Blank Spots on the Map

by Trevor Paglen

  The King Airs’ most consistent destination is North Base, a restricted enclave at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California’s Antelope Valley. A flight from Las Vegas to North Base follows a westward route over Death Valley. En route, the aircraft pass Fort Irwin National Training Center, where the Army trains soldiers in counterinsurgency operations on a vast desert landscape replete with mock Iraqi villages and actors hired to play the roles of civilians and insurgents. As the King Airs make their way to Edwards, they pass by other restricted military ranges whose sizes come close to rivaling the Nellis Complex in Nevada. The China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station in the California desert, for example, is the Navy’s counterpart to the Nellis Range. To its south is the vast expanse of the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms.

  Edwards North Base houses the Air Force’s Electronic Warfare Directorate and other units associated with black projects, whose personnel commute to the “remote locations” in the Nellis Complex on the King Airs when conducting black operations and projects. Other King Air destinations include the Air Force’s Plant 42 in Palmdale, just south of Edwards Air Force Base, an Air Force- funded industrial plant built in the early 1950s composed of towering aircraft hangars, giant runways, and mammoth buildings, and home to much of the black world’s industrial base. At Plant 42, aerospace contractors such as Northrop, Boeing, Rockwell, and the Advanced Development Projects division of Lockheed Martin (the Skunk Works) design and manufacture black airframes and other advanced technologies.

  The King Airs’ routes show how a place like Edwards North Base connects to the Tonopah Test Range, which in turn connects to Groom Lake, which connects to the secured terminal at the Las Vegas airport. The Janet flights showed how disparate places throughout the Southwest are connected to one another, each place forming one part in a larger geography of military secrecy. They were a kind of map.

  By paying attention to flight routes, I began to see what the arch-agitator Karl Marx famously called the “annihilation of space by time.” In the emerging world of fast-moving trains, telegraphs, and tourism, the notoriously cantankerous philosopher saw transportation and communication technologies helping to form vast non-Euclidean geographies. Spaces that were distant and disparate in terms of the absolute number of miles between them were becoming connected, even becoming indistinguishable from one another. The same was true for this secret world. Even though I was in the Southwest, through Marx’s space-time annihilation, I was also surprisingly close to some of the “war on terror” ’s more hidden episodes.

  If one way to map classified geographies is by tracking the aircraft acting as its transportation system, a different approach involves studying airports instead of aircraft: Rather than following the tail numbers and call signs of “interesting” airplanes, airport codes can be used to log the comings and goings of all aircraft in and out of specific airfields. This is the “fishing” method, using an “interesting” airfield code to locate aircraft that may prove equally “interesting.” A plane going in or out of a place like the Tonopah Test Range, for example, would qualify as “interesting.” The Desert Rock Airstrip (DRA), the airfield at the Nevada Test Site, is an excellent subject for this sort of fishing. DRA can be a cover story for a flight whose actual destination is Groom Lake, but flights to DRA hint at other unusual goings-on. In late 2002, a series of flights to DRA opened a window onto some of the more bizarre, even frightening, episodes in recent history. The “interesting” aircraft landing at DRA revealed another way that the Southwest’s classified geographies extend to the entire world.

  The landings began on October 20, 2002, when a white Lockheed Hercules model L382 (a civilian version of a C-130) touched down at DRA. The plane, a turboprop designed to carry heavy cargo and with the ability to land on short unpaved airfields, was owned by a company called Rapid Air Trans and operated by another company called Tepper Aviation. It bore the tail number N8183J on its white fuselage. The landing was curious because most of the flights to DRA are aircraft operated by the Department of Energy (which controls the test site) or known to use DRA as a cover story for other destinations in the Nellis Range. The Hercules didn’t fit into either category. Before long, other obscure aircraft followed. On October 27, a Beechcraft numbered N4489A, owned by Aviation Specialties, filed a plan to the airstrip. That plane was in turn followed by another Aviation Specialties Beechcraft: N5139A. In early December, the little-used airstrip received even more guests: a Cessna (N403VP) owned by One Leasing arrived from El Paso, Texas, on December 3. The Hercules, too, returned that day. On December 5, a Boeing 737 with the tail number N313P (owned by Premier Executive Transport Services) touched down at the test site, followed two days later by a Gulfstream IV sporting the registration number N85VM. The latter two aircraft arrived from Andrews Air Force Base, just outside Washington, D.C.

  The purpose of these landings was unclear, but some bizarre details about the planes were immediately apparent. First the Gulfstream IV (N85VM): The plane’s owner was a man named Phillip H. Morse, a Florida millionaire who, of all things, was part owner of the Boston Red Sox. But it was the Hercules that provided a clue to the flights’ purposes: A quick search through the LexisNexis database brought up some very interesting references to Tepper Aviation.

  Tepper Aviation had made news when one of its planes crashed at a remote airfield near Jamba, Angola, back in November 1989. The plane was hauling a load of weapons and supplies to Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA faction of Angolan rebels. At the time, Savimbi’s outfit was one of a handful of rebel groups around the world covertly supported and supplied by the CIA; others included the mujahideen in Afghanistan and the Contras in Nicaragua. Tepper Aviation was a CIA front company. The CIA created Tepper Aviation in the 1980s as an alternative to another proprietary called St. Lucia Airways when the latter company’s name attracted unwanted attention after transporting Oliver North (and HAWK missiles, among other things) to and from Iran in what would become known as the Iran-Contra Affair. When the name “Tepper Aviation” became public after the Angola crash, the CIA failed to create a new front company, as was the custom when the names of proprietaries became a matter of public record. Somewhere, somebody slipped up by keeping the name and, in doing so, left a dangling thread that future researchers would be able to tug upon.

  Another secret geography emerged from tracking the Hercules’ and the other planes’ movements after they had left the DRA. Flight plans showed the aircraft traveling to places like Libya, Afghanistan, Sudan, Poland, Romania, Morocco, Iraq, and Pakistan. There were numerous flights to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. These planes, it would turn out, were the workhorses of what Dick Cheney famously called the “dark side” of the so-called global war on terror. Their routes suggested unacknowledged collaborations between the CIA and some of the world’s ghastliest dictators and regimes. But the planes would become more famous for their involvement in the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program: The CIA was using these aircraft to kidnap terror suspects from around the world and quietly transporting them to a network of secret, agency-run prisons, where “harsh interrogation” and torture had become the norm. The aircraft were being used to disappear people. They would eventually acquire a collective nickname: the “torture taxis.” Their movements connected the normally sleepy airstrip in the Nellis Range to the global geography of a largely secret war.

  The extraordinary rendition program, however, didn’t explain why so many CIA aircraft visited the Nevada Test Site back in 2002. The question nagged at me for years, but I contented myself with assuming that the CIA was doing some kind of counterterrorist training at the Nevada Test Site, maybe an exercise at the test site’s faux Middle Eastern Terror Town. It wasn’t until 2006 that reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn would expose the true activities that went on at the Desert Rock Airstrip that autumn. The DRA landings, it would turn out, were no conventional training exercise. They were part of one of the most outlandish and secretive programs set up before the inv
asion of Iraq: a covert project code-named ANABASIS.

  According to Isikoff and Corn, two CIA officers in the Iraq Operations Group at the CIA’s Directorate of Operations conceived the Anabasis project in the fall of 2001. The idea was to install a team of covert operatives inside Iraq whose mission would be to create chaos inside the country in the run-up to the anticipated invasion. Composed of Iraqi exiles working for the CIA, the team would bribe and recruit Iraqi military officers, feed disinformation to the Saddam regime, sabotage railroad lines and communications towers, and even assassinate key Iraqi officials. Finally, the Anabasis plan called for the team to stage an incident like a terrorist bombing that would provoke a brutal reaction from Saddam Hussein that could, in turn, justify an American intervention. On February 16, 2002, President Bush signed a classified directive authorizing various parts of the project, and CIA officers in the Directorate of Operations went to work.

  By the fall of 2002 (when the rendition planes began landing at DRA), the CIA had established a secret training base at the Nevada Test Site to prepare for the operation. According to Isikoff and Corn, “the existence of the camp was one of the most tightly held secrets in the government.” In the fall of 2002, the CIA brought about eighty Iraqi fighters to the secret site in Nevada to train for their upcoming clandestine invasion of their former country. Despite all the expense and effort of this special training, by the time the United States was ready to invade Iraq, General Tommy Franks scrapped the idea of using the Iraqi fighters to stage a war-triggering incident, and the team was used instead to provide more conventional support to the U.S. military over the course of the invasion.

  Once again, a close look at the Southwest’s secret geographies showed that these spaces were remarkably close to, indeed a part of, a larger geography of secret projects spanning the globe.

  The DO NOT DISTURB sign still hung on the door handle outside my hotel room. Damp towels had taken over every chair back, the trash cans overflowed, and dirty clothes piled up in the corner. Each morning before dawn, I watched the red-striped 737s load up with passengers for flights into the Nellis Range. Some of the morning flights brought bleary-eyed workers home after they worked graveyard shifts at one of the clandestine sites to the north. At midday, there was a lull in the Janet traffic at the terminal below my window. The desert sun sent heat waves shimmering throughout the asphalt runways. Between noon and three P.M., when the Janets started to return at the end of the workday, I would go swimming in the faux lagoon at the center of the Tropicana’s casino complex in the ironic middle of a territory whose parched history was defined by the absence of water.

  It was time to go.

  4

  Wastelands

  Basin and Range

  I first heard the silence just before dawn in central Nevada’s Railroad Valley. I’d driven all night after an evening seminar at Berkeley on a three-day trip to circumnavigate the Nellis Range in my battered Acura hatchback. Pulling over to the side of Highway 375 to relieve myself, I shut the car door and heard it. Nothing. Nothing at all. No wind rustling clumps of dry sage, no insects buzzing to and fro, no cars in the distance or birds fluttering across the valley’s dry desert dust. It was as if the world had simply stopped, and I had been left in the vacuum of Earth’s aftermath. The absolute silence engulfed me, imparting to me that I was alone like I had never been alone before.

  Although I didn’t know it at the time, I wasn’t the first person to hear this. Physicist Freeman Dyson had heard the same silence when he arrived in Nevada in the early days of nuclear weapons. “It is a soul-shattering silence . . . ,” he wrote. Echoing Hebraic prophets wandering the deserts outside Jerusalem, Dyson described it as the silence of “being alone with God.” The absolute stillness tore at something inside the physicist: “There in that white flat silence I began for the first time to feel a slight sense of shame for what we were proposing to do. Did we really intend to invade this silence with our trucks and bulldozers and after a few years leave it a radioactive junkyard?”

  The Basin and Range is a place that is at once so still, so vast, and so unfamiliar that it seems to transcend space and time itself, like a vision of the world after the world itself is no more. But it is also violently alive.

  From the sky, the rocky mountains of the Basin and Range look like a set of tidal waves flowing from Salt Lake City to the west. Some of the ranges crash into the eastern Sierras; others lose their energy and flow harmlessly into the Mojave Desert like ankle-sized swells lapping onto a sandy beach. Each mountain range can span more than a hundred miles on a roughly north-south axis and reach heights well over ten thousand feet. They’re the product of a world that is literally being torn apart. As the North American plate stretches from east to west, Nevada’s mountains hurtle toward the sky, riding the planet’s molten mantle just below. Nevada’s topography, hundreds of miles of basins, faults, and ranges, is the swells, scars, and stretch marks of a geologic upheaval unfolding over eons.

  The Sierra Nevada in Eastern California is a blockade to rain and water coming from the Pacific Ocean, stopping eastbound moisture in its tracks and creating a desert out of Nevada’s mountains and valleys. Most of the little water Nevada receives comes in the form of winter snowfall, the bulk of which evaporates as soon as it begins to melt. The water that manages to trickle down the ranges forms small seasonal streams, which collect in shallow dry lakes. When desert winds blow across the shallow lakes, the surface ripples spread and condense the underlying sediment like a work crew smoothing concrete on a new sidewalk. The end result is a landscape marked by endless dry lakes, smooth and hard enough to land an airplane on.

  For those who haven’t spent their lives in the Basin and Range, the landscape is as inscrutable as it is vast. It is filled with illusions, deceptions, and redirections. Distances are notoriously difficult to judge. The weather changes instantaneously from blazing to frigid, from clear skies to lightning storm, and from bone-dry to impassable flash floods that are gone again in the blink of an eye. Then there are the mirages, the reflective horizons that promise water and sometimes deliver. But it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between what’s really there and one of the desert’s cruel tricks.

  On a map from 1863 I found in the Berkeley library, created after Nevada joined the union, the region surrounding most of the state’s interior was marked by the simple words UNEXPLORED TERRITORY, a precursor to the FRAMES EDITED FROM THE ORIGINAL NEGATIVE that I had found years earlier. The Southwest was one of the United States’ original blank spots on the map.

  For settlers trekking across the desert in the mid-nineteenth century, lured by the promise of gold on the other side of the Sierras, Nevada was an unknown and terrifying space, a space where European folk did not want to go. The Basin and Range was synonymous with pestilence and death. The settlers’ main route through the “wastelands” was a thin path along the Humboldt River, about where present-day Highway 80 traverses the desert. And those souls who, guided by the promise of a better future, made the journey though the desert described what they saw in their diaries: As they traversed the Great Basin’s jagged cliffs, vast dry lakes, and lonely waterless valleys, they described a nightmarish world of heat, thirst, violence, and horror. Lacking words for the western landforms so unlike anything in Europe, the settlers drew upon what they did have a language to describe: Hell.

  “Here, on the Humboldt,” wrote Horace Greeley of his 1859 journey, “famine sits enthroned, and waves his scepter over a dominion expressly made for him.” Reuben Cole Shaw explained in his diary,

  The reader should not imagine the Humboldt to be a rapid mountain stream, with its cool and limpid waters rushing down the rocks of steep inclines, with here and there beautiful cascades and shady pools under mountain evergreens, where the sun never intrudes and where the speckled trout loves to sport. While the water of such a stream is fit for the gods, that of the Humboldt is not good for man or beast. With the exception of a short distance near its so
urce, it has the least perceptible current. There is not a fish nor any other living thing to be found in its waters, and there is not timber enough in three hundred miles of its desolate valley to make a snuff-box, or sufficient vegetation along its banks to shade a rabbit, while its waters contain the alkali to make soap for a nation, and, after winding its sluggish way through a desert within a desert, it sinks, disappears, and leaves inquisitive man to ask how, why, when and where?

  Horace Belknap was more succinct: “meanest and muddiest, filthiest stream. Most cordially I hate you.”

  Nor was the Humboldt Sink the crystal-clear oasis the forty-niners might have imagined. Shaw writes,

  On arriving at the sink of the Humboldt, a great disappointment awaited us. We had known nothing of the nature of that great wonder except what we had been told by those who knew no more about it than ourselves. In place of a great rent in the earth, into which the water of the river plunged with a terrible roar (as pictured in our imagination), there was found a mud lake ten miles long and four or five miles wide, a veritable sea of slime, a “slough of despond,” an ocean of ooze, a bottomless bed of alkaline poison, which emitted a nauseous odor and presented the appearance of utter desolation. The croaking frogs would have been a redeeming feature of the place, but no living thing disturbed the silence and solitude of the lonely region. There were mysteries and wonders hovering over and around the sink of Humboldt, but there was neither beauty nor grandeur in connection with it, for a more dreary or desolate spot could not be found on the face of the earth.