Dungeons of Washington, D.C.: the contract C-9568
Originally posted in @vatfor Telegram channel (https://t.me/vatfor/5050)
November 25, 2019
This is a story about how deep a rabbit hole American taxpayers’ money can fall into. (Vatfor has nothing against it, this is just to banter over similar concerns on this side of the ocean.) This rabbit hole has many names: it is called “contract C-9568”, “Clark / Kiewit Utility Project”, “East Utilities Plant”, and even an article about applying agile methodology to crane maintenance (sic!) mentions a suspiciously similar project named “Project 3”. But let’s start from the beginning.
It all had begun back in 2002, in the federal district of Columbia. To fulfill a major Federal contract, two construction companies — Clark Construction and Kiewit — had created two joint ventures, “Clark/Kiewit III, a Joint Venture” and “Clark/Kiewit C4ISR, a Joint Venture”, based in the Arlington area — right behind the Pentagon. Meanwhile, Clark is more famous for the construction of various military bases and federal buildings, although there are also subways in his portfolio. And Kiewit just specializes in mines and subways. They are not above working on energy projects as well, though.
The newly created Clark/Kiewit III had signed with the US Navy (which usually act as the operator and customer of special facilities of federal importance in the United States, including facilities at Camp David and Maryland) a contract number C-9568, which had not got into any of the registers of the US military or federal contracts known, probably due to secrecy. It only had lit up last year — when Clark/Kiewit decided to take the US Navy to court. The issue had been settled before the trial, yet it appeared on the court website.
Instead, the public procurement sites list a subcontract 02-C-9568, already signed by Clark/Kiewit and some private security agency named New Age Protection which, at least from 2005 to 2012, protected certain objects under that subcontract. This agency, by the way, is in itself interesting — it had been created in 2003. Its CEO is a former marine, and its president is a former Pentagon official who spent his life dealing with various special facilities and classified premises.
Back to our Clark and Kiewit. We had learnt there were some active and very secret construction activities happening in Washington for the first time in 2002 from the complaints of local residents to the newspapers. Neighbors of the residence of the Vice President of the United States reported loud drilling and blasting works due to which they could not sleep. The Vice-President, it should be noted, lives on the territory of the so called Naval Observatory, so that journalists requested for comments to the US Navy. The US Navy responded that, “the construction had began a few months ago, we can not tell what we are building, but there is nothing interesting — just some ‘infrastructure improvement and utility upgrade’”. Remember this answer, we will hear it again.
Thanks to the date mentioned and Google Maps which allows anyone to view historical images, we can roll back to that distant 2002 and find what had been happening on the territory of the Naval Observatory. Here is a hangar, under which a mine shaft is dug, and inside this mine the aforementioned underground construction occurs:
A year later, at the end of 2003, the mining at this point finishes, the hangar is dismantled and, after a while, it is erected in a new place where it will remain for the next 13 years. This place is an island on the Potomac river, right across from the Pentagon.
We took a photo from 2007, which clearly shows the characteristic stripes on the roof of the hangar. We don’t know what it is, perhaps, these are just windows.
This construction site was soon stumbled upon by activists of the national movement Save the Mall, engaged in the protection of national parks from destruction. By the way, this island is a national park called East Potomac Park, and nothing can be built inside it without going through a lot of procedures, including public hearings. Unsurprisingly, nothing of the kind happened.
In the Directorate of the national park, activists were told that the land had been withdrawn at a turnout with no explanation, and further inquiries shall be addressed to the US Navy, which in turn assured that everything is in order: it is just “utility assessment and upgrade” happening (Oh!). At the same time representatives of Navy applied strong kung fu: we can’t tell you what it is under construction, but believe us, if you knew, you would prefer it to be built rather than not built.
Park advocates took a couple of photos of the construction site from the ground. Like this.
Corrugated hangars, a blind fence, mess in the territory, fuzzy explanations. All open sources, by the way, designated this site as Clark/Kiewit utility project.
Note that the “tunnel superintendent” Corey Golovich (the wording is taken from his LinkedIn profile, from where we learnt that he is an employee of Kiewit Infrastructure) has an address, but Pentagon employees Brad Rexford and Blake Swanson are designated by a numbered mailbox, which causes a nostalgic smile in our country.
The third hangar appeared in 2008 between the previous two. By a happy coincidence, this place was in a clearing near the left wing of the White House. Here is President Barack Hussein Obama on the background thereof:
At first, journalists did not pay attention to it, but as soon as the excavation works began outside, they immediately rushed to shoot reports about the secret construction in the White House. We, at Vatfor, had had our own interest in this. We planned to find out who was the contractor on this construction. The most obvious method for this is to look at the logos on the machines involved in the construction, and here we encountered a fiasco.
The White House did not deny the direction of construction and even in the book “The White House under Obama” it was written that a “five-storey bunker” was built underground. The construction of the phrase hints at a separate object, but the time of construction and its location tells us that the hangar and the mine shaft built under it were directly related to The Facility we are talking about here.
Back to East Potomac Park.
In 2015, the hangar was finally dismantled. Here a satellite of Google caught a fascinating moment: the hangar is being dismantled, and there is already a newly built building under it.
Today this building stands there behind the same blind fence. If one believes the signs, it is called East Utilities Plant.
Google could not find such an institution in Washington.
A small building remained in the Naval Observatory after the construction was completed.
Later, some more construction works happened, and there appeared two buildings. Judging by the number of cars parked nearby, they are not abandoned.
Overall, the construction works had lasted 14 years and they were completed only in 2016. (The term was revealed thanks to the Mr. Miceli’s request.) Given that the United States are unlikely to face significant problems with defense projects funding, such a construction period may hint on the tremendous size of the subject. Let’s finally put it on the map.
We call these sites shafts following a local (Russian) tradition. The numbering was assigned based on time of appearance.
Is there another mine shaft near the Pentagon? The question is complex — for obvious reasons, during the construction of The Facility, the Pentagon was undergoing reconstruction, so there were quite many mines around. Like this one:
It is noteworthy that this mine is open, not disguised from curious satellites inside a corrugated hangar. Today this location is occupied by a water intake construction fenced in with warning signs that this is Pentagon territory. It is unlikely that this has anything to do with The Facility, rather to the conditioning of the Pentagon itself. Anyway, the water intake is quite large.
In general, if the mine shaft was built into The Facility inside the Pentagon, we either missed it, or it was disguised a little bit better.
Now we try to present some of our thoughts on the configuration of The Facility.
We do not have any additional data on the depth of The Facility but, given the two years term when there was a construction site at the White House and assuming that the only purpose of construction was digging a mine into an already existing facility, its depth can be assumed from 150 to 700 meters. That’s not much. At 150–200 meters, special facilities were buried already in the sixties, and the magic figure of 700 meters of rocky soil comes from numerous American studies on the impact of penetrating nuclear weapons on special fortifications (here is an example). And this figure is even smaller than the project of the so-called Deep Underground Command Center from the sixties, which was proposed to bury more than a kilometer deep. Here is one of DUCC’s visualizations (from here):
Or, if you try to put it on a geological section of Washington and at the same time take into account the knowledge we have about the land part:
We assume the core facility is located under the Pentagon, as in the old projects, but in fact, it makes sense to pay attention to the “Observatory”. There are three reasons why it appears here. It can be an emergency exit from the facility (the escape tunnel) — just a convenient point operated by the Navy away from the main facilities; it can be a point under which the core facility is placed (note how much higher the granite thickness is at this point) — then the facility is mirrored relative to what is drawn in our diagram. Finally, it can be connected to evacuate the Vice President of the United States, if he meets happens to be in his residence in the beginning of a war. However, in the American tradition, the Vice President is not so important to build such epic structures for his safety.
Now a few words on why instead of an egg-shaped tunnel we drew three incomprehensible balls.
The truth is, there is the Protective Design Center inside the corps of military engineers of the U.S. military. Unfortunately, after their site attracted subscribers of the thematic group at the yahoogroups.com (they managed to write a letter to Pentagon asking if they really see what they see), the site ceased to be available from the Internet, and now there is only this incomplete residue on the Web Archive.
Nevertheless, there we see an interesting picture titled “Underground Center”. Good people have kept it for us in full resolution:
Surprisingly, here is drawn something confusingly similar to the unified command post 15V210, used in the Russian army.
Unfinished “15V210” command post (from here)
As can be understood, this ball was designed in that Protective Design Center for the modernization of the Raven Rock special facility, but the modernization did not take place, and the experience gained by the Center in its design “was used for the construction of facilities in District [of Columbia]”.
It is difficult to tell if such spherical workings are applied in The Facility. But the suspension of internal structures on shock absorbers is most likely there.
Finally, the last speculative assumption concerns the use of a nuclear power unit for backup power supply of the object. The idea sounds almost crazy, but first, Kiewit has a license for nuclear power.
Secondly, one of the few persons who reveals his affiliation with Clark/Kiewit in social networks, Mr. Ronald Castro, has a rather interesting biography: he served in the Navy as the operator of a nuclear reactor. Then he worked for many years at Kiewit Energy and now in Washington he is commissioning a secret Federal project.
Finally, Mr. Blake Swanson, mentioned in the above “site on the island” contacts screenshot, as follows from a Facebook account which, we believe, belongs to him, “hung out in the naval training command for nuclear energy” which usually trains military personnel and other civilians authorized for working in the field of nuclear energy.
This, of course, may mean absolutely nothing.
Vatfor does not know about actual implemented cases of backup power supply for special fortifications where nuclear power is used (except for various kinds of RTGs), but there were quite a lot of projects on both sides of ocean.
Concluding, The Facility was built and they lived happily ever after: Clark/Kiewit, for example, won the tender for the construction of the Washington subway and has already got into a number of scandals related to the supply of substandard materials, poor performance of works, breaking deadlines etc.
We at Vatfor, on the other hand, continue to watch the information popping up with curiosity. If you have something to tell about this construction, please contact us: vatfor@protonmail.com
Special thanks to all our correspondents. Their names have been intentionally left blank.
