Dan Smith - 100 Places You Will Never Visit

THE WORLDS MOST SECRET LOCATIONS

DANIEL SMITH

New York London

2014 by Daniel Smith

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Contents

Introduction

There are times when our world seems never to have been more open. The age of cheap air travel has allowed us the opportunity to reach almost any spot on the planet within a matter of hours. Meanwhile, the inexorable rise of social networking has blurred the boundaries between our public faces and private lives like never before. Indeed, Mark ZuckerbergFacebooks billionaire founderhas regularly spoken of his dream of accomplishing a social missionto make the world more open and connected. Then there are the countless politicians and corporate spokesmen who constantly reassure us of their transparency and the important role that we all have in our big, open society.

Yet for all that, a great many of us feel like there is an awful lot going on in our world that we are simply not privy to. So much that affects us in our everyday lives seems to be decided behind closed doors. For most of us who live in democracies, the idea of secrecy is a perturbing one. We associate it with oppressive regimes, such as those of Hitler and Stalin that resulted in the deaths of millions in the 20th century.

We think of wars that have been fought on our behalf for reasons never fully explained to us, of business decisions that we knew nothing of until they cost us our jobs, of public figures who tell us to do one thing in public and do quite another themselves when away from the public gaze.

Samuel Johnson, arguably Englands greatest man of letters and responsible for the landmark Dictionary of the English Language published in 1755, had his own thoughts on secrets. A renowned social commentator in his day, he once noted that: Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off. But was Dr. Johnsons conclusion overly simplistic? There has always been a tension that exists between what we need to know, what we would like to know and what others think it is best for us to knowa tug-of-war where it is not always clear in which direction it is best to pull.

In contrast to Johnson, Cardinal Richelieu was notably less concerned with moral navel-gazing. As the French King Louis XIIIs Chief Minister from 1624 to 1642, he was the arch exponent of realpolitik long before the phrase had even been coined. Where Niccol Machiavelli laid out his principles of statecraft in such notable works as The Prince (his philosophy often broadly summarized as the end justifies the means), Richelieu put it into vivid practice, forging for himself a role as the ultimate power behind the throne. He laid the groundwork for an absolutist monarchy that met its fullest realization in the rule of Louis XIV and governed under the premise that sometimes what needed to be done could not be executed in the cold light of public scrutiny. For Richelieu there was but one natural conclusion: Secrecy is the first essential in affairs of the State.

We may initially balk at the notion, but in many spheres of life we are quite accepting of the need for secrecy. If your football team were about to contest a cup final, for instance, you might be appalled if the manager revealed to the world his line-up and proposed tactics ahead of kick-off. Nor would you reasonably expect the opposition to do anything other than play their cards close to their chest too. In this context, it is all part of the game. At some level, we understand that secrecy is on occasions essential to achieving long-term goals. It is often so in public life too, with many a war ended by secret peace talks and countless jobs saved or created by secret business deals.

Ultimately, there will always be a conflict between the need for secrecy and our distrust of it. Indeed, very often it is the same people demanding transparency in public life who push hardest for the maintenance of privacy in private life. So no matter how much we struggle to accept the fact, secrets and secrecy are fundamental components of our society. And in practical terms that means that much of the world remains out of bounds to the ordinary man and woman in the street.

But of course, that does not mean we have to like it! So if you have ever been tempted to push at a closed door or sneak a peek around a curtained-off area, or if a Keep Out sign fills you with a burning sense of righteous indignation, this might be the book for you.

Contained herein are 100 places that are, to a greater or lesser extent, in the public sphere but physically off-limits. While the reasons for their being closed to us vary from case to case, they collectively exemplify the enduring struggle between what we would like to know about and what others feel it is right or safe for us to know about.

We are denied access to some of them because of the nature of the work undertaken there, whether it be spies practicing the dark arts of espionage or data centers building vast knowledge banks as they track our online activities. A few places are so secret that they are not even officially acknowledged, or their exact locations are unknown. Others are off bounds for security reasonssuch as the room containing the English Crown Jewelsor because they are simply too dangerous for us to enter (anyone fancy a day trip to the aptly named Snake Island?). Still others hold historical secrets, such as the legendary Amber Room that seemingly disappeared from the face of the Earth, or the Tomb of Genghis Khan, whose occupier ordered brutal measures to keep its location hidden. One sitethe Great Pacific Garbage Patchmay even be described as a dirty big secret, an environmental disaster in the making that the worlds governments scarcely acknowledge.

Whether you are driven by a raging belief in your right to know, or are simply a bit of a nosy parker, within these pages you can embark on a tour of some of the most secret, hard to reach or closely guarded places on the planet (though of course, there may be a few still even more secret places that we simply havent heard about yet!). Where else could you catch a glimpse inside the caves of Tora Bora, learn about the CIA headquarters or peek into the vaults of the Bank of England, all without having to get out of your armchair?

We start our tour far below the waves of the Pacific Ocean, looking at a submarine wreck that symbolizes all the intrigue of the Cold War. From there we gradually work our way eastward around the globe, stopping off in locations as disparate as Washington, DC, the Vatican Secret Archives, a mountain lair in North Korea and a satellite station in the Outback of Australia.