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Despite the official stonewalling and attempted suppression of the news, the NBC series spelled out the essentials of the NSA's activities. "We determined that Rosman had several missions," Windrem recalled in 2001: "One was intercepting communications from Soviet geosynchronous satellites, the Gorizont and Raduga." These were used to relay messages to and from both Russian troops in Cuba and Soviet missile sites in Europe. "The other mission was intercepting signals from the agent satellite network the Soviet Union maintained to communicate with its agents worldwide." (The operation to intercept Soviet signals was code-named Project LADYLOVE, according to historian Jeffrey Richelson's 1989 book, The U.S. Intelligence Community.)

If not for such reports from nongovernmental sources, the public would still know very little about Western North Carolina's significant place in the history of international espionage. Even today, the NSA, which moved out of the Rosman facility nine years ago, won't comment on what it did there. The NSA's public-affairs office did not respond to numerous inquiries about the agency's activities at the site.

PARI: A star is born
Eventually, the NSA, like NASA before it, deemed the Rosman station obsolete. After the Soviet Union fell apart, the spy agency underwent a massive overhaul, closing and consolidating many of its listening posts. In 1995, the NSA shut down the Rosman operation, taking away its computers and ripping several of its surveillance dishes out of their concrete bases. (Much of the high-tech equipment was relocated to another US eavesdropping base in Sebana Seca, Puerto Rico, according to Windrem.)

Once again, the Rosman station's fate was uncertain. The US Forest Service took control of the land and began planning to raze the structures. But then Don Cline of Greensboro, an astronomy buff with some money to spare, stepped in. Having recently retired from a successful career in telecommunications, he was trying to drum up interest in astronomy among NC universities when he heard about the government's Rosman real estate.

"I found this was going to be torn down, and that was very sad," he explained during a recent interview at his PARI office. "Your tax dollars, my tax dollars, several hundred million dollars have gone into the facility. Some of that was taken away, but a lot of it is still here. And it would be a shame to have all that bulldozed over."

So in 1999, Cline bought another piece of mountain land and swapped it for the Forest Service's Rosman property. Then he and a small group of scientists, engineers and former station employees went to work on creating the facility's next phase. Together, they built PARI -- or rather, they are building it, since the institution seems to grow with each passing month.

With a full-time staff of 16 and some 200 volunteers, PARI today is a hotbed of scientific (and thoroughly public) research. The nonprofit institute has attracted grant moneys from the National Science Foundation and other august institutions interested in advancing the cause of grassroots astronomy. "We're trying to provide an opportunity for young people to have an exposure to science," Cline explains. "I think there are a lot of students who have the capabilities to participate in science that never get the opportunity to do it."

PARI is now providing those opportunities. The site is abuzz with students, from kindergarteners to graduate-level researchers. Using PARI's unique collection of space-probing radio and optical telescopes, they're doing everything from basic research to highly advanced scientific exploration.

Still, for those who work there, the irony of pursuing public science at a once-secret facility is ever-present. Vestiges of PARI's classified past are everywhere: underground tunnels, panes of bulletproof glass, and an advanced security system complete with intrusion alarms and infrared sensors in the ceilings and under the floors. Even a leftover trashcan in the employee cafeteria, spray-painted with the words "UNCLASSIFIED WASTE ONLY," hints at the level of secrecy once maintained here.

"I've lived next door to the site all my life, and I always wanted to come up here, but it was kind of closed," says Lamar Owen, PARI's 36-year-old director of information technology. "You'd be walking up above the house and take a wrong turn at the top of the ridge, and all of a sudden here you are. And then here would come the guards, and they were armed. I was always able to beat a hasty retreat. It was serious stuff."

Owen spent his youth wondering about what lay within the site's clandestine confines, and he managed to pick up a few clues along the way. "There was a man who was a member of our church, and he worked out here, and you couldn't get anything out of him. And it was so bad that, when he went to go find another job somewhere, he couldn't get a reference from them. They wouldn't admit he worked for them. "Them' is one of those three-letter acronyms. If you can think of the three letters, they were here: DOD, NSA, CIA, FBI, the whole works."