We knew The Ranch was a place that could be very dark, because another time my father came back with a scabbed cut in his forehead. All he would tell us is that he had been driving across some dim landscape in the middle of the night in a rental car with the lights off and he had run into something and his head had been thrown forward into the steering wheel. “Why were you driving in the dark with no lights?” his wife and children wanted to know. But his answer was a smile.
To spy, you must agree to be spied on. To create a spy plane, you must agree to have your phone tapped, take lie-detector tests, have your background and clearance reviewed every five years.
That was the cost of working in Dreamland. Indeed, this seemed to be the key reason for the ceremony and the revelation of Shamu. At last the wives and the children, now grown, could be told. On black projects such as Shamu, Smith said, “All normal methods of communication are avoided, all identities and relationships are denied. Total isolation is the goal, and this caused hardship.” Divorce rates are high in black projects.
When the Air Force first began operating the Stealth fighter at Tonopah, it flew only at night. As a result, the pilots slept during the day. When they returned home on weekends, they would either continue to sleep all day, ignoring their families, or try, usually in vain, to switch their sleeping schedules, leaving them groggy and irritable. Some said they felt like vampires. Many pilots complained of a nagging exhaustion they could not shake. One of them was Ross Mulhare, who died in July 1986 when he flew his Stealth fighter into a hillside near Bakersfield. Mulhare’s family did not know what he was doing during the days he disappeared into the desert south of Tonopah, but they did know that he had to take a lie-detector test every three months.
Those who work on black projects must sign an agreement to respect the secrecy of information protected within Special Access Programs, called Sensitive Compartmented Information. These agreements, which for earlier programs were carried out under Reagan-era Executive Order 12356, involve an explanation of the system and “indoctrination.” Those inside understand they can be punished — fined and sent to prison for years — under sections 793, 794, 798, and 952 of Title 18 of the U.S. Criminal Code.
Secondhand accounts of the black world abound with tales of persuasive briefings punctuated by shouting and the near proximity of the muzzle of an M-16 rifle to the subject’s face. You will disappear, they are told. One former Red Hat flier simply took it for granted that people who talked about the program would disappear.
But the real teeth of the system, the tools for ensuring secrecy, are much more mundane: the threat of the end of a career, of loss of a pension, the regular administration of polygraph tests, the monitoring of phone calls and mail, the careful registration and tracing of the disposition of controlled documents and computer files. The Office of Special Investigations or FBI may also tap phones and watch the movements of employees and even family members.
With these tactics it is much easier to keep secrets than one would think. At first the black world was a world of intelligence — information. But beginning with the Manhattan Project, black methods were applied to the development of hardware — not just knowing things but building things. The Western Development Division of Air Research and Development in 1951, the first U.S. effort to develop an ICBM, was another early black program. Funding for these comes from budget lines with code names or vague headings. Some, like the U-2, were funded from various CIA funds. But the CIA is only one of some thirty-eight U.S. intelligence agencies, departments, and divisions, and its $2 billion budget is dwarfed by that of the National Security Agency.
Today, entire categories of operations are black as welclass="underline" the SIOP (single-integrated operating plan) for fighting a nuclear war, “continuity of government” plans following a nuclear war, or antiterrorist operations, for instance.
The biggest misunderstanding about secrecy is that it is a matter of levels, that higher clearance gives one access to more stuff. In fact, the key is not vertical but horizontal — in compartmentalization. The engineers building a Stealth fighter are separated from those building a laser weapon; being cleared for one highly secret project does not mean access to another.
For this reason, the black system was developed with almost scholastic rigidity. Beyond such commonly known stamps as Top Secret or Classified are code warnings like WINTEL: Warning Notice — intelligence sources and methods involved; ORCON, originator controls access and distribution; NORFORM, meaning not to be seen by foreign nationals; NO CONTRACT, meaning not to be seen by contractors.
Categories of information had names different from those of the sources of that information, as part of the compartmentalization process. Such names are almost a parody of themselves. Readers of John le Carré will be familiar with the use of separate code names for a body of intelligence information and its source. The material called “Witchcraft,” for example, is produced from a source called “Merlin.”
In the fully developed Cold War system, categories of intelligence had names like Umbra and Spoke. Gamma was the name for intercepts of various Soviet communications. (It was also applied in 1969 to the program of spying on American leaders in their protests against the Vietnam War.) A whole host of “G” words — Gant, Gabe, Gyro, Gut, Gult, Goat — some real words, some made up, were used for specific categories of these intercepts: Gamma Guppy, for instance, was the name for overheard telephone conversations of Soviet leaders being driven around Moscow in their limos. It seemed to consist largely of gossip about their various mistresses.
Secret hardware programs received special names, like the Byeman names for spy satellites. The U-2 was Aquatone and Idealist. Discoverer covered Corona, the first spy satellite. But it was in the naming of research programs like Teal Rain and Have Blue by the services, and by such agencies as DARPA, that the new tone of the black world emerged. Something else works to protect secrecy: a sense of fraternity, the qualities of a secret society, a sense of belonging to something special. (“Special” is a key word in the Pentagon. “Special weapons” are nukes; “special operations” are commandos.) To define a group, a cult, a religion, not only are certain key words used but certain words are not used. In the black world, there are terms that are never spoken aloud, like the true name of God. You never say Groom Lake — you say “the Ranch,” or “the remote location.” And rarely do you even say black.
There were also active efforts to penetrate security — like LeMay’s old security testers in SAC — and others listening in on family phone calls and watching employees to see that the penetrators were not succeeding.
“There were many efforts to do this,” one of the Whalers told me, adding proudly, “To my knowledge, none of them were successful.”
“Were there also,” I asked, “active disinformation efforts or cover stories?”
“You’d have to ask the professionals about that,” he answered.
The professionals. AFOSI? FBI? When I did ask them, of course, I got the inevitable “We can’t talk about that.”
Besides the little whale lapel button, many of the whalers wore another pin: a diamond arrowhead, icon of the Pioneers of Stealth, the loose organization of black-world engineers who had worked on Stealth and now met for occasional reunions in a wave of nostalgia for those early days.