Published in the March, 2004 issue of The Atlantic
The Armageddon Plan
by James Mann

At least once a year during the 1980s ***** Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld
vanished. Cheney was working diligently on Capitol Hill, as a
congressman rising through the ranks of the Republican leadership.
Rumsfeld, who had served as Gerald Ford's Secretary of Defense, was a
hard-driving business executive in the Chicago area—where, as the head
of G. D. Searle & Co., he dedicated time and energy to the success of
such commercial products as Nutra-Sweet, Equal, and Metamucil. Yet for
periods of three or four days at a time no one in Congress knew where
Cheney was, nor could anyone at Searle locate Rumsfeld. Even their
wives were in the dark; they were handed only a mysterious Washington
phone number to use in case of emergency.

After leaving their day jobs Cheney and Rumsfeld usually made their
way to Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington. From there, in the
middle of the night, each man—joined by a team of forty to sixty
federal officials and one member of Ronald Reagan's Cabinet—slipped
away to some remote location in the United States, such as a disused
military base or an underground bunker. A convoy of lead-lined trucks
carrying sophisticated communications equipment and other gear would
head to each of the locations.

James Mann, former Washington correspondent for the Los Angeles Times,
is senior writer-in-residence at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, in Washington, D.C. This article is adapted
from his book 'Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet'
to be published this month.