How FEMA fought the future - Federal Emergency Management Agency - Column

Confessions of an emergency "planner"

When a Federal Emergency Management Agency spokesman refused last June to release an agency memorandum refuting charges that FEMA was in league with aliens, it came as no surprise to conspiracists. To be sure, the charge had only the plot of a just-released movie (The X-Files: Fight the Future) as its basis, but such involvement would certainly be in character for a federal agency whose fleet of black helicopters is supposedly spotted all the time chasing UFOs in and out of caverns in Arizona.

After all, as Timothy McVeigh's erstwhile buddy, Michael Fortier, used to note in the flyers he handed out at the True Value hardware store in Kingman, FEMA is poised to run the country. At least it is once the United Nations has taken complete control and imposed its "New World Order" (you know, the one that the Trilateral Commission has long been developing in concert with the Council on Foreign Relations).

For a long time, FEMA cleverly hid its plans under a cover of incompetence. In the 1980s, for example, when Ronald Reagan revived the idea of fighting and winning a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, FEMA proposed to evacuate two-thirds of the population to rural areas - a plan that depended only upon the Soviets obligingly assuring us of a full week's notice before attacking. To raise morale among the dubious, the agency put out the good word that food should be no problem in the post-nuclear environment, inasmuch as livestock were far more likely to survive than people.

If called upon to respond to more-mundane threats - floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and the like the agency became famous for dealing slowly, incompetently, and even rudely with the disaster-struck communities seeking federal help. Meanwhile, FEMA provided safe haven for out-of-work pols and other holders of political chits. When Bill Clinton first came to Washington wanting to do something nice for Raymond L. (Buddy) Young, the former head of his Arkansas security detail, he gave him a $92,300-a-year job as director of FEMA's regional office in Texas. And when Young - and later Clinton himself - phoned one of the Arkansas troopers who had been spilling tales of the president's dalliances to the Los Angeles Times, the trooper reportedly said that Clinton offered him a FEMA job too.

Finally, however, when the agency's stumblebum reputation grew so bad as actually to threaten its multibillion-dollar budget, FEMA decided it had better pay more attention to its cover mission. In recent years the agency has responded competently to a record number of natural disasters (a coincidence?). Meanwhile, using the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (and later the Oklahoma City bombing) as justification, the agency has beefed up its capability to deal with chemical weapons, biological agents, and other nonnatural threats. As The Washington Post reported in April 1995, FEMA has held secret planning and training exercises in communities around the country, ostensibly in anticipation of further acts of foreign and domestic terrorism.

But the militia of cyberspace is not fooled. When FEMA announced an evacuation exercise in New Mexico two years ago, one Web site (www.iahushua.com/WOI/FEMA2.html) warned that should a real emergency be declared, "FEMA will...FORCE and escort ALL residents to 'safety zones.'...You will be required to leave your front door unlocked as you leave." And why would FEMA do that? "Folks might want to ask themselves one question, What is the only thing in the world that stands in the way of the full implementation of a worldwide socialistic central corporate government (NOW) and eliminating every trace of Sovereignty and Americanism in existence. OUR WEAPONS - OF COURSE.... This is what they have been practicing for when all the brain dead sheeple were telling us that we did not know what we were talking about."

Of course, most of us know better than that. Or do we?

In fact, FEMA and its predecessor agencies have been planning to take over the U.S. economy for many decades. I know. I was part of the planning effort.

Not many people remember, but FEMA has an ancestry of Pynchonesque intrigue and complexity. Its roots trace back to the World War II Office of Defense Mobilization, an Executive Office agency charged with galvanizing the resources of the civilian economy to support the crash war effort. Working with a small group of economists and operation researchers in the Defense Department and supportive think tanks, the ODM began to develop models of the U.S. economy that would facilitate its command and control in emergency situations.

After the war ended, the Eisenhower administration sent the Pentagon modelers packing based on the not-incorrect notion that their planning efforts smacked of socialism. But the ODM planners got a new lease on life through a merger with the Federal Civil Defense Administration, a ragtag agency newly charged with the impossible job of protecting the civilian population in the event of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.