He footnoted a number of references to the place and asked why they hadn’t said anything about Area 51. How could anyone make a judgment about the real environmental impact of the Nevada nuclear test site, he argued, if they didn’t know about Area 51 and such programs as Project 57 or Project Timberwind (the secret nuclear-rocket program with a classified Environmental Impact Statement)? Both the audience and the DOE panel listened silently. No one seemed shocked by any of this.
The speaker who made the most impact on the audience was a representative of the Western Shoshone, who pointed out that the tribe rejected the whole treaty of Ruby Valley of 1863, under which the U.S. government claimed ownership of the test site. The tribe had never accepted the federal payments that would have put the treaty in force; they still claimed the land. Speaker after speaker had made reference to the fact that taxpayers and citizens owned the test site, and I had always thought of myself as being as much an owner as a watcher. Now I had to consider that Native Americans might own the test site, and Dreamland itself.
Ownership had been important to us watchers. It lent a certain self-righteousness to our demands: We’re taxpayers, this is our place, we must be allowed in on its decision-making. But part of the government’s secrecy about Dreamland took the form of hiding or denying ownership. At the hearing, the Department of Energy effectively denied ownership, as the Air Force frequently did. But Native Americans, who did not share the white man’s sense of individual or collective ownership of land, were now, somehow ironically, claiming it.
From the DOE to Trader to the Shoshone, everyone seemed to be selling a different version of Dreamland, repping their views, agenting their image. They were like real estate agents. I had once been warned of that profession: “The difference between realty and reality is in the I.” And the eye.
23. “Job Knowledge”
Driving away from the Las Vegas hearing, I realized that there were very likely petroglyphs similar to those we had seen in the canyon inside Dreamland and in other distant reaches of the Nevada Test Site. There was even a report on the subject — our tax dollars at work. “An Archaeological Reconnaissance of the Groom Range” had been conducted in the summer of 1986, as part of the legal requirements of the 1984 seizure of Bald Mountain and other perimeter areas.
The archaeologists had also found a number of middens — trash heaps — and from the bones and other bits could determine what the tribal people had eaten and how they had lived. In 1994, an effort was begun to poke through Dreamland’s own midden. An ambitious and idealistic lawyer named Jonathan Turley, who ran an organization called the Environmental Crimes Project at George Washington University, filed suit on behalf of former Area 51 workers against the Air Force and the Environmental Protection Agency.
The defendants in the suit were Defense Secretary William Perry, National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall, and EPA administrator Carol Browner. In violation of law, the suit charged, the military at Area 51 had burned hazardous wastes without a permit, exposing workers to dangerous chemicals that made them ill and, in two cases, led to their deaths. The best known, Robert Frost, was a sheet metal worker who had died in 1989 of cirrhosis of the liver before the case had been filed. Frost had tried to sue Lockheed, to no avail. His widow joined the plaintiffs in the suit against the government. Frost had burned waste in open pits, he reported. His skin turned red and began to peel. After his death, a Rutgers University biochemist, Peter Kahn, found concentrations of dioxins and trichloroethylene in Frost’s body tissues. Another worker, Walter Kasza, died at age seventy-three of liver and kidney cancer.
Others in the suit gave accounts of burnings in open pits and the huge plumes of smoke from dangerous corrosive chemicals — solvents and sealants, plastics, paint wastes, by-products of composites, and stealth coatings. Their chemical names were frightening even to the layman: dioxins, methyl ethyl ketone, trichloroethylene, and dibenzofurans. The workers were given no protective clothing or masks, they said, even after they asked for them. They were forced to go into the pits and rifle through the half-burned material to be sure nothing was left. Everything was burned — chemicals, papers, leftover prime rib and lobster from the dining hall, furniture, and vehicles. They came down with all kinds of symptoms, not just the skin rashes but eye irritations, headaches, blackouts.
Two big Kenworth eighteen-wheelers were always in evidence, one worker reported, and huge fifty-five-gallon drums were brought in with materials from Burbank. The burning took place at the edge of Papoose Lake, near the storied S-4 of Lazar’s tales. Was the Lazar story the military’s own bizarre cover for the burning?
The story suggested a pattern like that Joe Bacco had described at the test site, where the sense of national urgency and emergency led to abuse of workers. In 1986, workers for the Skunk Works in Burbank sued Lockheed over illnesses they said were acquired from exposure to substances used in building the Stealth fighter — the chemicals used in its composites and in its radar-absorbing coverings were extremely toxic. The local citizenry had joined in later. That was why the original Skunk Works, the fenced-off wasteland I had visited, was now bare ground. The workers who had dealt with similar substances at Area 51 itself were stepping forward at great personal risk. Even as shielded by the John Doe conventions in the legal documents, they were violating their oaths and jeopardizing their pensions.
As I read about Turley’s suit and talked to him, I began to associate the sort of cumulative secrecy Trader had described to me with a great midden packed with layers of detritus. The suits were “citizens’ lawsuits,” not torts or damage claims. The workers weren’t after money, they were after information. They simply wanted to know the specific chemicals to which they had been exposed so they could seek treatment. But the Air Force argued that even to take soil and air samples might reveal the materials used in secret projects and thus compromise them.
Secrecy, so useful in crises, could also become a dangerous substance. Turley was charging that the abuse of secrecy was the means of hiding the abuse of the chemicals. The Air Force, he argued, had committed a crime by burning chemicals without a permit, and the result had been the injuries and deaths of the workers. “We have compelling evidence that the government and its contractors have used the secrecy of Groom Lake not to protect national security but to shield the illegal disposal of hazardous waste.”
The Air Force defense was that national security considerations protected it even against suits based on criminal activity.
It was a startling and unprecedented claim, far beyond anything Nixon had made at the time of Watergate, for instance. The implications were huge: Would the same national security defense have placed the officials beyond the reach of prosecution for murder? (Two of the plaintiffs had died, after all.) But no one had ever sued a black facility before.
At first the Air Force lawyers denied the existence of the facility, but Turley came up with three hundred pages of references to Area 51 and Project 51 in Air Force and DOE documents, and finally the officials acknowledged the memorandum of agreement that charged them with running it.[14] Claiming that Area 51 did not exist, the Air Force had apparently begun to avoid all references to it, using “Groom Lake” instead.
Area 51, after all, was an obsolete designation bestowed more than thirty years ago by the NTS and the AEC. The Air Force claimed the place was run by the Department of Energy (formerly the AEC), which in turn claimed it had given up authority years ago. The overlapping colors on the map of Dreamland became a means for passing the buck.
14
Inquiries brought this official response:
In response to your request for information concerning the Air Force’s facility at Groom Lake, Nevada, the 38,400-acre land area once known as “Area 51” was withdrawn from public use by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission more than 35 years ago under Public Land Order 1662 (filed June 25, 1958).
Since that time, the parcel has been used and administered as a national asset. Because DOE is not now active there, Area 51 no longer appears on maps of DOE’s NTS.
Today that land area is used by the Department of Defense as part of its 4,120-square-mile Nellis Air Force Range. For safety and national security reasons, air space above both the Nellis Range and the NTS is closed to commercial aviation and the general public.