Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Chapter 1 - Facts on the Ground Chapter 2 - A Guy in the Classified World Chapter 3 - Unexplored Territory Chapter 4 - Wastelands Chapter 5 - Classified Résumés Chapter 6 - Fiat Lux Chapter 7 - The Other Night Sky Chapter 8 - The Observer Effect Chapter 9 - Blank Spots in the Law Chapter 10 - The Precedent Chapter 11 - Money Behind Mirrored Walls Chapter 12 - Nonfunding the Black World Chapter 13 - Plains of Death Chapter 14 - Anything You Need Anywhere Chapter 15 - Bobs Chapter 16 - Screaming Their Heads Off Epilogue NOTES Acknowledgements INDEX DUTTON Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, Engl∧ Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen''s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. First printing, February 2009 Copyright © 2009 by Trevor Paglen All rights reserved Map on pages viii-ix created by Darin Jensen. Photo on page 7: courtesy of the USGS; page 80: courtesy of the Department of Energy; page 152: courtesy of the USAF; page 168: courtesy of National Parks Service; page 186: courtesy of the Library of Congress.

All other photos courtesy of the author. REGISTERED TRADEMARK--MARCA REGISTRADA LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Paglen, Trevor. Blank spots on the map: the dark geography of the Pentagon''s secret world / Trevor Paglen. p. cm. eISBN : 978-1-101-01149-2 1. Military bases--United States. 2.

Intelligence service--United States. 3. Defense information, Classified--United States. 4. Military bases, American. I. Title. UA26.

A2P2716 2009 355.3''4320973--dc22 2008042862 Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author''s rights is appreciated. While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content. Prologue "We need to find an old man," says Maiwand.

We''re standing on a street corner in downtown Kabul. The traffic around us is a tempest of battered 1970s Toyotas occasionally punctuated by a U.N. Land Cruiser or an American Suburban. We''re trying to find a taxi driver who knows the back road to Bagram, a road that has been so dangerous for so long that driving on it would have been unthinkable until recently. We need to find someone who remembers the route from before the Soviet invasion in 1979. An old man. Eventually we find a driver who knows the road and wants $15 to make the trip, a week''s salary for someone lucky enough to have a steady job outside the opium business.

We get into the man''s beat-up Toyota wagon and bounce toward Kabul''s outskirts. At the traffic circle near the military''s heavily fortified Kabul Compound around the corner from the bunker-like American embassy, we see a two-story-high paint-chipped and weathered sign instructing locals to turn in any terrorists they may know. Kabul itself is occupied by a gaggle of American military units, private military contractors, European troops from the International Security Forces, United Nations development outfits, and other assorted nongovernmental organizations, but their trappings fade away as our cab drives northeast past the airport toward the back road to Bagram. Once we''re outside town, houses give way to sprawling junkyards erected Mad Max -style on the Afghan plains. Guard towers protect the compounds'' precious scrap metal and junk. Solitary furnaces from distant brick factories lace the air with black smoke. A few oversized pickup trucks with homemade turquoise-blue paint jobs adorned with intricate gold and red markings ramble past, their backs overladen with burlap sacks bearing food from Afghanistan''s agrarian bread-basket to the north. After ten dusty miles, the walls of a compound rise in the distance, and we come to an old-world traffic jam: an elderly shepherd wearing baggy Afghan garb herding a flock of goats across the battered road.

The man turns around to look at us. He''s wearing a baseball hat. Unusual attire for a traditional Afghan, to say the least. Emblazoned on his cap are the same initials I''d seen printed on identity cards hanging from the necks of Bagram-bound contractors in Dubai. KBR: Kellogg Brown and Root, the construction firm that had until recently been a subsidiary of Halliburton, Dick Cheney''s old company. And there it is in the distance. The top of the crumbling old brick factory once known as the Hecht-hochtief, which found new purpose as one of the first black sites of the war on terror''s geography. A secret prison called the Salt Pit, built shortly after September 11 as the Northern Alliance, the CIA, and American Special Forces fanned though Afghanistan.

Like so many other secret places, it had been built as a "temporary" facility but stayed open long after the initial invasion was complete, eventually holding scores of the CIA''s "ghost" prisoners who''d been "rendered" from all over the world. When the CIA abducted a man named Khaled El-Masri from Macedonia and brought him here, his black-clad interrogators told him that he "was in Afghanistan, where there are no laws . ''We can do with you whatever we want.'' " What was once a single, crumbling building was now an entire complex spanning dozens of acres and surrounded by high brick walls and a barbed wire fence. Outside the walled gates was another wind-blasted and paint-chipped sign in Dari and English: NO PHOTOGRAPHY. I start snapping pictures. Black SUVs pull out from the far side of the compound, a tell-tale sign of some kind of "special" American unit: CIA, Special Forces, or contractor. Realizing that there''s a checkpoint ahead, I pull out the memory card on my camera, stash it under the car seat, then pull out another and shoot off a few more pictures.

If the guards demand to see what pictures I''ve taken, they will see that I have indeed taken forbidden photographs. I plan to play dumb. I''ll pretend not to have seen the billboard-sized sign, admit to taking the photos, and apologetically erase them or forfeit the camera and memory card. The good stuff will be safely under the car seat. The images on the card are far more valuable to me than the easily replaceable camera equipment. But none of that will be necessary. As we pull up toward the ramshackle checkpoint, the rail-thin Afghan guard lazily asks where we''re going. Maiwand tells them we''re going back to Kabul.

"What is this place?" we ask. "Training facility," says the disinterested guard. "Are there Americans here?" "Yes, lots of Americans." We turn around to go back the way we came; two Humvees painted desert-tan pass by. Every year, the United States spends more than $50 billion to fund a secret world of classified military and intelligence activities, a world of secret airplanes and unacknowledged spacecraft, "black" military units and covert prisons, a secret geography that military and intelligence insiders call the "black world." It is a global world. It extends from secret prisons in dusty Afghan hinterlands to ice-encrusted radomes near the North Pole, and from remote eavesdropping stations in the Australian outback to makeshift camps and dirt landing strips in South American jungles. But this black world is more than a collection of places.

It is an economy of secret dollars, a world of security clearances and secrecy oaths, code names and classifications tucked away in archives larger than the nation''s greatest libraries. But you don''t have to scour the earth''s corners to find the blank spots on maps characterizing this secret world. The vast majority of this secret world is not found i.