Why have conspiracy theorists missed this connection? Why has the Atomic Energy Commission escaped the scrutiny it deserves? The truth is hidden out in the desert at the Nevada Test Site. To borrow the metaphor of CIA spymaster James Angleton, that is where a “wilderness of mirrors” can be found. Angleton believed the Soviets spun lies from lies and in doing so were able to keep America’s intelligence agents lost in an illusory forest. In this same manner, throughout the Cold War the Atomic Energy Commission created its own wilderness of mirrors out in the Nevada desert, built from illusory half-truths and outright lies. The commission was able to send the public further and further away from the truth, not with “mirrors” but by rubber-stamping documents with Restricted Data, Secret, and Confidential, to keep them out of the public eye. The Area 51 conspiracy theories that were born of the Cold War—the ones peopled by aliens, piloted by UFOs, set in underground cities and on movie sets of the moon—these conspiracies all stand to aid and assist the Atomic Energy Commission in keeping the public away from secret truths.
It is no coincidence that the agency behind some of the most secret and dangerous acts out in the desert—at the Nevada Test and Training Range, the Nevada Test Site, and Area 51—has changed its name four times. First it was called the Manhattan Project, during World War II. Then, in 1947, it changed its name to the Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC. In 1975 the agency was renamed the Energy Research and Development Administration, or ERDA. In 1977 it was renamed again, this time the Department of Energy, “the government department whose mission is to advance technology and promote related innovation in the United States,” which conveniently makes it sound more like Apple Corporation than the federal agency that produced seventy thousand nuclear bombs. Finally, in 2000, the nuclear weapons side of the agency got a new name for the fourth time: the National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA, a department nestled away inside the Department of Energy, or DOE. In August 2010, even the Nevada Test Site changed its name. It is now called the Nevada National Security Site, or NNSS.
Since the National Security Act of 1947 reorganized government after the war, the Department of Defense, the CIA, the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force have all maintained their original names. The cabinet-level Departments of State, Labor, Transportation, Justice, and Education are all called today what they were when they were born. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has changed its name once since its formal beginning in 1908. Originally it was called the Bureau of Investigation, or BOI. By changing the name of the nation’s nuclear weapons agency four times since its creation in 1942, does the federal government hope the nefarious secrets of the Atomic Energy Commission will simply disappear? Certainly, many of its records have.
James Angleton spent his career trying to prove Soviet deception. Angleton argued that totalitarian governments had the capacity to confuse and manipulate the West to such a degree that the downfall of democracy was inevitable unless the Soviet deceivers could be stopped. Angleton’s belief system made him paranoid and extreme. For three years, he imprisoned a Soviet double agent and former KGB officer named Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko in a secret CIA prison in the United States—subjecting Nosenko to varying degrees of torture in an effort to break him and get him to tell the “truth.” (After passing multiple polygraph tests, Nosenko was eventually released and resettled under an assumed identity. His true allegiance remains the subject of debate.) The Nosenko affair brought about Angleton’s personal downfall. He was fired and he left the Agency disgraced. Deception may be a game between governments but the consequences of engaging in it are, for some, very real.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union did not have the monopoly on deception. In 1995, after President Clinton ordered his Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments to look into Cold War secret-keeping at the Atomic Energy Commission, disturbing documentation was found. In a memorandum dated May 1, 1995, the subject line chosen by Clinton’s committee to sum up early AEC secret-keeping protocol read: “Official Classification Policy to Cover Up Embarrassment.” One of the more damaging documents unearthed by Clinton’s staff was a September 1947 memo by the Atomic Energy Commission’s general manager John Derry. In a document Clinton’s staff called the Derry Memo the Atomic Energy Commission ruled: “All documents and correspondence relating to matters of policy and procedures, the given knowledge of which might compromise or cause embarrassment to the Atomic Energy Commission and/or its contractors,” should be classified secret or confidential.