What Life Was Like Inside the Hexagon Project

As new submitter kulnor writes, "Hexagon, a cold war secret project around spy satellites to monitor USSR was declassified last September." kulnor excerpts from the AP story as carried by Yahoo, outlining how more than 1,000 people in and around Danbury, CT kept mum about the nature of their employment: "'For more than a decade they toiled in the strange, boxy-looking building on the hill above the municipal airport, the building with no windows (except in the cafeteria), the building filled with secrets. They wore protective white jumpsuits, and had to walk through air-shower chambers before entering the sanitized 'cleanroom' where the equipment was stored. They spoke in code.' As more and more WWII and cold war secrets are declassified, we learn about amazing technological feats involving hundreds of people working in secrecy. I wonder what will emerge in a few decades around modern IT, the Internet, hacks, and the like." Every time I visit Oak Ridge, TN, I am amazed by the same phenomenon of successful large-scale secrecy.

The Shocking Truth Revealed

[Ukab the Great]

It was actually the secret government workers, and not the conspiracy theorists, who wore the tin-foil hats.

Keeping a secret

[Anonymous Coward]

So much for the usual anti-conspiracy claim of "more than a few dozen" people not being able to keep a secret. 1000 people can keep a secret for decades as long as they have a sufficient incentive.

Re:Keeping a secret

[alen]

they were building satellites to spy on a country that has 20000 nuclear bombs pointed at your country

not the idiocy that the US government destroyed 2 buildings in NYC and killed a lot of people

Future declassifications

[truthsearch]

I wonder what will emerge in a few decades around modern IT, the Internet, hacks, and the like.

I wouldn't be surprised if little or nothing is declassified in the future. Given the never ending "war on terror" they can come up with excuses to redact just about everything.

Conspiracy Toolkit

[Doc Ruby]

Any time people tell you that some conspiracy for which there is evidence actually exists cannot possibly be true, because too many people would have to know about it for it to remain secret, consider this story about the Hexagon Project. Consider how many Cold War projects like this one maintained secrecy for so long, until it was declassified decades after its mission was completely obsolete, generations after it was actually operating. Consider that a project like this was kept secret even though everyone keeping the secret had a clear conscience, their project never implicated in moral wrongs like torture, false flag invasion, inside job "Let It Happen On Purpose" self-sabotage or worse.

Then consider the conspiracy evidence you're being asked to ignore on the grounds that the Hexagon Project couldn't possibly have been kept secret. And consider it again.

Note that the demonstrated ability to keep complex, valuable secrets completely hidden for a long time does not create evidence of a conspiracy where there is none. It simply debunks the defense that a conspiracy cannot exist because it could not be kept secret. It can be kept secret. So the evidence, when it exists, can be judged on its own merit.

Re:Keeping a secret

[wisnoskij]

Ya, people who say that conspiracies cannot happen and secrets cannot be kept have never studied history.
More then a few things have come to light involving entire government branches and multiple big companies that kept secrets for decades (and of course any that lasted longer then a normal human life are less likely to come to light after that).

Re:Go read up on the process

[truthsearch]

I think what gets declassified now is great. What I'm talking about is the future. Only in the last 10 years have we been in what the government calls a permanent war on terror. In 30 years we could still be in perpetual war, based on the current crop of politicians we elect. So they'll surely redact more of the information from 2000 on if we're still in the exact same "war".

Cost, and profits, still classified

[mwehle]

intense activity of a relatively small company that had just been awarded a massive contract (the amount was not declassified)

What is the rationale for keeping the dollar amount spent classified? How were contracts awarded? What were the profits made? What sort of kickbacks were involved? As fascinating as the technology is, I'm thinking there is a still more fascinating, albeit quite different, story left untold.

Re:Conspiracy Toolkit

[JTsyo]

There was no conspiracy with Hexagon. It was a just a secret government project. No one doubts that there are secret government projects. But the existence of secret projects does not imply the existence of a conspiracy to harm the American people.

Re:You keep a secret because you know it's importa

[TheCarp]

> They know that info getting out could cause soldiers to die and wars to be lost. Speaking for my colleagues, it is not just another job because we know what's at
> stake.

Except that the wars and soldiers all work under the direction of congress. So those wars get started by those dummies, based on lies, and against our real interests. So... really the scary thing is that... you people who are so into the mission that you are willing to keep a secret, are also willing to work for the dummies in congress.

Frankly, It all seems like a huge waste to me, the only one of the lot who had any sense in his head, as far as I can tell, was Bradley Manning.

Re:Keeping a secret

[billcopc]

I'm still a million times more afraid of the American government with their mass media, than the Russian government with their nukes, because there's a lot less ambiguity around a nuke. You either blow shit up, or you don't. There is no profit motive if everyone's dead.

There are secrets and there are secrets

[brokeninside]

FTFA

In 1975, a `60 Minutes' television piece on space reconnaissance described an `Alice in Wonderland' world, where American and Soviet intelligence officials knew of each other's `eyes in the sky' — and other nations did, too — but no one confirmed the programs or spoke about them publicly.

Despite 1,000 workers mostly keeping mum, both the US and the USSR had a general idea of the operational capacity of the other nation. The `secret' was the proverbial `elephant in the room.' Everyone knew it was there, they just didn't talk about it.

That is an entirely different animal than actually keeping a conspiracy secret.

Re:Keeping a secret

[supercrisp]

As far back as the late 80s, the KH satellites were fairly common knowledge. At least I know that we knew about them at the planetarium I worked at. And there were complaints/rumors from some quarters that Hubble was "just" a repurposed KH design, whether that was true or not. I'm sure that, at some level, secrets were kept, but the overall project was known of. The same is true at Oak Ridge. If you live in the area, you eventually meet people who tell you things that aren't such common knowledge, like about the escort vehicles, terrorist threats, conventional weapons manufacturing, etc in the area. None of it is really, really secret, but just not generally known about, or talked about. Of course a lot of what you hear is probably BS. Anyway, BS or not, none of this implies that we need to rewatch all the alien dissection films to see if that was a secret badly-kept. At some level I think credulousness and paranoia should be trumped by common sense.

Re:Not possible today

[JackPepper]

I am overjoyed there is no more sense of shared purpose. Otherwise, I might have been drafted to go to Iraq or Afghanistan or attack the Libyans from afar. This idea that countries must have a purpose or a goal is ridiculous. You'll end up with a state like China, where talking heads decide what the next goal is and then the people blindly follow. And in following that goal, the path is only the vision of the talking heads. When the US was founded, the philosophers who wrote the Constitution didn't talk about how the US was going to be first in education or dominate another country in GDP. The philosophers spoke about a country where each man would be able to follow his passions with in the law. The 13 colonies fought the war of independence for mutual benefit. It's hard to see the benefit in beating other countries in subjective goals.

Oh shit, now I'm rambling, but I hope you get the point.

Re:Keeping a secret

[vlm]

Also there is the mushroom farm aspect, mentioned in several stories. So I'm grinding optics. Why? Well because my boss told me to. Whats the focal length and lens geometry? Sorry, classified, hey btw could I get your name for the FBI... um I mean for HR, in case a job opens up, its uh, just a policy we have to always report, uh, future employment candidates? Where does the lens go that you're making? In a storage box. Oh, OK, cool.

People at /. are good at systems analysis and assume everyone else is, and they can just look at systems and processes and understand how it ALL works and interacts. General public, not so much, and they often have no idea what they're "really" doing at work. I would not be surprised if many of the former employees still haven't figured out they were building this big ole satellite, even after the declassification and news reports.

Re:You mean the building where the Hubble was buil

[decsnake]

HST was not built in Danbury. HST was built by Lockheed in Sunnyvale. The primary mirror was ground (incorrectly) in Danbury by P-E.