WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W.Va. -- Fourteen years after a newspaper article exposed the government secret he'd kept since 1980, Ted Kleisner can still recall in detail the moment he realized they were busted.

Washington Post reporter Ted Gup checked into The Greenbrier resort, requested a room on the fourth floor in the West Virginia Wing, walked into Kleisner's office and pulled from his briefcase detailed drawings of the top-secret nuclear fallout shelter built underneath a wing of the hotel.

"I said to myself, 'I believe we're going to have a problem here,' " said Kleisner, now president of The Greenbrier. "And when things go wrong, they go absolutely wrong."

Kleisner kept his mouth shut, but in May 1992, the article was published.

Today, not only is the secret out, the resort has also just completed two years worth of renovations on the more than 112,000-square-foot nuclear fallout shelter commissioned by President Eisenhower in the late 1950s to house Congress. It will reopen for hotel guest tours Monday and to the public Aug. 20.

As officials gathered Friday to mark the bunker's reopening with members of the media, bitterness about the revelation of the shelter's existence lingered.

"It hurt us down here, it hurt us in so many ways," said Paul "Fritz" Bugas, who operated Forsythe Associates, the cover company for the government employees who operated the bunker. "The cover had been so hugely successful ... Personally I felt it a great disservice to the country. It took away a relocation site that was viable, up and running."

The renovations are meant to preserve the bunker's history for tourists, but primarily allow The Greenbrier to rent out the space for companies to store their documents in a secure, climate-controlled facility.

Kleisner said he was unsure they'd ever find another lucrative use for the underground, concrete complex until realizing the demand for safe document and data storage. In 2000, Greenbrier County residents voted against a referendum to allow the hotel to operate a casino in the bunker.

To the tour, they added an exhibit about the bunk rooms, medical facility, communications area and security that would have been used if the shelter had ever been occupied, and a video of Cold War and bunker history.

Recent renovations also include changing the bunker cafeteria into The Greenbrier's culinary school and ridding the bunker of asbestos. Current projects include refurbishing and modernizing the two meeting rooms that were built for the House of Representatives and the Senate.

It was no longer considered a viable shelter for the nation's legislative branch after that 1992 Washington Post story detailed its location and the complex secret-keeping operation, including exposing Forsythe Associates, a company that operated the bunker for the government under the guise of being television repairmen for the hotel.

It was kept an official secret for more than 30 years, hidden behind three cleverly disguised steel and concrete doors so large the railroad had to design special cars to transport them.

It took three years for the federal government to move out of the Greenbrier, disassembling a facility that had been kept in operating condition since 1961 with military Meals Ready to Eat, prescription medicine, clothing, congressional documents and even spare eyeglasses for the representatives and senators.

It was kept in a constant state of readiness to house a maximum of 2,500 people including members of congress, their staff and family members if there was space.

"That's one of the most remarkable things about this project, to keep a secret for that long a time," said George White, former architect of the Capitol, who served as a liaison between The Greenbrier and the government. "I was just a country boy from Cleveland, so to be put in the middle of something like this was a shock."

In the event of an imminent threat of nuclear war, members of Congress, most of whom did not know the facility existed, would have been given the option of traveling by train -- later by air -- to the bunker. Questions remain as to whether the plan was even viable, many of which were raised by the Washington Post article.

Regardless, those involved in the project still take enormous pride in it.

Larry Mazey, former chief financial officer for The Greenbrier and currently president and chief executive of the document storage company CSX-IP said he remembers his parents getting soil delivered to his childhood home in White Sulphur Springs, free to any resident who wanted it from the massive hole being dug for the bunker.

"I was very proud. The town has a huge sense of pride," Mazey said. "The mystique of the bunker will not die."

On the Net:

www.greenbrier.com