Diego Garcia is not one of the world’s most visited places. It happens to be a tiny island, little more than a coral atoll, at the bottom of the Chagos archipelago in the southern Indian Ocean. Once a British territory, it has for years been leased to the United States.
Despite its isolation, during the Gulf War it played host to the hastily assembled 4300th Bomb Wing of the USAF, flying B-52 Stratofortresses.
The B-52 was arguably the ol
dest veteran in the war, having been in service for over thirty years. For many of those, it had been the backbone of Strategic Air Command, headquartered at Omaha, Nebraska, the great flying mastodon that circled the periphery of the Soviet empire day and night packing thermonuclear warheads.
Old the B-52 may have been, but it remained a fearsome bomber, and in the Gulf War the updated G
version was used to devastating effect on the dug-in troops of Iraq’s so-called elite Republican Guard in the deserts of southern Kuwait. If the cream of the Iraqi Army came out of their bunkers haggard and with arms raised during the Coalition ground offensive, it was in part because their nerves had been shattered and their morale broken by around-the-clock pounding from B-52s.
There were only eighty of these bombers in the war, but so great is their carrying capacity and so enormous their bomb-load that they dropped 26,000 tons of ordnance, forty percent of the entire tonnage dropped in the war.
They are so big that in repose on the ground, their wings, supporting eight Pratt and Whitney J-57
engines in four pods of two, droop toward the ground. On takeoff with a full load, the wings become airborne first, seeming to lift above the great hull like those of a gull. Only in flight do they stick straight out to the side.
One of the reasons they cast such terror into the Republican Guard in the desert was that they fly out of sight and sound, so high that their bombs arrive without any warning and are the more frightening for it.
But if they are good carpet bombers, pinpoint accuracy is not their strong point, as the flight sergeant had tried to point out.
At dawn of January 22, three Buffs lifted off from Diego Garcia and headed toward Saudi Arabia. Each carried its maximum payload, fifty-one 750-pound dumb bombs prone to fall where they will from thirty-five thousand feet. Twenty-seven bombs were housed internally, the rest on racks under each wing.
The three bombers constituted the usual cell for Buff operations, and their crews had been looking forward to a day fishing, swimming, and snorkeling on the reef of their tropical hideaway. With resignation, they plotted their course for a faraway factory that they had never seen and never would.
The B-52 Stratofortress is not called the Buff because it is painted a tan or dun-brown color. The word is not even a derivation of the first two syllables of its number— Bee-Fif ty Two. It just stands for Big Ugly Fat Fucker.
So the Buffs plodded their way northward, found Tarmiya, picked up the image of the designated factory, and dropped all 153 bombs. Then they went home to the Chagos archipelago.
On the morning of the twenty-third, about the time London and Washington began to yell for more pictures of these mysterious Frisbees, a further BDA mission was assigned, but this time the photo-call was carried out by a recon Phantom flown by the Alabama Air National Guard out of Sheikh Isa base on Bahrain, known locally as Shakey’s Pizza.
In a remarkable break with tradition, the Buffs had actually hit the target. Where the Frisbee factory had been was a vast gaping crater. Washington and London had to be satisfied with the dozen pictures they had from Lieutenant Commander Darren Cleary.
The best analysts in the Black Hole had seen the pictures, shrugged their ignorance, and sent them to their superiors in the two capital cities.
Copies went at once to JARIC, the British photointerpretation center, and in Washington to ENPIC.
Those passing this drab, square brick-built building on a corner in a seedy and run-down precinct of downtown Washington would be unlikely to guess what goes on inside. The only clue to the National Photographic Interpretation Center comes from the complex exhaust flues for the air conditioning inside, which keep at controlled temperatures an awesome battery of the most powerful computers in the United States.
For the rest, the dust- and rain-streaked windows, the un-imposing door, and the trash blowing down the street outside might suggest a not very prosperous warehouse.
But it is here that the images taken by those satellites come; it is the analysts who work here who tell the men at the National Reconnaissance Office and the Pentagon and the CIA exactly what it is that all those expensive “birds” have seen. They are good, those analysts, up-to-the-minute in their grasp of technology, young, bright, and brainy. But they had never seen any disks like those Frisbees at Tarmiya.
So they filed the photos and said so.
Experts at the Pentagon in Washington and at the Ministry of Defence in London, who knew just about every conventional weapon since the crossbow, examined the pictures, shook their heads, and handed them back.
In case they had anything to do with weapons of mass destruction, they were shown to scientists at Sandia, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Livermore in America and at Porton Down, Harwell, and Aldermaston in England. The result was the same.
The best suggestion was that the disks were part of big electrical transformers destined for a new Iraqi power-generating station. That was the explanation that had to be settled for, when the request for more pictures from Riyadh was answered with the news that the Tarmiya factory had literally ceased to exist.
It was a very good explanation, but it failed to elucidate one problem: Why were the Iraqi authorities in the pictures trying so desperately to cover or rescue them?
It was not until the evening of the twenty-fourth that Simon Paxman, speaking from a phone booth, called Dr. Terry Martin at his flat.
“Care for another Indian meal?” he asked.
“Can’t tonight,” said Martin. “I’m packing.”