Late one night during the summer of 1984, two fighter pilots saw a ghost in the skyabove Las Vegas. A single two-seat F-16 `Viper' fighter was on a routine flight over thecity that night, its pilots alternating between watching instruments, checking in withground controllers, and scanning the skies above. And then they got a glimpse ofsomething they could not explain. One thousand feet above, the Viper pilots watcheda black arrowhead-shaped craft streak by.

The startled fighter pilots radioed a Las Vegas air traffic controller below, whocame back that the Viper had seen an A-7 Corsair. Shot back the pilot, ``I don't knowwhat it is, but it's no fucking A-7!''

If the Viper pilots imagined seeing a ghost that evening, they would have beenright. The F-16 crew were the first `noncleared' people to see an F-117A stealth fighter,a new and highly classified aircraft that had only recently begun to make cautiousforays out of a vast tract of restricted airspace to the north. The stealth fighter was a`black' aircraft; it `did not exist'.

The anonymous pilot in the stealth plane had overheard the exchange between theViper and the air traffic controller that night, and radioed his own operations center atthe Tonopah Test Range, 160 miles to the north, to report that his secret aircraft hadbeen spotted. The stealth pilot was practicing bombing runs against the Vegas skylinethat night, counting on the blinding Las Vegas lights to prevent anyone from seeinghim. This was not supposed to have happened.

When the Viper crew landed at their home base, Air Force brass was waiting forthem on the tarmac. The crew was told in no uncertain terms that they had not seenanything that night and that they were not going to talk about it.

In the close-knit world of Air Force pilots, the Viper crew may have heard rumorsabout a new `black' jet at Tonopah, or they may have had an inkling that the Pentagonwas building a new class of `stealth' aircraft, but they most surely did not know thenickname of the 4450th Tactical Group's Q-Unit, one of two units responsible for flyingthe planes: the Goatsuckers (Peebles, 1999; Scott, 2003).

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Goatsucker: toward a spatial theory of state secrecy

Trevor PaglenDepartment of Geography, University of California at Berkeley, 507 McCone Hall #4740,Berkeley, CA 94720, USA; e-mail: tpaglen@berkeley.eduReceived 1 May 2008; in revised form 6 April 2010

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2010, volume 28, pages 759 ^ 771

Abstract. While the question of state secrecy has become a topic of much political debate, relativelylittle attention has been paid to the topic in academic literature. Most of the literature adopts one ofseveral frameworks. In the legal literature, state secrecy has been examined as a historical andconstitutional question. Social scientists have tended to follow Weber in examining secrecy as aquestion of regulation and bureaucracy or have focused on the cultural play of visibility and invisi-bility that is often characteristic of state secrecy. This paper, by way of contrast, uses the developmentof the F-117A `stealth fighter' as a case study to give a spatial account of secrecy. I show how statesecrecy gives rise to numerous spatial, political, juridical, and even ecological contradictions andpropose that a spatial understanding of state secrecy foregrounding these contradictions provides afruitful basis for a deeper understanding of state secrecy.

doi:10.1068/d5308

This paper is about state secrecy and the production of space. It is about thestrange dialectics of secrecy and geography that take place under conditions of top-secret production. Using the development of the F-117A `stealth fighter' and itsaftermath as a case study, I propose that an understanding of state secrecy as theproduction of space is a valuable addition to the theoretical literature on state secrecy.

Existing work on state secrecy explores the various cultural, epistemological, polit-ical, bureaucratic, cartographic, and legal questions posed by state secrecy. Weber(1978) famously described secrecy as a bureaucratic means of accruing power, andwas followed by former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who described state secrecyas a ` form of regulation'' (1998, page 59). In his seminal article ` Removing knowledge''(2004), Peter Galison developed the relationship between bureaucracy, secrecy, andknowledge, inferring that in terms of knowledge produced ` the classified universe asit is sometimes called is certainly not smaller, and very probably much larger than thisunclassified one,'' and developed a Habermasian argument that state secrecy formed an` anti-epistemology'' fundamentally at odds with liberal democracy. Anthropologistssuch as Gusterson have examined the everyday workings of secrecy and the productionof classified knowledge (Gusterson, 1998; 2004; Reppy, 1999), while Louis Fisher hasdone extraordinary work on state secrecy in the legal system (2006).

Recent commentators such as Bratich, Dodge, and Perkins have emphasized therole of secrecy in public culture and politics. Following Debord (1998), Deleuze andGuattari (1987), and Taussig (2002), Bratich understands secrecy as a spectacle ofconcealing and revealing through which the state exercises power (Bratich, 2006). Dodge(2004) and Perkins and Dodge (2009) have examined the politics of seeing in relation tosensitive sites in their studies of Cryptome's ` eyeballing'' series and other cartographicpractices, pointing out that cartographic efforts to visualize secret sites have a complicatedand sometimes contradictory relationship to state power but are nonetheless ` importantin the construction of oppositional discourse'' (Perkins and Dodge, page 559).

My aim here is to synthesize some of this work on secrecy with the goal ofdeveloping a broader theoretical framework to understand state secrecy in terms of theproduction of space. Understanding state secrecy as the production of space illustratesthe connections between the seemingly disparate approaches scholars have takentowards the topic.

Fundamental to any understanding of state secrecy, I believe, is the notion ofcontradiction. Indeed, if state secrecy is understood as an array of bureaucratic,practical, cultural, political, and social operations designed to conceal, render invisible,mask, misrepresent, or hide the relations, programs, sites, or events under their pur-view, state secrecy can only be characterized by contradiction. Why? Because thosesecret relations, programs, sites, and events have to be made out of the same `stuff ' thateverything else (ie the nonsecret world) is made of. Because there are no such things asinvisible factories, airplanes made out of unearthly ghost-matter, or workers who`don't exist', logics of secrecy are contradicted by their material implementations. Statesecrecy, thus, consists not only of state efforts to conceal programs, relationships, andevents in the first instance, but also attempts to manage ensuing contradictions inpolitical, cultural, and legal spheres. Managing those contradictions inevitably producesmore contradictions, which must in turn be managed. By understanding state secrecyas a dynamic characterized by the production of contradictions and their subsequentmanagement, we can begin to explain how state secrecy tends to sculpt the material,cultural, and political spaces around them in their own image (Paglen, 2009).

And so we return to the stealth fighter, our case study. As we will see, developingthe stealth fighter involved much more than developing a secret weapon; it involved theproduction of peculiar kinds of space. The secrecy associated with the stealth fighter

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did far more than produce a weapon that `did not exist', in some sort of political,bureaucratic, or legal sense; it went much further. Producing a weapon that `did notexist' meant producing internally contradictory political, legal, labor, and ecologicalspaces. A space of stealth. As the Air Force sought to manage the contradictionscreated when the space of stealth intersected other spaces around it, those spaces,in turn, were transformed. They, too, became `stealthy'.

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If we were to look at a map of the United States showing the restricted militaryranges devoted to weapons testing, it would be easy to see that secret weapons arealmost without exception tested in the `badlands' or `wastelands' of southwesterndeserts. Occupying most of southern Nevada is the Air Force's 3.1 million-acre NellisRange Complex, a swath of restricted land and airspace the size of Switzerland. Justsouth of western Utah's great salt flats is the Army's 800 000-acre Dugway ProvingGrounds, home to the Army's biological and chemical weapons testing programs.California's Mojave desert hosts the Navy's 1.1 million-acre China Lake Naval AirWarfare Weapons Division. And there are many, many more. These desert ranges areunited by the fact that, since the European invasion of the Americas, they have beenregarded as `wastelands': little more than a bad no-man's-land one had to traverse inorder to get to the gold and oil of California (Kuletz, 1998; Paglen, 2007a; Solnit, 1994).When many contemporary weapons ranges were initially established during theSecond World War, the prevailing logic was summed up by the Army Air Corps.The land, they said, ``wasn't much good for anything but gunnery practiceöyou couldbomb it into oblivion and never notice the difference'' (Loomis, 1993, pages 9 ^ 10).

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The F-117A stealth fighter had its roots in a 1974 Defense Advanced ResearchProjects Agency (DARPA) competition called `Project Harvey', named after the invis-ible rabbit in the James Stewart movie of the same name (Sweetman, 2001). ProjectHarvey took the form of a challenge: DARPA invited five defense companies (Boeing,Northrop, McDonnell Douglas, General Dynamics, and Grumman) to come up withideas for an aircraft with dramatically reduced radar cross sections. In other words,DARPA wanted an airplane that would be far less visible to radar than the fighters ofthe time were. Lockheed was not on the initial list of invitees, even though thecompany's Skunk Works division had pioneered stealth designs with its A-12 airplaneand D-21 reconnaissance drone. The problem was that Lockheed's early work onstealth had been done on behalf of the CIA, and remained highly classified; DARPAhad no idea that the Skunk Works had already begun to solve the problems they nowposed to the aerospace community (Peebles, 1999). When the Skunk Works found outabout the competition, they lobbied the CIA to allow them to share the top-secretradar information developed for the A-12 Blackbird. The CIA gave them the OK, andthe Skunk Works entered the competition (Rich, 1994).

Lockheed had two crucial tools in hand to improve the effectiveness of their stealthconcept. In one hand, they held a paper by a Soviet scientist at the Moscow Institute ofRadio Engineering named Pyoty Ufimtsev, and in the other, they had newer and fastercomputers. Utfimtsev's paper, called ``Method of edge waves in the physical theoryof diffraction'', updated a set of equations about the behavior of electromagneticwaves first proposed by the 19th-century Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell.The Soviet paper, first published in the 1960s, had been recently translated intoEnglish and given to defense researchers, courtesy of the Air Force Foreign Tech-nology Division. The paper's translation excited a young Lockheed radar specialist

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named Denys Overholser. Showing the obscure physics paper to his boss Ben Rich,Overholser said, ``this guy has shown us how to accurately calculate radar crosssections across the surface of the wind and the edge of the wind and put togetherthese two calculations for an accurate total'' (Rich, 1994, page 20). Overholser con-tinued: ``we can break down an airplane into thousands of flat triangular shapes, addup their individual radar signatures, and get a precise total of the radar cross section''.Rich did not completely understand what Overholser was talking about, but allowedhim use of the Skunk Works' computers to explore the concept (Rich, 1994).

Using Lockheed's computers, Overholser designed a program called `Echo I' thatwould predict the radar cross section returns for simple aircraft shapes. A few monthslater, the engineer returned to Rich's office with the results of the equations and aproposal for a strange-looking aircraft:

`Boss, meet the Hopeless Diamond.''`How good are your radar-cross-section numbers on this one?''`This shape is a thousand times less visible than the least visible shape previouslyproduced at the Skunk Works.''`Whoa! Are you telling me that this shape is a thousand times less visible than theD-21 drone?''`You've got it!'` If we made this shape into a full-sized tactical fighter, what would be its equivalentradar signature ... as big as whatöa Piper Cub, a T-38 trainer ... what?''`Ben, understand, we are talking about a major, major, big-time revolution here.We are talking infinitesimal.''`Well, what does that mean? On a radar screen it would appear as a ... what? As bigas a condor, an eagle, an owl, a what?''`Ben, try as big as an eagle's eyeball '' (Rich, 1994, page 26).After Overholser's discovery, the Skunk Works set to work fabricating all sorts of

test shapes and trucking them to the Grey Butte Microwave Measurement Range inthe Mojave Desert and the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico for analysis.DARPA and the Air Force began taking notice of the resulting radar measurements,which showed that the test shapes were essentially invisible, and commissionedLockheed to build a prototype demonstrator. As the gravity of Lockheed's newtechnology dawned on DARPA officials, they made `stealth' one of the most highlyclassified military programs since the Manhattan Project (Rich, 1994). Stealth movedinto the `black world', control over the program shifted from DARPA to the AirForce Special Projects Office, and the project effectively disappeared from the record.Even the word `stealth' could no longer be used in any public statement or in anunclassified context (Peebles, 1999).

Thus, stealth began as a series of algorithms published by a Soviet academic. Thena computer program, and a set of sketches in a top-secret factory. As the Skunk Worksand Air Force began transforming those ideas into actual hardware, new spaces wereproduced.

At first, the stealth program reproduced and reinvigorated existing spaces ofsecrecy. The Skunk Works built two prototypes at their secret factory in Burbank,California. By 1980 Lockheed had flown the two stealth demonstrators, code-named`Have Blue', at a secret Air Force Base near Groom Lake, Nevada. Impressed with theresults, the Air Force prepared to commission a squadron of fighter-bombers based onthe Skunk Works design. This shift from a secret prototype to a classified, operationalaircraft meant expanding the emerging geographies of stealth.

To manage the operational aspects of the stealth program, the Air Force createdthe 4450th Tactical Group on October 15, 1979, and began recruiting potential pilots.

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Major Alton C Al' Whitley was one of the first to be offered a job with the top-secretsquadron. Whitely was told to report to Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas for aninterview and was promptly offered a chance to join. The interviewer did not tellWhitley what the job wasöonly that it would require him to be away from his familyconstantly, that he could not be told much more, and that he had five minutes to decide.Whitley only needed ten seconds (Rich, 1994). He was then told to return to his unit:he would be contacted soon with new orders (Peebles, 1999).

The 4450th Tactical Group would have an unprecedented assignment. It would bean entire unit with a classified mission flying classified planes. Even though the secretbase at Groom Lake provided the secrecy that such a program would require, the basefunctioned as a flight-test center rather than an operational base. The Air Forcedeemed it unsuitable for the newly formed stealth unit. The solution was to builda new secret base within the Nellis Range near the old mining town of Tonopah,approximately 50 miles northeast of Groom Lake (Patton, 1998).

The stealth base at the Tonopah Test Range was an expansion of an older facility,originally built in 1957 by Sandia National Laboratories to test arming, fusing, andfiring systems for weapons and delivery systems for nuclear weapons (Duncan et al,2000). New construction began in 1979 and continued even as the infant squadronbegan training in 1981. The Air Force beefed up security at the facility by surroundingthe flight line with high fences and electronic security systems. Over the course of theearly 1980s, the base grew from a remote Department of Energy outpost to a full-featured Air Force Base complete with new dormitories, dining halls, fire stations, fueland water tanks, an improved runway, and rows of hangars (Lake, 1998; Peebles, 1999).Everything was in place except the planes.

When the 4450th Tactical Group began training in June 1981, the stealth fighterswere far from operational. The first flight of a stealth fighter, code named SeniorTrend, took place at Groom Lake on June 19, 1981, but the plane required severalyears of tweaking and testing before it became truly functional. Meanwhile, for train-ing purposes the Air Force outfitted the 4450th Tactical Group with a number of A-7Corsairs, whose flight dynamics were similar to the new stealth planes. The olderaircraft also provided a useful cover story for the `true' purpose of the group: whenasked about the 4450th,Whitley and his colleagues said that they were testing avionicsfor A-7s (Rich, 1994).

In September 1982, the 4450th Tactical Group at Tonopah Test Range got their firststealth fighter, providing the core of the Q-Unit, who would fly the `real' stealthfighters. By the end of that year, the Q-Unit began to receive additional planes asthey rolled off the assembly line at Burbank and were deemed acceptable by test pilotsat Groom Lake. As the planes arrived and operations began in earnest, the Q-Unitacquired a new name: the Goatsuckers (Peebles, 1999).

As the stealth programs progressed, life at the Tonopah Test Range became increas-ingly vampiric. At the beginning of each week, pilots would leave their families in LasVegas and fly north to the test range. Hangars at Tonopah opened an hour after sunsetand closed an hour before sunrise. Two sorties flew each night, conducting nightly`turkey-shoots', simulating attacks against everything from apartments in Cleveland,to boats in Lake Tahoe. Whitley said that ` we could find Mrs. Smith's rooming houseand take out the northeast corner guest room above the garage'' (Rich, 1994). Witheach `kill' of an unsuspecting person, or bombing of a sleeping home, the pilots gainedpoints. When they arrived back at Tonopah after a night of hunting, the pilots wouldrace against the clock to get to sleep before the sun came up (Peebles, 1999).

This nocturnal schedule took its toll on the pilots and crews. By the end of eachweek, sleep-deprived pilots were a `wreck' (Sweetman, 2001). Lack of sleep coupled

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with the disorientation of flying at night was exceedingly dangerous, even for anexperienced pilot. Some of the goatsuckers began falling out of the sky. On July 11,1986 Ross Mulhare complained to another pilot that he was exhausted and ` justcouldn't shake it''; nevertheless, he took off from Tonopah at 1:13 am (Richelson, 2001).

At 1:44 am, at a rest stop near Bakersfield, California, a tourist named Andy Hoytsaw ` three red lights and a dark image behind them like an upside-down triangle''(quoted in Peebles, 1999, pages 174 ^ 175). Grabbing his camera, Hoyt took severalpictures before the object disappeared from his sight. ` It seemed like something otherthan an airplane'', Hoyt said later, ` Believe it or not, I thought it was a UFO'' (TheBakersfield Californian 1986). An instant later, something ` lit up the sky like it wasdaylight out'', and a pair of explosions rocked the valley (Peebles, 1999).

Ross Mulhare was dead. The exhausted stealth pilot had become disoriented in thenight sky and slammed into the side of a mountain. When the Air Force arrived atthe site, they installed armed guards to keep the curious away, made local firefighterssign statements swearing them to secrecy, and declared the site a national security/national defense zone (Peebles, 1999). It was only the first in a series of crashes(Richelson, 2001).

As the stealth planes ventured outside the restricted airspace of the Nellis Range,so did the space of stealth. Expansion created new contradictions. Mulhare's crashoutside Nellis's borders meant that rural firefighters were compelled to sign secrecyoaths and that public spaces were cordoned off as national defense zones.

The stealth fighter crash also pointed to another problem that was becomingendemic to the program: what to do with top-secret trash, such as the wrecked hullsof crashed stealth planes? How were the commanders of Groom Lake and the TonopahTest Range to dispose of materials whose existence, not to mention chemicalcomposition, were state secrets? The problem was not new to the stealth program:top-secret planes had been falling out of the skies near Groom Lake since the earlydays of the U-2 spy plane (Pedlow and Welzenbach, 1998). But top-secret weaponsprograms generate far more trash than wrecked aircraft hulls: in the case of thestealth program, there were paints and solvents, strange radar absorbent materials,experimental fuels, plastics, resins, and other unholy chemical concoctions.

In the 1990s the military's solution to the problem of top-secret hazardous wastebecame public. Former workers at the Groom Lake described digging giant trenches;throwing top-secret airplane parts, chemicals, plastics, and other kinds of refuse intothem; soaking the piles with jet fuel; and lighting them on fire (Rogers, 1993; Shenitzand Begley, 1995). The Air Force had developed a simple solution to the problem of`nonexistent' trash: burn it.

In retrospect, evidence for a history of burning classified waste comes as early as1968, when the US Geological Survey snapped an aerial image of the Groom Lakebase for one of its aerial surveys. The photograph shows a long runway, rows ofhousing for base workers, an old collection of U-2 hangars to the north, and a groupof hangars used for the A-12 spy plane to the south. Just west of the A-12 hangars,the photograph shows a cloud of thick, black smoke. As early as 1968, something wasburning at the southwest corner of the base.

As the stealth program developed over the late 1970s and early 1980s, so did thewaste disposal problems associated with it. Not only did Lockheed and the Air Forceburn the wreckage of crashed stealth planes and waste chemicals at the base, but theyalso began shipping waste from the Skunk Works manufacturing plant in Burbank toGroom Lake for similar disposal. Throughout the 1980s, a former worker explained,trucks would arrive on Mondays and Wednesdays filled with 55-gallon drums oftop-secret waste from Burbank. The trucks carried no shipping manifests. The only

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paper trail they did have was indecipherable through a haze of code names associatedwith the stealth program's various compartments. The trucks would make their waypast the dormitories in the middle of the base and down a road towards the southernend at the foot of Papoose Mountain. Workers would then unload the barrels into300 ft trenches, douse the barrels and other trash with jet fuel, and set the trencheson fire. The ensuing smoke became as ` thick as London fog'', said an anonymousformer worker (Leiby, 1997, page f1). Fog from the burning stealth chemicals creptthrough the base and into the bodies of the people who worked there (Rogers, 1994d).

The first inklings that something was not right came from the Skunk Works plantin Burbank, California. In 1988 a group of at least 160 Lockheed workers beganpublicly complaining of headaches, nausea, rashes, disorientation, memory lapses,and cancer. Five workers had already died. The phenomena centered on Skunk WorksBuilding 351, an old World-War-Two-style hangar with a single guarded door. Inside,rubberized curtains hanging from the walls as a security measure collected the accu-mulated dust and debris from decades of work on secret airplanes. Exotic particlesswirled continuously around the plant like snowflakes (Noble, 1988).

The following year, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)ordered a series of inspections at the Skunk Works plant and cited Lockheed for 251instances of ``willfully violating OSHA record-keeping requirements for injuring andillnesses'' (Swoboda, 1989, no page), 88 instances of willfully violating the govern-ment's hazardous communication standards, and failure to supply its workers withinformation about hazardous chemicals at the workplace (Swoboda, 1989).

But the rubber-draped walls of the Skunk Works plant could not contain theaccumulated decades of top-secret chemicals. By 1989 residents of Burbank foundthat the local water supply was horribly polluted and that the air was some of theworst in the country. Trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene made water beneaththe San Fernando Valley too toxic to drink, cook with, or even bathe in (EPA, nodate), while chemicals like carbon tetrachloride, chloroform, methylene chloride,and hexavalent chromium, or chromium 6, poisoned the air and soil. The SkunkWorks would soon become a superfund site (Aviation Week and Space Technology 1996;San Diego Union Tribune 2000; Victoroff, 2000).

By 1991 Lockheed had agreed to pay $60 million in a settlement with the Envi-ronmental Protection Agency (EPA) over the Burbank site. Several years later,Lockheed settled a lawsuit with its employees. In 2000 the company agreed to a$5 million settlement with city residents (San Diego Union Tribune 2000). In the mean-time, Lockheed abandoned Burbank and moved the Skunk Works northeast to the cityof Palmdale, near Edwards Air Force Base in California's Antelope Valley.

The stealth program had taken an unforeseen turn. If the plane was designed to killwithout being seen, to enter someone else's airspace and deliver death before they knewit was coming, to create deadly lapses between cause, effect, and evidence, then in asense, stealth was doing exactly that. But it was doing so far closer to home than thePentagon might have intended. Nightly `turkey shoots' from the Tonopah test rangemay have only simulated the wanton destruction of the sleeping American West, butthe chemicals leaking through the ground and cracks in the walls of the Skunk Worksfactory and the thick smoke from burning pits at Groom Lake brought the reality ofthe stealth program to land and bodies.

Stealth insinuated itself into the groundwater, the soil, and the flesh of communitiesin its vicinity. Once again, as the stealth program expanded, so did the space of secrecyfrom which stealth was indistinguishable. Stealth was first an idea, then a computerprogram and some sketches, then secret factories, a secret airbase, a pair of secretsquadrons. It migrated outside the restricted boundaries of the Nellis Range. Now it

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was becoming part of the chemical composition of the air itself, even making its wayinto the bodies of the workers around it.

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In early 1994 Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall received a letter informing herthat a George Washington University (GWU) professor was planning to sue the AirForce over toxic burning at Groom Lake. Professor Jonathan Turley, head of theEnvironmental Crimes Project at GWU asked Widnall to disclose any environmentalcrimes at the secret base in preparation for the lawsuit (Rogers, 1994a). The previoussummer, a widow named Helen Frost had unsuccessfully tried to sue the Air Force andLockheed over her husband's 1989 death, arguing that he had been killed by toxicfumes from the burn pits at Groom Lake. Frost failed to convince the judge that herhusband's death was due to toxic fumes rather than alcoholism, but the 1993 lawsuithad prompted Nevada's Environmental Protection Division to begin an investigationinto the site (Rogers, 1993). Turley became involved when a group of six anonymousworkers came forward with stories corroborating Frost's allegations. They, too, claimedto have acquired strange illnesses while working at the base downwind of the burningtrenches.

Turley directed the first lawsuit towards the EPA, claiming that the EPA had failedto fulfill its obligations to inspect the site and was thereby culpable in part for hisclient's sicknesses (Rogers, 1994b). Two weeks later, Turley filed a second lawsuitagainst Secretary of Defense William Perry, National Security Advisor AnthonyLake, and Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall (Las Vegas Review Journal 1994). RobertFrost's widow, Helen Frost, was the only named plaintiff in addition to the six JohnDoes (Rogers, 1994c).

The Air Force's first line of defense was to deny the existence of the base at GroomLake and to invoke a `state secrets' privilege to claim that the federal court hadno jurisdiction over the matter (Granader, 1995). In other words, the very existenceor nonexistence of the base was a state secret, and therefore the federal courts hadno jurisdiction over it.

By November, Turley had presented hundreds of legal documents referring to theexistence of the facility, forcing the Air Force to concede that ``there is an operatinglocation near Groom Dry Lake'' (Rogers, 1994d, no page), but not the existenceof hangars and a control tower, or anything elseöcertainly not the existence of afull-scale flight-test facility (Bates, 1994).

In the meantime, the Air Force quietly brought the EPA to the `operating location'for an inspectionöa move designed to render the lawsuit against the EPA moot. Butneither the Air Force nor the EPA would say anything about the EPA's findings, citingan obscure legal privilege that allows the Defense Department to conceal unclassifiedinformation (Greene, 1995).

After finding out about this move, Turley wanted to know what the EPA reportcontained, and so did the six John Does. Their hope was that, if they learned whatchemicals they had been exposed to, they could get better medical treatment (Darlington,1997). In early September 1995 it appeared that the John Does were on the brink ofwinning when US District Judge Philip Pro ordered the government either to declassifythe EPA report or to seek an executive order exempting the secret base from disclosure(Bates, 1995b). Turley proclaimed that the dying workers were being `vindicated' (Bates,1995b). Judge Pro gave the government a deadline of 2 October to either release theEPA report or seek a presidential exemption.

Although Judge Pro's ruling declared that the government could seek an exemptionfrom the president, Turley thought that this was unlikely, saying that if the president

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allows the military to ` circumvent the law, he will have to do so publicly and face thepolitical consequences'' (Bates, 1995b, no page). He confidently stated that ``on Oct. 2,citizens will learn that they have a new federal facility'' and that ` the president will nowhave to personally exempt this facility by name, or order the military to operate itunder the same rules as other [bases]'' (Bates, 1995b, no page).

But Turley had misjudged the extent to which the government would go to keepits `operating location' secret. President Clinton accepted Turley's challenge to``accept the political consequences'' of allowing the military to ``circumvent thelaw''. The facility would remain secret. It would also remain nameless. Its environ-mental report would remain secret. The workers would not get information aboutwhat they had been exposed to. Presidential Determination No. 95-45 was a simpletwo-paragraph memorandum to the EPA (see momorandum below).

Turley and the John Does had been trumped by the highest authority: the facilityremained unnamed, and the Air Force was exempt from providing information aboutits activities, no matter how mundane. The presidential order created a total ban oninformation coming out of the secret base.

The toxic `London fog' at Groom Lake not only represented the space of stealthcreeping into the flesh of those in its vicinity, but gave rise to an array of contra-dictions. The workers had gotten sick from their exposure to top-secret chemicals.They visited hospitals and went to see doctors. Stealth, thus, intersected the medicalestablishment. The workers sought a lawyer. That lawyer filed suit, bringing a discus-sion of the secret airbase and its goings-on into the legal system. The lawsuits raisedenvironmental concerns at Groom Lake and brought the classified airbase to theattention of the EPA. The EPA's ensuing report represented another contradiction:

THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTONSeptember 29, 1995Presidential Determination No. 95-45

MEMORANDUM FOR THE ADMINISTRATOR OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTIONAGENCY THE SECRETARY OF THE AIR FORCE

SUBJECT: Presidential Determination on Classified Information Concerning the Air Force'sOperating Location Near Groom Lake, Nevada.

I find that it is in the paramount interest of the United States to exempt the United States AirForce's operating location near Groom Lake, Nevada (the subject of litigation in Kasza v.Browner (D. Nev. CV-S-94-795-PMP) and Frost v. Perry (D. Nev. CV-S-94- 714-PMP)) fromany applicable requirement for the disclosure to unauthorized persons of classified informationconcerning that operating location. Therefore, pursuant to 42 U.S.C. ½ 6961(a), I hereby exemptthe Air Force's operating location near Groom Lake, Nevada from any Federal, State, interstateor local provision respecting control and abatement of solid waste or hazardous waste disposalthat would require the disclosure of classified information concerning that operating location toany unauthorized person. This exemption shall be effective for the full one-year statutory period.

Nothing herein is intended to: (a) imply that in the absence of such a Presidential exemption, theResource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) or any other provision of law permits orrequires disclosure of classified information to unauthorized persons; or (b) limit the applicabil-ity or enforcement of any requirement of law applicable to the Air Force's operating locationnear Groom Lake, Nevada, except those provisions, if any, that would require the disclosure ofclassified information.

The Secretary of the Air Force is authorized and directed to publish this Determination in theFederal Register.

[Signed] William J. Clinton

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EPA reports are not supposed to be classified. At each of these moments, the space ofstealth crept out from the restricted borders of its classified airbases. Each momentwas like Ross Mulhare's plane crash, posing a contradiction between the space ofsecrecy and more mundane sectors of the state.

The following March, Judge Pro dismissed the lawsuit against the Air Force byinvoking the Mobius logic of state secrecy:

`The court first notes that the military and state secrets privilege is absolute,notwithstanding any allegations of criminal conduct. The court holds that federaldefendants were not required to admit or deny allegations as to whether hazard-ous waste had been stored, treated, or disposed of at the site, because suchinformation was classified and encompassed within the privilege ... the courtnext holds that plaintiffs could not provide the essential evidence to establish aprima facie case for any of their RCRA claims. The defendants' assertion of themilitary and state secrets privilege prevented the plaintiffs from providing detailedphotographic evidence, sealed affidavits, and information in other exhibits'' (Frost v.Perry 1996).In other words, because all references to operations or activities at the unnamed

`operating location' were state secrets, Turley and the John Does could not submit anyevidence of wrongdoing (because the evidence would be secret). Because it is impos-sible to have a lawsuit without any evidence, the lawsuit, like the base and the stealthfighters tested there, cannot `exist' in some sort of conventional political or legal sense.The legal contradiction was resolved by the judge's ruling that the space of stealth wasfundamentally incompatible with the legal system. The legal system was thereby alteredto accommodate (by way of exclusion) the stealth program.

Judge Pro's ruling was only barely more sophisticated than the Air Force's initialtautological claim: We don't know what you're talking about, because this place doesnot exist. And because this place does not exist, we don't know what you're talkingabout. If fragmented evidence of the ` operating location near Groom Lake'' had begunto form a rough sketch of the secret base in public, its lines would not be filled in.Instead, they would be erased.

As the case seemed to be winding down, the government went again on theoffensive, demanding to know the names of the six John Does and to interview them(Palermo, 1996). It was the last act in a strategy of complete silence: the governmenthad denied everything, even the existence of the base itself, but made sure to try to findout who was asking. On appeal, Turley was able to convince the 9th Circuit Courtof Appeals to preserve the anonymity of the John Does (Bates, 1996), but was unableto successfully appeal Judge Pro's ruling that no court case could proceed becauseno evidence could be discussed. In November 1998 the Supreme Court refused to heara final appeal (Rogers, 1998).

When the figure of John Doe (an amalgam of stealth workers' identities), throughJonathan Turley, sued the EPA for access to its newly minted report on the operatinglocation near Groom Lake, Doe was asking a question about his own physiology.His hope was that the EPA report would help him understand what was happening tohis changing body, that it would explain the burning flesh and bleeding skin that lefthim screaming in pain before the end of each day and left his bed sheets soaked withblood each morning (Leiby, 1997). John Doe hoped that by getting access to the EPAreport, he might be able to explain to his doctor what he had been exposed to andtherefore get specific treatment. He wanted to know what he was becoming so thathe might treat himself, but relief was not coming.

John Doe's body had fused with that of the stealth fighter, but the stealth fighter wasstill a state secret. John Doe's bare life took on that secrecyöhis living flesh became a

768 T Paglen

special access program, and he was not in the `need to know' to be cleared for it. The spaceof stealth transformed his biology, which in turn led to the transformation of his politicalidentity: in order to assert himself, Doe had to take on a political identity akin to thestealth fighter. To become a political subject, in other words, Doe's identity paradoxicallyhad to become secret. He could only speak through a proxy.

Jonathan Turley would speak for him. Next was his name: he became `John Doe',a man without history or family. His job was also obscuredöwas he a welder, aconstruction worker, a flight technician, a pilot, a general? Who did he work for?The Air Force? Bechtel? Wackenhut? EG&G? REECO? The CIA? In the years beforehe died, Doe may have told acquaintances any number of things about his life as longas he did not reveal where he worked. Now, the exact opposite was true: Doe could sayalmost nothing except the location where he had worked. To stand up to the Air Forceand to ask what he was becoming, Doe had to become as invisible as possible: secretdeath became a singular signifier for his life. The voice of John Doe had a simpleand singular message: ``I am John Doe. I exist. I worked at Groom Lake. It exists.We burned things there. Now I am dying because of it.''

In 1995 one of the John Does died. Only after his death would his name becomepublic: Walter Kasza. He had been awarded three bronze stars for heroism fightingagainst the Nazis in World War Two; he had been married for 45 years; he hadchildren; and he had worked for seven years as a sheet-metal worker at the ` operatinglocation near Groom Lake'' (Bates, 1995a; Leiby, 1997; Patton, 1998).

$

My aim here has been to show how state secrecy works in terms of the productionof space. I have shown how state secrecy cannot be wholly understood by focusing onits legal, political, bureaucratic, or cultural/spectacular aspects in isolation from oneanother. Moreover, I have shown how state secrecy creates peculiar political subjects,even ecologies and transformations of nature. This, I believe, represents a step towardsformulating a more theoretically convincing account of secrecy than what is availablein the current literature.

Although I chose the story of the stealth fighter to illustrate the ways in which statesecrecy and the production of space are one and the same, there are myriad otherstories which would have illustrated the same argument. A study of Khaled el-Masri'sextraordinary rendition' from Macedonia, his subsequent confinement at a CIA prisoncalled the `Salt Pit' outside Kabul, and failed attempts to seek redress from the courtsystem (where the case discussed in this paper, Kasza v. Browner, was cited as aprecedent to keep `state secrets' out of court) would have illustrated the same dynamicsof state secrecy (Grey, 2006; Mayer, 2008; Paglen and Thompson, 2006).

There is little doubt that the proliferation of classified programs and covert actionsduring the Bush administration, and their substantial continuation under the Obamaadministration, has entailed a deep transformation of American cultural and politicalgeographies. Indeed, geographies of secrecy have carved out their own `nonspace' inthe American legal system, as illustrated by the Bush (and now Obama) JusticeDepartment's unprecedented reliance upon the state secrets privilege to keep trouble-some lawsuits out of the court system (Hendler, 2010; Siegel, 2009). Meanwhile,classified spending (the so-called `black budget') has grown under the Obama Admin-istration to historic highs, creating secret military and intelligence industries andeconomies (Sweetman, 2009). Moreover, geographies of secrecy have even transformedthe epistemic norms of political discourse, as illustrated most famously by DonaldRumsfeld's ` unknown unknowns'', but perhaps more concretely by Marc Thiessen's

Goatsucker: toward a spatial theory of state secrecy 769

recent celebration of the CIA's torture program, where he argues for the efficacy oftorture based on uncited classified evidence (Mayer, 2010; Thiessen, 2010).

In sum, I believe that a theoretical synthesis of existing literature on the bureau-cratic, cultural, legal, and political dynamics of state secrecy is necessary in order tounderstand 21st-century transformations in the American state. I believe that aspatial analytics of state secrecy foregrounding the contradictions inherent in secretgeographies is a fruitful avenue towards that goal.

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