Blank Spots on the Map Read online

  Blank spots on maps were a hallmark of Renaissance cartography. Early modern geographers like Henricus Martellus, having rediscovered works of ancient Greek geography such as Ptolemy’s Geography, used ancient Greek cartographic projections to depict the earth’s known surface. Martellus’s maps from 1489 updated the ancient Greek projections to include data from Marco Polo’s journeys and Portuguese voyages down Africa’s coast. His maps portray Africa as a long, distorted, and featureless swath of land, and Southeast Asia as a contiguous landmass extending far into the Southern Hemisphere. Australia is missing entirely. After Columbus and Portuguese explorers began charting the New World, vast new blank spots appeared on contemporary maps. The Cantino planisphere, one of the earliest surviving maps to the New World, shows fragments of North and South American coastlines. Beyond them, the world is vast, empty, and unexplored.

  It was hard for me to believe that here, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, there could be such a thing as an unmapped space. Our world has maps for just about everything imaginable: With GPS-enabled navigation systems, it is impossible for modern ship captains to get lost at sea. Real-time weather satellites transmit up-to-the-minute atmospheric conditions to anyone connected to the Internet or with access to a shortwave radio. Google Earth provides detailed, scalable satellite images of nearly every inch of the world’s surface. Maps from the United States Geological Survey contain precise topographic and elevation data for the world’s landforms. There are maps for the ocean’s deepest trenches and maps of the outer planets; cosmological maps describe the large-scale structures of the universe itself, while maps of the human genome chart human life’s most basic building blocks. The world, in short, has been elaborately and meticulously mapped. The images I was looking for were missing, not because the desert hadn’t been mapped, but because what they showed was secret.

  As it turns out, this also had a historical precedent. During the age of exploration there were two kinds of maps: Some were intended for general consumption, others were tightly held state secrets. The maps Magellan used to circumnavigate the globe, for example, were of the latter sort. Although Magellan’s maps were rife with blank spots showing the limits of Spanish exploration, they contained far more detail than the public maps. The Portuguese and Spanish empires’ secret maps revealed landforms and trade routes the rival empires sought to hide from one another. Other, deliberately inaccurate, maps were produced and “leaked” from one empire to another in elaborate disinformation and deception campaigns. The “real” maps were the empires’ greatest secrets, documents so sensitive that an unauthorized person caught with them could be put to death. The maps themselves, and control over the information they depicted, were instruments of imperial power. As author Miles Harvey put it, “The Portuguese controlled the Indies because the Portuguese controlled the maps.”

  I didn’t tell my fellow geographers about my growing fascination with places that had been erased from the public record, although I did locate an old Soviet reconnaissance photo of the black site near Groom Lake, which I posted on my office door as an inside joke to myself. In my free time, I started consuming everything I could on the topic of secret places. Sifting through stories of secret aircraft and black military operations, I realized that I already knew something about this world. As the son of an Air Force doctor, I’d grown up on military bases all over the world, and like so many other people who grow up in the military, I had always assumed that I’d end up in the service as well, hopefully as a fighter pilot. It was the only world I knew. I was fascinated by aircraft like the SR-71, whose engines seemed to split open the sky itself when its black cobra-like airframe swooped down over annual base air shows. I knew that its performance characteristics were highly classified—almost no one really knew how fast or how high it could fly. When my father fixed up some of the pilots, he was invited to Beale Air Force Base to see the aircraft up close. I remember him arriving home that evening and saying that the plane could go a lot faster than what it said in The Guinness Book of World Records. Later on, as a teenager, I’d drink tequila with guys returning from Special Forces missions, who could never say where they’d been or what they’d been doing after returning home. My high school friends and I agreed that the SF guys all had a few screws loose but we were happy to take advantage of their alcohol ration cards.

  As I started to research black sites in earnest, I was surprised by the lack of serious literature about them. To be sure, I could find plenty of soft documentaries about places like Groom Lake; the UFO literature abounded with references to “secret bases” like Area 51 and Hangar 18 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. There were a handful of articles in more legitimate magazines like Popular Science. References to the black sites near Groom Lake and Tonopah showed up from time to time in defense industry publications like Aviation Week & Space Technology, mostly in articles speculating about new, still classified, warplanes. A few notable books had taken up the subject of secret airplanes or the psychology of UFOs, but the more I looked, the more I discovered another blank spot of sorts: There was very little scholarship on black sites. In other words, there was a blank spot in the literature.

  There aren’t a lot of things that someone, somewhere in the halls of academia, hasn’t dedicated their life to exploring. The halls of universities play home to people studying some of the most obscure phenomena imaginable, from the life cycles of Siberian slime molds to the geologic makeup of Pluto’s moons, and from the question of whether there’s something objectively good about eating chocolate to the historical lineage of a particular line in a James Joyce novel. No doubt, at this very moment a handful of scholars are engaged in passionate, even vicious debates on those very topics at conferences and in the pages of peer-reviewed journals. That’s one of the wonderful things about academia: Someone, somewhere, is studying just about anything and sharing their theories and findings with a cast of international colleagues. With this in mind, the fact that I couldn’t find a serious body of literature on black sites puzzled me. But it wasn’t entirely surprising, either: Tales of hidden air bases and secret weapons tend to be so entwined with conspiracy theories and other sorts of fringe vernacular myths that the average academic would have a hard time acknowledging that sort of research to their colleagues, much less get funding to support the work.

  At the same time, however, black sites were taking on a different cultural meaning. Not only were they real, they were deadly serious. In an October 12, 2001, memo, Attorney General John Ashcroft instructed all federal agencies and departments to err on the side of secrecy when processing Freedom of Information Act requests, ending the Clinton era’s “presumption of disclosure.” A few months later, the CIA was interrogating terror suspect Abu Zubaida at an “undisclosed location” after his early 2002 capture in Pakistan. In the Office of Legal Counsel, my colleague John Yoo was writing legal briefs authorizing the creation of “ghost prisoners” and other opinions that would become collectively known as the “torture memos.” By 2003, classified military spending equaled the Cold War highs of the Reagan era. Vice President Dick Cheney’s frequent jaunts to “undisclosed” or “secure” locations became the stuff of comedy. His comments about having to work on the “dark side” in the war on terror would become emblematic of what Alberto Gonzales called the “new paradigm.” Blank spots on maps were coming to define the twenty-first-century United States, just as they have defined empires of the past.

  Most social scientists who’ve studied secrecy have done so by developing Max Weber’s pithy comments on the subject from his posthumously published Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society). These oft-quoted lines are from his chapter on bureaucracy:

  Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret. Bureaucratic administration always tends to be an administration of “secret sessions”: in so far as it can, it hides its knowledge and action from criticism . . . The concept of the �
��official secret” is the specific invention of bureaucracy.

  The Weberian thesis applies to bureaucracies in general: The DMV, or your Parent-Teacher Association, or your Rotary Club, or your local softball league is just as unlikely to disclose its mistakes as the CIA. In the Weberian scheme secrecy is little more than an unintended effect of modern bureaucratic organization.

  But the CIA isn’t your softball league, and this is where the Weberian thesis falls short. State secrecy is a form of executive power. It is the power to unilaterally and legitimately conceal events, actions, budgets, programs, and plans from the legislature and public at large—the people who are paying for it. State secrecy is a form of monarchical power that contemporary states have inherited from the kingdoms of yesteryear. In our American system, state secrecy is the provenance of the executive branch; it has little statutory basis. It is a tool of kings.

  And so, while this book is about state secrecy, it is, more importantly, a book about democracy; it is about how the United States has become dependent on spaces created through secrecy, spaces that lie outside the rule of law, outside the Constitution, outside the democratic ideals of equal rights, transparent government, and informed consent.

  It seems to me that when we think about secrecy, it’s helpful to think about it in terms of geography, to think about the spaces, landscapes, and practices of secrecy. We live in a world that can often seem supremely abstract, ungrounded, and confusing, especially when it comes to matters of politics and notions of democracy. I think that trying to understand secrecy through geography helps make the subject more real. Thinking about secrecy in terms of concrete spaces and practices helps us to see how secrecy happens and helps to explain how secrecy grows and expands.

  State secrecy is an amalgam of logics and practices with a common intent: to conceal “facts on the ground,” to make things disappear, and to plausibly deny their existence. To accomplish this, military and intelligence officials create “secure” facilities in military bases and in research institutions, clandestine outposts in the corners of vast deserts, and develop elaborate cover stories and false identities to disguise surreptitious programs. State secrecy means pulling satellite photographs out of public archives, instituting security clearances, compartmentalizing information, and forbidding workers to speak about what it is that they do. But geography theory tells us that it really isn’t possible to make things disappear, to render things nonexistent. Geography tells us that secrecy, in other words, is always bound to fail, and because secrecy is always bound to fail, perhaps counterintuitively, it tends to grow ever stronger.

  Geography tells us that it’s impossible to take something that exists and make it nonexistent at the same time. “Geography,” my friend and colleague Allan Pred used to say before he passed away, is “an inescapable existential reality. Everybody has a body, nobody can escape from their body, and consequently all human activity—every form of individual and collective practice—is a situated practice and thereby geographical.” What this means is that secrecy can only work as a Band-Aid, a way to cover something up. But just as a Band-Aid announces the fact that it conceals a wound, blank spots on maps and blacked-out documents announce the fact that there’s something hidden. Secrets, in other words, often inevitably announce their own existence. For example, when the government takes satellite photos out of public archives, it practically broadcasts the locations of classified facilities. Blank spots on maps outline the things they seek to conceal. To truly keep something secret, then, those outlines also have to be made secret. And then those outlines, and so on. In this way, secrecy’s geographic contradictions (the fact that you can’t make something disappear completely) quickly give rise to political contradictions between the secret state and the “normal” state. In order to contain those political contradictions, new ways of practicing secrecy are created and deployed. This is one of the reasons why secrecy reproduces itself, why it tends to sculpt the world around it in its own image.

  Since the Second World War the secret world has grown dramatically. Covert operations and classified programs have placed new forms of sovereign power in the hands of the executive branch, institutionalized dishonesty and disinformation, and thoroughly militarized the national economy. Secret programs, and the social, cultural, legal, and economic blank spots that they represent, have transformed and continue to transform the United States in their own image.

  More often than not, their outlines are in plain view.

  It was the weekend, and campus was relatively quiet. No throngs of students meandering to morning classes, no activists handing out flyers for one thing or another, no overtaxed professors rushing around from meeting to meeting, quietly hoping not to bump into their graduate students en route. As I stepped into McCone Hall and turned down the corridor to face my office, I noticed someone standing outside my door. The well-groomed man, who must have been in his late thirties, sported casual J. Crew-style clothes and held himself with the disciplined poise of a military officer. From his appearance, I knew a few things about him: He was too old to be an undergraduate, too well-dressed to be a professor, and his posture was too good for him to be a graduate student. I hung back watching, trying to figure out what he was doing outside my office.

  After a few moments, he crouched down to stare at the photograph I’d put in a plastic frame outside my door, the Soviet satellite photo of the base at Groom Lake that was the redacted image from the archive. The man stared long and hard at the image, which intrigued me because it depicted something rather esoteric. As I continued standing at the end of the hallway watching, the man started opening the frame to take my photograph out. It was time for an intervention. I ran up and asked him why the hell he was trying to steal my picture.

  The stunned man apologized, stammering that he was only interested in the photo because he’d never seen such a clear picture of the site. He just wanted a closer look.

  “Do you know what that place is?” I asked.

  “Yes; do you know what that place is?” came the reply.

  “Yes.”

  After a long pause, he said, “I used to be a fighter pilot.”

  Back when he flew F-15s, he explained, they’d have big war games out in the Nevada desert, learning how to dogfight and fly combat missions in the Air Force’s version of Top Gun, called Red Flag. They had a huge amount of airspace for these war games, he explained, but there was one place, in the middle of the range, they weren’t supposed to fly into—the place in the photo. He said it was called “the Box.” You weren’t allowed to fly anywhere near the Box, he explained. Even if you were running out of gas and needed an emergency landing strip, you were supposed to bail out rather than land on the runway in the Box.

  Eventually, the man let out that one of his buddies from the fighter squadron had actually landed there. Running out of fuel over the Nevada desert, the man’s friend had decided to spare the taxpayers the $30 million cost of the warplane, and perhaps his own life, by declining to pull the F-15’s ejection seat. Instead, he landed in the Box. When the wayward pilot returned to his squadron more than a week later, his fellow pilots laid into him: He’d flown into the Box; he wasn’t supposed to do that under any circumstances; what happened? The pilot just shrugged his shoulders; he couldn’t say.

  Pointing to the satellite photo outside my door, the pilot said, “That place is part of the black world.”

  2

  A Guy in the Classified World

  An Air Force Base in California

  Outside the visitors’ center at Vandenberg Air Force Base on the California coast near San Luis Obispo, I met my escort, Lieutenant Stewart. The morning fog had lifted surprisingly early from Vandenberg’s home atop Burton Mesa, and the warm sun on my jacket reminded me of the California dream and all the hopeful-ness so many Americans have carried out west. Stewart was also enjoying the surf and sun: He’d been in-state for just two weeks but was already working on his surfing technique in his downtime at the coasta
l beaches. An easygoing guy with brown shaved hair and glasses, Stewart already had an advanced degree in chemical engineering and was scheduled to begin missile school in a few months. It was a good deal, he figured: a guaranteed salary, health care, school paid for, and when he finished his service he’d have a Top Secret clearance. Stewart calculated that he’d be able to work in whatever sector of the government or private industry he wanted. He was probably right.

  “I’d go if they told me to; that’s what you signed up for,” said Stewart, bringing up the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, “but I’m not much of a shot,” he continued. He pointed to the Air Force regulation glasses resting on his nose, often called BCGs, “birth control glasses,” on account of their unflattering look.

  As a prospective missileer, Stewart reckoned that he was far more likely to end up at the bottom of a silo in Nebraska or Wyoming with his finger on a nuclear launch button than he was to find himself on the back of a Humvee in what he called “the desert.”

  But the beginning of missile school was still months away. In the meantime, Stewart was stuck in the Public Affairs Office baby-sitting visitors like me. I was there to learn about spy satellites.

  One of the contradictory things about the United States is that an incredible amount of the government is dedicated to doing things in secret. At the same time, it’s one of the world’s most open governments. Where I was standing was a case in point. I wanted to learn something about the secret world, so I called up the public affairs officer at a military base almost entirely dedicated to black projects. They offered me a tour. I could walk right in through the front door. But, of course, they weren’t going to let me see everything I wanted to.