Top-secret research wears its art on its sleeve

Published on Tuesday 1 April 2008 22:11

SKULLS. Black cats. A naked woman riding a killer whale. Snakes. Swords. Occult symbols. A wizard with a staff that shoots lightning bolts. Moons. Stars. A dragon holding the Earth in its claws.

Welcome to the world of the Pentagon's $32 billion (16 billion) "Black Budget" – the US military's top-secret research programmes.

A new book is offering a glimpse of this dark sphere through a revealing lens – patches, the kind worn on military uniforms.

"It's a fresh approach to secret government," said Steven Aftergood, a security expert at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. "It shows that these secret programmes have their own culture, vocabulary and even sense of humour."

One patch shows a space alien with huge eyes holding a stealth bomber near its mouth. "To Serve Man" reads the text above, a reference to a classic Twilight Zone episode in which man is the main course, not the customer. "Gustatus Similis Pullus" reads the caption below, cod Latin for "Tastes Like Chicken."

Military officials and experts said that the patches are real if often unofficial efforts at building team spirit.

Trevor Paglen, an artist and photographer finishing his PhD at the University of California, has managed to document some of this hidden world. The 75 patches he has assembled reveal a bizarre mix of high and low culture where Latin and Greek mottos frame demons and sexy warriors, dragons dropping bombs and skunks firing laser beams.

"Oderint Dum Metuant," reads a patch for an air force programme that mines spy satellite images for battlefield intelligence, according to Mr Paglen, who identifies the saying as from Caligula, the first-century Roman emperor famed for his depravity. It translates as: "Let them hate so long as they fear."

Wizards appear on several patches. One hurling lightning bolts comes from a secret air force base at Groom Lake, northwest of Las Vegas. Mr Paglen identifies its five clustered stars and one separate star as a veiled reference to Area 51, where the government tests advanced aircraft and, UFO buffs say, captured alien spacecraft.

The book's title I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me, is the English translation of Latin on a patch designed for Navy Air Test and Evaluation Squadron 4, at Point Mugu, California. Its mission, he says, is to test strike aircraft, conventional weapons and electronic warfare equipment and to develop tactics to use the hi-tech armaments in war.

"The military has patches for almost everything," Mr Paglen writes in the introduction. "Including, curiously, for programmes, units and activities that are officially secret." He said contractors in some cases made patches to build esprit de corps. Other times, he added, units produced them informally, in contrast to official logos.

Mr Paglen said he found them by touring bases, noting what personnel wore, joining alumni associations, interviewing active and former members, talking to base historians and filing requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

What sparked his interest, Mr Paglen recalled, were Vice-President Dick Cheney's remarks when the Pentagon and World Trade Centre were attacked on 9/11. Mr Cheney said the nation would engage its "dark side" to find the attackers.

In his research, Mr Paglen became fascinated by the patches and started collecting them and displaying them at talks. A breakthrough came in 2004, when he visited Peter Merlin, an "aerospace archaeologist" who works in the Mojave Desert not far from a military base. Mr Merlin argued the symbols could be substantive clues about unit numbers and operating locations, as well as the purpose of programmes. "These symbols," Mr Paglen writes, "were a language. If you could begin to learn its grammar, you could get a glimpse into the secret world."

His book explores this idea and seeks to decode the symbols. Many patches show the Greek letter sigma, which Mr Paglen identifies as a technical term for how well an object reflects radar waves, a crucial parameter in developing stealth technology.

Paglen said his favourite patch was the dragon holding the Earth in its claws, its wings made of American flags.

He said it came from the National Reconnaissance Office, which oversees developing spy satellites and was "both belligerent and weirdly self-critical". He added: "It's representing the US as a dragon with the whole world in its clutches."

NOW A HUGE INDUSTRY

THE classified budget of the defence department, concealed from the United States' public in all but outline, has nearly doubled under the Bush administration, to $32 billion. That is more than the combined budgets of the Food and Drug Administration, the National Science Foundation and Nasa.

Those billions have expanded a secret world of advanced science and technology in which military units and federal contractors push back the frontiers of warfare. In the past, such handiwork has produced some of the most advanced jets, weapons and spy satellites, as well as some notorious follies.

US budget documents tell little. This year, for instance, the Pentagon says Programme Element 0603891c is receiving $196 million, but will disclose nothing about what the project does. Private analysts say it apparently aims at developing space weapons.

Mr Paglen plans to keep mining the patches and the field of clandestine military activity. "It's kind of remarkable," he said. "This stuff is a huge industry. And it's remarkable that you can develop these projects on an industrial scale, and we don't know what they are. It's an astounding feat of social engineering."