7 Escape from California: Boltholes at the Bottom of the World
“The most terrible misfortunes are also the most improbable and remote.”
—Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims, 18511
I met Ian Clarry for dinner at Moorish Blue, a restaurant in North Sydney. It overlooked Luna Park, a small but iconic landmark with games and rides. As I walked from the Milsons Point railway station, the colors of the spinning Ferris wheel were reflected in the still waters of Sydney Harbour. Clarry, a self-styled “doomsday capitalist,” had told me that his twenty-eight-year-old Swedish bodyguard, Manny Ray, would “be in attendance” for our 7 p.m. dinner, and texted me a photo of Manny looking ripped at a gym, along with an image of himself driving a yacht in Ray-Bans. I wasn’t sure if this was meant to intimidate or impress me—both, probably. I arrived just as the owner, Jamil, was sending the last customers out the door, closing the restaurant down for our private conference.
Clarry, a Kiwi who preferred to be called by his surname, was the Australia and New Zealand representative for Hardened Structures, a company based in Virginia in the United States that specializes in designing fortified homes, bomb shelters, and hardened military facilities. The people at Hardened Structures seemed to me to be the most elusive of the dread merchants. I’d heard that they were involved in many of the large-scale doomsday community projects that I hoped to visit: Sanctum in Thailand, Fortitude Ranch in West Virginia, Kansas’s Survival Condo, the grandly named Oppidum in the Czech Republic, and some build-outs for California-to–New Zealand émigrés. However, the Hardened Structures website was a smear of vague photographs, technical diagrams, and reports that made drawing any kind of narrative about what they actually did challenging. They also advertised a backyard shelter called the Genesis (playing on the resurrection theme), but the website again provided only schematics, not photos of installed shelters. The owner, Brian Camden, when asked in an interview what they were building for, once gnomically replied that “the only thing we know for sure, is that no one knows what’s going to happen.”2 The thing I didn’t know was how you could build an international business on that premise. When I contacted Camden asking to see what they’d built, he simply sent me another batch of blurry photos that had no context. I was hopeful Clarry could act as gatekeeper and introduce me to Douglas Clark, the Oregon-based project manager for Hardened Structures, so that I could get on-the-ground access to one of their bunkers.
Clarry was welcoming: he’d informed the staff that I’m vegan, and a gorgeous plate of okra, hummus, beetroot, and giant couscous was set before me.3 Clarry pushed his meal aside when it arrived. His bodyguard, meanwhile, ate a plate of salmon at astonishing speed and then started scrolling through his phone rapidly with one thumb, face aglow in the dim lights of the restaurant. As we talked, it became clear that Clarry was incredibly enthusiastic about “asset risk management,” but vague about why it was necessary. His starting point was that the end of the Central American Maya people’s calendar in 2012—which was meant to indicate transformative global events would occur—had caused a significant uptick in interest for bunkered space. It was obviously a thing for dread merchants: Vicino had put a Maya calendar countdown timer on his website in 2011 to encourage buyers.
“Okay,” I said, spooning couscous around. “But there obviously wasn’t an apocalypse in 2012.” Besides—I didn’t add—I knew the calendar didn’t really end in 2012: it was just the end of a four-hundred-year segment in the Maya long-count calendar, another turning of the wheel.
I asked Clarry if the sustained interest in hunkering down, in the lead-up to 2012, perhaps had to do with the more incremental environmental apocalypse picking up speed. Perhaps, I suggested, the Maya calendar thing was a displaced fear over the climate crisis—an especially tangible threat in Australia.
“Global changes are obvious,” Clarry acknowledged, adding that for him the cause of such changes was “irrelevant.” Hardened Structures, he said, with an estate agent’s brightness, “only deals in solutions.” The solutions he proposed were massive, almost government-scale: evacuation plans, off-grid communication networks, and bunkers for dozens, even hundreds, of people. He told me Hardened Structures liked working with “the elite” because they didn’t skimp on cost. As a rule of thumb, Clarry thought that everyone should invest 1 percent of their net worth into prepping for Black Swan events.
“If you make ten million a year,” he said, spreading his hands out on the restaurant table, “would you think twice about putting a hundred thousand of that into security?” Point made, he got up from the table and vanished for ten minutes without explanation. As his dinner congealed, I tried to chat with his bodyguard Manny Ray, who Clarry had told me was a Thai kickboxing champion. Engrossed in his phone, he wasn’t interested in talking.
When Clarry returned, I described the xPoint bunkers, which were selling for a fraction of the amounts he was talking about; a range of people, I observed, seemed to be coveting hardened architecture, not just the rich. He nodded enthusiastically.
“Fortified, off-the-grid, hardened homes with shelters will become the new norm in time,” he said, craning his neck around the corner, toward the front door.
“Are you waiting for someone else?” I asked.
“Nope,” he responded. Other than the clinking of dishes in the kitchen, the restaurant was silent. In a back garden, the owner and two large men were smoking a hookah and sometimes looked in, as if also waiting for someone to enter. The whole scene, the sense of anticipation, was making me jittery.
Hardened Structures was overwhelmed by demand, Clarry told me. Not only were they doing “military-grade risk mitigation for high-net-worth individuals,” they also had government and military contracts for prisons, schools, and shopping malls.4 But when I asked for details of specific projects, Clarry was evasive. He told me that he’d completed “dozens” of bunkers for Silicon Valley elites who wanted a backup location in New Zealand, now seen as the most friction-free and least disaster-prone part of the English-speaking world.
Clarry wanted me to know that they were helping elites to build bunkers, panic rooms, and secure compounds, where the wealthy were parking their money in cryptocurrency outside of the nation-state, expecting its demise in a global catastrophe. They, Clarry and Manny Ray, were determined not just to ride it out but to make economic gain from the disaster.
I wanted to know: Could I visit one of these projects? Yes, said Clarry, “eventually,” though maintaining OPSEC (aka operations security) was paramount. This, apparently, was also the reason for our clandestine meeting—though the veneer of secrecy was quick to wear off, as Clarry explained that he held all his meetings here, that he’d been the best man at Jamil’s wedding, and that he had limitless credit. “I don’t even want to know what my tab looks like,” he said, laughing.
After spending a few hours with him, I began to feel that Clarry was a dread merchant without a product. The only information I managed to extract from him related to his passion for “bitcoin, bunkers and billionaires,” Maya prophecies, and the ZetaTalk conspiracy website, the source of the “Planet X” pole-shift scenario.
It didn’t help that as we talked, both Clarry and his bodyguard were twitchy. At one point, Manny Ray took a gym bag out to his car, saying he was going to work out later. I couldn’t help but wonder what was really in the bag.
Though I’d arrived at the meeting feeling pretty relaxed, I grew tense and could feel my stress levels spiking. My paranoia, I realized, was partly down to spending too much time loitering on conspiracy-laden prepper internet forums, but it was also fueled by the slipperiness of Clarry’s “solutions.” I was frustrated, and felt I was losing my grip.
I told Clarry I had to get going, thanked the staff for the private meal, and headed out. He insisted on walking me back to the station. On the way, I asked him if he could give me some case studies of actual projects with which Hardened Structures was involved. I made sure he got the sense that I would not be returning without something substantial—and physical—that I could visit.
“Okay, I’ve got this covered!” he said, beaming. “I’ll send a message to Jakub Zamrazil, the founder of Oppidum, and see if we can’t link you guys up. Let me also put you in touch with Auggie at Chiang Mai so you can go visit Sanctum. And let’s get you on the phone with Douglas Clark, the Hardened Structures project manager for the US Pacific Northwest.” It seemed as though I was finally getting somewhere.
As I settled back into my office at the University of Sydney the next day, I found myself distracted, unable to focus. I was supposed to be preparing a lecture, but I kept listening to news on the radio instead, waiting for something bad to happen. I soon abandoned all pretense of working and was busily scrolling through a sequence of mildly hysterical news stories about “billionaire bunkers” built by tech giants who were going to “escape” to the Southern Hemisphere—specifically, New Zealand—when I had an epiphany.
Which was this. These stories had started taking hold back in 2012, when police raided the New Zealand property of Kim Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz), a US-born millionaire hacker and founder of Megaupload, a file sharing site. The US wanted Dotcom extradited for piracy—the Feds were being pressured by global media conglomerates who wanted the man behind bars. While his mansion was ransacked by seventy-two police officers—like the old FBI survivalist raids—Dotcom hid in a panic room he’d built. When the police finally cut their way into it, they found the six-and-a-half-foot-tall, three-hundred-pound black-clad man sitting inside with a loaded sawed-off shotgun, holding three passports under different names, a bulletproof wristwatch, and twenty-five credit cards.5
After being caught up in a seemingly endless battle over extradition and appeals during the next seven years, Dotcom finally told New Zealand Herald journalist Steve Braunias that he’d bought the land on the South Island in preparation for the Fall.6 “New Zealand was going to be a bolthole, a bunker,” he said. “I never had a plan to live here permanently until we [were] close to the event… [but] I may have accelerated it, because I told my friends in the Silicon Valley, and I’m very well connected.” Dotcom was convinced we were approaching the end times. “Humanity is heading to a large mass casualty event simply because of the increase in population and the pressures on resources, and the political pressure that causes,” he said. He fantasized about building a compound for thirty to forty people, where they could wait out the impending collapse. His arrest triggered a slew of media stories perpetuating the idea that tech moguls were all building “doomsteads” in New Zealand—all of which could be traced back to 2012, the same year as the end of the Maya calendar, the same crescendo in interest that Clarry saw for bunkered space.
The evidence for an exodus of the rich to New Zealand looks compelling. According to the 2013 census, more than half of the 2,781 homes in Wanaka (a resort town on New Zealand’s South Island) were unoccupied. Many were owned by foreigners.7 LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman claimed that among his techno-aristocrat friends “saying you’re ‘buying a house in New Zealand’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more.”8 Meanwhile, then–prime minister John Key, seeing it as a boon to the economy, was cheerleading for preppers to relocate, reiterating that New Zealand was the safest place to be in the event of Armageddon. In 2017 PayPal founder Peter Thiel was handed a Kiwi passport at an embassy in Santa Monica, California, enabling him to purchase a 477-acre property on Lake Wanaka.
Yet every journalist who flew to New Zealand attempting to drill down into these “boltholes of the rich and famous” stories came back with pretty flimsy evidence that people were burying bunkers there. For instance, a 2018 article by Olivia Carville in Bloomberg reported that seven Silicon Valley entrepreneurs had purchased two three-hundred-square-foot bunkers from Rising S in Texas and had them shipped to two locations in New Zealand: Picton, across the Cook Strait from Wellington, and Auckland’s Waitematā Harbour.9 They were supposedly buried soon afterward.
The CEO of Rising S, Gary Lynch (whom I’d interviewed, of course, in my time in Texas) claimed that he’d in fact shipped about thirty-five underground bunkers to New Zealand from the Dallas factory that I’d visited. However, local councils in New Zealand had no evidence of shipment, transport, or planning permission for these massive structures.10 The same Bloomberg article contained the by now almost obligatory quote from Robert Vicino, who airily claimed to be getting to work on a bunker in New Zealand that could accommodate three hundred people. This was news to me.
The media hype around the Kiwi bunkers, which I’m convinced was all precipitated by the story about Dotcom’s panic room, reminded me of the “sea steading” panic of the early 2000s, when Silicon Valley elites were supposedly all going to do business on floating platforms or reappropriated cruise ships in international waters off the coast of San Francisco—all to remain beyond the sway of immigration authorities, tax collectors, and labor laws. Ultimately people forgot about those plans and moved on.
The simple fact is that if people like Tom, Milton, and Mark back at xPoint in South Dakota were willing to stump up $40k to $50k to invest in their own safety by building out a remote bunker, it’s easy to imagine that a billionaire might drop $20 to $30 million on protection. For Peter Thiel (net worth: $2.3 billion), meeting Clarry’s 1 percent test would mean investing $23 million in security. So, while there’s no evidence that he had some massive subterranean lair at Lake Wanaka, the fact that Thiel turned his walk-in closet into a panic room in another house he had built in Queenstown an hour away isn’t too surprising. In the end, having two passports and a private jet to a remote estate is a pretty solid bug-out plan: you don’t need a blast shelter, geography is the bunker.
My curious contemplation, as I scrolled through all those stories to avoid looking at my empty PowerPoint lecture slides, was whether in New Zealand the bunkers were a red herring; it was the ideology behind the bugout that mattered. The paradox in any truth behind the stories was that the tech giants of Silicon Valley—or some of them, anyway—were making a fortune from the systems they felt might trigger a disaster. Peter Thiel’s stated goal in starting PayPal, for instance, was to “create a new internet currency to replace the US dollar.” For someone holding the reins to an alternative currency, destabilizing existing currency could be a great investment opportunity.
Equally, as Silicon Valley execs were becoming aware, making money out of AI and robots was generating widespread anxiety and resentment among an all-too-human US workforce. Back in 2018, tech exec Andrew Yang (who ran in America’s 2020 Democratic presidential primary) remarked that when self-driving vehicles stabilized into a reliable technology “we’re going to have a million truck drivers out of work who are 94 percent male, with an average level of education of high school or one year of college.” “That one innovation,” he said, “will be enough to create riots in the street.”11 Tech moguls seem less worried about a nuclear war, an asteroid, a plague, or a pole shift than just a good old-fashioned mob of their own making, and their dread was trickling down in a way their wealth was not.
Certain quarters of “techno-libertarian” philosophy map onto prepper philosophy, where they seem to see crises not simply as inevitable risks to mitigate but as necessary and productive periods of resetting and renewal. These are times in which prudent moves can consolidate already-obtained wealth and power. One of Thiel’s favorite books, a foundational text from 1997 called The Sovereign Individual, suggests that the time is ripe for the morally bankrupt “welfare state” to transition into a libertarian utopia.12 The book’s epigraph is a quote from Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia: “The future is disorder.”13 Unsurprisingly, it’s a book inhaled not just by Thiel, but by many aspiring Silicon Valley types. (Recall Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s now famous motto: “move fast and break things.”)
One of the coauthors of The Sovereign Individual, James Dale Davidson, is a self-proclaimed “crisis investor.” Davidson specializes in advising the rich on how to profit from economic catastrophe—essentially what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism,” with a twist.14 The Sovereign Individual posits that the rise of cryptocurrency (keep in mind that this was written in 1997) will make it impossible for states to tax incomes, thereby causing them to collapse. Then (here’s the twist), “out of this wreckage will emerge a new global dispensation, in which a ‘cognitive elite’ will rise to power and influence, as a class of sovereign individuals ‘commanding vastly greater resources’ who will no longer be subject to the power of nation-states.…”15
Thiel founded PayPal just after reading The Sovereign Individual. He did so explicitly recognizing its ability to erode the power of the state. The Bitcoin boom, leading to the proliferation of cryptocurrency, was well designed to do the rest. Given that Facebook is now rolling out their own currency called Libra, and countries like Sweden have all but done away with cash, it’s not an implausible scenario.
The book’s other author, Lord William Rees-Mogg, who died in 2012, was a British conservative, Euroskeptic, and onetime editor of the influential newspaper The Times. He was a libertarian who saw the nation-state as an obsolete relic. So it’s no surprise that some of the tech giants of Silicon Valley were convinced by the ideas in his book and seem to be deploying their technologies to similar ends.
Rees-Mogg also had a marked influence on the political career of his son, Jacob Rees-Mogg, one of ringleaders of the Conservative Party who’d met with Steve Bannon as he pushed for Brexit. In doing so, he brought his father’s prophesies to fruition, and profited handsomely from it. According to Channel 4’s Dispatches program, his political maneuverings helped the value of Britain’s currency to plummet, and Jacob Rees-Mogg made £7 million (approximately $8.5 million US) in profits by betting against the pound. In fact, all the architects of Brexit seemed to have benefited from the country’s political turmoil: in particular Boris Johnson, who in July 2019 became prime minister, propelled into Britain’s highest political office by a core of Conservative Party members.16
For many in the UK and around the world, the Brexit referendum of 2016 signaled an end to the age of global cooperation, of the sort needed to tackle worldwide crises, in particular impending climate catastrophe. In September 2019, a British photojournalist leaked details of a report, entitled “Operation Yellowhammer,” that outlined grim outcomes for the country in a “no-deal Brexit,” including breakdown of trade, resource shortages, and civil disruption. The leak forced the UK government to publish a watered-down version of the full report. Soon after, it was realized that “Operation Yellowhammer” was in fact not the worst-case scenario. That scenario was known as “Operation Black Swan,” echoing the book by Nicholas Taleb.
Around the same time, the government rolled out a £100 million (approximately $122,000,000 US) “Get Ready for Brexit” campaign, sending pamphlets out and running ads on TV. The police advised everyone to prepare an emergency “grab bag” at home, without really explaining what it was for. Spoofing the official public information campaign, one joker in the city of Bristol wheatpasted a fake ad over a billboard that asked “Are You Brexit Ready?” and offered bunkers for £9,000 (approximately $11,000) and reduced prices on “child traps” and “flame throwers,” as well as “in-store demonstrations on preparing and cooking a human body.” Brexit seemed like a microcosm of the wave of neonationalist sentiment sweeping the globe, a breakdown of fragile geopolitical and social fabrics threaded over many decades. Six months previous, the UK government had activated “Operation Redfold”: a defense contingency plan to house a thirty-five-hundred-person military team in a nuclear-proof bunker under the Ministry of Defence that would provide backup for the police if chaos were to take hold during the post-Brexit period.
Britain’s people were quick to cotton on to, and to capitalize on, this sense of emergency. In the Yorkshire city of Leeds, one entrepreneur started selling “Brexit Boxes”: disaster chests containing sixty freeze-dried meals and a fire starter for £295 (about $350 US). Another survivalist charged £250 ($300 US) for weekend courses on combat and urban survival. By early 2019 10 percent of the UK population were stockpiling food in advance of Brexit. What spooked people was not the suggestion that the international supply lines, which bring in a third of the country’s food, could collapse, but a more generalized sense of uncertainty.17
Ironically, these preparations left some Britons better prepared for the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which put even Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the intensive care unit.
The Sovereign Individual also discusses the disruptive potential of technology like satellite-uplinked portable computers, cyber warfare, the possibility that online bots could imitate humans to propagate discontent, and the inevitability of a populist backlash against globalization. All prescient stuff, for 1997: these last two phenomena are of course central to how Trump ended up in the Oval Office. What’s most disturbing about the book is how much of it had already come to pass, twenty-some years from publication. It’s almost as though—if you take statements like Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things” at face value—these people actually brought this situation about.
The Silicon Valley elites’ ambitions go further than simply building bug-out locations, or indeed cherry-picking the communities with which to populate the after time. Many of them share the belief, prevalent among preppers, that preserving consciousness is more important than preserving the body—and unlike most preppers, they have the financial resources to try and make it happen. If there is any chance consciousness can be uploaded onto servers or into robot bodies, cryonically frozen in their heads until they can be resurrected, or transferred through DNA reincarnation, they’ll do it. But of course this data must also be protected and preserved in the bunker.
At least one bunker has already been turned into a reincarnation facility. It was originally built in 1978 by Girard Henderson, the director of Avon Products in Las Vegas and a big fan of underground living. In the middle of the first doom boom, Henderson created an exhibit at the 1964 New York World’s Fair called “Why Live Underground?” and, in reciting the benefits, claimed that “underground living boasts of pure air, elimination of noise, freedom from all climate hazards and nuisances, lower heating, air-conditioning, insurance and maintenance costs, [and] more durable construction…”18
The five-thousand-square-foot, twenty-six-foot-deep bunker under Henderson’s house had a swimming pool, putting green, his and her sinks in the well-appointed bathroom, and a pink-tiled kitchen and bar—all of which were in a setting constructed to resemble a landscaped garden. Pastoral murals were painted on every surface, treelike pillars loomed overhead, and mood lighting shifted from day to night to dupe the brain.
In 2018, Henderson’s bunker was purchased by the Society for the Preservation of Near Extinct Species for $1.15 million. After a bit of digging, I discovered this society was connected to a company called Trans Time that charged $150,000 for the “suspension and reanimation” of cadavers. As of 2018, they had four whole human cadavers stored in the bunker, and ninety more signed up to be frozen, according to chief technology officer Steven Garan.19 Given the disjunction between the false fecundity of the bunker’s interior and the harsh reality of the surrounding Mojave Desert, it would be a confusing place to be resurrected.
At least since the Cold War, it seems American elites have been determined to turn catastrophe into opportunity. The loot reaped—if you took The Sovereign Individual as representative of their worldview—would not just be financial, it would be political. If you’re truly committed to speculating on the apocalypse, the fact that collapse has not yet come is only further proof that the threat is still out there.20 For the techno-libertarians of California, distance is all the shelter they need to assure it would only be an apocalypse for some.
Ian Clarry never provided me with any firm details about what Hardened Structures had built in New Zealand, as I’d asked. In lieu of this, rather bizarrely, he invited Douglas Clark to send me an assessment of Kim Dotcom’s security situation. For all Clarry and Clark’s apparent helpfulness, I still couldn’t get any clear information about anything Hardened Structures had actually built. Finally, I got Clark on the phone, but when I pressed him for specifics, he simply told me that the company had been “shortlisted presently for both domestic and international government-scale projects, but those are all confidential and we cannot disclose any details.” After our call, he sent me blueprints for a bunker under a house, labeled “Project Sedna,” in an undisclosed location, where a secret staircase from a walk-in closet traversed an eighty-four-inch pipe tunnel that could be pumped full of Agent BZ (3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate gas) to incapacitate “determined” attackers. The bunker itself was standard fare, with a second escape route running to a hatch in a garden retaining wall. Given his recent experiences in building fortified domestic architecture, I sent it to my brother Pip, the California contractor, and asked him what he thought.
“It just looks like regular plans with massively thick walls. It would be ridiculously expensive to build for what it is, just based on materials,” he wrote back. Clark didn’t provide me with an estimate of construction costs. When I asked if I could see a photo of the finished project, Clark responded, “We did not construct Project Sedna. The client went another direction, and purchased a remote property instead.”
I was deeply frustrated. Much about Hardened Structures felt like a shell game. After I told Clarry as much, he invited me to another dinner at Moorish Blue, at which I’d have the chance to interview Jakub Zamrazil, the founder of Oppidum in the Czech Republic, touted as “the largest billionaire bunker in the world,” and in whose construction Hardened Structures had played a pivotal role, according to Clarry.
Oppidum offered an illusion of exclusivity that the media gobbled up. It’d been featured in Forbes and on CNN, CBS, and a host of other outlets. To get access to the facility’s website, you had to request a secure code. Once you’d entered this code, the website disgorged spectacular representations of a bunker that rivaled even the most sophisticated government deep underground military base. The word oppidum, Latin for “an enclosed space,” was originally used by the Romans to describe Celtic settlements. I guess the Latin was meant to make the modern version sound imposing—which Zamrazil’s bunker certainly was. The website depicted this hundred-thousand-square-foot facility as being big enough for a few dozen very wealthy inhabitants spread across seven apartments. It was originally carved out of the rock by Soviet forces in 1984, intended as the ultimate fortress, geologically shielded inside a mountain at a secret location. Now made over for the private market, it had a helipad, golf course, and twenty-room bunker split over two deep levels with a command center. In the images of the command center, a sort of situation room with screens everywhere, a hologram of Earth beamed over a massive dark wood table.
“The bunker will be able to provide long-term accommodation for residents, up to 10 years if necessary—without the need for external supplies,” the Oppidum LinkedIn page boasted. The endorsement of the former chief of the Czech Military Intelligence Service, General Andor Šándor, lent the project an air of solemn credibility.
After my previous experience at Moorish Blue, I arrived at about 2 p.m. with trepidation. To my relief, the atmosphere was completely different: the restaurant was buzzing. A table had been prepared for about ten people. As I chatted with Jae Wydeveld, an Australian ex–navy diver who was interested in investment opportunities, and Nina Bell, a marketing guru who was helping revamp the Hardened Structures social media feeds, New Zealand Herald journalist Steve Braunias—he of the original interview with Kim Dotcom—peppered Clarry with questions about what he actually did for a living besides hang out at Moorish Blue. Braunias was professorial and incisive, but he seemed to get about as much out of Clarry as I had: very little. Manny Ray, the bodyguard, was at Clarry’s side as before, scrolling through his phone. Then the afternoon’s VIP appeared: Jakub Zamrazil walked through the door.
Zamrazil cut a disheveled figure. He was wearing a stained, mismatched tracksuit and carried his belongings in a torn plastic shopping bag. He said he’d just come from a helicopter ride over the Sydney Harbour. He’d been excited to play tourist for the afternoon, having never been to Sydney. Braunias and I, wanting to know how Zamrazil had come to found Oppidum, got down to brass tacks.
Zamrazil murmured that he was a real estate investor, and was interested in unique properties.
Oppidum certainly fit that bill, I said, and asked about Hardened Structures’ involvement in Oppidum’s design. Zamrazil clutched the shopping bag in his lap, looking perplexed. He scratched the back of his neck and explained that he was here to try and sell the bunker to Clarry, or to an investor like Jae Wydeveld.
“What, the whole bloody thing, with the helipad and command center?” Braunias said.
“Oh, well, we’re looking at selling the bunker in shell core stage,” Zamrazil responded meekly. “Shell core” meaning empty. In other words, there was no billionaire bunker: the website, the LinkedIn page, and the “news” reports all depicted something that didn’t exist.
Braunias closed his eyes briefly. Then he leaned over to me. “Brad, Clarry is a loose unit,” he said. “These guys are all grifters.”
We finished our lunch. Zamrazil ate nothing and left about thirty minutes later, presumably without securing a buyer for the “billionaire bunker.”
Arriving back to my office, I Googled “Oppidum, Czech Republic” and reminded myself of the dozens of outlets that had run stories about it, many seemingly inviting the reader to believe it was a place that one could move into tomorrow. Journalists had enticed readers to see future plans as present realities. I was getting used to this: the media had written about Vivos bunkers in Germany and Seoul, often including the standard-issue computer renderings that looked like photos, that had never been built. At the same time, Robert Vicino had called out Oppidum. “It’s a fiction!” he’d roared to me at xFest. “These guys called me trying to sell me a stake in the property they never built. Look at the photos, you can see they’re aboveground, it’s all a fantasy!”
Whatever their state of completeness, these bunkers they were selling were supposedly designed to alleviate dread but, to my mind, were rather perpetuating it by making such buildings seem more ubiquitous than they actually were. As I scrolled through the stories about Oppidum, it struck me—not for the first time—that the architecture of dread was a source as well as a symptom of our collective anxiety.
As a case in point, when at the beginning of 2020 the team of atomic scientists’ Science and Security Board set the Doomsday Clock to one hundred seconds to midnight, they stated that “focused attention is needed to prevent information technology from undermining public trust in political institutions, in the media, and in the existence of objective reality itself.”21 I thought about the stark realism of those articles in Life magazine from the 1960s: grim, yes, but they were also serious investigative journalism, in stark contrast to contemporary uncritical clickbait articles about nonexistent bunkers like Oppidum.22
Soon after our encounter with Zamrazil, Braunias filed a piece in the New Zealand Herald, titled “The Bodyguard at the End of the World.” Its tone was scathing and incredulous.23 Clarry did not come off well and emailed me constantly, seeking redemption. At one point, he confessed that Oppidum was actually a “front” for another bunker in Switzerland that Zamrazil was selling, which only made him sound even sketchier. When I asked for info on this Swiss bunker, Clarry sent the “off-market” PDF ad: it was fourteen thousand square feet, and was decorated in a way that made me imagine a 1960s alpine ski lodge cafeteria. It was priced at 140 million euros (about $150 million US), which seemed like an unfathomable sum for any private buyer. It was also almost certainly a fiction. When I looked up the address of the Czech limited liability company listed on the ad under Zamrazil’s name, it turned out to be a graffiti-covered apartment block in Prague.
For all that, the charade to which Clarry had subjected me sat in contrast with the solidity of Hardened Structures’ architectural plans: both Douglas Clark and Brian Camden, a civil engineer and the CEO of Hardened Structures, seemed competent enough. But by the time I was done chasing these guys around, I was left with a distinct sense that they were doing a lot more consulting than construction: Hardened Structures did their best to convey the impression that their bunkers were all over the world—but on closer examination almost all seemed to melt into air. Like many of the dread merchants, much of their business was speculative and their clients were elusive.
Clarry did eventually come through with another contact, promising that I could see an actual physical location where Hardened Structures had played a pivotal role. The contact was Auggie, who was busy building a massive luxury bunker in Thailand that he had called Sanctum (more Latin). Auggie, though, was quick to send through photos of his under-construction fortified home, as soon as Clarry connected us on Facebook. Taking a full tour of the bunker, he assured me, required nothing more than showing up. Sanctum was a chance for me to see how the technicalities, aesthetics, and ideologies of bunkers were trickling down into the domestic sphere, and how a global bourgeois class were increasingly incorporating defensibility into their everyday lives around the globe. A month later, I was on my way to Chiang Mai.