January 12, 2005
San Diego is a Secret Base

The city of San Diego is synonymous with the military. It is chock-full of defense contractors and military bases, and it’s sky is filled with so many F-18s and Blackhawk helicopters that it feels like an occupied country. In mid-January 2005, we undertook an expedition to view some of the more peculiar sites in this military city.

The trip began when we piled into five cars and drove to the north side of the UCSD campus, where the university blurs seamlessly into the offices of numerous defense industry giants. At the end of a road in a corporate park, we stopped the cars and walked through puddles of mud (it had been raining the day before) and onto a hill overlooking a sea of glass buildings. The site that we were interested in had black, mirror-like windows. There was no way to see in.

We were trying to look at the SAIC (Science Applications International, Inc.) company, described by the Associated Press as the “most influential company most people have never heard of” and by the Asia Times as “the most mysterious and feared of the big defense giants.” Like most large defense contractors these days, SAIC doesn’t offer one product: they are instead a kind of “one-stop-shop” for defense needs. They provide everything from technical support to research to psychological operations. Most recently, SAIC was in charge of the Pentagon-sponsored “Iraq Indigenous Media Network,” set up as a competitor to Al-Jazeera in occupied Iraq. SAIC hired Robet Reilly, former director of the Voice of America propaganda network to do the job. SAIC’s other commitments include a partnership with Bechtel to manage the Yucca Mountain project, and a huge presence at the secret testing ranges in Nevada and Southern California. Much of SAIC’s work is classified. In conspiracy circles, SAIC is the alleged keeper of the U.S.’ antigravity-propulsion program. Like many stories in the conspiracy lore, there is a grain of fact to this story: in 1990, SAIC produced a study called “Electric Propulsion Study” for the USAF’s then Astronautics Laboratory at Edwards AFB, indicating that SAIC had some competency with bizarre technologies.

After peering at the black, reflective glass of the SAIC headquarters with a high-powered spotting scope, we bundled back into the cars and set out to our next destination: the Hughes Mining Barge. We went south on the I-5 and then west on the 75. This turned out to be a terrible idea. Traffic in San Diego gets bad. Real bad. We ended up sitting in gridlock in Coronado for hours, and we only had to go a couple of miles.

Hours later, we broke free of the traffic and found a small parking lot from which the Hughes Mining Barge (HMB-1) was visible. The story behind the barge is remarkable – it was originally built by the CIA in the early 1970s as a part of “Project Jennifer.” Project Jennifer was an operation to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the bottom of the ocean. The CIA’s cover story for the secret project was that a company called Global Marine was going to mine the ocean depths for “manganese nodules.” They built a ship called the “Glomar Explorer” as a flagship, and the Hughes Mining Barge as an auxiliary. The HMB-1 housed a giant “claw” that would grab and raise the sub, and would house the ill-fated sub once it had been raised. Something went wrong and the sub cracked in half as it was being brought up. The CIA only got half the sub. (note: the Speculative Archive has some very interesting footage from this operation in their video “It's Not My Memory of It”)

The Huges Mining Barge was re-commissioned in 1983 as a part of the “Sea Shadow” project – a top-secret effort to create a stealth-ship using technologies developed for Lockheed’s stealth fighter. The Navy chose the HMB-1 as a place to assemble the ship, and to house the ship once it was built. The advantage of the HMS-1 was that it could conceal its contents, and that it was mobile. Nighttime testing on the Sea Shadow began in 1985 near Long Beach, CA. The existence of the Sea-Shadow wasn’t revealed until 1993, and only then because the Navy wanted to test the ship during the day. Since the mid-1990s, the Sea Shadow has sat within the HMB-1 in the San Diego harbor.
Unfortunately for our expedition, the Navy had the doors of the HMB-1 closed, so we could not see into the barge.

From the HMS-1, it was only a short distance to the last stop on our expedition, a CLASSIC BULLSEYE listening station. We parked in Imperial Beach and walked north along the coast until we saw it behind barbed-wire fences. CLASSIC BULLSEYE is a network of shortwave listening posts run by the NSA in conjunction with the Navy Security Group. There are other locations in Wales, Diego Garcia, Scotland, Guam, Japan, Iceland, and Spain. By the time we got to the site it was dark, cold and hard to see. Nevertheless, it is strange to be on a quintessentially Californian beach in San Diego standing right next to a giant global-surveillance apparatus. We talked for a while about the NSA’s ECHELON system, which this listening post is (in part) in the service of.

It was dark, we were cold, and it was time to go home.

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Special thanks to Natalie Jeremijenko and Robert Twomey of UCSD for making this trip such a success!