick Cheney was evacuated there moments before an attack on the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, as officials feared a plane would also hit the White House.

The last time the bunker was widely discussed in the news was in the summer of 2020, when violent BLM rioters in Lafayette Park outside the White House North Gate threatened to overrun the thin line of Park police and Uniformed Secret Service officers arrayed to stop them.

I was there as a security contractor for a foreign TV news crew, and can attest the mob was ugly, attacking police, starting fires, burning cars, and firing industrial incendiary and explosive pyrotechnics at law enforcement. Several dozen officers were injured during the clashes.

I assessed at the time that the mob could swarm the police and breach the older 6-foot-high White House fence and onto the grounds. Note: The new, much-improved, high-tech, hardened 13-foot-high fence surrounding the grounds is a different story.

Either way, after a breach occurs, other than deploying its Belgian Malinois attack dogs and/or firing on the crowd, including using the rooftop snipers, there is little to keep a mob from the mansion itself.

That’s why, at the time, the Secret Service correctly decided to take Trump, First Lady Melania, and First Son Baron into the bunker as a precaution, an emergency move ridiculed by some critics. Trump denied he was directed to go there.

But now we are learning that the hastily demolished East Wing may also have been partly a cover for “top-Secret” efforts to rebuild the underground bunker. While the ballroom will be paid for by private donors, the bunker underneath will be covered by tax dollars.

CNN reports that:

During a recent meeting of the National Capital Planning Commission where the ballroom was discussed, White House director of management and administration Joshua Fisher said broadly that the overall ballroom project will “(enhance) mission critical functionality,” “make necessary security enhancements” and “(deliver) resilient, adaptive infrastructure aligned with future mission needs.”

Fisher was pressed on why the project broke with precedent by starting the demolition process without the commission’s approval — and he indicated that the “top-secret” work taking place underground was the motivation.

“There are some things regarding this project that are, frankly, of top-secret nature that we are currently working on. That does not preclude us from changing the above-grade structure, but that work needed to be considered when doing this project, which was not part of the NCPC process,” he said.

When feasible, the PEOC works in direct coordination with the Situation Room in the White House, said Jonathan Wackrow, a former U.S. Secret Service agent. 

However, he added: “The Situation Room is a much more focused watch center that will feed information over to the PEOC, but because it is a complex that’s in the West Wing [basement], it is secure to a point, but it’s not a hardened facility.”

Meanwhile, we can only speculate as to the exact form the new secure bunker may take, and the advanced technologies it will incorporate to keep the president safe from nuclear, chemical, biological, and terrorist threats, and able to manage a war if needed.

But I expect it to be bleeding edge and impenetrable.

As CNN noted:

Trump has suggested the US military is “very much involved” in the ballroom construction, and it’s likely that the project is being executed by some combination of military officials; Secret Service; the Executive Office of the President; contractor Clark Construction, which has significant experience in highly secure facility construction; and Shalom Baranes Architects, the group leading the ballroom construction, which also led the project to rebuild and fortify the Pentagon after the 9/11 attack.

In the meantime, while the new bunker is being constructed, reliable sources confirm that the president has several alternate secure sites and redundancies in the event of an emergency. So, Trump will be safe.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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