Flashes in the Dark Volume 2

Flashes in the Dark Volume 2 continues the story of the US nuclear espionage conducted from the territory of Argentina or the Argentine aesospace. Following the secret use of older, modified aircraft intended to detect uranium deposits at earlier times, in 1958-1960, the US Air Force began deploying types like Lockheed WU-2A and Martin NB-57B at the Ezeiza Airport, outside Buenos Aires. These were tasked with capturing radioactive particles resulting from nuclear and thermonuclear explosions in the Soviet Union and France. Later, in 1966, a permanent detachment was installed in the IV Air Brigade of Mendoza to spy on the French explosions in the Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls with Lockheed WU-2C, Martin/General Dynamics RB-57F and various variants of "investigation". weather" and electronic intelligence of the Boeing C-135.

Despite the official recognition of AFOAT-1/AFTAC in 1975, much remains a secret around these two units, a shield to which USAF lawyers have contributed very efficiently, who have refused to approve the declassification of their documents and even to the elaboration of an official history focused even on the first years of operation of the unit, those during which the first deployment of North American spy planes to Argentina took place.

However, the door that the USAF closed with ten padlocks was next to windows that other US federal agencies opened over time. Indeed, over the years the National Archives of the United States (National Archives and Records Administration, NARA) have been receiving and making available to the public documents initially classified as secret coming from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Atomic Energy Commission (USAEC), the Defense Atomic Support Agency (DASA), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Environmental Measurement Laboratory (EML). A good number of these documents alluded to or were linked to the AFOAT-1/AFTAC units, which allowed the author to trace the activities of long-range nuclear detection carried out in Argentina and confirm isolated notes of a symphony that was performed so masterful for fifteen years in our country without anyone being able to hear it.

The air operations carried out from Argentina were classified as ultra-secret (Top Secret and Top Secret Umbra), so its officers took pains not to leave a single trace, indication or record among us. Such was the secret that not even the Argentine Air Force could know in depth what was happening in Ezeiza and Mendoza, the two airports from which secret air operations were projected permanently, both under its jurisdiction.

Given the unprecedented and sensitive nature of the issues addressed in this book, the author abounds in bibliographical and documentary citations, so that other researchers can exploit them in the course of future work.