Dreamland

by Phil Patton

  The premise will come as no surprise: Shoot ’em fast as you can as they pop out from behind boxes and vehicles or dash along catwalks. Hangars make fine settings for shoot-outs. The ultimate goal of the game is to “penetrate” far enough to set off a special nuclear destruction device and rid the planet of the invading scourge. I couldn’t help noticing, a little wistfully, that winning the Area 51 game meant destroying Area 51. But when I played, I never managed to get very far inside the perimeter before running out of ammo and lives.

  With Tom Mahood’s detailed time line of Lazar’s life in hand, I drove around Las Vegas on my own personal Lazar tour. I passed the WELCOME TO FABULOUS LAS VEGAS sign that marked the beginning of the Strip. I wanted to get a sense of the place where Lazar was said to have “pandered”—the Newport Cove Apartments, site of an alleged brothel. A few blocks off the Strip, I found them: a complex with thick pseudo-adobe walls and the wavy red tile that was supposed to signal Spanish style but looked instead like giant clay lasagna. This was not a dump or a cheap hotel but a fairly high-class if anonymous set of apartments. WELCOME HOME! a sign shouted.

  I passed the familiar Glass Pool Motel, one of my favorite places in Vegas, even though it represented a minor gimmick for the Strip, which was in its fetal stages here on the edge of town as if foreshadowing for drivers entering the city the fountains and swim-up bars that lay ahead. But I took it as an early, touching bit of entrepreneurial show business: The pool was raised above ground and fitted with portholes so you could glance in at the swimmers. It reminded me of old-style aquariums, where you could see porpoises through portholes, then go upstairs to watch them leap. I liked it because it still had an amateurish quality to its showbiz, although now the water looked none too blue, murky and uninviting.

  I stopped by Lazar’s old house, where his first wife had committed suicide. It was empty now. It stood on a nice, quiet street, exactly the kind TV reporters flock to when someone is hauled away on a stretcher, the neighbors telling them that they would never have dreamed of it in a thousand years. The concept “safe house” leaped to mind.

  I headed back east past the Janet terminal and came to the edge of the Hughes Industrial Park on the other side of McCarran Airport. This was Dreamland’s navel, as it were, the umbilicus connecting it to the real world. The contractors who served Dreamland were clustered here on the map that would double as an organizational chart. There, in neat, slick glass boxes of low buildings, like stereo components arranged in a store, were Wackenhut and SAIC, in the same building as Bechtel. Lockheed sat on its own little loop—Kelly Johnson Drive!—across from EG&G Special Projects.

  A gardener was working around the sign proclaiming EG&G SPECIAL PROJECTS. That word special again, as in special forces, special weapons, special operations. Having run most of the Nevada Test Site’s operations, directly or through its REECO subsidiary, having hired guards and owned aircraft, and now operating most of Dreamland, EG&G had come a long way from the labs at MIT where Harold Edgerton had started out.

  The man who had invented stroboscopic photography was great PR and beloved at MIT. Harold “Doc” Edgerton’s images of bullets passing through apples, and footballs indented by the toe of a kicker, turned technology into showbiz. They reached a wide public, the Life magazine sort of audience, and showed science not as equations or test tubes but as something fun and exciting and amazing. MIT president James Killian, who had headed the commission that recommended building the U-2, would coauthor a book with Edgerton on his photographs.

  Edgerton’s photos also represented a turning point in the way twentieth-century man saw the world. In his standard History of Photography, Beaumont Newhall writes that strobe photography had “gone beyond seeing … and brings us a world of form normally invisible,” which fixes “forever form never detected by the unaided eye.” It revealed what art critic Rosalind Krauss would later call “the visual unconscious.”

  Edgerton’s photographs captured the dreams of everyday vision, the moments that slept beneath the waking level of ordinary sight: frozen bubbles and bullets, and the magical crown created by the splash of a drop in a pail of milk.

  Born in 1903, Edgerton spent most of his childhood in Aurora, Nebraska, a science-fair whiz kid. In the late twenties he experimented with argon lamps and developed the stroboscopic method of photography, a bright, extremely short flash of light in sync with the camera shutter.

  He was fascinated with aviation, having seen the Wrights fly at Fort Myers, Virginia, in 1909; during World War II, reconnaissance aircraft were equipped with his strobes. Edgerton’s flash illuminated crossroads and town squares in Normandy the night before D-day, documenting the placement of German troops.

  By the thirties it was clear there was too much money to be made with the strobe not to commercialize it. With his key associates, Herbert Grier and Kenneth Germeshausen, Edgerton established a company to commercialize the equipment for industrial clients. Strobe photographs could reveal the inner workings of machines, and, adapted, strobes would pace the party of the sixties—their dreamy lighting inducing reveries while dancing to rock and roll—and sometimes trigger epileptic fits. The strobes later went underwater with Jacques Cousteau and discovered the wrecks of the Titanic and the Monitor. But their most important use would be in capturing the milliseconds of an atomic explosion, tracking the fireball out from its plutonium kernel, so that Life magazine could reveal the unfolding of the nuclear blooms that obsessed its readers.

  Edgerton’s cameras were at Eniwetok Atoll in 1946 and, a few years later, at the new Nevada Proving Ground, set up on a seventy-five-foot tower seven miles from ground zero. There, they captured the nuclear explosion in the moment it hung like a leukocyte, a terrifying organism blown from micro to macro size.

  It soon became clear that triggering a camera to take a picture of an atomic blast was very much like triggering the blast itself, and EG&G became one of the AEC’s chief contractors. EG&G didn’t just photograph the bombs, it helped to explode them. It produced thyratrons, krytrons, and other detonators. And soon EG&G was running all sorts of things at the test site, such as the building and operation of the blast doors in underground tunnels, which would close in a millisecond.

  For the DOE, EG&G developed special bacteria to remove radioactive components from the soil, and it grew top-grade mercuric iodide crystals on space shuttle flights in 1985 and 1992 to serve as the heart of new types of extremely sensitive radioactivity detectors. As the Cold War wound down, EG&G began to look to civilian work. In 1993 it obtained a new contract to manage the space shuttle launch and landing complexes for NASA, a task that, according to the company’s annual report, required a “200-man uniformed security force and SWAT team.” It also ran facilities for separating tritium—the heavy isotope of hydrogen used in nuclear weapons—from helium. It had branches in Langley, Virginia, in Florida, and in West Virginia.

  The company’s 1995 annual report listed some $1.4 billion in sales and touted the company’s work in sensors for air-bag deployment and other automotive uses, its “Z-scan” airport security system, and other work. There was a terse mention of “continuing assignments for U.S. Customs” and a contract “from a U.S. federal agency to conduct a classified project.” However, there was no mention of the Janet airline, or of Groom Lake, or of the decision to let the contract to run the Nevada Test Site go to Bechtel. And there was no picture of the building that houses “EG&G Special Projects.”

  22. Searchlight

  We were heading for the center of the world. In a rented Hyundai Sonata, Trader and his friend and I were driving east from Las Vegas, then south toward Searchlight, Nevada. Trader had read that the Mojave Indians believed a certain mountain called Avikwame was the center of the universe. Based on description and hand-drawn maps, Trader said that Avikwame appeared to be Spirit Mountain, part of the Newberry Range near Searchlight. Trader brought a friend, a journalist who had once accompanied one of Gary Schultz’s secret saucer base expeditions to th
e perimeter of Dreamland.

  The town’s name suggested a government special-access or black program. I thought of Black Light, the name of one such mysterious program, and Redlight, the alleged secret saucer program inside Dreamland. And the UFO group CSETI (Center for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) called its program for tracking sightings Spotlight.

  Trader tracked the black budget that financed secret aircraft projects. By interpreting the budget’s secret codes and mysterious symbols, he had audited the books of Dreamland. He’d followed the money.

  Trader was red-haired, tall, not what I’d imagined—he had been for me a stealthy character behind an e-mail name for so long. His real name was Paul McGinnis, and he spent his working hours creating and debugging software for a firm in Irvine—that glittery futuristic planned city packed with aerospace and high-tech firms. He was a “Code Warrior.”

  It was not by accident that he was also fascinated with mythological symbolism, odd rituals, and the bizarre corners of culture. His extensive home page furnished links to pages on Finnish epics, Betty Page pinups, tattoo art, and voudoun, or voodoo. The site was illustrated with a strange crosslike shape, and Trader explained to me that it was a “vever,” a voudoun symbol of the crossroads that was believed to open the gates to other dimensions.

  In the budget, Trader looked for the confluences and crossings of information that opened up an understanding of what was actually going on, a search for little vevers in the bureaucracy. In a sense, all Dreamland was a kind of vever, an opening to the black world, linking reality and imagination. You could see the black budget as a kind of hoodoo book of conjure spells, a set of computer viruses in bureaucratic codes—a pattern somewhere between hex and hexadecimal.

  He could read along in Aviation Week, say, about the specifications of a new airplane, about performance envelopes and flyaway costs, and then all of a sudden the bottom would drop out with a sentence like “The other projects, however, remain firmly concealed in the black world.” It was as if you had sailed to the edge of the pre-Columbian map and gotten the message “Here there be dragons.”

  The black world—and Dreamland itself—was like what computer experts call a black box. A black box refers to circuits or program codes whose functions are known but whose internal structure is not. The internal mechanics do not matter to a designer who uses a black box to obtain that function. Dealing with a black box was a form of reverse engineering, and decoding.

  For Trader, it was all about breaking the code, trying to comprehend the inputs and outputs of the black box. It had gradually dawned on me, too, that many people who bought into conspiracy theories, especially those that neatly tied everything together, were engineers or computer programmers, people who worked in worlds where things connected, affected each other, had problems that could be solved. They wanted the rest of the world to work that way—indeed, saw the world as behaving that way. They wanted to find the code and debug it.

  Trader did for a hobby what intelligence analysts did for a living. He made himself into a collector, interpreter, collator, and on-line publicizer of the black budget and its associated “special-access programs,” with code names like Senior Trend and Tractor Bat and Have Donut.1

  The black budget is the government’s classified accounting of the amounts it spends on activities it doesn’t want to make public: secret military research and weapons programs, intelligence gathering, and covert operations. It admits of no easy calculation, but Trader guessed it might be as high as $40 billion a year—a figure larger than federal spending on education or health care. Looked at in simpler terms, the government was spending $100 million a day on black work.

  He explained that the black budget is documented in funding requests and authorizations voted on by select congressional committees, and published with omitted amounts and blacked-out passages. It hides all sorts of strange projects, not just from enemies foreign and domestic but from the public and their elected officials as well. The Pentagon’s black budget is actually composed of two budgets, a Procurement budget and a Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation budget, the tab for the toy testers. There are other black budgets, too, covering defense intelligence and research. The reorganization of intelligence gathering has given us exotic and almost unknown organs such as the Central Imagery Office (CIO) and the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office (DARO). An internal Pentagon memo from August 1994 that was accidentally released and showed up in Jane’s Defense Weekly revealed numbers for some of them: The National Security Agency spends $3.5 billion a year, the Defense Intelligence Agency, $621 million, and the Central Imagery Office, $122 million for spy satellite work.

  Trader collects such government documents as the House and Senate versions of the “National Defense Authorization Acts,” scrutinizing both the reports and the supporting testimony to Congress. He spends hours consulting the Pentagon’s own guides to reading the budget—Department of Defense Handbook DoD 7045.7-H—and with publications like “FYDP Program Structure,” Department of the Air Force document “Supporting Data for Fiscal Year 1994—Budget Estimate Submission—Descriptive Summaries—Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation.”

  These are not exactly light reading, and the plots are slow. Trader soon learned that the black budget was a tissue of truths, half-truths, and quite likely outright untruths, a fabric of disinformation as much as information. Huge items can be hidden by breaking them up into smaller items, mislabeling, or simply omitting them.

  Even the names and responsibilities of the agencies involved are often hidden. The National Reconnaissance Office, in charge of spy satellites, was so secret that until a few years ago its very name could not legally be spoken. The “Virginia Procurement Office” is really the CIA, and the “Maryland Procurement Office” is the National Security Agency. And beyond programs marked merely secret are budget items tagged with the wonderful euphemisms “selected activities” and “special access.”

  Through the Freedom of Information Act, Trader managed to get such juicy documents as the RAND corporation’s “Route Planning Issues for Low Observable Aircraft and Cruise Missiles,” a manual about the rules for the China Lake airspace. There was also one, he was sure, for the Dreamland airspace itself, R4808N. He had security manuals from the Nevada Test Site that revealed you had to have an “8” on your badge to get into Area 51.

  Trader had strong political convictions, to be sure—he supplies politicians advocating reform with inside information. But more than anything, I got the sense he was taken with the joy of the hunt, the thrill of the puzzle.

  The black budget is the tip of a huge iceberg of secret government records that date back to World War I. Well, not really an iceberg, perhaps, but a glacier of classification, increasingly exposed as the Cold War thawed out the files. The list of odd numbers and funny words that is the budget stands for something more: the true information that belongs to the American taxpayer.

  The black budget had its origins in top-secret World War II research like the Manhattan Project. It took on added strength in 1958 in the wake of Sputnik, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the use of CIA “reserve funds” for the U-2, the Blackbirds, and other programs. It was the slush fund for Ike’s famed military-industrial complex.

  Even after the standoff with the former Soviet Union ended, the black budget remained huge. One reason is the Gulf War, which lent high-tech weapons enhanced prestige and strengthened a vision of video-game war in which few human beings—at least on our side—are actually killed or wounded and where information gathering is vital. We fell even more deeply in love with high-tech “silver bullet” weapons.

  In a strange way, the cuts in the overall defense budget led to a new emphasis on the sort of weapons for which the black budget is best known. Smart bombs are cheaper than stealth bombers, the argument goes. The black budget may even have increased as a percentage of the overall national budget. By the mid-nineties we were still spending perhaps $20 billi
on on secret weapons research programs. Some of those programs involved the planes flying out of Dreamland, some were satellites, some were exotic energy weapons. Work continues on mounting anti-missile lasers in Boeing 747s. “You know,” Trader said, “Star Wars never really went away.”

  At work a proud “Code Warrior,” Trader would spend long nights trying to decipher code, going through the mind-numbing documents in which the black budget is laid out. He had discovered the black budget because he was a black-airplane buff. Specifically, he became fascinated by Aurora. What distinguished Trader from other Aurora watchers is that he began filing Freedom of Information Act requests about programs whose names suggested they might be aircraft. (Black-budget watchers know that “Senior” is the designation for the Air Force’s advanced R&D projects—Stealth was Senior Trend, for instance.) In September 1993, he filed Freedom of Information Act requests for information on what he thought was Aurora—Senior Citizen (Program Element 0401316F)—and on Groom Lake.

  Trader found himself exchanging letters with an Air Force colonel named Richard Weaver, then the secretary of the Air Force’s deputy for security and investigative programs, and later the author of the report tying the Roswell incident to the Project Mogul balloon.

  What really set Trader off was doing an FOIA on the FOIAs he had previously filed: He wanted to understand the process and why his requests had brought back very little real information. Reading his own censored case files, he grew angry. “I became convinced,” he told me dryly, “that the Air Force, and other military services, had large numbers of senior officials who held arrogant attitudes towards the average American taxpayer.”

  In the files were memos from Colonel Weaver recommending rejection of Trader’s requests, including such lines as “His appeal ‘justification’ is the standard [blacked-out censored area] provided by almost everyone else who makes similar requests for this information. All have been turned down. His rationale that he somehow should be allowed to perform those oversight functions of Congress, while novel, is not compelling.”