Parts Dealer Finds Secret Blueprints Pays $1 At Auction For Drawings Of Trident Nuke Submarine Base

For Bill Zimmerman, it was just a routine trip to Fort Lewis for a government surplus auction until he wound up with blueprints for a top-secret nuclear submarine base.

He usually gets odds and ends he knows he can sell - office furniture, trailers, and one time 250 pairs of snowshoes.

On Nov. 16, Zimmerman said he paid $1 for a blueprint rack to give to his brother-in law, an electrician. When he took it home, he found it contained a thick roll of large and richly detailed drawings for much of the Navy’s Trident submarine base at Bangor.

“Here’s the missile parts warehouse,” he said, leafing through the six-inch stack Friday.

“There’s the maintenance shops, the Trident training facility, the Polaris missile facility, the hospital, the training center, the control building.”

The documents were not marked classified and most apparently were 16 years old, but Zimmerman said they could still help potential terrorists locate telephone lines, power supply and other sensitive features.

On Wednesday, he called Bangor to tell them of his find. He arranged a meeting with base officials at a restaurant parking lot, then alerted a newspaper and television station because “I thought that this should be known.”

Lt. Eric Lee of the base public works department and Lt. Dave Lee of the base public affairs office, who are not related, took the documents, made a list and gave Zimmerman a receipt for them.

“I don’t know that they are a classified document until we get a (closer) look at them,” Dave Lee said.

“There’s undoubtedly been changes on the base since 1979.”

It’s possible that someone made a mistake by leaving important documents in a piece of furniture destined to be a surplus, although Lee said he’s never heard of such a thing in his 20 years in the Navy. It’s also possible that the documents were never sensitive in the first place.

“We’ll have our experts take a look,” Lee said.

He did not return a telephone call for further comment Saturday.