Blank Spots on the Map Read online

  Watching the black site at Groom Lake grow larger year after year, it’s tempting to hypothesize correlations between rumored aerospace programs and different buildings. No doubt, there probably are some unconfirmable correlations. But after watching the black site grow over time, the most I’d venture to say is that the site’s expansion is a microcosm of the black world’s continuing expansion. Not just behind the restricted borders and no-fly zones in the Nevada desert, but in the United States’ most fundamental civic institutions.

  Lee Tien learned Stella Kasza’s name trying to sue AT&T for helping the NSA spy on its customers. Wherever there were lawsuits involving the black world, her name inevitably appeared on government briefs and motions to dismiss on the grounds of “state secrets.” Kasza’s name adorned the pages of El-Masri v. Tenet, brought against the government by Khaled El-Masri, whom the CIA kidnapped in Macedonia and spent months torturing in a secret prison outside Kabul before deciding he was the wrong guy. When they finished, the CIA dumped him on the side of a country road in Albania. Stella Kasza’s name surfaced in government motions in the Arar v. Ashcroft case, filed by a Canadian victim of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program after Americans shipped him to a gravelike prison in Syria. After a year of torture, the Syrians shipped him back to Canada.

  After Lee Tien filed suit in the AT&T case, Kasza’s name adorned the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss. In short, in every case alleging disappeared people, black world malfeasance, and state secrets, government attorneys used the words “Kasza v. Browner” to argue that some things lie outside the purview of the law.

  I found Stella Kasza in the Las Vegas white pages and drove to the city’s outskirts to meet her.

  The sweltering summer day reminded me of the journals forty-niners had kept during their brutal ordeals through Nevada’s parched landscape. Mirages were indistinguishable from the asphalt; the “check engine” warning light on my car flashed on and off in a silent but persistent protest. Reaching the city’s outermost developments, I turned into the trailer park where I’d arranged to meet the woman whose name echoed through the nation’s halls of justice.

  I knocked, then stood waiting in the sun. Nobody answered. Wondering whether I’d found the right place, I double-checked the address. As I turned to leave, the door cracked open. A small, thin, aging woman in a blue blouse studied me for a long, silent moment. “Uh . . . I’m Trevor,” I said. She stared uncomprehendingly until I was certain of my mistake, then she broke into a smile and said, “I’m Stella.”

  Sitting down at the kitchen table with Stella Kasza and her daughter, Nancy, I explained my interest in the case they’d been involved in during the 1990s, when the government had, in effect, told Stella that her husband, a sheet metal worker named Walter, didn’t exist. “He did exist!” Nancy protested.

  Stella was nervous about my recording of the interview. She confessed a tendency to swear a lot when she talks about the circumstances of her husband’s death. “Sons of bitches!” she hissed when we first spoke on the phone. “They can do whatever they want.” In an ironic twist, Stella Kasza’s name was now used by the government to do to other people what they did to her husband. Her husband, Walter, had, in a sense, been killed by secrecy. He’d been sacrificed to keep Groom Lake black.

  Walter Kasza didn’t have a lot of control over where he worked, Stella told me. “Back then,” in the 1980s, “if you were a sheet metal worker, you joined the union, and the union assigned you to different job sites.” One day, Wally came home with news that he’d been assigned to a particularly strange job site, one he wasn’t supposed to talk about: a military base so deep in the Nevada desert that he had to take an unmarked plane to get to work each day. When the plane landed, he told his family, it was met by a column of armed soldiers he had to pass through on the way to his job. They told him not to look anywhere but straight ahead. An easygoing guy, Wally wasn’t fazed, but he did find the whole thing bizarre. He did as he was told, though, looking down when they told him some strange new plane was flying overhead, and rarely spoke about what went on at the secret base. The new job made his daughter, Nancy, nervous. “I told him that I didn’t like him working in a place like that,” she said, “something could happen.”

  Wally laughed off his daughter’s concerns and kept up his work at the black site plying his sheet metal trade. The 1980s were boom times for the black world. The Reagan administration’s unprecedented peacetime military buildup meant Wally had plenty of work. Government watchdog groups estimated that during the Reagan administration, 34 percent of the Air Force research budget went black and 39 percent of its procurement was secret. The pages of public accounting documents started looking like Dadaist sound-poems as line items like “Cactus Plant,” “Leo,” “Bernie,” “Have Trump,” “Theme Castle,” “Honey Badger,” and “Tacit Rainbow” filled the pages of the public ledger.

  From his job site on the huge scaffolds, Wally had a panoramic view of the secret air base where a new generation of “silver bullet” weapons was first flying.

  If Wally obeyed his orders not to look up when a classified airplane flew overhead, then he would have spent an awful lot of time looking at the ground. All sorts of exotic birds tore through Groom Lake’s skies during the 1980s. There was TACIT BLUE (the stealth prototype that looked like an upside-down bathtub outfitted with short, stubby wings I mentioned in chapter 5) and the YF-113G, an airplane whose purpose remains classified. A steady pace of acceptance tests for the top-secret F-117A stealth fighters took place at the base and the Red Hats flew Soviet MiGs from a collection of hangars in the north they called Red Square. Somewhere in an unmarked hangar, the National Reconnaissance Office was developing a giant aircraft code-named QUARTZ (also known as the Airborne Reconnaissance Support Program) as an unmanned follow-on to the SR-71. It would never fly, and to this date, it remains classified, although the Air Force Flight Test Center’s Web site cryptically refers to a “classified, high-flying, large-payload, stealthy, autonomous, modest-cost UAV to eventually substitute for the U-2 and the SR-71,” and says that “the program proved too great a challenge.” There were undoubtedly many other projects.

  But there was something else in the air around Walter Kasza each day as he helped build the ever-expanding site. A cloud of smoke billowing from a collection of trenches at the southern end of the base enveloped Wally as he worked. Smoke from burn pits created a haze so thick that workers took to calling it the London Fog.

  With so many top-secret projects under way at the base and across the Southwest, the Air Force and its contractors developed a problem: what to do with all the top-secret trash? How should it dispose of the exotic refuse from crashed experimental aircraft, the toxic by-products from stealth aircrafts’ radar-absorbent coatings, and the leftover composites and polymers developed for next-generation weapons systems? The Air Force settled on a crude answer: burn it.

  Air Force officers at Groom Lake ordered workers to dig trenches the size of football fields, throw the secret trash into the pits, douse the concoction with jet fuel, and light it on fire. Waste from other secret projects started arriving. On Mondays and Wednesdays, trucks hauling classified detritus from projects based in Southern California made their way to Groom Lake, driving past the dormitories and down a road toward the base of Papoose Mountain. In lieu of shipping manifests, when they had paperwork at all, the drivers submitted documents covered with an indecipherable haze of code names. With each arriving convoy, the workers reignited the toxic fires. The London Fog enveloped the base. Walter Kasza, his friend Robert Frost, and many others worked in the thick of it.

  It didn’t take long for Wally to develop bizarre skin problems. “He’d come home from work on Friday covered with a red rash,” said Nancy, “but it would be gone by Monday.” After seven years working at the secret base, Wally’s rashes worsened. A chronic cough joined the bleeding cracks in his skin. His doctors prescribed everything they could think of, but nothing helped. T
oward the end, Wally was crippled. He died in April 1995. He wasn’t the only one. Five years earlier, Wally’s good friend Robert Frost, “Frosty,” as the others called him, had passed away at age fifty-seven. Wally and Frosty shared the same symptoms: Their bodies were covered with fishlike scales that seeped blood when they moved. They hacked, coughed, and bore the red welts and scars from an unknown sickness. When Frost had a biopsy, doctors found his flesh interlaced with an assortment of dioxins, dibenzofurans, and other industrial chemicals known to be highly dangerous to human beings.

  When Frost died from a kidney illness his doctors said was related to the industrial toxins found in his body, his wife, Helen, wanted to file a wrongful death suit against his employer, the Reynolds Electrical and Engineering Company (REECO). She eventually found a Washington-based watchdog group called the Project on Government Oversight to investigate. The case found its way into the hands of Georgetown law professor Jonathan Turley. Other workers at the site who’d developed similarly bizarre illnesses joined the class-action suit.

  “We never knew who the other people in the suit were,” Stella told me. “Turley set it up so that we didn’t have contact with each other.” Their lawyer borrowed a trick from the black world he was taking on, compartmentalizing information so that if one person’s identity became compromised, it wouldn’t lead to the others. In Turley’s estimation, going after an Air Force black site was not only unprecedented but dangerous. Frost, Kasza, and everyone else at the base had signed secrecy oaths condemning them to years in prison if they had the temerity to talk about their jobs to any outsiders. To hide their identities, the workers became a class of John Does. In a certain sense, they had become like the black site where they worked. Their very physiology, changed by their exposure to the base’s unpronounceable toxins, had become just as secret. Their identities became like the unacknowledged name of the base itself. Turley told the Kaszas to assume their phones were tapped; the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations was most certainly keeping tabs on them. “We started to notice cars parked outside our home,” said Nancy, still unsure if they were just being paranoid or if the old saying “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you” might apply to her family.

  The lawsuit had several goals: The John Does wanted the Air Force to acknowledge the burning; they wanted the Air Force to disclose what kinds of chemicals they’d been exposed to so that they could receive proper medical treatment; and they wanted an apology. Turley hoped they might receive care from military doctors with the proper security clearances to know what chemicals the workers had been exposed to. Time was short; the men’s health was rapidly deteriorating.

  Responding to the lawsuit, the Air Force took a startling position: The base “did not exist.” Turley proceeded to produce hundreds of documents with the name “Area 51” on them. There were old radiation-monitoring reports from the Department of Energy, pay stubs, and Air Force documents. Turley even produced a security manual for the base. Nonetheless, when the judge asked Justice Department lawyer Richard Sarver point-blank about the existence of the base, the lawyer replied, “That is a subject probably better taken up at another time.” Eventually, the Air Force would begrudgingly admit to the existence of an “operating location near Groom Lake,” but nothing more.

  Next, the Air Force moved to invoke the state secrets privilege, claiming that the federal court had no jurisdiction over the matter. The following March, Las Vegas judge Philip Pro dismissed the lawsuit against the Air Force, invoking the circular logic of state secrecy:

  The court holds that federal defendants were not required to admit or deny allegations as to whether hazardous waste had been stored, treated, or disposed of at the site, because such information was classified and encompassed within the privilege . . . the court next holds that plaintiffs could not provide the essential evidence to establish a prima facie case for any of their RCRA [Resource Conservation and Recovery Act] claims. The defendants’ assertion of the military and state secrets privilege prevented the plaintiffs from providing detailed photographic evidence, sealed affidavits, and information in other exhibits.

  Because all references to operations or activities at the unnamed operating location were state secrets, wrote Judge Philip Pro, Turley and the John Does were not allowed to submit any of their evidence of wrongdoing because the evidence in a public court would compromise the secret. Because it was impossible to have a lawsuit without any evidence, the lawsuit, like the base and the mysterious aircraft tested there, could not exist.

  In the middle of the court process, Wally passed away. With his death, the need to protect his identity became moot. The lawsuit then took on his name as its own, becoming Kasza v. Browner. In November 1998, the Supreme Court refused to hear a final appeal. Stella would never have her day in court.

  10

  The Precedent

  Robins Air Force Base, Near Macon, Georgia

  It began outside Waycross, Georgia. The crumpled hull of a crashed B-29 Superfortress smoldered in a swampy field on the Zachry family farm. Charred and shredded debris from the hulking plane was strewn about. An unfurled parachute lay near the fuselage. Attached was a man’s body laying facedown in the water. Other bodies lay strewn among the wreckage. The scene on the Zachry farm looked like a battlefield. Before long, crowds of people arrived. Then the military. The soldiers took over, holding everyone, even local police and firemen, back from the site. Four men had survived; nine had not. Robert Palya was among the dead.

  There’s nothing natural about how state secrecy carved a blank spot into the law, creating legal no-man’s-lands wherever government attorneys cried secret. In a field near the Okefenokee Swamp on October 6, 1947, a B-29 crashed and created a collection of facts on the ground. In the name of protecting a secret project aboard the crashed plane, the White House would appeal a lawsuit brought by the families of the deceased men, United States v. Reynolds, up to the Supreme Court. The executive branch would find a favorable decision, and the state secrets privilege would become a juridical precedent. More than a half century after Robert Palya’s death, his daughter Judith would come to learn that the whole thing was based on a lie.

  The Manhattan Project was by no means the only secret weapons technology program to come out of the Second World War. There was Secret Project MX-397, the first U.S. jet fighter, the XP-59A. The Norden Bombsight was so secret that its operators swore to defend it with their lives. One of the more bizarre was Project X-Ray, a “bat-bomb” containing hundreds of live bats strapped with incendiary devices designed to create firestorms. After the war, top-secret weapons research continued. The XP-59A program developed into the first operational jet fighter, Lockheed’s P-80 Shooting Star. In 1946, the military contracted RCA to develop project MX-767, an avionics package that would convert B-29 bombers into unmanned drones. It was the precursor to guided missiles, cruise missiles, and modern-day unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Its code name was PROJECT BANSHEE.

  Robert Palya was an engineer assigned to the project. After two years on the job, he and his team from RCA were starting to make real progress, although the work remained highly experimental. “The plane [flies] in the right direction,” Palya had written to a colleague the previous summer, “but the run is by no means a straight line. We have not progressed far enough to determine what exactly the trouble is.” The following year, PROJECT BANSHEE approached its conclusion; the last mission was scheduled to fly a B-29 out of Robins Air Force Base near Macon, Georgia, on October 6, 1948.

  Just after 1 p.M., Palya and his team of technicians and engineers, including a man named Bob Reynolds, boarded the hulking bomber and prepared for the day’s experiment: a five-hour test flight between Georgia and Florida.

  The World War II-era bomber lumbered down the Air Force runway and into the autumn sky. As the bomber lifted through the clouds at four thousand feet, the flight engineer reported the engines running hot, not unusual for the notoriously troublesome B- 2
9s. The pilot adjusted the bomber’s pitch to increase the airflow over the engines and cool them down. At eight thousand feet, engine number one blew out. In and of itself, that wasn’t a crippling problem, but the pilot advised the crew to strap their parachutes on. At twenty thousand feet, the engine burst into flames. A few moments later, the whole wing was ablaze. “Stand by to abandon ship,” barked the pilot. When the pilot opened the bomb-bay doors to allow his crew to escape, the aircraft careened into a spin. Centrifugal forces pinned the crew and engineering team against the walls as the hulking bomber spiraled toward the ground.

  At 2:08 p.M., the sound of an explosion tore through the town of Waycross, Georgia. Only four men had managed to parachute out. The other nine were lost. The bodies, including those of Robert Palya and Bob Reynolds, lay strewn around the plane’s wreckage in a farmer’s field outside of town.

  Newspaper accounts of the crash made elliptical references to the project’s purpose. The plane “was on a secret mission testing secret electronic equipment,” said one account. A separate account held that “full details of the plane’s mission were not disclosed, but it was believed that it may have been engaged in cosmic ray research.”