The Greenbrier by Richard Newton

Everything points to the Greenbrier. Although the famous resort nestles discreetly in an Appalachian valley, seemingly remote from the world, the Washington DC-Chicago railroad skirts the boundary, Interstate Highway 64 passes within two miles, and the nearby regional airport has an incongruous runway long enough to receive jumbo jets. For those wishing to escape America's capital, this stately hotel is the perfect retreat, whether in peace or in war.

With the war on terrorism in full swing, the Greenbrier sits quietly in the wings, for it is no ordinary resort. Its story has always been intimately entwined with the history of the United States, and in these uncertain times the link endures.

At the beginning of February 2002, the Greenbrier's 739 rooms were temporarily closed to paying guests and the nearby town of White Sulphur Springs was inundated with secret servicemen and state police. A private train pulled in bearing as many as 400 dignitaries, and later Air Force One touched down without ceremony. Motorcades swept briskly through the 6500 acres of immaculate gardens and golf courses (three of them) to the Georgian-style main building, which looks like a cross between the White House and Buckingham Palace. For a few hours, the Greenbrier was effectively the seat of power for the most powerful nation on earth. In residence were President George W Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and all of the top ranking Republicans. Few outsiders knew in advance about the gathering. The Greenbrier has always been able to keep a secret.

Take Paul 'Fritz' Bugas, who led a double life here for more than twenty years. As far as the guests were concerned (not to mention most of his friends and colleagues) he was the regional manager of Forsythe Associates, the company charged with maintaining the hotel's many television sets.

"That was my cover, but TV repair work occupied only about twenty per cent of my working day," he says. The rest of the time he was engaged in a duty of national importance.

"All the years I knew Fritz, he never let on," says Dick Brockway, a retired forester who has lived in the area for decades and now guides tourists. "There'd been local rumours that the Greenbrier was hiding something significant, but not in a million years would I have guessed that Fritz was involved in it."

Escorting a group of Greenbrier guests, Brockway has brought us through dappled woodland to a ramp that descends to an aluminium door marked Danger High Voltage. "I now wonder why I wasn't more observant. Why, for instance, did I never consider that this entrance might conceal something other than the hotel's back-up generator? Let's go look."

He pulls the door open, revealing a concrete vestibule and a 25-ton steel blast door. When that opens - with surprisingly little effort, for it is superbly balanced - we step into a 433-foot-long tunnel.

"Welcome to your worst nightmare," murmurs one of my fellow guests.

We have entered the bunker designed to provide the US Congress with refuge in the event of a nuclear war. From 1961 until 1992, when an article in the Washington Post exposed its location, the bunker was kept in permanent readiness by a team of government agents posing as Forsythe employees.

"Throughout my tenure as on-site manager of the facility - that was my real job - we were involved in a constant process of renewal," Bugas explains. "Food supplies were kept up-to-date and were stored along the side of the entrance tunnel; enough to feed a thousand people for sixty days. The communications equipment was state-of-the-art, and included TV and radio studios. The medical centre was always well stocked." (He even ensured that there were current copies of Time magazine on the tables in the waiting room.)

Dr Robert Conte, the Greenbrier's historian, remains amazed by the whole thing. "All of that was going on beneath our feet and we were oblivious. If you want to hide a vast nuclear bunker, where better to put it than underneath a venerable five-star resort?"

And resorts don't come more venerable than the Greenbrier, which, with George Dubya's arrival, has hosted twenty-six US Presidents. It owes its existence to a natural sulphur spring that was originally discovered by native Indians.

"Throughout the nineteenth century, American high society flocked here to take the waters," Dr Conte relates. One advertisement unashamedly bragged that the Greenbrier's spa was 'better than Europe'.

With the outbreak of World War II, the Greenbrier briefly served as a detention camp for German and Japanese diplomats. It wasn't the toughest of regimes; the POWs left a total of $65,000 in tips. After the repatriation of the VIP prisoners, the hotel was converted into a military hospital that included General Dwight Eisenhower among its patients.

Following the restoration of peace, a substantial refurbishment programme was initiated, overseen by the lauded designer Dorothy Draper, whose trademark was the juxtaposition of apparently incompatible colours.

Dr Conte recounts: "Someone once made the mistake of saying to her: 'I don't think green and blue should go together.' Dorothy dismissively pointed outside: 'The grass is green, the sky is blue. If God can do it, so can I.' That was the essence of the woman. She thought she was on a par with God."

Since her death in 1968, her successor, Carleton Varney, has faithfully sustained Draper's style. The flowery schemes shouldn't work, but they do (the line between bad taste and refinement can be a fine one). Even so, stumbling out of bed onto a bright green carpet can be startling first thing in the morning.

The contrast between the busy opulence of the hotel and the austerity of bunker buried beneath the West Virginia wing could not be starker. In fluorescent light, Dick Brockway leads us through the decontamination room in which arriving congressmen would each have had 30 seconds to strip, shower and change into their bunker fatigues. "When a nuclear war's imminent, you don't hang around." They would then have emerged into the main part of the bunker, an extensive labyrinth of rooms and corridors that was designed not just to shelter the politicians, but to function as the seat of government. The location could not have been better: within easy reach of Washington, yet protected by the Allegheny mountains and with prevailing winds from Canada to disperse any radiation.

Two other bunkers, for the president and the judiciary, remain hidden, and, presumably, active. One of them is rumoured to be in another part of West Virginia.

"I was stunned when the truth came out," says Brockway. "I suppose I was also a little hurt that Fritz hadn't selected me to work for him, but hey, what good would a forester have been down here?"

Brockway leads us into a vast, colonnaded room. "Now this is the most amazing thing. This is the Greenbrier's Exhibit Hall, and for years I came here with my wife for exhibitions and dances. How close were we to the bunker? We were in it. It was hidden in plain view."

Two blast doors concealed behind false walls would have sealed the hall off from the rest of the hotel in an emergency. Immediately adjacent to the hall are two auditoriums. "I sat in one of them for my briefing when I was a marshal for the 1979 Ryder Cup, which was held on the Greenbrier Course. Little did I know that I was actually sitting in the House of Representatives."

When I ascend out of the bunker after three hours under ground, I discover that I have missed a thunderstorm, and I can imagine the sense of the displacement that the politicians would have experienced during their time in subterranean isolation, severed from the world above.

Life in the hotel has ticked on. In the main lobby, blue-rinsed women are taking afternoon tea, a tradition that predates two world wars. In the luxurious spa, younger guests are enjoying their daily pampering.

Outside, the puddles evaporate from the golf courses. From the club house there is an excellent view of two adjacent eighteenth greens. Beyond them, several players are clustered on the practise tee of the Sam Snead Golf Academy, named in honour of the golfing great who was closely associated with the Greenbrier from 1936 until his death in 2002.

In February, during lulls in their conference, some of the Republican congressmen were able to fit in a round of golf, or to make use of the resort's many other facilities. But all the time they would have been aware that their country is once again on a war footing, and that beneath the hotel there is concrete evidence of just what that could mean.

"If our cover hadn't been blown by the Washington Post, I'm convinced that the facility would still be on standby today," says Fritz Bugas with undisguised regret. "When the story broke, the bunker, which we referred to as 'Project Greek Island', closed down immediately. Within twenty-four hours we removed all of the most sensitive equipment."

Or did they? Over the past few years the Greenbrier has been developing sections of its wooded hinterland for luxury residential housing. Locals would give you a nod and a wink and hint that there was more to the construction work than met the eye. Could it be that there is another bunker concealed beneath these hills? If so, February's gathering may have been more than just a Republican summit. It could have been a dress rehearsal for the unthinkable.