100 Places You Will Never Visit

100 PLACES YOU WILL NEVER VISIT

THE WORLD’S MOST SECRET LOCATIONS

DANIEL SMITH

New York • London

© 2014 by Daniel Smith

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ISBN 978-1-62365-154-1

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Contents

1 Wreck of Soviet Submarine K-129

2 The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

3 HAARP research station

4 Bohemian Grove

5 Skywalker Ranch

6 Google Data Center, The Dalles

7 Hawthorne Army Depot

8 The Skunk Works

9 US-Mexico drug smuggling tunnels

10 Area 51

11 Granite Mountain Records Vault

12 ADX Florence

13 Dulce Base

14 Cheyenne Mountain Complex

15 Waste Isolation Pilot Plant

16 Forensic Anthropology Research Facility

17 Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility, Johnson Space Center

18 Fort Knox Bullion Depository

19 Coca-Cola’s Recipe Vault

20 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

21 Iron Mountain, Boyers

22 Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center

23 Raven Rock Mountain Complex

24 CIA Headquarters

25 DARPA Headquarters

26 The Pentagon

27 The Oval Office

28 Centralia

29 Harvey Point Defense Testing Activity Facility

30 Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Vaults

31 AT&T Long Lines Building

32 The Tomb, Yale University

33 Air Force One

34 The Oak Island Money Pit

35 Guantánamo Bay Detention Center

36 Snake Island

37 Surtsey

38 The Royal Mint

39 Guardian Telephone Exchange

40 Government Communications Headquarters

41 Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, Porton Down

42 RAF Menwith Hill

43 The Queen’s bedroom, Buckingham Palace

44 MI5 Headquarters, Thames House

45 Whitehall tunnels

46 Bank of England vaults

47 PINDAR Bunker

48 Tower of London Jewel House

49 Rosslyn Chapel vaults

50 Wildenstein Art Collection

51 La Basse Cour

52 Bilderberg Group Headquarters

53 The Large Hadron Collider

54 Swiss Fort Knox

55 Bavarian Erdställe

56 The Amber Room

57 The Führerbunker

58 Vatican Secret Archives

59 Radio Liberty Building

60 Svalbard Global Seed Vault

61 Pionen White Mountains

62 Varosha

63 Gaza Strip Smuggling Tunnels

64 Mossad Headquarters

65 Negev Nuclear Research Center

66 Camp 1391

67 Al Kibar

68 The Ararat anomaly

69 Chernobyl Exclusion Zone

70 UVB-76 transmitter

71 FSB Headquarters

72 Moscow Metro-2

73 Mount Yamantau

74 Hobyo

75 Chapel of the Ark of the Covenant

76 Fordo uranium enrichment plant

77 Tora Bora cave complex

78 Diego Garcia

79 Osama bin Laden’s compound, Abbottabad

80 Line of Control

81 Temple Vaults, Sree Padmanabhaswamy

82 North Sentinel Island

83 Naypyidaw

84 Bang Kwang Central Prison

85 Gobi Desert unidentified structures

86 Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center

87 The Tomb of Qin Shi Huang

88 Hainan submarine base

89 The Tomb of Genghis Khan

90 Chinese Information Security Base

91 Room 39

92 Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center

93 Mount Baekdu hideout

94 Korean Demilitarized Zone

95 Camp 22

96 Ise Grand Shrine

97 Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant

98 Woomera Prohibited Area

99 Pine Gap Joint Defence Facility

100 Headquarters of Joint Operational Command

Acknowledgments

There are times when our world seems never to have been more open. The age of cheap air travel has allowed us the opportunity to reach almost any spot on the planet within a matter of hours. Meanwhile, the inexorable rise of social networking has blurred the boundaries between our public faces and private lives like never before. Indeed, Mark Zuckerberg—Facebook’s billionaire founder—has regularly spoken of his dream of accomplishing “a social mission—to make the world more open and connected.” Then there are the countless politicians and corporate spokesmen who constantly reassure us of their transparency and the important role that we all have in our big, open society.

Yet for all that, a great many of us feel like there is an awful lot going on in our world that we are simply not privy to. So much that affects us in our everyday lives seems to be decided behind closed doors. For most of us who live in democracies, the idea of secrecy is a perturbing one. We associate it with oppressive regimes, such as those of Hitler and Stalin that resulted in the deaths of millions in the 20th century.

We think of wars that have been fought on our behalf for reasons never fully explained to us, of business decisions that we knew nothing of until they cost us our jobs, of public figures who tell us to do one thing in public and do quite another themselves when away from the public gaze.

Samuel Johnson, arguably England’s greatest man of letters and responsible for the landmark Dictionary of the English Language published in 1755, had his own thoughts on secrets. A renowned social commentator in his day, he once noted that: “Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off.” But was Dr. Johnson’s conclusion overly simplistic? There has always been a tension that exists between what we need to know, what we would like to know and what others think it is best for us to know—a tug-of-war where it is not always clear in which direction it is best to pull.

In contrast to Johnson, Cardinal Richelieu was notably less concerned with moral navel-gazing. As the French King Louis XIII’s Chief Minister from 1624 to 1642, he was the arch exponent of realpolitik long before the phrase had even been coined. Where Niccolò Machiavelli laid out his principles of statecraft in such notable works as The Prince (his philosophy often broadly summarized as “the end justifies the means”), Richelieu put it into vivid practice, forging for himself a role as the ultimate “power behind the throne.” He laid the groundwork for an absolutist monarchy that met its fullest realization in the rule of Louis XIV and governed under the premise that sometimes what needed to be done could not be executed in the cold light of public scrutiny. For Richelieu there was but one natural conclusion: “Secrecy is the first essential in affairs of the State.”

We may initially balk at the notion, but in many spheres of life we are quite accepting of the need for secrecy. If your football team were about to contest a cup final, for instance, you might be appalled if the manager revealed to the world his line-up and proposed tactics ahead of kick-off. Nor would you reasonably expect the opposition to do anything other than play their cards close to their chest too. In this context, it is all part of the game. At some level, we understand that secrecy is on occasions essential to achieving long-term goals. It is often so in public life too, with many a war ended by “secret peace talks” and countless jobs saved or created by “secret business deals.”

Ultimately, there will always be a conflict between the need for secrecy and our distrust of it. Indeed, very often it is the same people demanding transparency in public life who push hardest for the maintenance of privacy in private life. So no matter how much we struggle to accept the fact, secrets and secrecy are fundamental components of our society. And in practical terms that means that much of the world remains out of bounds to the ordinary man and woman in the street.

But of course, that does not mean we have to like it! So if you have ever been tempted to push at a closed door or sneak a peek around a curtained-off area, or if a “Keep Out” sign fills you with a burning sense of righteous indignation, this might be the book for you.

Contained herein are 100 places that are, to a greater or lesser extent, in the public sphere but physically off-limits. While the reasons for their being closed to us vary from case to case, they collectively exemplify the enduring struggle between what we would like to know about and what others feel it is right or safe for us to know about.

We are denied access to some of them because of the nature of the work undertaken there, whether it be spies practicing the dark arts of espionage or data centers building vast knowledge banks as they track our online activities. A few places are so secret that they are not even officially acknowledged, or their exact locations are unknown. Others are off bounds for security reasons—such as the room containing the English Crown Jewels—or because they are simply too dangerous for us to enter (anyone fancy a day trip to the aptly named Snake Island?). Still others hold historical secrets, such as the legendary Amber Room that seemingly disappeared from the face of the Earth, or the Tomb of Genghis Khan, whose occupier ordered brutal measures to keep its location hidden. One site—the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—may even be described as a dirty big secret, an environmental disaster in the making that the world’s governments scarcely acknowledge.

Whether you are driven by a raging belief in your right to know, or are simply a bit of a nosy parker, within these pages you can embark on a tour of some of the most secret, hard to reach or closely guarded places on the planet (though of course, there may be a few still even more secret places that we simply haven’t heard about yet!). Where else could you catch a glimpse inside the caves of Tora Bora, learn about the CIA headquarters or peek into the vaults of the Bank of England, all without having to get out of your armchair?

We start our tour far below the waves of the Pacific Ocean, looking at a submarine wreck that symbolizes all the intrigue of the Cold War. From there we gradually work our way eastward around the globe, stopping off in locations as disparate as Washington, DC, the Vatican Secret Archives, a mountain lair in North Korea and a satellite station in the Outback of Australia.

Whatever our motives for wishing to uncover a secret, the process of discovery is a delectable one. The American poet, Robert Frost, neatly captured the frisson of excitement that a secret can inspire within us when he wrote: “We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.” So sit back and strap in for the journey of a lifetime to places that you either never knew existed or couldn’t hope to visit even if you wanted to.

Go on, push at the door. It’s open…

1 Wreck of submarine K-129

LOCATION Beneath the Pacific Ocean

NEAREST POPULATION HUB Petropavlovsk, Russia

SECRECY OVERVIEW Location uncertain: a sunken submarine at the heart of a Cold War mystery.

The K-129 was a nuclear-equipped submarine that sailed as part of the Soviet Pacific Fleet. After sinking in unknown circumstances in 1968, it was located by US forces, who subsequently attempted to raise it in a covert “black op.” While some of the wreckage was retrieved, much remains in the sea—exactly what the Americans found, and in what circumstances, remains a mystery to this day.

Launched in 1960, the K-129 was based at the Rybachiy Naval Base in Russia’s far eastern Kamchatka region. On February 24, 1968, the vessel and her 98 crew set out on a scheduled patrol and, after undertaking a deep-sea test dive, the captain reported that all was well. Nothing more was ever heard from the sub.

In March 1968, Soviet naval headquarters implemented a massive search and rescue effort across the North Pacific. They failed to find the submarine, but their efforts attracted the attention of American intelligence. By analyzing data from its underwater Sound Surveillance System, the US pinpointed the resting place of the K-129, almost 5,000 meters (16,500 ft) beneath the waters of the Pacific.

Confronted with the opportunity to get his hands on one of the USSR’s nuclear fleet, President Nixon authorized a top secret salvage attempt known as Project Azorian. A bespoke vessel, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, was built especially for the job. The cover story was that the ship was to be used for mining manganese nodules from the seabed.