What happened to the supercomputer under the zoo?

Fifty feet beneath the stamping of zebra hooves and the trumpeting brays of elephants at the Louisville Zoo, a man-made cavern carved out of Kentucky’s underbed sprawls through 17 subterranean miles of limestone. Across 3 million square feet of underground real estate — about 100 football fields — the private owner of this cavern leases space to an obscured roster of secretive businesses. I’ve descended into the depths on a Thursday afternoon because, nearly 20 years ago, Sen. Mitch McConnell earmarked $4.5 million in Congressional funds for an IBM supercomputer and cybersecurity research lab down here which has seemingly disappeared from all record and memory.

As unanswered source calls mounted into the dozens, this is where my last-ditch effort to solve a missing supercomputer cold-case has taken me. Not stealth spelunking into a high-security lair with James-Bond aplomb, but packed into the back of a rickety Jeep-drawn tourist tram with about a dozen other visitors to the owner’s more well-known business — an underground amusement park known as the Mega Cavern.

The old quarry still contains tin-can rations from its days as a nuclear fallout bunker during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the cavern had a 50,000-person capacity and a secret list of invitees that Colonel Sanders once boasted of being on. The cans are scattered about an ambulance from the Korean War (no one quite knows how it got there), along with fine bourbon and chocolate vaults, Hollywood film reels and industrial explosives that all enjoy the perpetual 58-degree climate. 

The calcium-dappled ceilings are lined with drone-racing tracks leftover from a 2017 Pentagon experiment, weaving through the blast-scarred rock face which glows neon green. Compressed remains of old cars and trash heaps have been lain smooth to make interior roadways. Families drive over them into a recurring summer maze of gigantic animatronic dinosaurs that roar into the vast dark of the tunnels, and into an annual labyrinth of psychedelic Christmas lights which goms up the neighborhood streets above with hours-long SUV traffic jams. Meanwhile, parent company Louisville Underground boasts year-round of having the world’s longest underground zipline (that incidentally killed one person, according to Jefferson County court records).

The whole thing is a Kentucky-fried fever dream inside a semi-hallucinatory roadside circus, brought to life by political strong-arming atop a post-industrial waste dump. But the real show goes on in the dark, where nameless companies churn a buzzy economy in the adjoining commercial spaces. Behind a gift shop strewn with old-timey mining decor, Louisville Underground’s fully-wired offices and storage docks are brimming with expensive vehicles, government records, document shredding services, and whatever else you might want to hide.

Maybe even a supercomputer.

The Mega Cavern's 17 miles of internal roadway allow vehicle access to temperature-controlled private storage units such as the one displayed above. (Photo by Rae Hodge)

A digital Fort Knox for cyber-9/11 

Bates Capitol Group was something of a McConnell alumni club back in the early aughts. The Republican senator’s former aides and even family members packed the lobbying firm’s bench, and the projects and petitions of its clients found easy purchase in the ears of Kentucky’s self-described Grim Reaper.

It was a time of tall cotton on Capitol Hill for lawmakers and nepo-lobbyists — and for journalists chasing paper trails between campaign cash and American power. If a senator was pushing a bill with budget earmarks to line his own pockets, the lobbying disclosure rules didn’t apply to his Congressional aides, nor those aides’ spouses. If you happened to be a chamber leader, it would have been an off-books gold rush.

By 2006, USA Today was calling out Congress for keeping it in the family; the paper counted 54 lobbyists who were relatives of members and aides, and found they’d helped write themselves $750 million worth of projects into their kinfolk’s appropriations bills. Without missing a beat, the Lexington Herald-Leader’s John Cheves dropped a bunker-busting report exposing the machinations of McConnell’s own family and friends at Bates Capitol.

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From 1999, it took E-Cavern president Mark Roy and executive James Philpolt three years of touring trade shows and lobbying Kentucky's Congressional delegation before the duo turned to lobbyist G. Hunter Bates — McConnell’s former chief legal counsel and chief of staff from 1997 to 2002. Shortly after a lawsuit ended Bates’ 2003 bid for lieutenant governor of Kentucky, the former McConnell staffer founded the firm and quickly became known as the man who could get things done in the Senate Minority Leader’s office.

The first archival snapshots for E-Cavern’s website show up in January 2002, with old versions suggesting that it and Louisville Underground were once synonymous.

E-Cavern was a prime client for Bates Capitol, arriving at the height of the data center construction boom in the US. And McConnell’s family and friends at the firm made bank. Holly Piper, wife of McConnell’s chief of staff Billy Piper, made $220,000 lobbying for E-Cavern in 2006 alone. McConnell’s spokesman at the time said his relationship to the Pipers had nothing to do with the senator’s decision to add $1.5 million in funding for E-Cavern to an appropriations bill. Bates himself also defended the deal.

"Working with members of Congress to achieve outcomes that are consistent with shared vision and values is not corrupt, but rather, is a critical part of the democratic process,” Bates said in 2006.

Within that deal, E-Cavern had a proposal: It would partner with the University of Kentucky (UK) and the University of Louisville to lease space from local owners — themselves, doing business as Louisville Underground, LLC — and allow the universities to conduct research into securing critical US infrastructure against a digital terrorist attack akin to a cyber-9/11.

High-profile shutdowns and hacks now plague the global digitally-driven economy and national infrastructure — annually causing billions of dollars of damage to public utilities, healthcare providers, education systems and state and local governments. E-Cavern’s setup would have been a strong foundation for long-term public research into preventing and protecting critical U.S. cybersecurity vulnerabilities and surveillance threats.

In the frenzied aftermath of then-recent terrorist attacks, officials were looking for a way to shore up defenses for the U.S. financial sector. A take-down of Wall Street systems was feared. And what better place to secure the nation's most valuable data than deep in the state where Fort Knox once held the nation's gold.

And that's exactly how McConnell pitched it.

“In a post September 11th world, it is critical that our financial institutions be secure,” McConnell said in a 2004 press release. “E-Cavern is ideally suited to protect critical data and communications facilities, and both the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky have research expertise applicable to this field.”

Despite FEC records showing that the E-Cavern duo had never previously donated to McConnell, E-Cavern officials gave around $10,500 in cumulative campaign donations to McConnell-affiliated PACs and McConnell-supported Republicans from 2004 to 2006.

In 2007, Bates was the board of regents chair for Eastern Kentucky University. He was also a name highlighted alongside McConnell by the transparency watchdogs at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The E-Cavern deal had landed McConnell a spot on the advocacy group’s list of the “22 most corrupt members of Congress.”

McConnell’s office didn’t respond to Salon’s request for comment.

By 2015, Bates Capitol would report charging E-Cavern about $460,000 in lobbying fees. But by 2008, E-Cavern would boast $4.8 million in federal funds, brought home across four years by McConnell and Bates.  

Ghost stories

For all its cultural and economic legacy as a place of extracted wealth, where captains of industry have bitten into the earth to carry off the riches of coal seams, Kentucky is also a state where things go to disappear. Bodies, money, records — with more than 765 miles of surveyed mile-plus cave passages, things go missing here all the time. And every so often, the hungry earth opens into a sinkhole, eating everything in sight and beckoning the unwary into a maze of shifting waters and wind tunnels.

There, gleaming gypsum flowers bloom from stone draperies laced with translucent cave pearls. The mineral cave decor — epsomite, mirabilite, sulfate — rusts into the ruddy orange of iron oxide, the deep black of manganese. Caves are as hypnotic as they are dangerous. The limestone belly of the state's under-bed has more mouths protruding from the topsoil than we’ve been able to count. And we’ve been counting them longer than we’ve been a state.

The karst lands are so embedded in our cultural sense of place, we’ve got our own map of chthonic legends. Explorers trapped in the howling dark or enslaved people escaping to freedom, secret weddings and occult rituals, stolen treasures and hungry monsters — the caves are settings that become amoral characters in our stories, guarding Kentucky from outsiders and the elements.

It's been said for generations that the outlaw Jesse James once woke up, pistols blazing, in a bedroom above Bardstown’s famed Talbot Tavern, firing a few bullets still lodged in the wall at one of its well-known ghosts before escaping arrest by slipping into a cave under the bar, emerging in the Lost River Cave, where Union soldiers and Confederate alike once made use of the tunnels.

In Louisville, Al Capone had a quick getaway into under-city caves through a secret door in the Seelbach Hotel. Rumor holds that the tunnels let him run prohibition-era liquor and dodge the feds. The whole joint is swarming with ghosts. And beneath Louisville’s former Lakeland Asylum for the Insane, a haunted cave system now blocked was a supposed escape route from the poorly-named facility.

From my seat in the rattling metal tram, I hear the Mega Cavern tour guide recount how political strong-arming ultimately won the cavern its commercial approval after a dramatic snowfall left workers homebound, shutting down United Parcel Service’s global hub. UPS employed about 50% of the city then. When it threatened to move, city officials panic-bought an unwieldy mountain of road salt with nowhere to store it.

It turned to Louisville Underground. The company had been angling for necessary city approval to expand commercial operations from a recycling heap to a business park. It cut the city a deal: The Mega Cavern would store the salt if the city would stamp the commercial paperwork. The salt is still down there today, along with more businesses than we know about.

In virtually limitless dark

With the Bates-McConnell success under their belt, E-Cavern plans rolled ahead. Design firm Arkatype laid out the 4,200-square-foot, high-density data center. In 2005, the Kentucky legislature dispersed $729,140 in treasury funds to UK for a 19-month cavern lease, with authorization recurring into 2009.

At $173.60 per square foot, the price raised eyebrows. Then-leasing agent for E-Cavern, Larry Williams, said the space needed costly improvements for the IBM equipment — like specially run internet lines. But by 2005, it was already hawking commercial leases, touting those specially run internet lines and its own power substation.

“E-Cavern provides the ideal space for businesses to locate their primary or backup data center with the security, reliability, performance and ease of use required in the 21st century. The site is able to withstand tornados, storms and even earthquakes,” the company said.

When the Department of the Interior charted E-Cavern’s property the company in 2006, it was "designing, building, and storing electronic data in a secure environment for the financial, government, business, and military sectors."

"The facility contained a state-of-the-art conference center, office space with full internet capability, and an underground cafe," per the U.S. Geological Survey report.

In 2012, sans universities, E-Cavern obtained non-expiring Defense Department authorization to contract with US and foreign governments. Roy dissolved E-Cavern in 2016, per Kentucky Secretary of State records, but the DOD authorization appears still active and E-Cavern is labeled a public-private company. If any government contracts exist beyond Louisville Underground’s current National Archives storage agreement, they’re nowhere near the surface.

Answers would be clearer if Mark Roy wanted to talk. He’s got a notary business I reached out to a few times, looking to confirm basic details and timelines. When I finally got an answer, he wouldn’t confirm whether the IBM tech was still in use, whether it was still underground, whether he was still involved in E-Cavern, or when (if?) the business shuttered.

Louisville Underground’s current co-owner, Jim Lowry, also declined to comment per the company’s press relations firm, Runswitch PR. The University of Kentucky’s School of Engineering did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Nor did IBM.

Visitors to the Mega Cavern are invited to drive their vehicles through a winding path of ornate holiday lighting displays, including this kaleidoscopic tunnel, during the park's of annual Lights Under Louisville event. (Photo by Rae Hodge)

An early grave for critical research 

It didn't take long for academic scrutiny to collapse the project’s initial wild-hair pitch of running 750 miles of cables under the Appalachian Mountains to Manhattan for near unimaginable amounts of New York Stock Exchange data. The idea even became an engineering lesson at Cornell University on the early difficulties of creating off-site storage for Wall Street’s data flood.

Other E-Cavern research came, though, on Smart City cybersecurity and public surveillance. As they’re often known to be, researchers at the University of Louisville’s School of Engineering were ahead of their time. Professor Adel Elmaghraby led some of the earliest work into what we know today as cyber-resilience.

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"We were talking about artificial intelligence way back then. We were talking about voice input-output," Elmaghraby said.

Research conducted under Elmaghraby — first published by the Army College of War in 2011 (and other government studies into 2017) — was a formative influence on military cybersecurity work.

"I don't think we had a fair chance to follow up, and the ideas were too novel,” he said of the cyber-resilience research. "We were maybe thinking too early, but we get hit by that a lot. And we're not bitter because we keep going and we keep generating new ideas.”

A public cyber-resilience research lab would come in handy today for a state struggling with outdated, underfunded IT infrastructure — particularly as the Biden Administration hastily recruits a cybersecurity corps for critical system resilience.

If only one could be found. 

A mysterious sinkhole

Louisville Underground co-owner Jim Lowry said that about 12 businesses occupied roughly 700,000 square feet of the cavern in 2015.

"Some of which I can tell you about, some of which don’t want to be known," Lowry told Louisville NPR affiliate station WFPL.

More interest in Lowry's business concerns came to light in 2019, when a sinkhole nearly the size of a football field opened up on the grounds of the Louisville Zoo just over the Mega Cavern. No animals or people were harmed, but the zoo’s costs ran into the millions as it closed for weeks of emergency work. 

Lowry sued in 2020, accusing the zoo of water drainage neglect, and claimed more than 100 million gallons had rushed underground. The county attorney defending the zoo shot back at Lowry, blaming excessive mining and his cavern expansion.

Small to moderate-sized sinkholes can and do happen in the city, but experts said sinkholes this big don’t just appear in Louisville. Kentucky Geological Survey Director Bill Haneberg, whose office mapped several in the area, told the Louisville Courier-Journal in 2020 he found the sheer size of the sinkhole unusual for the city. And that the local ground wasn’t meant for caverns this big. According to Mega Cavern, enough limestone was originally quarried out to rebuild all three pyramids of Giza.

The main cause of Louisville-area sinkholes is water drainage — a problem accelerated by too-rapid temperature changes and freeze-thaw cycles in the ground. 2019 kicked off with a surge of rainfall after the city saw nearly double its usual rainfall in 2018. 

“We definitely have a water issue,” Mega Cavern supervisor Alec Zaremba said in a 2015 interview. “We pump out about 50,000 gallons of water a day. We pump that back into those tributaries that they can either flow back down here or flow downstream and end up in the Ohio River.”

“It’s so wet down here in the summertime that we have to have fans on to blow air around, to keep air moving so that the cavern stays a little bit drier than it typically would,” he said.

If data centers occupy the caverns, any improper water management or heat discharge could quickly become an immediate risk to adjoined residential neighborhoods. Underground or above, most data center tech is aging poorly and needs constant heat-sinking with heavy water use. As climate change accelerates temperature extremes, data centers designed in the early aughts work harder to stay cool and thus generate more heat.

On the Mega Cavern tour, our guide lets us tram-riders know we’re now beneath the zoo’s wildcat and eagle exhibit, joking that any drips we feel from above may not be water.

She confirms there are now 78 businesses — compared to a dozen in 2015 — at the cavern’s address. That address is poised to expand as Louisville Underground has petitioned the city for another 1 million square feet.

What the earth keeps

The Talbot Tavern has since closed off its underworld entry, but Jesse James’ presence at his favorite haunt is still so routine only tourists seem shocked. And it’s still a rite of passage among Bardstown teens to see how far across the under-city you and your friends can get with your guttering Bic lighters and your courage.

This time of year, you can also book tours of the Seelbach’s haunted vaults, and hunt for Lakeland Asylum spirits. After weeks of calls, emails and shoe leather, the supercomputer is becoming a legend too.

There’s been no answer — not from from IBM, McConnell, Roy, Lowry, nor University of Kentucky — about what happened to the publicly funded tech lab under the zoo. If any of them respond, we’ll let you know. But for now, $4.5 million in federal supercomputing research power seems to have vanished into the cavern. Even Elmaghraby doesn't know for certain where all that equipment went.

"Regardless, they will be obsolete, you know. Technology becomes obsolete anyway. The value of the computers becomes zero after about five years anyway. So I'm not as worried about where the computer went," he said.

I passed the Bic test long ago and have gone soggy-sneakered into plenty of Kentucky’s dark. Down in the man-made Mega Cavern, the scariest things one risks encountering aren’t ghoulish haints but possible money laundering, government data lakes, and slow-rotting municipal infrastructure straining under rising commercial energy demands. But there’s a good chance we won’t find out exactly which are down here and which are just rumor.

Because that’s the thing about both Kentucky cave lore and the underbelly of American tech funding — the descent into darkness isn’t always followed by a re-emergence into disinfecting sunlight. Some things stay down here when they shouldn’t and become ghosts. Some treasures the earth keeps, and all we’re left with are the stories.