The Quiet Zone

by Stephen Kurczy

  Bob built a cabin using hand tools. It had no telephone, electricity, running water, or indoor toilet. He met Ginger in 1980 while visiting Boston, and the following year she moved in with him. After having two children, they built a bigger house with solar panels and plumbing. Bob used the G.I. Bill to pay his way through the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine and worked in health care for about thirty years, including a decade operating a clinic in the nearby town of Hillsboro. Ginger became a librarian. When I later met their son, Andrew, he was converting an old Lobelia schoolhouse into a home for himself, and I asked why he hadn’t branched off to find his own paradise, as his father had done. “I felt like he had already figured it out,” Andrew said. “The environment is unspoiled and pristine. Humans haven’t had much of a chance to ruin it. It’s a nice legacy to continue.”

  And the hippies never really stopped coming. Through Yew Mountain Center, I later met a rugged-looking character from New Jersey named John Leyzorek, who’d moved to Pocahontas in 1988 after going to the Princeton Public Library and studying maps for a place on the East Coast with no highways, cities, military bases, or nuclear plants. I hadn’t realized so many people went to the library to figure out where to live. He purchased a six-hundred-acre parcel in central Pocahontas at $180 an acre. He later befriended a retired biologist from Maryland named Joel Rosenthal, who in the early 2000s purchased a 262-acre tract in southern Pocahontas where he started rehabilitating wild animals, from fawns to cubs. When the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources charged Rosenthal with illegal possession of wildlife, Leyzorek assisted him in a four-year legal battle that went all the way to the state supreme court, with Rosenthal ultimately winning the right to care for animals on his property, which he called Point of View Farm. The county had also been host to a well-known, 180-acre hippie commune called the Zendik Farm, which aimed to overthrow America’s consumerist “Deathculture” and save the world from environmental catastrophe.

  Had I walked into a dream? An elderly man was cohabitating with bears down the road from the world-famous clown doctor Patch Adams and just a few miles from a hippie enclave, all of them sharing a patch of Appalachia with world-renowned astronomers and secretive government operations. The area seemed tinged with magical realism, with an impossible menagerie of eccentrics congregating in the forest. How had so many random groups found their way to the same corner of West Virginia?

  “All of these subcultures came here for a reason,” said Dale, the former sheriff. To escape. To be left alone.

  Not all the hippies settled permanently in Pocahontas. In 1984, Laurie Cameron found himself trying to sell a 267-acre parcel in Mill Point that he’d initially purchased with friends to create a commune. After their plan fizzled, they put the land back on the market, and Cameron gave a property tour to an interested buyer who characterized himself as part of a church. During their walk-around, the man seemed to be sizing up the land’s potential as a militia base, showing special interest in a ridge above the property. “He was interested in these heights and places that had wide fields of fire,” said Cameron, himself an army veteran.

  Just before selling the property, Cameron happened to read an article in the Washington Post about extremist groups in the United States and thought he recognized one of the people. Sure enough, it was William Pierce, the man with whom he’d spent seven hours walking around Mill Point.

  Pierce had been on law enforcement’s radar for several decades. In the ’60s, he was a high-ranking member of the American Nazi Party led by George Lincoln Rockwell, a bombastic man with a penchant for “Heil Hitler!” salutes. After a former party member assassinated Rockwell in 1967, Pierce became a leader of Youth for Wallace, which supported the presidential bid of George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama. In 1970, Pierce reconfigured Youth for Wallace as the National Youth Alliance, which became the National Alliance in 1974 to appeal to a wider audience. He started a monthly newspaper called Attack! that sold guns for “urban firefights,” gave assassination tips, and provided bomb-making instructions. From 1975 to 1978, while in his early forties, Pierce wrote and serialized The Turner Diaries in Attack! Though poorly written even by Pierce’s own judgment, the book quickly became a fundamental document for extremists, in part because of how it reframed white nationalism as a struggle against a tyrannical government. Inspired by the novel, some National Alliance members helped form a gang called the Order that, along with committing robberies and murdering perceived enemies, stole $3.6 million from an armored vehicle in California. A member of the Order later told FBI agents that he personally gave $50,000 in stolen funds to Pierce, who was suspected of having used the money to purchase the land in Pocahontas.

  Cameron proceeded with the sale, but he also called the Washington Post to tip journalists off. Within weeks, according to Cameron, newspaper reporters and FBI agents had visited the area to keep tabs on one of the most dangerous hate leaders in America.

  BACK ON THE FOUR-WHEELER, Pringle and I drove deeper into the National Alliance compound, coming to the organization’s old meeting hall, surrounded by overgrowth. Inside, the smell of mildew was overpowering. No gatherings had been held here since at least 2010, Pringle said, though he claimed to have witnessed $80,000 in donations pour in during single meetings. When Pierce was alive, the National Alliance had hosted biannual summits with as many as 125 people.

  The floor was lined with boxes of books, the kind you’d find at any bookstore. I spotted Killing Kennedy, by Bill O’Reilly, alongside All Too Human, by George Stephanopoulos. Atop one box was a battle shield, the kind actually used for combat, emblazoned with “an Aryan Nations symbol of some kind,” according to Pringle. He said he was bringing in a construction worker who could rehab the building and turn the upstairs into a library and a workout gym. He claimed it would be the largest library in the county, even though most of the organization’s books—an estimated twenty-seven thousand volumes—had already been relocated to Tennessee. Pringle said another building on the compound held boxes “stacked high to the ceiling” of The Turner Diaries. Considered by the FBI to be “the bible of the racist right,” the book was credited with helping inspire a militiaman named Timothy McVeigh to bomb a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people and injuring another 680 in what remains the deadliest incident of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. “We’re the preferred seller on Amazon,” Pringle boasted of a book linked to at least forty terrorist attacks and hate crimes in the United States and overseas—the most recent of them the 2016 assassination of a British parliamentarian. He seemed to enjoy talking, and I didn’t want to stop him, because I thought this might be my only chance to learn about the National Alliance from an insider. He was divulging far more than I’d expected to hear, and it was alarming.

  As we revved along on the four-wheeler, Pringle pointed toward Pierce’s former residence, a single-wide mobile home that I would have overlooked because it was surrounded by tall shrubs and trees. The floor was rotting out and the ceiling was caving in. This was where Pierce died of cancer in 2002.

  In the nearby woods, Pringle had inoculated several logs with shiitake mushroom spores. He also showed me his homemade apiary. He said he wanted to make a sign that said “Our Bee Wants Free,” a riff on the phrase “Arbeit Macht Frei” that had hung at the entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Pringle thought it was funny because he found the whole idea of the Holocaust a joke—“Allied propaganda,” he called it.

  We rode another half mile uphill to the property’s highest point, which had a panoramic view of surrounding farmland and mountains. There was a picnic table and a fire pit with charred beer cans, remnants of a gathering that Pringle had organized a few nights earlier. He said we stood on Pierce Point, where the late leader’s ashes were scattered. Upon Pierce’s death, the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke credited him with making “a tremendous contribution to our cause . . . After having read almost every word he wrote, I feel once m
ore as though a family member was lost.”

  Standing atop Pierce Point, looking over the valley toward Droop Mountain, Pringle said he felt out of authority’s reach, with the absence of cell service making it harder for the government to monitor his whereabouts. In a 1987 field report on the National Alliance, the FBI itself lamented that “surveillance opportunities are limited and infrequent due to the remote setting. Ground surveillance . . . is exceedingly difficult. Anyone from outside the area can be readily identified as a stranger by the local residents. Furthermore, the mere presence of strangers is information which is disseminated quickly throughout the area.” The quiet was an asset to the neo-Nazis, a blanket for their ideology to hide under. Relocating to Pocahontas got Pierce away from law enforcement and hostile neighbors that badgered him back in Arlington, Virginia. In a place with a culture of minding one’s own business, he could pursue his radical agenda in relative peace while preparing for a looming race war that he predicted.

  “The thing about Dr. Pierce, he was a strategic thinker and he was thinking tactically,” Pringle said. “He wanted a place he could defend. Even in the throes of violent revolution at lower altitudes, you couldn’t get up here with an infantry division. And he wanted a place where if he had to grow his own groceries, he could. We’re never going to run out of fuel. Look, it’s all over the place,” he said, waving to the trees. “Plus, there’s food walking around everywhere. You kill a doe, a nice young yearling doe, it’s like filet mignon.”

  I LATER LOOKED PRINGLE UP. He had once been on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of “40 to Watch: Leaders of the Radical Right.” (The list was alphabetical, so I didn’t know where he ranked.) I’d had no idea he was so notorious, and I’d heard him strategizing how to bring more white nationalists into Pocahontas County and essentially teach them the religion of The Turner Diaries, which seemed to be experiencing a kind of sinister renaissance. Not a year earlier, the analyst J. M. Berger of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at the Hague had warned that the book was likely to gain new traction amid a “highly charged social climate” in which “mainstream politicians ratify white racial fear and white nationalist beliefs predicated on worries about terrorism and immigration.” If the National Alliance really was staging a revival, I thought authorities would want to know, so I called up the former county sheriff David Jonese in Green Bank.

  “I know a few guys who are sympathizers, they’re not doing anything,” Jonese told me, shrugging off the idea of the National Alliance posing any threat. Besides, he said, there was no law against being a neo-Nazi. “You can’t legislate it, you can’t change it, so you just learn to suck it up and live with it.”

  Jonese said his biggest concern in Pocahontas was drugs from a region-wide opioid epidemic. Only once during his eight-year tenure as sheriff had he responded to a problem at the National Alliance, when its chairman, Will Williams, was accused of assaulting a woman who worked there. Jonese had taken Williams into custody. “I talked to him for several hours while he was in prison,” Jonese said. “He’s actually a very cordial guy.”

  Chapter Nine

  “A Low Roar”

  CHUCK NIDAY HELD WHAT LOOKED like a futuristic stun gun from Star Trek. It allowed the Quiet Zone cops to find electric poles causing interference to the telescopes. The device picked up radio frequencies between 320 megahertz and 335 megahertz, which could point Niday toward staticky power lines. He next picked up a giant mallet.

  “This is a troubleshooting technique for noisy power line hardware,” he said as we stood outside the observatory. “You go up to the base of the electric pole and give it a good smack and look for the [radio] noise. If it gets worse, you know the noise is coming from somewhere on the pole. It’s also incredibly dangerous because the noise might be caused by an insulator that’s getting ready to break.” Quiet policing had its hazards.

  Niday put the mallet back inside the government-owned Dodge Ram 2500, an electromagnetic interference tracking truck known by the acronym EMITT. It reminded me of the wraith-hunting vehicle from Ghostbusters, and its aim was similar. Niday was effectively searching for ghosts: the invisible waves of electromagnetic radiation that are all around us, emanating from power lines and WiFi routers, flying through walls and zooming across the sky.

  A bearded, bearlike man in his early sixties, wearing jeans and a ball cap, Niday was on the front line for maintaining Green Bank’s radio-quiet environment. Hypothetically, you couldn’t turn on a smartphone in town without him knowing. This had been his part-time role, in addition to other work at the observatory, since Wesley Sizemore’s retirement in 2011. Niday was also a technician at Alleghany Mountain Radio, where his wife was the manager. (They cohosted a weekly jazz program that had about ten steady listeners—“pretty good for around here,” Niday said.)

  Seventeen antennas protruded from the truck’s roof, a system for pinpointing local sources of radio frequency interference. A main antenna picked up signals from 25 megahertz to 4 gigahertz, while smaller antennas operated as a direction-finding array. “Through some method, which I believe involves witchcraft, it comes up with a direction for the signal we’re looking for,” Niday said. Every few weeks he went out on patrol to keep tabs on local noise levels.

  It started to drizzle, so we hopped in the truck. Wiring snaked from the roof down to a stack of electronics and computer monitors in the cab. “Footloose” played on an AM/FM radio. Over a two-way communications radio, we heard the voices of bear hunters. Their dogs wore radio collars that had the potential to interfere with the telescopes, and these hunters appeared to be veering too close. But Niday had other concerns. He adjusted the dials on a computer to look for signals in the 2.4 gigahertz frequency: WiFi. He shifted into drive.

  As we exited the observatory’s parking lot, the monitor started bleeping angrily. Before we reached the main road, we had picked up thirteen wireless signals. Within a half mile, we found sixty-six signals. Niday’s gadgetry was going berserk, revealing the radio pollution in Green Bank. We passed by Arbovale United Methodist Church, where Niday sang in the choir alongside Betty Mullenax, the elderly cashier at Trent’s General Store across the street. We heard another bleep. Trent’s had WiFi.

  Instead of jumping out of the truck with a pair of handcuffs to bust WiFi offenders, Niday simply took note of the source of radio noise and kept driving. He didn’t seem the least surprised. Within five miles of the telescopes, we counted more than two hundred WiFi signals, some coming from the homes of staff living on the observatory’s own property—a blatant violation of the facility’s regulations.

  “It’s not a radio silent zone,” Niday said, rain beating down on the windshield. “We’re just trying to keep everything down to a low roar.”

  I had always suspected Green Bank was not as quiet as media suggested, but Niday had just revealed a shocking level of noise. How could this be called the quietest place in America? Why had so many news stories portrayed this as a town without WiFi?

  When I was next at Trent’s, I asked manager Bobby Ervine if he’d ever considered installing WiFi.

  He nodded.

  “Do you have WiFi right now?” I asked.

  Ervine nodded again, as if he were letting me in on a dangerous secret. This close to the telescopes, operating any wireless equipment likely caused interference and was arguably breaking state law.

  “Does the observatory know you have WiFi?” I asked.

  “You show me where it says in the law that I can’t have it,” he said, his tone turning defensive.

  NOT LONG AFTER my patrol with Niday, CNN’s medical journalist Sanjay Gupta visited Green Bank, driving into town for an episode of Vital Signs. “National Radio Quiet Zone,” Gupta said to the camera, “that means there’s no cell service, there’s no WiFi, there’s no radio. It’s just really quiet.” Soon after, the TV news personality Katie Couric visited for a National Geographic series. “Green Bank is a town where technology is almost completely banned,
” she said in a bright voice-over when the series aired, later opining, “People here seem happy to follow the law of the land.”

  Had Gupta and Couric so much as searched for a WiFi signal using their smartphones, they might have started to see a messier portrait of the Quiet Zone. Couric’s 2017 visit included a stop into Trent’s, which had installed WiFi a full year earlier. She and Gupta were each surrounded by supposedly banned tech. There was radio. There was WiFi. Even cell service had become negotiable within ten miles of the telescopes.

  In 2015, Snowshoe Mountain Resort, which was about nine miles from the Green Bank Telescope as the crow flies, installed cell service through a specially designed system of 180 low-power antennas distributed around its ski village and slopes. The observatory helped oversee the installation, which reflected a complete reversal from its initial opposition to the mere idea of a ski resort. Back in 1974, the observatory’s director had written a letter to Snowshoe’s developer expressing concern about interference from the resort’s communication system, ski-lift machinery, and automobile traffic. “Green Bank’s high international reputation, and its value to the scientific community, are dependent in no small part on the ‘radio quietness’ of the site,” the letter stated. “We are of course anxious that it remain quiet.” Had something changed?