The adventurous, insightful, and often chilling story of a young geographer’s road trip through the underworld of U.S. military and CIA “black ops” sites
Trevor Paglen is a scholar in geography, an artist, and a provocateur. His research into areas that officially “don’t exist” leads him on a globe-trotting adventure into a vast, undemocratic, and uncontrolled black empire—the unmarked spots on a map, where our military conducts its most clandestine operations. Run by an amorphous group of government agencies and private companies, this empire’s annual budget is over $40 billion, yet almost no one knows how it works or what it does.
Paglen spies on the covert site at Groom Lake, Nevada, taking photos from a mountain top thirty miles away. He visits the widow of Walter Kazra, who, while working construction at Groom Lake, was poisoned by the toxic garbage pits there. The U.S. Air Force defense to his estate’s suit? The base does not exist. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case.
Whether it’s from a hotel room in Vegas, secret prisons in Kabul, buried CIA aircraft in Central American jungles, Washington, D.C., suburbs, or a trailer in Shoshone Indian territory, Paglen’s reporting is impassioned, rigorous, relentless—and eye-opening. Blank Spots on the Map is an exposé of a world that, officially, isn’t even there.
Blank Spots on the Map
Prologue
1. Facts on the Ground
Berkeley
2. A Guy in the Classified World
An Air Force Base in California
3. Unexplored Territory
Downtown Las Vegas
4. Wastelands
Basin and Range
5. Classified Résumés
Mojave Desert
6. Fiat Lux
Alamogordo, New Mexico
7. The Other Night Sky
A Few Miles North of the U. S. Frontier
8. The Observer Effect
3,000 km Altitude, 63.4 Degrees Inclination
9. Blank Spots in the Law
Berkeley and Las Vegas Revisited
10. The Precedent
Robins Air Force Base, Near Macon, Georgia
11. Money Behind Mirrored Walls
Farm Credit Drive, Washington, D.C., Suburbs
12. Nonfunding the Black World
United States Capitol, Washington, D.C., 20515
13. Plains of Death
Outside Tegucigalpa, Honduras
14. Anything You Need Anywhere
Aguacate
15. Bobs
Kabul
16. Screaming Their Heads Off
In the Dark, Around the World
Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
