by Phil Patton
This response turned a mild-mannered inquirer into a muckraker. “I was merely pointing out the Air Force’s violations of U.S. classification policy, contained in Executive Order 12356, and how secret spending violated Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of the U.S. Constitution.” He referred to the requirement that Congress approve all federal spending. The black budget, Trader and others argue, violates that provision by hiding the purpose of the expenditures.
He took further inspiration from a book called Blank Check, by reporter Tim Weiner, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his exposé of blackbudget programs for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Weiner called the black budget “a culture of deception.” It is, he wrote, a closed world built on the familiar cozy relationship between Pentagon officials, the military brass, and defense contractors. The result was waste. Weiner had investigated cost overruns and performance failures of programs such as Milstar, the military communications and control satellite. He wrote that it was all about preserving empires, that keeping programs secret is an expression of institutional power, part of the still-closed world of the military and its contractors.
But Trader wanted to go further: into the projects whose very existence was hidden. He began assembling his own black budget, using congressional and DOD documents. It was like reconstructing a crashed airplane or assembling a dinosaur skeleton, with conjectural plaster pieces filling in the missing gaps. He set up an Internet site to distribute his files.
Trader, like most critics of the black budget, argued that for all the triumphs of the Skunk Works, most secret programs hid waste. Revealing the cost of a Stealth fighter tells no more about how to build one than the cost of a Cadillac does. Many black programs, such as the B-2 Stealth bomber and the Milstar satellite system, ended up costing far more than planned, but by the time the public learned of the cost overruns it was too late to kill the programs. So much money had been spent that proponents successfully argued that ending the programs would be a bigger waste.
The B-2 was too big to hide. If the Skunk Works provided stories of how black programs could provide stunning success, the B-2 was the prime public example of the disasters secrecy could produce. I caught my first glimpse of a B-2 bomber one day as I drove past the chain-link at Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale. It was twilight, and far across the open ground I saw a gray blobbish whale shape, derived in part from what Northrop had learned by flying Shamu. It was the primary example of a black program gone awry. With an undefined mission and an unproven need, pushed by the great momentum of airpower advocacy, its cost ballooned to over a billion dollars a copy, Tim Weiner had calculated, three times the worth of its weight in gold. “It just got away from them,” Ben Rich told me, referring sympathetically to his traditional rival Northrop.
The B-2 compounded the cults of airpower and of stealth with a third, the flying wing. In January 1981, a frail, ill eighty-five-year-old man walked into a room at the Northrop offices on Century Boulevard in Los Angeles. Senior officials and engineers welcomed Jack Northrop. From a box they pulled a model of the Stealth bomber. To Jack Northrop, it was instantly recognizable as the heir to the flying wing bombers he had designed in the 1940s. “Now I know why God has kept me alive these last twenty-five years,” he said tearfully. Standing beside him were Steve Smith and John Cashen, who had helped create Shamu.
The flying wing had always enjoyed a mystical, almost fanatic following from those who saw it as the pure aircraft shape. It obsessed Jack Northrop. He had worked for Lockheed, designing the Vega and Orion; in his spare time he designed and built his first flying wing and tested it at Muroc Dry Lake in 1929. By 1940, he had his own aircraft company, and his flying wing bomber was approved for construction; its first flight was in 1946. When the YB-49 flew cross-country in 1949, President Truman went aboard. It was featured in the 1953 film The War of the Worlds, looking as strange as the ships that bring the invading aliens to Earth.
But the flying wing was a doomed dream. Northrop tried to modify the prop version with jets, but it lost out to the B-36. Northrop lost his company in 1952, sacrificed on the altar of the flying wing. As the B-2, the flying wing seemed doomed again. Costs rose, and by the end of the Cold War the vision of the B-2 as the successor to the B-52, the B-1, and other SAC bombers seemed absurd. Too expensive and too precious to fly, it sat out the Gulf War.
The Bush administration killed the Navy’s A-12 Stealth carrier aircraft before it was ever unveiled to the public. Two billion dollars had been spent—the budget, one journalist noted, for the whole National Park Service. I thought of that every time I saw a photo of the A-12, thought of the lodge at Yellowstone and rangers in little Smokey the Bear hats.
Trader’s work impressed some of the public-interest muckrakers in Washington who had been looking at the black budget for years. One of Trader’s admirers was Steve Aftergood, John Pike’s colleague at the Federation of American Scientists. Aftergood wrote the FAS’s Secrecy and Government Bulletin, which tracked the progress of those battling excessive secrecy and, in the process, charted the follies of the classification system. It was only a slight exaggeration to say that what Ralph Nader was to Detroit, Aftergood had been to the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies.
Keeping too many secrets is not only undemocratic, he wrote, it is expensive. It requires guards, vaults, background checks. Think of it as servicing the national information debt. A GAO study placed the figure at $2.2 billion, but pointedly noted that its calculations had been hampered by the CIA’s refusal to cooperate. Private industry spends an estimated $13 billion more adhering to government security standards.
“The more secrecy you have,” Aftergood states, “the thinner your security resources are spread, and there is a loss of respect for the system. That promotes leaks.”
Out of incompetence, exhaustion, or spite, leaks had been increasing. The leaks were a sign of institutional decadence, Aftergood explained: “The government has found it easier to let the classification system disintegrate than to establish new standards that command respect and loyalty. If current trends are taken to the limit everything may eventually be classified—but nothing will be secret.”
Aftergood described a secrecy structure that might well collapse of its own weight. I got the picture of a crumbling empire with a capital city too poor to keep its walls repaired. The strange, distant civilization of the Pentagon appeared a decaying fortress—Rome with the Huns outside, and the black marketeers inside, trading through gaps in the crumbling walls. In fact, it sounded a lot like the Soviet Union in its final years.
We parked under blue skies and continued toward the center of the universe on foot. We climbed into a lovely canyon, its soaring rock walls neatly decorated with green. A few other visitors had clambered up one of the walls and, in triumph, taken off their shirts at the top. The canyon narrowed and twisted and the plants at its base grew larger and more verdant. There was more water deep in the canyon, as well as little beds of dirt where the grass grew almost like a marsh, in contrast to the wide delta of desert into which the canyon opened.
We stopped at a cave where painted bighorns loped across the walls among spirals and concentric circles. The walls were as liberally covered with drawings as a New York subway station. Zigs and zags, circles and slashes, and romping mountains goats and deer. These were homes, and I felt almost like an intruder. They were comfortable little ledges where earlier peoples had slept and eaten and laughed, their ceilings blackened by campfires.
Trader took pictures with his digital camera. He would post them on his Web page, where there was a link to a compilation of Native American petroglyphs in Nevada. I liked the idea that these ancient drawings would be burbling across this most advanced medium as soon as he got home.
He had recently discovered a program for rapidly building makeshift runways and hangars—a program that could turn all kinds of distant spaces into little Dreamlands on short notice. He was looking at something called Timberwind, a project for building nuclear rockets—an ide
a most people thought had been scotched long ago. Of the Star Wars programs—“directed energy” weapons—there was even less to be found.
The next night we went together to a Department of Energy public hearing in Las Vegas. A formal solicitation of democratic sentiment on what the DOE should do with the NTS now that the Cold War was over, it had brought Trader to town. He had studied the eight lilac-covered volumes of the DOE’s environmental impact statement, which considered the effects of different courses of action. What would happen if the place was closed? What would happen if it was used for other kinds of testing? But Trader wanted to know why Area 51, which had some of worst known environmental problems of the whole test site, was not discussed. The only mention of Area 51 in the document was this: “Under Public Land Order 1662 (June 20, 1958), approximately 38,400 acres were reserved for the use of the Atomic Energy Commission in connection with the NTS. Management of this land has since been delegated to the U.S. Air Force.” This was the old game of shifting responsibility for the place between the Air Force and the DOE.
A hearing such as this is a winning process in many ways, a bizarre and rare membrane in which the public in all its diversity touched the bureaucracy. It made me proud to be an American in a way a flyover by Thunderbirds, for all their powerful engines, high speeds, and amazing precision of flying, did not necessarily do.
These hearings brought out local color. At an earlier one a man had stood up and said, “In the name of God, my name is Moe. I’m a permanent resident who has been living in Las Vegas for over six years. Believe in your God!” With that, he raised his green Koran in his hand and began to speak. The number of the area where the secret base was located was 51, he said, so he would read chapter 51 of the Koran: “Believe in your God. Promise in the winds which blow in holy directions. Promise in the clouds that carry heavy rains. Promise to the angels who perform the orders of God. Promise to all corners that whatever you say is true.”
He came to another passage: “Abraham said, ‘What is your duty here?’ to the aliens, ‘What is your duty here?’ The answer, ‘We are here to destroy the bad crime!’ ” The man pointed to officials from the Bureau of Land Management and continued: “All aliens! All aliens! We want to see the freedom of those captured aliens, because we are here to save the good from the bad one more time.”
This evening was much calmer. There were the usual Greenpeace spokespeople and, in counterpoint, a former Air Force officer who said he had eaten plutonium day and night, and bragged that he “pissed plutonium.” He had cleaned up after SAC when the B-52 bumped the tanker over Palomares, Spain, back in the sixties, accidentally scattering plutonium the way the AEC scattered it intentionally in Area 51 as part of Project 57, back in the fifties.
Trader got his chance. He read his formal statement and showed a couple of the gemlike documentary artifacts he had picked up: one, a press release from October 17, 1955, relating to the construction of the Watertown Strip by REECO; the other a letter written on AEC stationery stating that a small private plane had landed on the strip in 1957.
He footnoted a number of references to the place and asked why they hadn’t said anything about Area 51. How could anyone make a judgment about the real environmental impact of the Nevada nuclear test site, he argued, if they didn’t know about Area 51 and such programs as Project 57 or Project Timberwind (the secret nuclear-rocket program with a classified Environmental Impact Statement)? Both the audience and the DOE panel listened silently. No one seemed shocked by any of this.
The speaker who made the most impact on the audience was a representative of the Western Shoshone, who pointed out that the tribe rejected the whole treaty of Ruby Valley of 1863, under which the U.S. government claimed ownership of the test site. The tribe had never accepted the federal payments that would have put the treaty in force; they still claimed the land. Speaker after speaker had made reference to the fact that taxpayers and citizens owned the test site, and I had always thought of myself as being as much an owner as a watcher. Now I had to consider that Native Americans might own the test site, and Dreamland itself.
Ownership had been important to us watchers. It lent a certain self-righteousness to our demands: We’re taxpayers, this is our place, we must be allowed in on its decision-making. But part of the government’s secrecy about Dreamland took the form of hiding or denying ownership. At the hearing, the Department of Energy effectively denied ownership, as the Air Force frequently did. But Native Americans, who did not share the white man’s sense of individual or collective ownership of land, were now, somehow ironically, claiming it.
From the DOE to Trader to the Shoshone, everyone seemed to be selling a different version of Dreamland, repping their views, agenting their image. They were like real estate agents. I had once been warned of that profession: “The difference between realty and reality is in the I.” And the eye.
23. “Job Knowledge”
Driving away from the Las Vegas hearing, I realized that there were very likely petroglyphs similar to those we had seen in the canyon inside Dreamland and in other distant reaches of the Nevada Test Site. There was even a report on the subject—our tax dollars at work. “An Archaeological Reconnaissance of the Groom Range” had been conducted in the summer of 1986, as part of the legal requirements of the 1984 seizure of Bald Mountain and other perimeter areas.
The archaeologists had also found a number of middens—trash heaps—and from the bones and other bits could determine what the tribal people had eaten and how they had lived. In 1994, an effort was begun to poke through Dreamland’s own midden. An ambitious and idealistic lawyer named Jonathan Turley, who ran an organization called the Environmental Crimes Project at George Washington University, filed suit on behalf of former Area 51 workers against the Air Force and the Environmental Protection Agency.
The defendants in the suit were Defense Secretary William Perry, National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall, and EPA administrator Carol Browner. In violation of law, the suit charged, the military at Area 51 had burned hazardous wastes without a permit, exposing workers to dangerous chemicals that made them ill and, in two cases, led to their deaths. The best known, Robert Frost, was a sheet metal worker who had died in 1989 of cirrhosis of the liver before the case had been filed. Frost had tried to sue Lockheed, to no avail. His widow joined the plaintiffs in the suit against the government. Frost had burned waste in open pits, he reported. His skin turned red and began to peel. After his death, a Rutgers University biochemist, Peter Kahn, found concentrations of dioxins and trichloroethylene in Frost’s body tissues. Another worker, Walter Kasza, died at age seventy-three of liver and kidney cancer.
Others in the suit gave accounts of burnings in open pits and the huge plumes of smoke from dangerous corrosive chemicals—solvents and sealants, plastics, paint wastes, by-products of composites, and stealth coatings. Their chemical names were frightening even to the layman: dioxins, methyl ethyl ketone, trichloroethylene, and dibenzofurans. The workers were given no protective clothing or masks, they said, even after they asked for them. They were forced to go into the pits and rifle through the half-burned material to be sure nothing was left. Everything was burned—chemicals, papers, leftover prime rib and lobster from the dining hall, furniture, and vehicles. They came down with all kinds of symptoms, not just the skin rashes but eye irritations, headaches, blackouts.
Two big Kenworth eighteen-wheelers were always in evidence, one worker reported, and huge fifty-five-gallon drums were brought in with materials from Burbank. The burning took place at the edge of Papoose Lake, near the storied S-4 of Lazar’s tales. Was the Lazar story the military’s own bizarre cover for the burning?
The story suggested a pattern like that Joe Bacco had described at the test site, where the sense of national urgency and emergency led to abuse of workers. In 1986, workers for the Skunk Works in Burbank sued Lockheed over illnesses they said were acquired from exposure to substances used in building the St
ealth fighter—the chemicals used in its composites and in its radar-absorbing coverings were extremely toxic. The local citizenry had joined in later. That was why the original Skunk Works, the fenced-off wasteland I had visited, was now bare ground. The workers who had dealt with similar substances at Area 51 itself were stepping forward at great personal risk. Even as shielded by the John Doe conventions in the legal documents, they were violating their oaths and jeopardizing their pensions.
As I read about Turley’s suit and talked to him, I began to associate the sort of cumulative secrecy Trader had described to me with a great midden packed with layers of detritus. The suits were “citizens’ lawsuits,” not torts or damage claims. The workers weren’t after money, they were after information. They simply wanted to know the specific chemicals to which they had been exposed so they could seek treatment. But the Air Force argued that even to take soil and air samples might reveal the materials used in secret projects and thus compromise them.
Secrecy, so useful in crises, could also become a dangerous substance. Turley was charging that the abuse of secrecy was the means of hiding the abuse of the chemicals. The Air Force, he argued, had committed a crime by burning chemicals without a permit, and the result had been the injuries and deaths of the workers. “We have compelling evidence that the government and its contractors have used the secrecy of Groom Lake not to protect national security but to shield the illegal disposal of hazardous waste.”
The Air Force defense was that national security considerations protected it even against suits based on criminal activity.
