3/19/95--When you think Sources of Arctic Anxiety, you naturally think hypothermia, leaky pipelines, Exxon Valdez. Well, residents of the Last Frontier--and maybe the rest of us--have something new to fret about. A six-year-old Pentagon project being conducted 200 miles east of Anchorage, Alaska, is getting a chilly reception from locals, and not without good reason. The U.S. Air Force and Navy's High Frequency Active Auroral Research Project (HAARP) is officially described as an effort to beam radio waves into the Aurora Borealis to turn the "Northern Lights" into a gigantic transmitter capable of bouncing signals to nuclear submarines. That, anyway, was the explanation given when the project began during the last act of the Cold War.
Now, however, locals are worried that the little-publicized experiment has taken on much more ambitious, Strangelovian proportions--including Star Wars weapons applications, surveillance capabilities, and perhaps even weather modification.
According the flamboyant conspiratologist known as "Agent X," HAARP's phased-array transmitters are intended to "heat" the ionosphere, the uppermost portion of the earth's atmosphere, which is composed mainly of charged particles: "HAARP will excite these particles by injecting more than a gigawatt (one billion watts) of electromagnetic radiation into the earth's atmosphere, in the form of high-frequency radio waves," writes Agent X in an article that can be found bouncing around the Internet and in the current issue of The Nose magazine (#26). Per Agent X, the project is set for a $75 million expansion next year, which will pump up the volume to 1.7 gigawatts--creating the most powerful transmitter on the planet.
The Pentagon and Alaska's governor's office deny that HAARP has any super-secret weapons applications. But physicist Bernard Eastlund, who developed the technology at ARCO, has described his original plan as an opportunity to use the transmitter to shoot down missiles and alter the weather. Per Agent X, H-Bomb pater-and-Star Wars zealot Edward Teller caught wind of ARCO's research and from there the military took charge. Under the Pentagon's stewardship, Eastlund tells Agent X, "HAARP is the perfect first step towards a plan like mine. Advances in phased-array transmitter technology and power generation can produce the field strength required. The government will say it isn't so, but if it quacks like a duck and it looks like a duck, there's a good chance it is a duck."
With a transmitter as powerful as HAARP, the military (theoretically at least) would be able to use the ionosphere as a "resonant mirror" to direct an electronic beam back to specific points on the earth. Thus, the energy could be used as a "sort of CAT scan for the planet," with the ability to "see" underground, submits Agent X. More powerful signals might be used to supercharge the electrons in the ionosphere, thereby exploding any missile traveling through that layer of the atmosphere. Even more insidious uses might include a more potent version of weapons used against Iraq during the Gulf War: pulsed electromagnetic radiation bounced off the ionosphere and aimed at power grids, delicate microelectronics, missile guidance systems, and perhaps even human "brain chemistry." Agent X also speculates that an overheated upper atmosphere might affect weather patterns, giving the military the deity-like ability to smite its enemies with floods or droughts.
The Air Force insists that it is only "looking at" the ionosphere, not zapping it like dimestore demigods. Still, as an unnamed Air Force factotum put it to Agent X, "The real beauty of HAARP is that nothing you can see on the outside is sensitive. The secret is the beam-steering agility and pulsing of the tranmissions. . . . When covert operations occur, the science team, the operating funds and the mission will all be black."
Soon as our brain chemistry goes supercritical, we'll let you know. Assuming we know about it, that is.
3/19/95--The latest issue of Wired magazine contains a quick update on the Inslaw software theft conspiracy. The background on the Reagan-era scandal that wouldn't die is covered at length in 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time, but to recap everso briefly: As part of a Reagan administration intelligence operation, Justice Department officials allegedly ripped off a software program called PROMIS, which was developed by a tiny private company, Inslaw, Inc. PROMIS was a database management system that offered powerful applications for law enforcement. According to various government officials and Inslaw President Bill Hamilton, after the Justice Department stole the software, it modified the program into a kind of electronic Trojan horse and sold PROMIS to foreign intelligence agencies and banks. That "neat idea" was supposed to give the CIA secret backdoor access into the top secret files of foreign governments and financial institutions. Though a couple of federal judges subsequently found evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Justice, in March 1993 a retired federal judge tapped by the Bush administration to reassess the evidence found no signs of wrongdoing.
OK, that almost brings us up to date. As Wired reports, last October House Resolution 4862 looked likely to pass. That bill would have overturned the March 1993 finding and bound the Federal Claims court to re-investigate the Inslaw case. Though Bill Clinton backed HR 4862, a week before the vote Attorney General Janet Reno "deluged both Congress and the press with a report. . . in which she stated that there was no scandal, and no need for an independent counsel or further investigation," according to Wired. Wouldn't you know it? The House resolution subsequently was squashed by a partisan committee vote, and Democrats who supported the bill were left fuming at Reno.
Any chance of the Republican-led congress reopening the matter? Well, that fact that Reno, a Clinton official, doused the matter would seem to bode well for a resuscitation of the Inslaw case. However, the fact that the key suspects in the scandal are veteran Reagan-Bush officials will probably ensure that Inslaw-gate remains a political hot potato for now.
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