Faces of Berkeley
Watching the ‘Black World’ Of Government Intelligence

Geography graduate student Trevor Paglen probably can’t take you to the target of his research.

It’s not a changing coast or an ancient formation. Instead, he probes the shadowy world of what the government wants left off the map.

From secret CIA prisons to spy satellites, Paglen’s photographs and research document the physical traces left by classified military programs.

An artist as well as a geographer, Paglen often presents those findings at art exhibitions like the one that opened in July at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. His displays include fake passports used by intelligence agents during secret raids against suspected terrorists.

“You have all these images that don’t represent anything, but at the same time do represent something,” he says. “It’s kind of a curious phenomenon.”

At a lecture about his work on campus tonight, Paglen says he plans to show 200 photos of items he’s collected or seen—a trail that extends across the country and the globe.

One of Paglen’s projects entails taking photographs of secret military installations. Sometimes spending weeks hiking in the desert, he uses topographic data to scout points like mountaintops with a clear line of sight to the bases.

“You can’t get anywhere near these places, so I use these very high-powered telescopes that allow me to take pictures of places that are 20, 30, 40 miles away,” he says.

While conducting fieldwork in Afghanistan, Paglen says he became the only person to photograph a CIA facility where prisoners in America’s war on terror are held.

Piecing together information such as how many secret aircraft the U.S. has built since the 1980s sometimes takes some creative maneuvering. For one of his books, Paglen compiled numerous biographies of test pilots, cross-referencing names and dates from resumes he obtained from the Air Force.

His investigations also depend on a network of contacts close to what defense industry insiders call the “black world,” a group that includes sources based in places ranging from Las Vegas to Washington, D.C.

Last summer, Paglen visited bases in Central America to interview “old mercenary guys” from the era of the Iran-Contra scandal. Today, he says some of those bases are again being used to teach combat skills—this time to fighters paid to use them in the Iraq conflict.

But even after all his far-flung research, Paglen seems happy at UC Berkeley.

He says he sometimes gives less serious tours here to point out places where the campus intersects with the black world, noting that McCone Hall is named for former CIA director John McCone.

“For me, it’s like being a kid at a candy store,” he says.

Paglen’s projects profit from collaboration with different departments, including those in art—where he teaches a seminar about experimental landscapes—and rhetoric, where he weighs the philosophical implications of his research.

After his dissertation is published in 2009—he’s signed a book contract for it—Paglen says he’ll seek a job that continues to combine art and scholarship.

“You can train yourself to see things that other people don’t see,” he says. “That’s what art is all about: trying to show people something they haven’t seen before.”

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