For Pike, this gap showed that government secrecy inhabited a bizarre alternate universe where the perpetuation of secret aircraft programs—programs generally designed to further the interests of defense industry and to promote an ideology that presupposes future military conflict—is the primary end, rather than secrecy to protect national security interests.
One irony of the photo release was that the Russian government surely had higher-resolution photos. The U.S. government had placed a restriction on the image resolution that commercial providers could sell to private customers. It also theoretically retained “shutter control” over releasable imagery of sensitive sites.4
The Air Force Flight Test Center’s Detachment 3 manages operations at Groom Lake for all customers, including the CIA. Those who work there call it “the remote site,” “the alternate site,” or simply “the site.” With the largest dry lake bed outside Edwards Air Force Base in neighboring California, it remains the place where the Department of Defense and the CIA test their secret aviation projects and exploit and test aircraft parts stolen from other countries.
About two thousand government employees and contractors touch ground there at least once a year. According to the résumés of several engineers who have served at the site, Detachment 3 services about one hundred continuing projects, a dozen of which are fully realized prototype aircraft.∗ Many—especially the unmanned aircraft—are managed by the Air Force’s new Rapid Capability Office, which exists on paper as an acquisitions team, and by the Air Force’s Big Safari Program Office, which for decades has overseen the acquisition, fielding, and testing of secret intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance planes.5 Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman have a full-time presence on the site.
To protect the facility, the Air Force restricts all related information to a special access program known by the initials CD. In a four-hour session, initiates are “read in” to the basic purpose of the site, its history, its security procedures, and how the base is restricted even to those who are given permission to be there. Groom Lake’s 350 security officers are contractors drawn from the same firm that manages the flights to and from the site: EG&G Technical Services. They actually went on strike after 9/11 because of too much overtime, the union steward told a Las Vegas newspaper.6 The Air Force security squadron ostensibly assigned to the remote site (the 99th Security Forces Group) has no actual presence there.7
Initiates are also told that the neighboring Tonopah Test Range, a 336,000-acre site operated under Department of Energy cover (it used to be known as Area 52) is also not to be acknowledged, although the Department of Energy does so freely, as do contractors bragging about their projects there.8 Formally, Lockheed Martin, under a DOE contract, uses the area to test the nuclear weapons stockpile reliability (checking, for instance, whether fuses and electromagnetic pulse shielding work properly).∗ Informally, the Army, the Air Force, and the Navy have program offices at the site (the U.S. Army Threat Systems Management Office is one of them).9 The Air Force occasionally uses Tonopah Test Range as a cover for projects that were actually tested at the Groom Lake site. Lockheed Martin’s once highly classified RQ-170 Sentinel drone was tested at Groom Lake beginning in 2006; officially, the Air Force says it was tested at Tonopah Test Range. It has also served as a forward staging base for foreign aircraft parts that are due to be exploited by engineers at the Groom Lake site. Often the two sites are used together for what the government calls Foreign Material Exploitation (FME) Tactical Material Exploitation missions. (First, figure out what the enemy aircraft is capable of. Then figure out how your pilots can effectively counter the threat.)
In 2006, the government declassified a program called CONSTANT PEG, revealing that the United States had acquired numerous Soviet aircraft and brought pilots to the Tonopah Test Range to fly these aircraft with other pilots to test their skills against actual Russian jets. In 1984, the vice commander of the Air Force Systems Command was killed at Groom Lake while flying a MiG-23—something the government unsuccessfully attempted to cover up at the time.10
The Air Force implies that the end of the Cold War prompted the end of such testing and reverse engineering, but the U.S. government continues to use Groom Lake and Tonopah Test Range for the same purposes today. The cover-name conventions likewise remain the same. In 2006, Groom Lake was used for testing Su-27 Flankers (Russia’s version of the F-15) that the United States had purchased from one of the former Soviet republics. Flying the foreign aircraft can be dangerous, and most of the FME data is used to create virtual simulations of foreign fighters. Somewhere on base is a repository of foreign aircraft parts and systems, and the United States has billion-dollar procurement programs in place to find and steal them.
Groom Lake has to control its employee access somehow. As of 2008, its site badges were emblazoned with the crest of the Air Force Flight Test Center. AFFTC owns land abutting the complex, but officially (and unsurprisingly) has no presence in Nevada. Its home is at Edwards Air Force Base in California, but flight trackers have identified jets that regularly travel between Edwards and Tonopah Test Range, Nellis, and McCarran—and also, apparently, Groom Lake.11
Because flights out of McCarran are difficult to keep secret, the detachment’s security team often brings employees in by bus. Some shuttles might be manifested for Site 1 but will deliberately go to Site 4, something that workers must know in advance, lest they get dropped off somewhere at the site that they’re not supposed to be and see something they’re not supposed to see.
When the site needs power lines replaced, it transports specially cleared personnel in blacked-out vans, although the workers are forced to wear frosted goggles, or “froggles,” that provide an extra measure of visual obscurity. This may have been necessary when Area 51’s existence wasn’t acknowledged, but it’s hard to imagine that the workers aren’t aware of where they’re headed now.
Getting time to test your secret project is difficult, and program managers sometimes find the site’s security restrictions overly onerous. Security officers at the site’s Range Coordination Agency often forbid offsite transportation of any data or telemetry transmitted to or from an aircraft that indicate the aircraft had been at the site. In practice, that means that the Air Force or the CIA has to create a separate security compartment for flight data recorders and instruments that are tested there, even though everyone involved in the particular program has been cleared at the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information level.
Remote sensor platforms (drones) are particularly hard to test. The aircraft are outfitted and launched by a ground unit at the site, and they’re operated by pilots and technicians elsewhere—sometimes at nearby Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, or at Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts. Site rules require that no latitude or longitude data be transmitted outside the airspace, so systems engineers have to create special software programs specific to the testing phase. The risk in this case is miniscule, given that the data is encrypted and the chances of it being intercepted, decrypted, deciphered, and exploited by a foreign government is nil. But the site makes the rules.
Anytime an alien hunter or curious passerby triggers a remote sensor, crews have to quickly push aircraft and equipment back into hangars. The Detachment receives intelligence from Air Force units tracking Chinese, Soviet, and Israeli satellites. If there’s any chance that satellite (commercial or foreign) might be overhead during any given day, the site will be locked down.
There are several other areas inside the National Security Test Site where spooky things happen. The Air Force tests missile defense systems and new radars at the Tonopah Electronic Combat Range. The U.S. Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA maintain training facilities. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency also maintains a presence inside the container.
Even in our hypothetical opening example, the only thing hypothetical is that anyone would have seen it. When the Predator program began its tests at the site in the mid-1990s, Detachment 3
managers insisted on fitting the aircraft with special automatic detonation devices that would destroy the drones if they wandered out of the restricted airspace.∗ On the maiden voyage of one of the first test Predators, its operator increased its speed beyond allowable tolerances. This somehow sent bad data to the communication module on the detonation device, which sent an error message to a ground unit that had interrogated it. All of this resulted in a computer generated auto-destruct order. A $30 million prototype was destroyed—a victim of an obsession with operational secrecy.
Yet it is hard to fault the government for a zero-risk policy. GRASS BLADE was the developmental nickname for two Black Hawk helicopters built in secret by the U.S. Army Integrated Aviation Systems 21 group, working under the umbrella of the Applied Aviation Technology Directorate at Fort Eustis, Virginia. For three years beginning in 2007, engineers and technicians developed sound-dampening devices, mixed special resins and paints, and laboriously and rigorously subjected the resulting helicopter prototypes to radar and acoustic tests. Once assembled, the helicopters were transferred to Groom Lake in 2010 and given the operational nickname TRACTOR PULL. At Groom Lake, pilots from the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command Aviation Testing and Evaluation Group practiced flying them. To those who didn’t know about TRACTOR PULL, the gray helicopters often seen at the Groom Lake looked like mechanical wolves and soon acquired the nickname “Air Wolves.” Had the program been compromised, the military would not have had a way to clandestinely transport Navy SEALs to Abbottabad on the morning of May 3, 2011.
∗Something it was forced to admit when former employees sued the Air Force over the effects of alleged exposure to toxic fumes, prompting the Clinton administration to assert a state secrets privilege and order the Environmental Protection Agency to exempt the site from certain federal regulations.
∗On his LinkedIn profile, one such engineer wrote that he worked “on a DOD national electronic combat test and evaluation range for tri-service customers.”
∗According to the DOE, “Sandia Corporation (a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation through its contract with the U.S. Department of Energy [DOE]), National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Sandia Site Office (SSO), operates the Tonopah Test Range (TTR) in Nevada. Westinghouse Government Service, TTR’s operations and maintenance contractor, performs most environmental program functions.”
∗Officially, the Predator was tested at another range on the Nellis complex, the Indian Springs Auxiliary Airfield.
Notes
1. Thornton D. Barnes, Roadrunners Internationale, http://www.roadrunnersinternationale.com/roadrunner_blog/; Trevor Paglen, I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2010).
2. United States Air Force, Airport Diagrams: Russia and CIS, October 2010, http://www.checksix-fr.com/Files/DCS/A-10C/Doc/chart.pdf.
3. John Pike, “Area 51—Groom Lake, NV,” Federation of American Scientists, April 2000, http://www.fas.org/irp/overhead/groom.htm.
4. William J. Broad, “Snooping’s Not Just for Spies Any More,” April 23, 2000, New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/043200satellite-review.html
5. U.S. Air Force, Rapid Capabilities Office Fact Sheet, September 2, 2009, http://www.af.mil/information/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=3466. The term Big Safari refers to the acknowledged special access program under which these aircraft are budgeted. See Department of Defense Inspector General, Audit Report: Allegations Relating to the Security Controls on Two Air Force Programs, December 16, 1999, http://www.dodig.mil/Audit/reports/fy00/00-059.pdf.
6. Keith Rogers, “Area 51 ‘Camo Dudes’ on Strike,” December 11, 2001, Las Vegas Review-Journal; Keith Rogers, “Security Guards for ‘Nowhere’ Strike for Contract, Higher Pay,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, December 12, 2001. The figure of 350 security officers is from an EG&G job posting seeking candidates for a security manager at a “TS/SCI Air Operations” facility in Nevada.
7. Email exchange with Tim Farrell, former commander of the 99th Security Forces Squadron.
8. Nellis Air Force Base, Wing Infrastructure Development Outlook (WINDO): Final Environmental Assessment, June 2006, p. 32, http://www.nellis.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-060619-037.pdf; Bill Murphy, “Tonopah Test Range Open for Business,” Sandia Lab News, March 2010, http://www.lazygranch.com/ttr.htm#area52_area54.
9. Threat Systems Management Office, August 24, 2011, http://www.peostri.army.mil/PM-ITTS/TSMO/.
10. U.S. Air Force, “U.S. Air Force Declassifies Elite Aggressor Program,” November 13, 2006, http://forum.keypublishing.co.uk/archive/index.php?t-64908.html.
11. Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (New York: Dutton, 2009), 32–48.
CHAPTER 9
The Tip of the Spear
For the SEALs of Red Squadron, putting two bullets in a primary target wasn’t asking much. The insertion aircraft were a little different, a little more crowded than standard Black Hawks, owing to some bolted-on stealth technology recently tested at Area 51. Destination X, a fair-weathered hill town only thirty miles from the capital of Pakistan and well within that country’s borders, would make for a daring incursion. One blip on a station’s radar would scramble Pakistani jets armed with 30 mm cannons, air-to-air missiles, and very possibly free-fire orders. Still, it wasn’t anyone’s first time in Pakistan, and it wouldn’t be the last. When you’re fighting shadow wars everywhere from Iran to Paraguay, quiet infiltrations with no margin for error are simply the expected way to do business.
Those men of the Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU), better known as SEAL Team Six, had spent weeks (and, it later occurred to the them, months) training for the mission. That night, the aircrews of the U.S. Army 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne) piloted the one-of-a-kind stealth helicopters through Pakistan’s well-guarded and highly militarized border. CIA paramilitaries acted as spotters on the ground and monitored the situation from afar. A ratlike RQ-170 Sentinel unmanned aerial vehicle operated from Nevada by the U.S. Air Force 30th Reconnaissance Squadron hovered about fifty thousand feet above Abbottabad, equipped with a special camera designed to penetrate thin layers of cloud and down to a three-story compound below.
The drone was ordered by defense planners to provide a covert way to monitor nuclear weapons sites in Iran and North Korea. The National Security Council, however, had granted special permission for its use over Pakistan. To mitigate diplomatic fallout in the event the drone was to crash in Pakistan, the U.S. Defense Department disallowed nuclear-sensing devices from the aircraft, in opposition to the wishes of the CIA. Pakistan was incredibly sensitive about U.S. surveillance of their nuclear establishment; the CIA was obsessed with it.
Transmitters on this drone’s wing beamed encrypted footage to an orbiting National Reconnaissance Office satellite, which relayed the signal to a ground station in Germany. Another satellite hop brought the feed to the White House and elsewhere.
The Sentinel had spent months monitoring and mapping the Abbottabad compound. The area had fallen under scrutiny after intelligence analysts learned that the high-value target in question communicated by courier. Captured enemy combatants—some subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques—fleshed out details. A name. A description. A satellite first spotted the courier’s van, and the drone circled. Ground crews in Afghanistan attached sophisticated laser devices and multispectral sensors to the drone’s underbelly, allowing the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to create a three-dimensional rendering of that little piece of Pakistan. Details were so precise that analysts managed to compute the height of the tall man in question they nicknamed “the Pacer.” When it wasn’t gathering imagery intelligence (IMINT), the drone would sometimes fly from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to Abbottabad and back, on signals intelligence (SIGINT) operations, listening to the routine chatter of Pakistan’s air defense forces so that U.S. National Security Agency analysts could de
termine patterns and alert configurations.
There was a scare just three weeks before the Abbottabad raid. While the drone was in transit over a Pakistani airbase, translators listening to the feed picked up Pakistani air controllers alerting crews to an orbiting American reconnaissance plane. Had the Sentinel—designed to evade detection and crucial to the operation—been outed? Moments later, when a Pakistani air controller ordered its fighter pilots to ascend to the altitude of “the EP-3,” Americans could exhale. The Pakistanis were merely practicing for the possible straying of an EP-3E Aries surveillance plane from its permitted flight path from the Indian Ocean into Pakistan.
Among the list of units that participated in the Abbottabad mission—otherwise known as Operation Neptune’s Spear—there are others still unknown but whose value was inestimable. Some entity of the U.S. government, for example, figured out how to completely spoof Pakistani air defenses for a while, because at least some of the U.S. aircraft in use that night were not stealthy. Yet at the core of it all were the shooters and the door-kickers of Red Squadron, SEAL Team Six, and a dog named Cairo. It took just forty minutes from boots on dirt to exfiltration, and although they lost one helicopter to the region’s thin air (notoriously inhospitable to rotary-wing aircraft), they expended fewer rounds than would fill a single magazine, snatched bags of evidence, and collected a single dead body.
The team detonated the lost Black Hawk and slipped like phantoms back to Jalalabad, where DNA samples were taken from the body. They loaded into MH-47 Chinooks and again passed over now-cleared parts of Pakistan, then landed on the flight deck of the waiting USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier. In accordance with Muslim rites, a short ceremony was held above deck (all crew members were confined below), and the body of Osama bin Laden was tossed overboard. The after-action report doesn’t go into much more detail than that, but the story of Abbottabad, of seamless integration between elite special forces and the intelligence community, includes many more layers. Lost in the sparkling details of the raid is the immense logistical challenge of providing reliable communications. There was a contingency plan; military interrogators were in place on the Vinson, along with CIA officers, just in case bin Laden was captured alive. The 75th Ranger Regiment played an unknown role in the proceedings. And someone had to later exfiltrate the CIA officers who were on the ground.
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