I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me

"Yes. Trevor Paglen occupies a strange position between being a geographer and artist who gets gallery shows, and a researcher with a political bent. He became interested in the geography of the West, partly because it is an area that is so underused. It’s where America goes to do stuff that is dangerous or dirty. There’s a group called The Center For Land Use Interpretation which has done a lot of work recording various sites and infrastructural things, from mining to abandoned theme parks out in the desert, and he’s doing something similar. This particular book is part of a long project of his, trying to trace the contours of the secret state. He’s combed through budgets and tried to find out what appropriations are given to secret work. This book is a side-effect of that. It’s a collection of military patches that are worn by mostly air force people. Exactly. Woven patches, like scout patches. It’s a thing these air force guys do, get a patch made for every project they’ve been on. Oddly, these patches are the only public face of some of these secret projects. He has collected hundreds of them and he analyses the iconography. Some of them are utterly obscure. One I’m looking at is just a smiley face on a dark background and it says “Project Dipper – We Make Threats, Not Promises”. Each one is accompanied by a very short piece of text, of what he can find out about the projects. For example, “This patch represents an unknown project undertaken by the 413th flight test squadron. We make threats might refer to making simulated or real electronic threats against aircraft.” There’s a lot of bad pseudo Latin. There’s one called “The Triangulum” which is a strange wedge plonked on a map of the world, going through Europe. There’s one completely black patch that says “If I Tell You I’ll Have To Kill You”. The title of the book is a kind of Englishing of a dog-Latin phrase that one of these patches uses. It’s a black patch with a red border and the dog-Latin at the top. It’s apparently a generic insignia for black projects conducted by the Navy for air tests from Evaluation Squadron 4, based in California. No. None of them are very illuminating. You just realise how much is going on behind the scenes. These could vary from satellite launches, through to missile tests, communications or testing new secret aircraft. When you drive around the desert you are constantly coming up against huge tracts of land, the size of Wales, that are completely off-limits. I spent time in 29 Palms, which is a service town for the largest marine base in southern California. That’s where they go and do a lot of combat training for Iraq. They have whole simulated Iraqi and Afghan towns in the desert. I ended up using this in the novel because they hire role players – real Iraqis to go and play Iraqis, and they end up having their houses raided again and again and again. When I was presenting this in New York, somebody came up to me and said he’d just come back from a tour of duty and was reminiscing about the same training programme on the east coast, in North Carolina, where there was a simulated Iraqi town in a forest. So they had all these people dragging around pretending to be in Iraq in the middle of a damp wood. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The marines are out there too. There’s a missile testing range in New Mexico – hundreds and hundreds of square miles where they shoot the crap out of stuff. There’s Edwards airforce base, there’s Area 51 north of Las Vegas – in a dry lake, a salt flat, an extremely remote area. They test experimental aircraft there. There’s a place called Yucca Mountain where they’re intending to store all the radioactive waste. All these places co-exist with a scrubby network of little towns. There are plenty of empty highways with signs by the side of the road saying that you must on no account stop unless it’s an emergency."