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 billion 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.”
This response turned a mild-mannered inquirer into a muckraker. “I was merely pointing out the Air Force’s violations of U.S. classification policy, contained in Executive Order 12356, and how secret spending violated Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of the U.S. Constitution.” He referred to the requirement that Congress approve all federal spending. The black budget, Trader and others argue, violates that provision by hiding the purpose of the expenditures.
He took further inspiration from a book called Blank Check, by reporter Tim Weiner, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his exposé of blackbudget programs for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Weiner called the black budget “a culture of deception.” It is, he wrote, a closed world built on the familiar cozy relationship between Pentagon officials, the military brass, and defense contractors. The result was waste. Weiner had investigated cost overruns and performance failures of programs such as Milstar, the military communications and control satellite. He wrote that it was all about preserving empires, that keeping programs secret is an expression of institutional power, part of the still-closed world of the military and its contractors.
But Trader wanted to go further: into the projects whose very existence was hidden. He began assembling his own black budget, using congressional and DOD documents. It was like reconstructing a crashed airplane or assembling a dinosaur skeleton, with conjectural plaster pieces filling in the missing gaps. He set up an Internet site to distribute his files.
Trader, like most critics of the black budget, argued that for all the triumphs of the Skunk Works, most secret programs hid waste. Revealing the cost of a Stealth fighter tells no more about how to build one than the cost of a Cadillac does. Many black programs, such as the B-2 Stealth bomber and the Milstar satellite system, ended up costing far more than planned, but by the time the public learned of the cost overruns it was too late to kill the programs. So much money had been spent that proponents successfully argued that ending the programs would be a bigger waste.
The B-2 was too big to hide. If the Skunk Works provided stories of how black programs could provide stunning success, the B-2 was the prime public example of the disasters secrecy could produce. I caught my first glimpse of a B-2 bomber one day as I drove past the chain-link at Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale. It was twilight, and far across the open ground I saw a gray blobbish whale shape, derived in part from what Northrop had learned by flying Shamu. It was the primary example of a black program gone awry. With an undefined mission and an unproven need, pushed by the great momentum of airpower advocacy, its cost ballooned to over a billion dollars a copy, Tim Weiner had calculated, three times the worth of its weight in gold. “It just got away from them,” Ben Rich told me, referring sympathetically to his traditional rival Northrop.
The B-2 compounded the cults of airpower and of stealth with a third, the flying wing. In January 1981, a frail, ill eighty-five-year-old man walked into a room at the Northrop offices on Century Boulevard in Los Angeles. Senior officials and engineers welcomed Jack Northrop. From a box they pulled a model of the Stealth bomber. To Jack Northrop, it was instantly recognizable as the heir to the flying wing bombers he had designed in the 1940s. “Now I know why God has kept me alive these last twenty-five years,” he said tearfully. Standing beside him were Steve Smith and John Cashen, who had helped create Shamu.
The flying wing had always enjoyed a mystical, almost fanatic following from those who saw it as the pure aircraft shape. It obsessed Jack Northrop. He had worked for Lockheed, designing the Vega and Orion; in his spare time he designed and built his first flying wing and tested it at Muroc Dry Lake in 1929. By 1940, he had his own aircraft company, and his flying wing bomber was approved for construction; its first flight was in 1946. When the YB-49 flew cross-country in 1949, President Truman went aboard. It was featured in the 1953 film The War of the Worlds, looking as strange as the ships that bring the invading aliens to Earth.