At the stroke of midnight on June 16, 1988, Grace Bukowski of Citizen Alert and Dr. Richard Bargen, a activist for military oversight, began their hike into the Groom Mountains. Although the Air Force had claimed the entire range and Congress has finally approved the withdrawal, the two hikers were breaking no laws. A temporary withdrawal enacted in 1984 expired on June 15, while the final Congressional action did not take effect until June 17, so the land was open to the public for two days.
In this case, the public consisted only of Bukowski and Bargen. They were not comforted by the knowledge of their legal rights, because the anonymous, well-armed security guards patrolling the area were unlikely to appreciate such subtleties. In the Groom Range, the Air Force had already established a reputation for flaunting the law. It began when a new guardpost appeared on a county road on public land in 1984. Travelers were told that this was now military land and they could go no further. The military chose to seize the land first and only then obtain the legal sanction. Some irate citizens equated the action to an armed invasion, and the public outcry resulted in this now-famous exchange in the House of Representatives...
Congressman Sieberling: "Is it true the Air Force has already acted to restrict public use of the Groom Range area?"
Asst. Secretary of the Air Force Rittenhouse: "...Yes, it is true. We have asserted the right to control the surface access and egress to the extent of requesting people not to go in and out."
Sieberling: "Under what legal authority was that done?..."
Rittenhouse: "As far as I know, sir, there is none; except the decisions were made at a much, much higher level than mine..."
Sieberling: "There are no higher levels than the laws of the United States."
Traveling without flashlights, the two hikers made their way toward Bald Mountain, the highest peak in the range, to an area they had already selected as appropriate to their purpose. They were not looking for military secrets at "Area 51," the highly restricted land around the lake bed below. They were not hoping to contact the aliens at Groom Lake or catch a glimpse of the next generation of stealth aircraft. Theirs was a more earthly quest. They were looking for gold.
Specifically, they had come to stake a mining claim in an area that Dr. Bargen had determined would be promising for gold and other economically viable minerals. They spent several hours in the early morning collecting rock samples, erecting markers and engaging in the survey work required to lay a claim. Then they withdrew from the area as quietly as they had come.
Two days later, the window closed, and the Groom Mountain Range was again under the control of the military. Unknown to the Air Force, Bukowski and Bargen had created a sort of Trojan Horse. Although the Air Force had won control of the land, the two prospectors had also asserted the right to conduct mining activities there. Since the claim was staked when the land was still public, the mining claim ought to take legal precedence. Any number of "miners" ought to now be able to come into the area to work the claim.
Of course, claiming the right to do something has little meaning if you don't exercise it, and this was the reason for a second expedition a month later. Under the authority of Dr. Bargen, who now owned the claim, Bukowski, Bob Fulkerson, Louis Benevet and Thomas Croxall crossed the new military border with the intent of performing further preparatory work at the claim site. Needless to say, they didn't get far. Anonymous camouflage-clad men with big guns descended on the group; the four were detained for two hours then turned over to the Lincoln County Sheriff's Dept. for criminal processing.
In a trial by a local Justice of the Peace, the four were convicted of misdemeanor trespass and fined $600 each. They appealed the decision, and four years from the date of their arrest a higher court finally reversed it, saying that the government had an obligation to respect such claims. The Trojan Horse had worked, albeit it at the slow and costly pace of the judicial system. By the time the final verdict was reached, Bargen, Bukowski and their colleagues felt that they had already won the concessions they had sought from the military regarding mitigation for the withdrawal. To reassert their newly-won right to work the claim might have required getting arrested again and going through yet more legal cases. Recognizing that the Air Force has very deep pockets for this sort of battle, the mining claim was allowed to expire, and the "Groom Range Four" attempted no further hikes to Bald Mountain.
These 4,000 acres are far from insignificant, however. The parcels selected just so happen to cover a couple of minor hills from which aviation watchers, UFO buffs and the just plain curious have been catching entirely legal glimpses of the top secret aircraft testing facility at Groom Lake. To Air Force spokesmen, the base does not officially exist and has never existed since the formerly nonexistent U-2 and A-12 spy planes were first tested there in the 50s and 60s. Inquiries about the base to the Nellis AFB Public Affairs Directorate yield only verbal smirks and various forms of "No Comment." ("Groom Lake, where's that?") The viewpoints are proving an intense embarrassment to the Air Force as a stream of urbanites and television crews make the pilgrimage to "Freedom Ridge" to see for themselves what the Air Force isn't telling.
Obviously, the safety of the public and the security of the Nellis Bombing and Gunnery Range--whose pilots are excluded entirely from this forbidden zone--have nothing to do with the withdrawal, and therein lies the popular fascination. Everyone loves a secret base, and the Air Force has failed to grasp that pretending it isn't there is the best way to attract attention to it. Before the Air Force applied for the land, the visitors to the viewpoints were a manageable trickle. The application itself provided the reportable news event that elevated the secret base to a national mania. When the land grab story hit international newsstands on the cover of the March Popular Science, the trickle of visitors instantly turned into a flood. Recreational groups from Las Vegas and Southern California began organizing outings, and countless civilian "weekend warriors" donned their camouflage garb to probe along the border. Muckraking journalists everywhere started asking the inevitable embarrassing questions: Why now? Who's accountable? What is so secret anyway?
As secret bases go, this one isn't exactly "stealth," even without the viewpoints. Detailed satellite photos of the base are offered for sale to the public by our former enemy the Russians, and beginning this year they and their former allies will be permitted to overfly the base with sophisticated reconnaissance planes as part of the international Treaty on Open Skies. The existence of the Groom facility has never been much of a mystery to the Soviets, who devoted great attention to analyzing its activities during the Cold War. Worries about Soviet spies looking down on the base were the obvious but unstated reason that the Air Force seized the entire Groom Mountain Range in 1984. In the end, however, that effort failed because the less obvious viewpoints now in question were overlooked.
What super-secret military projects are now going on at Groom? The best answer seems to be, anything you want. The stories are many and the verifiable facts few, so what people believe about the place seems more an exercise in psychology and social anthropology than a reflection of what is really out there. Anything seems possible, and no hypothesis can be reliably dismissed. Underground cities and alien spacecraft are an integral part of the folklore here, and no one on the outside can prove these claims false. Fevered government conspiracies involving the JFK assassination, the invention of AIDS and sinister liberal plans by a One World Government to take away our handguns also seem to be headquartered at Groom. Did you ever wonder where all those thousands of missing children have gone who are now on the back of milk cartons? This is the place. They've been interred in underground prison camps where they are forced to endure hideous, unspeakable medical experiments.
If you want to limit yourself to the observable evidence, hangers and runways usually mean airplanes, and Groom Lake was certainly used to test the most secret military aircraft of the Cold War. The best speculation at present says that Groom is, or recently was, the home of a high speed, high altitude spy plane dubbed Aurora. Vehement denials by the military that there is such a craft have been met with public skepticism similar to that suffered by the Boy Who Cried Wolf. Regardless of what is going on there, Groom is certainly a busy place, and it seems likely that billions are being spent. A fleet of anonymous 737s makes ten to twelve round trips each weekday from Las Vegas, suggesting a work force of anywhere from 500 to 1500. These shuttle jets seems to be the only activity that most visitors to the viewpoints see. If secret aircraft are housed there now, it seems likely they will be kept out of sight whenever an observer is detected at the viewpoints.
Until 1984, private citizens could drive to a corner of the lake bed itself, but the land grab that year neutralized the privilege. The base vanished from USGS maps even as it expanded dramatically on the ground. The history after 1984 remains sketchy. Early F- 117 Stealth Fighter prototypes were apparently built and tested there, but it is difficult to find any worker who will admit this openly. To this day, anyone who has worked at the base can be imprisoned even for mentioning it. Even official histories of the 40-year-old U-2 refer to Groom only as "a remote desert test facility."
Of course, unofficial histories still call it Groom Lake, and no one without a security clearance seems afraid to utter those forbidden words. While some projects at Groom remain secret--and perhaps justifiably so--the existence of the base itself certainly is not. The secret base that everyone knows about has become a prominent example of the classification bureaucracy far exceeding the bounds of reason. The most powerful objection to the current withdrawal, and the one that could most realistically shoot it down, is that the Air Force does not acknowledge the base or its desire to keep it hidden in its application to BLM. At the same time, it has not stated on the application that the need for the land is classified, as is required by the federal regulations governing such withdrawals. In pursuing the "What secret base?" line, the Air Force has crippled only itself.
As a lawyer opposing the withdrawal points out, this and all other public lands are designated by law for the purpose of "public multiple use." That is the preferred assignment of the land as mandated by Congress, and the burden is on the Air Force to prove that its use is more important. Burdened by its own excessive secrecy, the Air Force has not attempted to prove anything at all and seems to assume that it will get the land just for the asking. In quieter circumstances, this might be so, but public pressure on the BLM is great enough now that victory by the Air Force is no longer a foregone conclusion. The BLM is likely to watch its step and avoid any decision that would make it legally and politically vulnerable.
More dangerous than the financial costs is the loss of governmental oversight inherent in every secret program. Given the choice to operate with or without public knowledge of its activities, any government agency would certainly choose the latter. The Postal Service and our local Department of Motor Vehicles don't have this option, so we know how inefficient they are. There is no reason to suppose that an agency operating outside the public view's is going to be any more productive or trustworthy. Stamping something as secret may protect the national interest, but it can also protect the self interest of the people doing the labeling. Egos, jobs and the protection of bureaucratic territory can be seen as national security issues in the eyes of the bureaucrat whose funding or control is at risk.
Even when operating fairly efficiently, each government department is, by nature, a single minded entity, pursuing its given mandate with little concern for any other. The military, pursuing its sworn duty to protect the nation from foreign enemies, has also turn out to be one of the nation's worst polluters. It seems the every defense facility has its illegal hazardous waste dump, and Groom Lake appears to be no exception. Running parallel to the current land grab case are the legal battles of Helen Frost, who claims that her husband died as the result of exposure to toxic fumes at the base. Stealth aircraft employ a lot of exotic materials, and their production generates highly toxic wastes. In the 1980s, these wastes were allegedly disposed of in a manner that would never have been tolerated at any open facility: They were dumped into trenches and burned in the open air, then bulldozed over. The claimed site of the burn pits at Groom was directly upwind of the base itself, where Mrs. Frost's husband, a maintenance supervisor, often worked outdoors and on roofs.
Secret bases don't have to comply with environmental regulations. They can only "police themselves"--if there is such a thing. At Groom Lake, the military has recently allowed a state inspector on site, but only with a security clearance and after signing the same secrecy oaths required for all base workers. It would seem that such inspections are allowed only when the inspector can't report what he finds.
Secret bases don't have to comply with labor or civil rights regulations, either. A worker who signs the papers allowing entry to the base also signs away many of his legal rights. When the walls at Groom Lake eventually fall, it is reasonable to assume that many horror stories will begin to see the light. The most terrifying of these are likely to arise from the security apparatus itself. Thousands of employees are not kept quiet by an oath of loyalty alone. Any reporter who talks to a present or former worker knows that there is also a lot of fear. Loose lip sink ships--and bring a visit by the internal "secret police" to enforce the code of silence. A worker who says one word too many in the local bar finds himself the next day facing an enforcer in a conference room under harsh fluorescent lighting. There is no reason to suppose that torture has ever been used--physical torture, that is. Mental torture, definitely. In a closed society like this, the enforcer has free rein to do whatever he wants, and the accused has no rights or recourse.
A base that does not exist also does not have to pay its local taxes. Dirt-poor Lincoln County gains no more than a handful of jobs and a trickle of revenue from the billion dollar base within its borders. Most of the business and employment of the base goes to wealthy Las Vegas, 95 miles to the south. The federal government itself cannot be taxed, but if any profit making company uses a government owned building for its activities, that building becomes subject to property tax. Groom Lake appears to be run primarily by private contractors. EG&G and its subsidiary REECO are prominent here, and if any aircraft production takes place in those big hangers, it is probably staffed and managed by either Lockheed or Northrop. Buildings used by contractors are supposed to be assessed at the same rate as they would on private property, and the tax can be paid either directly by the contractor or as an equivalent payment by the federal government.
In the 1993-94 tax year, the Air Force paid Lincoln County $65,000 on a total assessment of $2.5 million, including contractor facilities. For a billion dollar base, that is hardly a realistic sum. A single hanger or assembly building used by a technical contractor could be worth much more than $2.5 million, and Groom Lake is a city of these facilities. Every year, the Air Force tells the county what its assessment is, and the county has to accept it. Keeping the base secret means that no local tax assessor can visit to confirm the valuation. The situation is similar to asking any other taxpayer to assess his own property and choose his own tax, with no threat of audit.
Considering all the advantages of having a secret base, it is no wonder that the Air Force continues the play the role. Secrecy means greater power, less "meddling" by politicians and fewer public embarrassments when things go wrong. Even if the facility isn't really secret to any of our potential enemies, declining to acknowledge it to the American public saves the Air Force millions of dollars in taxes, environmental cleanup and employee liability.
The "Cammo Dudes," as they are known to the watchers, are alerted that someone is approaching by a network of road sensors on public land up to seven miles from the border. Sensors can be found on every road or dirt track in the Tikaboo Valley that approaches the border. Each unit consists of a transmitter hiding behind a bush, powered by a nearby battery pack and connected by wires to two magnetic detection units buried beside the road. The sensors do not seem a significant threat to the environment, and the more sophisticated watchers have mapped where they are and learned how to evade them. Still, when an anonymous, well-armed paramilitary force lays a sensor network on public land and routinely "stalks" visitors, one wonders if these are public lands at all. These are military controlled lands, differing from the adjacent Restricted Zone only by the absence of a formal withdrawal.
If the Groom Range was withdrawn as a buffer zone for the Groom Lake base, then the sensor laden Tikaboo Valley has become a buffer zone for the buffer zone. It is a symbolic issue to some: No matter how much land the Air Force is formally given, it will always try to take and control even more.
As of this writing, two public hearings have taken place, one of them a well attended and nationally reported affair in Las Vegas. After an upcoming public comment period on the Environmental Assessment report, the problem is in the hands of BLM. The soonest the land could be closer, if things went well for the Air Force, is around May 1.
But things are not going well for the Air Force. Media interest in the base continues to build, and that means a steady flow of visitors to the viewpoints almost every day. The attention is unlikely to go away as long as the base remains nonexistent, but announcing the base to the public presents its own risks to the military. The central objection to the withdrawal is the Air Force's failure to state the obvious reason: to hide the base from public view. If they changed tack and admitted that the base exists, then they would also have to admit that they aren't taking all the viewpoints, only the most convenient ones that can be neutralized in less than 5000 acres.
The current action is required only because of fatal flaws in the original 89,000 acre withdrawal. Bureaucrats in distant offices draw straight lines across a rugged landscape and must have assumed that acreage alone was all that was needed to hide the base from public view. Secrecy is evidently not conducive to brilliant thinking, because any worker standing on the tarmac at the base ought to recognize a far more efficient survey method. If you stand at the base and look around you, you'll see mountains and hills in the distance. It doesn't take an Einstein to figure out that if you can see a mountain, then anyone on that mountain could also see you. To make sure the base is invisible from the ground, all you need to do is check off the visible mountains and make sure each is within the proposed military area.
Apparently, no one tried this test in 1984, and as a result, the current viewpoints were ignored. It makes sense to take any of the viewpoints only if the Air Force takes all of them, so the the entire 89,000 acre buffer zone, so bitterly fought over in the 80s, was useless. Now the Air Force is repeating the same mistake. They are taking the most popular viewpoints because that's where people are flocking, but the opponents have discovered still others that remain untouched by the current action. If Freedom Ridge is closed it is reasonable to expect the visitors to flock to the new vantage points instead.
Tikaboo Peak to the east is twice as far from Groom Lake as Freedom Ridge, but the view of the base is almost as complete. In the clear desert air, viewing the activities on the distant tarmac requires only a more powerful telescope. The hike is longer--two hours each way compared to one--but the cedar and juniper forests on the eastern slope and the dramatic cliffs on the west, could make this alpine hike an attractive tourist destination in itself.
If the Air Forced revealed that it wanted to close Freedom Ridge to keep people from viewing the base, then opponents would point at Tikaboo Peak and say, "What about that?" The terror for the Air Force is that Tikaboo and other nearby mountains cannot be neutralized without bursting the 5000 acre limit beyond which Congressional approval is required. The Air Force would rather tangle with a dozen Saddams than present its case before Congress, which would ask the same embarrassing questions that the press and public are asking now.
The Air Force is caught in a no-win situation that can only end in the official "revelation" that there is indeed a base at Groom Lake. Even that may not be enough, however. Now that the Air Force's own actions have turned the national spotlight on their nonexistent base, people want to know what's going on there. The many mice now nibbling at the corners of military secrecy can't be easily swept aside, and they won't run out of embarrassing questions: What about that hazardous waste dump?... Tell us about the base's history.... Why can't we take tours?.... Show us the UFOs.... Give us back our missing children!
Whatever may be out there behind our own Berlin Wall, the cracks are showing, and the answers could be flooding out very soon.
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