Blank Spots on the Map Page 4
No. The closest thing I’d see to the big screen would be a window display advertising a one-dollar Whopper Jr. at the base Burger King. If I wanted to see into the secret world, I’d have to try the back door.
3
Unexplored Territory
Downtown Las Vegas
From more than a hundred miles away, the neon signs and street-lights of Las Vegas glow deep pink on the desert horizon like a distant twilight that grows and grows the closer you get. Before pulling over the last set of mountains in the Mojave desert on the drive from California, you’re engulfed with the sky’s red glow as it pulls a bright veil over the star-filled darkness of the desert. Vegas is truly dazzling. On the Strip, neon billboards and JumboTrons pound the streets with flashing, multicolored brilliance. At the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Tropicana Avenue is a mock New York City, complete with faux Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn Bridge, and a roller coaster plunging through fake buildings. Across the street, the Excalibur Hotel: a casino castle replete with staged tournaments and jousting as family entertainment. The Strip beams with incandescent tributes to Paris, Rome, Venice, ancient Egypt, and the Caribbean. Las Vegas advertises itself as a landscape of seduction, oversized rum cocktails served in plastic footballs, and endless partying. A city whose greatest export is its own image, a vision of excess. But Las Vegas is also home to another, far less illuminated landscape that becomes visible from some of the casinos’ higher floors. I chose the eighteenth floor of the Tropicana. Oddly enough, it’s one of the best vantage points for catching a glimpse of the Pentagon’s black world.
From a hotel perch high up in the Tropicana’s Island Tower, my view toward the southeast looked unremarkable. It’s a view of McCarran Airport. Exactly the panorama I wanted. I was spending the week looking for airplanes.
With Las Vegas’s airport spread out below me, I could spend each day watching plane after plane line up on the crowded runway, barrel down the tarmac, and disappear into the sky. Most of the aircraft wear the same bold colors of the Vegas Strip: Southwest Airlines’ bright blue, red, and brown scheme; the green and orange of America West; Frontier Airlines, with the name “Frontier” painted in large block letters across the fuselage; the chrome-silver of Northwest Airlines; and an Air Canada jet, draped entirely in the red maple leaf of the Canadian flag. I was looking for airplanes, to be sure, but in contrast to the bright colors of the commercial carriers, the planes I spotted were remarkable only for their blandness. I went to Las Vegas to chart the movements of a small fleet of 737s and King Airs, unmarked save for an inoffensive white or blue stripe painted down the length of their dry-white airframes. These planes, known by the call sign they use in civilian airspace—Janet—are shuttles to and from the black world. Each day, they bus people to work at a handful of secret military installations in the deep desert to the north. Their home is a small, secure facility on the airport’s northwestern side, far away from McCarran’s vast commercial terminals. This secure and unassuming building lay almost directly below my hotel room.
My goal for the week was to begin mapping these aircrafts’ movements. If I could trace the plane routes, understand their schedules, see where they go and how they get there, I could begin to describe the secret geography their routes represent. By cataloging the places they visited, I could begin pointing to places on the map and be certain that, wherever the destinations might be, they were somehow a part of the black world.
But mapping aircraft routes is far easier said than done, particularly with this wily fleet of planes, which, it turns out, engages in all sorts of high jinks to prevent someone like me from doing exactly what I’d set out to do. My hotel room overflowed with the equipment I’d need for the job: a high-powered telescope, eye-pieces, a tripod, and a camera. With these I’d be able to see and record people getting on and off the planes as they made their way to and from work each day. I’d be able to read and record the tail numbers on the aircraft, then use the numbers to look up each airplane’s Federal Aviation Administration file, making use of the open information to fill in my map. Another crucial piece of equipment was a RadioShack military-band-capable radio scanner, meticulously programmed with McCarran Airport’s communication frequencies. The scanner allowed me to listen to the exchanges between pilots and air traffic controllers, and to overhear controllers’ directions to the pilots. A DO NOT DISTURB sign hung from my door.
I awoke to the bell-like monotones of my cell phone alarm. As the predawn light lit up the thin film of grime on the window facing the airport, I saw the parking lot at the Janet terminal begin to fill up. A steady procession of cars moved through a guard gate at the far end of the compound before pulling into their places in the sprawling parking lot. These were the workers. Like many others, they call Las Vegas’s expansive suburbs home, but instead of dealing blackjack, working the convention center floor, or filling any of the innumerable services a typical city requires, these men and women spend their days working in the defense industry’s deepest recesses. One after another, they walked past a USA Today newspaper dispenser into the nondescript terminal. Through the eyepiece of my telescope, I spied them idling in the waiting area under cold-blue fluorescent lights. In time, a security officer on the far end of the room opened up a door to the runway and the workers filed through, across the tarmac, and up a mobile staircase. A stewardess in a dark blue uniform stood there to greet each one of them just before they disappeared into the plane’s fuselage. It was 4:10 A.M., the first flight of the day.
A search through Federal Aviation Administration records shows that the Janet fleet is owned by a division of the Department of the Air Force housed at Box 1504 in Layton, Utah, just outside Air Force Materiel Command’s Hill Air Force Base. But Air Force pilots don’t fly these aircraft: The fleet is operated by the Special Projects Division of Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier, or EG&G for short. Their headquarters is just south of the airport at 821 Grier Drive, an address named after one of the company’s founders. EG&G’s history is synonymous with the history of nuclear weapons testing and classified military activities. Harold “Doc” Edgerton was the inventor of stroboscopic photography, the man who gave us images of bullets passing through apples, the intricate splash of a falling drop of milk, and the indentation on a football at the moment of a punt. Edgerton’s images revealed the intricacies of the world faster than the human eye could see. The military ended up hiring his company to take high-speed photographs of nuclear weapons, first at Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific, then at the Nevada Test Site. Before long, EG&G was developing specialized equipment for other parts of nuclear testing—everything from blast doors to detonators—and providing more mundane kinds of logistical support to the Atomic Energy Commission and military alike. From time to time, EG&G advertises jobs for pilots and flight attendants in the Las Vegas area. The jobs require Top Secret clearances.
The assumption underlying my long week in the Vegas room was one of geography’s axioms: that the black world, like the rest of the world, is inescapably spatial. It must exist in the same way that shopping malls, fire stations, casinos, state capitals—indeed everything—must. It had to be composed of the same stuff as the rest of the world. This geographic axiom may seem obvious, but it is why I thought I could learn a lot about secrecy by looking through a telescope, by listening in on air traffic controllers, and by paying close attention to the daily flight patterns of the white 737s on the northwestern side of McCarran Airport. With these instruments, I would be able to see and hear the secret world breathing with life each day as people came and went, reproducing and reinvigorating this hidden world with their movements. Insisting on the black world’s materiality is my starting point.
The aircraft on the tarmac below me, now loaded with the day’s first batch of commuters, rifled down the runway and into the sky. My scanner crackled to life on 125.90 MHz, the Las Vegas Departure Control frequency. “Janet three-o-one: Climb and maintain four thousand five hundred.” Leaving the domain of Las Vegas Dep
arture controllers, the aircraft would start talking to Nellis Control, which manages the larger airspace around southern Nevada on 126.6500 MHz.
“Nellis, Janet three-o-one, good day,” announces the plane’s pilot on the new frequency.
“Janet three-o-one. Nellis Control. You’re loud and clear. Nellis altimeter two-niner-eight-eight.”
The aircraft headed northwest out of Las Vegas, making a bee-line for the nondirectional beacon (NDB) at Mercury, Nevada, and the southernmost region of the nation’s nuclear-weapons testing range at the Nevada Test Site. A few short minutes later, the aircraft entered the restricted military airspace above the Nevada Test Site, sixty miles northwest of Las Vegas. Nellis Control crackled over the radio, “Janet three-o-one, frequency change approved.” It’s a telling moment: Nellis Control just told the Janet that it’s being handed off to another controller, but Nellis doesn’t indicate the new frequency. The civilian air traffic controller trusts that the pilot knows which frequency he should tune in to for the new, anonymous controller. “Janet three-o-one. Good day,” says the pilot. The Janet enters the restricted airspace of the Nellis Range Complex, a 3.1-million-acre tract of land covered by an even greater twelve thousand-square-mile swath of military airspace, an area the size of Switzerland. With the flick of a switch, the aircraft disappears and my scanner goes dead.
The enormous military range of the Nellis Complex is a landscape of extremes—parched dry lakes, sun-bleached sands, and mountains of craggy bedrock whose jagged outcroppings have been blunted and pulverized by eons of wind and erosion across the Basin and Range. A scant five inches of average annual rainfall nourish seemingly endless fields of gnarled sage and creosote, whose brittle, dry tendrils lay like bleached skeletons across the desert sand. In the summer, the horizon glimmers with mirages and convection waves as the desert bakes in one-hundred-plus-degree heat. Come winter, a thin layer of snow turns the desert into a frozen no-man’s-land. From its inception as a bombing range during the Second World War, the Nellis Complex has been a place where the government does whatever it wants. When it created the Nellis Range (originally called the Las Vegas Range), the Army Air Corps explained that the land “wasn’t much good for anything but gunnery practice—you could bomb it into oblivion and never notice the difference.”
On the southern end of the restricted area is the company town for the Nevada Test Site, Mercury, and the small airfield adjacent to it, the Desert Rock Airstrip (DRA). Just north of Mercury and the DRA, blinding lights from atmospheric nuclear explosions lit the skies throughout the 1950s and ’60s, creating the ultimate spectacle for Las Vegas partygoers to the south while raining the invisible death of nuclear fallout on small-town “downwinders” to the northeast. Nuclear detonations left the desert so scarred with pockmarks and craters that astronauts in training eventually used it to simulate the surface of the moon. To the east of the test site, a mock city called Terror Town holds counterterrorism training exercises. On the southern border lies Creech Air Force Base, home to squadrons of unmanned Predator and Reaper drones. The Predator “pilots” stationed at Creech control their aircraft all over the world via satellite uplink from anonymous computer terminals here in the Nellis Complex. Just north of Mercury, squarely in the middle of the Nevada Test Site, a recently constructed secret base takes shape on the east side of Yucca Dry Lake. Lockheed Martin tested an experimental unmanned aerial vehicle nicknamed “Polecat” here in late 2004; new hangars at the base undoubtedly house some of the company’s most recent black offerings.
Northeast of the Nevada Test Site, just past Pahute Mesa, is a base called the Tolicha Peak Electronic Combat Range (TPECR), two miles north of Quartz Mountain. A sprawling facility, the TPECR is home to top-secret electronic warfare applications. Military documents suggest that Nellis Air Force Base in northern Las Vegas controls the facility, and that the TPECR plays a role in simulating threats, monitoring activities during Red Flag war games, and conducting acceptance testing for various electronic warfare capabilities. But much about the TPECR remains obscure. According to a research project conducted by the Center for Land Use Interpretation (in cooperation with the U.S. Air Force), “facilities at Tolicha Peak are . . . considered by the Air Force to be too sensitive to discuss.”
Just past Mount Helen, near the northern border of the Nellis Complex, stands the Tonopah Test Range (TTR). The TTR is a kind of a “gray” base: Its existence is public, and like other conventional military bases and airports it has an international airport designation (TNX). A sign outside a guard shack on the northern edge of the base welcomes personnel to the installation. The Tonopah Test Range began its life in the early 1950s when Sandia Labs built the facility to experiment with test shapes for nuclear weapons. It was a counterpart to the Nevada Test Site. While the Department of Energy (then the Atomic Energy Commission) lit the skies with mushroom clouds to the south, engineers at Tonopah devised rockets, bombs, and other shapes to deliver those nuclear payloads.
For the last thirty years, however, the Department of Energy facilities at the TTR have taken a backseat to classified Air Force activities. The Air Force laid the groundwork for the base’s newer incarnation in the late 1970s, when the 4477th Test and Evaluation Squadron funded improvements to the airstrip and added hangars, taxiways, support facilities, and other structures adjacent to the older Sandia facilities. Known by their nickname, the Red Eagles, the 4477th had an unusual mission: Under the code name CONSTANT PEG, they flew a small squadron of pilfered Soviet fighters, developed dogfighting tactics against the foreign aircraft, and trained a generation of pilots to fight against them. Other classified squadrons followed the Red Eagles to the TTR.
In 1981, the newly created 4450th Tactical Group set up shop at the TTR, building more hangars and funding more improvements to the clandestine Air Force base. The 4450th’s mission was to fly an aircraft that would become one of the largest secret programs since the Manhattan Project: the F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighter. As the stealth fighters became operational, they joined the ranks of the other black aircraft at Tonopah, flying secret training missions each night over the American West—missions that surreptitiously continued for almost a decade before the Air Force acknowledged the stealth fighter’s existence on November 10, 1988. Thirteen months later, the planes took off from Tonopah to spearhead the December 1989 invasion of Panama. In 1990, the black planes deployed to King Khalid Air Base in Saudi Arabia to lead the first Gulf War. Stealth crews took to calling King Khalid Air Base “Tonopah East.” When the stealth fighters returned home to the United States, the Air Force transferred the fighters to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. But the base at Tonopah stayed open for business, its new mission obscure.
Sixty miles southeast of the Tonopah Test Range, nested in the Emigrant Valley between the Papoose Range and the Jumbled Hills, is a place former U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers once called “one of those ‘you can’t get there from here’ places.” If the Tonopah Test Range is a sort of “gray” facility, the base adjacent to a dry lakebed called Groom Lake is a black site through and through. Though the aerospace complex has been operational for more than half a century, the Air Force has said almost nothing about it. Before a series of lawsuits during the 1990s forced the Air Force to admit that it has an “operating location near Groom Lake,” the Air Force denied its very existence.
Over the course of its history, the site at Groom Lake has been known by many names. Working under a contract from the Central Intelligence Agency, Lockheed built the base in 1955 to test and train pilots for the U-2 spy plane, known then by the code name AQUATONE. Upon its completion, Lockheed’s legendary aerospace engineer Kelly Johnson, who was in charge of the U-2, called the desolate site “Paradise Ranch.” In CIA documents, the base went by the name “Watertown,” perhaps in reference to the birthplace of CIA director Allen Dulles. In 1958, President Eisenhower issued Public Land Order 1662, withdrawing much of the land around Watertown from public access and designating the surroundin
g land “Area 51,” a name that has stuck in the public imagination ever since. Although former workers simply call it “the Area,” “the remote location,” or “the test site,” on patches, coffee mugs, paperweights, and other souvenirs from classified programs at the base, the site is referred to as “Detachment 3, Air Force Flight Test Center.” Not that the “DET 3” name has appeared on any official documents: Air Force officials always claim the site either has no name or has a classified name. The base, nonetheless, remains a state-of-the-art flight test center, home to billions of dollars’ worth of black military and intelligence projects.
As my stay on the eighteenth floor of the Tropicana wore on and I started to worry about the bill I was racking up, I discovered that the aircraft maintain consistent flight patterns. The first flight of the day is Janet 301 at approximately 4:10 A.M., followed by Janets 312 and 323, both departing around five A.M. Over the next four hours eight more depart, culminating in Janet 391 just before nine A.M. All the aircraft file flight plans with the FAA indicating that their destination is the Tonopah Test Range. I knew, however, that for some of the flights, the pilots were using Tonopah as a cover story for an actual flight to Groom Lake. By listening to the pilots’ interactions with Nellis Control, it became relatively easy to tell which aircraft were going where. Because the Tonopah Test Range has an actual airport code (KTNX), when Nellis Control handed the Janet plane off to military controllers in the Nellis Complex, they’d acknowledge the plane was handed off to the Tonopah Tower on 134.1000 MHz or Tonopah Approach on 127.2500 MHz. On the flights where Nellis Control passed the Janet off to an unnamed control, the plane’s actual destination was Groom Lake.
It isn’t just 737s that make up the Janet fleet. Just south of the terminal were the propeller-driven King Airs, whose fuselages were adorned with blue stripes. Unlike their 737 counterparts, the King Airs fly using visual flight rules (VFR), meaning that the pilots don’t have to take continuous instructions from air traffic controllers. Nor are they required to report their flight plans to the FAA, although they do on occasion. The King Airs didn’t keep regular schedules, often flying late at night and on weekends. Regardless, I was able to track enough of them to get a general idea of how they operated. By plugging their tail numbers into an FAA database, I found some of the places that they had filed flight plans to. Like their 737 counterparts, the King Airs’ flight paths served as a guide to the black world’s geography. Their routes revealed how the black world’s contours extended far beyond the restricted borders of the Nellis Range to places that, on their face, are far more familiar.