Blank Spots on the Map Read online

  For Thompson, the 8X cover story hypothesis went too far. “I saw enough and heard enough about 8X that the idea of it being a cover story gets into a conspiracy so vast that I don’t believe it. . . . I think there really was supposed to be an 8X program. 8X was alive as late as 1996 or 1997.” His conclusion: “I am of the fairly strong opinion that 8X was real.” But there was another far-reaching part of the MISTY story that he did subscribe to.

  Before 1983, the Goddard Space Flight Center published regular tracking data of known satellite orbits and maneuvers, including those for KH-11 imaging satellites, although it did not name them as such. A researcher named Anthony Kenden had used this data set to virtuosic effect, writing articles and publishing detailed accounts of reconnaissance satellite activities, including a classic February 1983 article about whether a KH-11 had photographed the space shuttle Columbia’s underbelly to check for damage on a 1981 flight.

  In June of 1983, the Goddard Space Flight Center abruptly stopped publishing that data set. At the time, the move was widely seen as a response to Kenden’s work. As aerospace historian Curtis Peebles put it, “Apparently, NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command] realized just how much could be learned from the data . . . although the Soviets have their own tracking network, it was decided not to give them the data ‘for free.’ ”

  Years later, once the MISTY hypothesis sounded more and more plausible, another theory emerged: that the Reagan administration had stopped publishing the data set to create a “new normal” of increased secrecy. Removing the tracking data from the public record would have other benefits: It would get the Soviets used to the idea of finding—and losing—satellites (the United States knew that the Soviets weren’t as good at tracking satellites as NORAD was). Thus, when the first MISTY spacecraft went up a few years later, its disappearing act wouldn’t seem out of the ordinary. The Soviets would assume that when the object vanished, the most likely cause was their own tracking error. If the Soviets did pick up the actual stealthy payload at some point on radar, its signature would look like an uninteresting piece of debris. According to Thompson, that theory was right: The 1983 classification wasn’t about Kenden, it was about the upcoming MISTY program.

  In late 2004, the MISTY program made a brief public appearance when The Washington Post reported the program’s cost had swelled from $5 billion to $9.5 billion, and that it had probably become the largest single line item in the vast intelligence budget. MISTY was consuming so much money, said one official, that “you could build a whole new CIA.” The Senate Select Committee had tried to kill the program twice in the past, only to have the stealth satellite resurrected by the Senate and House appropriations committees and by the House Intelligence Committee, chaired at the time by future CIA director Porter Goss. Senator John D. Rockefeller IV joined other Democratic senators in refusing to sign the “conference sheets” that the committee uses to develop the intelligence authorization bill. Rockefeller took his protest to the Senate floor itself, explaining, “My decision . . . is based on my strenuous objection—shared by many in our committee—to a particular major funding acquisition program that I believe is totally unjustified and very wasteful and dangerous to national security.” Right-wingers went for Rockefeller’s throat, accusing him of divulging classified information. Under the black world’s bureaucratic cover, MISTY had become so stealthy that the Senate committee charged with overseeing it lacked the power to cancel it.

  In the summer of 2007, MISTY’s glint once again flashed in the public sphere. At a briefing, newly appointed director of national intelligence Mike McConnell joked that he’d been advised to “kill a multibillion-dollar” program to show that he had the cojones for the new job, and, he added, he “did just that.” Newspapers and blogs spread the news that MISTY was now, definitively, dead. After McConnell’s statement, other unnamed intelligence officials confirmed that the program on the DNI’s chopping block was indeed MISTY. It later came out that former NRO director Donald M. Kerr had recommended canceling not one but two major classified satellite programs. The programs, said Kerr, “represented significant new acquisitions undertaken by the NRO and they were touted by NRO as examples of excellence and industry ingenuity—and both of them failed.” Again, MISTY was supposed to be one of them. The identity of the other program was unclear.

  But was MISTY actually canceled? At Globalsecurity.org, John Pike thought that McConnell’s statement could quite plausibly be a bureaucratic equivalent to the USA 144deb decoy Molczan had spotted in a 63.4 degree orbit. The director of national intelligence, said Pike, “was under no obligation to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” The DNI is a spy, not a Boy Scout. The purported cancellation could be another piece of disinformation: “If I was gonna build me a stealth satellite constellation, I’d try to persuade the Chinese that I had canceled it.”

  As Pike and I chatted about the MISTY program, he mentioned the continuing threats to classify the Space Track catalog. I had another question on the tip of my tongue when he stopped me. “That just went right by you, didn’t it?” he chided. If I wanted to divine MISTY’s future, he was telling me, I’d be smart to pay close attention to the fate of the Space Track catalog. Remember that the Space Track catalog is useful in that it provides a guide to the night sky’s “known knowns,” the other night sky’s negative outlines. Pike recalled the recent threats to classify the Space Track data. “It’s very real that they’re trying to pull that,” said Pike. The justification? “It’s probably because they say bin Laden would find the data useful.” But Pike saw a potentially much deeper subterfuge at work, something recalling the 1983 end of the Goddard elements: “The objective of MISTY follow-on,” if there were such a program, he reminded me, would be “to make the spacecraft look like space debris. The object of MISTY follow-on is to have spacecraft disappear into debris populations.” There are different “families” of space debris, said Pike, everything from missing astronaut gloves, to spent rocket bodies, to shards of satellites blown apart by antisatellite weapon tests. The Americans, he said, had put a huge amount of work into tracking all of this debris, far more than any other country. “Based on ballistic coefficients and orbits, if I had a gigantic bank of computers, I could run my data on all this space debris on those computers and run it through signal processors and categorize every piece of space debris into different families. It would seem to me that if the Red Chinese did this, they’d determine that there were three to four pieces of debris that were in a family by themselves and that they were exhibiting attributes that were un-debris-like. They’d conclude that these were the American stealth satellites.” Having access to the Space Track data set, in other words, would vastly simplify the job of anyone wanting to find stealth satellites.

  And so, like so many other black satellites, the key to MISTY’s future might be in a debris cloud hidden in plain sight: “If they stop publishing this report,” Pike concluded, “then I’d guess MISTY follow-on is still alive.”

  9

  Blank Spots in the Law

  Berkeley and Las Vegas Revisited

  One afternoon at a café in Berkeley, I sat down for lunch with Lee Tien, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Tien was one of the lead attorneys working on the Hepting v. AT&T case, a class-action lawsuit charging the telecom with illegally collaborating with the National Security Agency to spy on Americans. Attempting to quash the lawsuit, telecom and Department of Justice lawyers invoked a once-obscure “state secrets privilege,” arguing that the case could not proceed because by doing so, the state would be forced to publicly disclose information sensitive enough to endanger national security. The case revolved around a black site in my own backyard.

  In January 2003, Mark Klein, a veteran technician at AT&T, noticed unfamiliar workers constructing a new room in downtown San Francisco’s SBC Communications building at 611 Folsom Street. Klein recognized the man in charge of the new construction. The previous year, AT
&T’s site manager told Klein to be on the lookout for someone from the National Security Agency, who’d be interviewing a high-level technician for a special job. That technician was now installing equipment in room 641A, right next to the company’s 4ESS switch room, where public phone calls are routed. Once the construction finished, none of the building’s employees were given access to 641A. It was a secret. Later that year, AT&T put Klein in charge of the Worldnet Internet room, home to racks of routers and modems connecting AT&T customers to the Internet. Klein noticed that fiber-optic cables in the Worldnet room were being diverted into room 641A. From internal technical documents, Klein learned the secret room housed a Narus STA 6400, a “semantic traffic analyzer” that, its manufacturer claims, “captures comprehensive customer usage data . . . and transforms it into actionable information . . . [providing] complete visibility for all [I]nternet applications.” Klein knew intelligence agencies use the Narus STA for filtering huge amounts of data. To the veteran technician, the evidence led to an obvious conclusion: The National Security Agency was piggy-backing on AT&T’s communication infrastructure, vacuuming up Americans’ Internet use in an elaborate surveillance program. In conversation with another technician at a different AT&T site, Klein learned of similar rooms under construction in Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Diego.

  After ordering ham and cheese sandwiches, Tien and I discussed the EFF’s case against AT&T. Although the Bush administration publicly acknowledged the existence of what it called a “terrorist surveillance program,” it was arguing to throw the EFF’s case out on “state secrets” grounds. The phone companies, argued Department of Justice lawyers, couldn’t defend themselves without revealing classified information. In the vast majority of post-9/11 cases where the Bush administration invoked “state secrets,” said Tien, “the court made the case disappear.”

  Tien’s case, however, was different. Federal district court judge Walker wasn’t going along with the Bush administration’s wishes. Tien paraphrased the judge’s rationale: “No, I’m not going to make the case disappear. You haven’t proven that the surveillance program is a state secret. In fact, a lot of what you’re arguing isn’t a secret at all because the government admitted that it’s participated in the so-called ‘terrorist surveillance program,’ and AT&T has said that it does what the government tells it to do.” Judge Walker wrote, “The compromise between liberty and security remains a difficult one. But dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security.” In response, the Justice Department appealed to the higher Ninth Circuit.

  At first glance, geography and the law might seem to have little to do with one another. But the legal system is inextricably woven into the ways that spaces are created and is often, in turn, strongly sculpted by existing facts on the ground. Zoning policies create possibilities and constraints for urban development just as rent-control laws dramatically affect the social makeup of cities. But black sites are a peculiar case: They are designed to exist outside the law. The history of secret geographies shows that when they do come into contact with the legal system, the legal system tends to change in order to accommodate them. When the secret state wins, as it usually does, blank spots on maps create blank spots in the legal system.

  As Tien and I sat around our table at the sidewalk café, I couldn’t help pointing out that we were, quite literally, sitting in the shadow of John Yoo’s office at Berkeley’s law school. Yoo was a young law professor who worked with Alberto Gonzales at the Office of Legal Counsel in the early years of the second Bush administration, as I mentioned in the first chapter. A proponent of the unitary executive theory of presidential power, Yoo was famously responsible for declaring the Geneva Conventions irrelevant to the war on terror, for giving the president the legal go-ahead to torture terror suspects at Guantánamo Bay and at CIA black sites, and for authoring a classified legal opinion arguing for the NSA domestic surveillance program.

  Returning to a teaching position at Berkeley after leaving the Bush administration, Yoo became a public advocate for the administration’s most controversial policies. On the subject of the NSA case, Yoo told Fox News, “There is, I think, two lawsuits that were just filed against the NSA program. But, I think, they’re going to fail because you need to show standing, which means that you have to show that the plaintiffs in those cases actually suffered a harm or were actually surveilled by this program. And they don’t appear to have anyone who knows or can show that that happened.”

  “I don’t understand why that guy hates America so much,” said Tien when I mentioned Yoo’s shadow over our lunch.

  “Have you spent any time looking into Area 51?” Tien asked, seemingly out of the blue.

  After a moment, I saw where the affable lawyer was going. “I just talked to Stella Kasza a few weeks ago,” I replied.

  At this, Tien chuckled and said, “Imagine my surprise when I learned that a serious precedent for this case went to Area 51.”

  As it turned out, I had spent far more time “looking into” Area 51 than Tien might have imagined. “Looking into” the black site near Groom Lake means driving deep into the Nevada desert and climbing a mountain named Tikaboo Peak. I’d made the trek many times.

  Getting to the base of Tikaboo Peak means finding the dirt road located at mile marker 32.2 off U.S. Highway 93, just between the Upper and Lower Pahranagat lakes near the small town of Alamo, Nevada. From this easy-to-miss highway turnoff to the mountain base, the route is a twenty-mile dirt road through valleys filled with Joshua trees, sage, fine desert dust, and dry heat. Along the approach, cacti give way to juniper pines surviving on a few inches of annual winter snowfall. Near a cattle watering hole called Badger Springs, the road deteriorates completely.

  The hike isn’t at all bad at first. A trail marked with bits of yellow caution tape that a friend of mine puts up every year serves as a guide. Before long, a small hill gives way to a clearing littered with nylon sheets from shredded tents, a fire pit filled with Bud Light cans, and a pair of faded blue sweatpants that have been hanging from the same tree for at least three years.

  From this point, the trail gets harder to follow. I usually lose it, but the only way to go is up. There aren’t any switchbacks or official routes. Although this is public land, this isn’t a national park. Toward the summit, the side of the mountain turns into a river of pulverized shale. Small landslides careen down the mountain with each step.

  The steep stretch of shale peaks with a spectacular panoramic view of Nevada’s Tikaboo Valley. This is the false summit. Up to the right, the true peak towers in the distance.

  From here, the route leads down a ridge and to the left of a large rock outcropping and down to a saddle where previous climbers have left another charred firepit filled with burned leftover cans of Vienna sausages. The next ascent involves a bit of climbing to navigate through the boulders and red rock of the mountain’s face. This section of the mountain leads to a second false summit. The peak, however, is just in sight.

  After a final scramble, Tikaboo Peak offers a breathtaking view of Nevada’s Basin and Range. A brass USGS medallion cemented into a boulder on the mountaintop reads ELEV. 8000 FT. ABOVE SEA LEVEL. Scratched into the wood on a railroad tie, 1990s-inspired graffiti speaks to the black site twenty-six miles to the west: THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE. On an exceptionally clear day, it’s just possible to make out a building at the base of the Papoose Mountain Range beyond the Jumbled Hills in the foreground. The black site lies so far in the distance that it’s all but invisible to the unaided eye.

  Through the eyepiece of a telescope, the dot of the building is clearly part of an entire secret city far to the west. Shimmering through the convection waves of desert heat and blurred by miles of thick airborne dust, rows of hangars, runways, radar dishes, and a red-and-white checkered water tower make up the site at Groom Lake. At the south end of the base, a small quarry carved into the mountainside provides the raw materials for the base’s
continual expansion. A few miles to the north, dozens of dormitory, operations, and administrative buildings form a dense “downtown” in front of a massive loading area where scores of semitrucks line up to deliver cargo. On the northern end of the base’s five-mile backbone, the spindly shapes of oversized radio towers and antennae crisscross the desert floor. If the day is exceptionally clear, it’s just possible to see two black outlines on the tarmac: the base’s Black Hawk security helicopters.

  As I’ve returned to this mountaintop year after year, I’ve never failed to notice new constructions rising from the desert floor at the black site in the distant west. One year, a titanic blue tower appeared among the radar dishes and antennae on the base’s northern edge. On another occasion, I noticed a handful of new hangars in the south and the deep black lines of freshly laid tarmac for a new taxiway. More recently, a colossal new hangar the size of a city block rose from the dust in the base’s southern section.

  It’s unclear what all of this means. Like desert-crossing forty-niners tricked by mirages because they wanted to see water, it’s easy to see what one wants to see when staring into the distant landscape. Professional intelligence analysts learn about the dangers of placing too much trust in images, as anonymous visual data tends to support whatever truths the observer is predisposed toward. In 1962, Adlai Stevenson made dramatic use of overhead imagery at the United Nations during the Cuban Missile Crisis. More recently, Colin Powell attempted an equally dramatic presentation to the U.N. in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Powell claimed that the satellite photos he presented to the international community showed proof of prohibited Iraqi biological weapons programs. One of Powell’s own aides, State Department intelligence analyst Greg Thielmann, later said, “My understanding is that these particular vehicles were simply fire trucks.” “Satellites and intercepts can’t see into someone’s head,” complained former CIA operative Robert Baer about the intelligence community’s love affair with glossy, high-technology satellite photos. When the famous operative arrived home for a stint at CIA headquarters in the early 1990s, he lamented that “satellites, not agents, became the touchstones of truth in Washington. Few things are more satisfying for a policymaker than to hold in his hand a clean, glossy, black-and-white satellite photo, examine it with his very own 3-D viewer, and decide for himself what it means.” For Baer, satellite photos were a recipe for ignorance.