Goatsucker: Toward a Spatial Theory of State Secrecy

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2010, volume 28, pages 759 ^ 771 doi:10.1068/d5308 Goatsucker: toward a spatial theory of state secrecy Trevor Paglen Department of Geography, University of California at Berkeley, 507 McCone Hall #4740, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA; e-mail: [email protected] Received 1 May 2008; in revised form 6 April 2010 Abstract. While the question of state secrecy has become a topic of much political debate, relatively little attention has been paid to the topic in academic literature. Most of the literature adopts one of several frameworks. In the legal literature, state secrecy has been examined as a historical and constitutional question. Social scientists have tended to follow Weber in examining secrecy as a question 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 development of the F-117A `stealth fighter' as a case study to give a spatial account of secrecy. I show how state secrecy gives rise to numerous spatial, political, juridical, and even ecological contradictions and propose that a spatial understanding of state secrecy foregrounding these contradictions provides a fruitful basis for a deeper understanding of state secrecy. Late one night during the summer of 1984, two fighter pilots saw a ghost in the sky above Las Vegas. A single two-seat F-16 `Viper' fighter was on a routine flight over the city that night, its pilots alternating between watching instruments, checking in with ground controllers, and scanning the skies above. And then they got a glimpse of something they could not explain. One thousand feet above, the Viper pilots watched a black arrowhead-shaped craft streak by. The startled fighter pilots radioed a Las Vegas air traffic controller below, who came back that the Viper had seen an A-7 Corsair. Shot back the pilot, `Ì don't know what it is, but it's no fucking A-7!'' If the Viper pilots imagined seeing a ghost that evening, they would have been right. 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 cautious forays 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 the Viper and the air traffic controller that night, and radioed his own operations center at the Tonopah Test Range, 160 miles to the north, to report that his secret aircraft had been spotted. The stealth pilot was practicing bombing runs against the Vegas skyline that night, counting on the blinding Las Vegas lights to prevent anyone from seeing him. This was not supposed to have happened. When the Viper crew landed at their home base, Air Force brass was waiting for them on the tarmac. The crew was told in no uncertain terms that they had not seen anything 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 rumors about a new `black' jet at Tonopah, or they may have had an inkling that the Pentagon was building a new class of `stealth' aircraft, but they most surely did not know the nickname of the 4450th Tactical Group's Q-Unit, one of two units responsible for flying the planes: the Goatsuckers (Peebles, 1999; Scott, 2003). $ 760 TPaglen This paper is about state secrecy and the production of space. It is about the strange dialectics of secrecy and geography that take place under conditions of top- secret production. Using the development of the F-117A `stealth fighter' and its aftermath as a case study, I propose that an understanding of state secrecy as the production of space is a valuable addition to the theoretical literature on state secrecy. Existing work on state secrecy explores the various cultural, epistemological, political, bureaucratic, cartographic, and legal questions posed by state secrecy. Weber (1978) famously described secrecy as a bureaucratic means of accruing power, and was followed by former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who described state secrecy as a ``form of regulation'' (1998, page 59). In his seminal article ``Removing knowledge'' (2004), Peter Galison developed the relationship between bureaucracy, secrecy, and knowledge, inferring that in terms of knowledge produced ``the classified universe as it is sometimes called is certainly not smaller, and very probably much larger than this unclassified one,'' and developed a Habermasian argument that state secrecy formed an `ànti-epistemology'' fundamentally at odds with liberal democracy. Anthropologists such as Gusterson have examined the everyday workings of secrecy and the production of classified knowledge (Gusterson, 1998; 2004; Reppy, 1999), while Louis Fisher has done extraordinary work on state secrecy in the legal system (2006). Recent commentators such as Bratich, Dodge, and Perkins have emphasized the role of secrecy in public culture and politics. Following Debord (1998), Deleuze and Guattari (1987), and Taussig (2002), Bratich understands secrecy as a spectacle of concealing 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 to sensitive sites in their studies of Cryptome's `èyeballing'' series and other cartographic practices, pointing out that cartographic efforts to visualize secret sites have a complicated and sometimes contradictory relationship to state power but are nonetheless `ìmportant in 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 of developing a broader theoretical framework to understand state secrecy in terms of the production of space. Understanding state secrecy as the production of space illustrates the connections between the seemingly disparate approaches scholars have taken towards the topic. Fundamental to any understanding of state secrecy, I believe, is the notion of contradiction. 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 those secret relations, programs, sites, and events have to be made out of the same `stuff ' that everything else (ie the nonsecret world) is made of. Because there are no such things as invisible factories, airplanes made out of unearthly ghost-matter, or workers who `don't exist', logics of secrecy are contradicted by their material implementations. State secrecy, thus, consists not only of state efforts to conceal programs, relationships, and events in the first instance, but also attempts to manage ensuing contradictions in political, cultural, and legal spheres. Managing those contradictions inevitably produces more contradictions, which must in turn be managed. By understanding state secrecy as a dynamic characterized by the production of contradictions and their subsequent management, 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, developing the stealth fighter involved much more than developing a secret weapon; it involved the production of peculiar kinds of space. The secrecy associated with the stealth fighter Goatsucker: toward a spatial theory of state secrecy 761 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 not exist' meant producing internally contradictory political, legal, labor, and ecological spaces. A space of stealth. As the Air Force sought to manage the contradictions created when the space of stealth intersected other spaces around it, those spaces, in turn, were transformed. They, too, became `stealthy'. $ If we were to look at a map of the United States showing the restricted military ranges devoted to weapons testing, it would be easy to see that secret weapons are almost without exception tested in the `badlands' or `wastelands' of southwestern deserts. Occupying most of southern Nevada is the Air Force's 3.1 million-acre Nellis Range Complex, a swath of restricted land and airspace the size of Switzerland. Just south of western Utah's great salt flats is the Army's 800 000-acre Dugway Proving Grounds, 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 Air Warfare Weapons Division. And there are many, many more. These desert ranges are united by the fact that, since the European invasion of the Americas, they have been regarded as `wastelands': little more than a bad no-man's-land one had to traverse in order to get to the gold and oil of California (Kuletz, 1998; Paglen, 2007a; Solnit, 1994). When many contemporary weapons ranges were initially established during the Second 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 could bomb it into oblivion and never notice the difference'' (Loomis, 1993, pages 9 ^ 10). $ The F-117A stealth fighter had its roots in a 1974 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) competition called `Project Harvey', named after the invisible rabbit in the James Stewart movie of the same name (Sweetman, 2001). Project Harvey took the form of a challenge: DARPA invited five defense companies (Boeing, Northrop, McDonnell Douglas, General Dynamics, and Grumman) to come up with ideas for an aircraft with dramatically reduced radar cross sections.

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