If You Think There Are No More Secrets, Think Again

The irradiated portion of the vast Nevada desert, where we began testing nuclear weapons in the 1950s, is larger than the state of Rhode Island. Walking around that highly restricted space recently, I was struck by just how close we have come to ending this world, both in the past and the present. The land is pockmarked by nuclear detonations, more than 1,000 of them. 100 of those were atmospheric explosions, bombs triggered above ground. Over the course of four decades, we made these weapons so powerful they were hotter than the center of the Sun.

On a recent tour of the place known now as the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS), I thought about how secrets, especially military ones, have been their own kind of currency for at least a few thousand years. Our ability to obtain a rival’s plans or conceal our strengths and weaknesses from our enemies has often determined who won and who lost, who lived and who died. As we entered the atomic age at the close of World War II, those secrets became even more precious.

The southern Nevada desert turned out to be the ideal place to hide the development of the most destructive weapons ever imagined from the world. As I detail in my dual timeline mystery, The Bitter Past, the test site quickly became the most clandestine facility in the world. The Soviet Union was racing to catch up, and it employed spies at every opportunity to do so. Some of these people were American scientists while others were trained in Russia and sent to the U.S. to work covertly under assumed identities. The latter scenario plays out in this novel, a “what if” spy story that begins in 1955.

The truth is that despite WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden, and the all-too-often hack into classified information systems, our government has become very adept at guarding its secrets. The CIA didn’t officially acknowledge the existence of Area 51 (part of the NNSS) until almost sixty years after it was constructed. Conspiracists had been speculating about what went on there for decades, including that the government was hiding and reverse-engineering technology from extraterrestrials. What’s fact and what’s fiction? The not knowing is what drives us crazy!

Our DNA is coded with an insatiable curiosity. As if pulled by gravity, we are drawn to the shadowy, tight-lipped, covert world. It’s why James Bond and Jack Ryan will always be popular, why Frederick Forsyth and John le Carré are giants in the espionage genre. In the real world we know about Mata Hari, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Kim Philby, and Aldrich Ames, but how many have operated under the radar? How many have gone undetected?

In The Bitter Past, I introduce Lt. Georgiy Dudko, a young man who comes to the U.S. as radioactive mushroom clouds repeatedly rise into the desert sky. He’s a Soviet agent charged with infiltrating the Nevada Test Site (as it was called for many years). What Dudko did—or didn’t do—becomes the focus of a murder investigation sixty years later, led by Sheriff Porter Beck of nearby Lincoln County, who has spent his own career in the shadowy world of spy vs. spy.

As a reader first and a writer second, I wanted to create a story that captured this scary, unique period of our history, and to blend what really happened with what might have happened. Walking over that bombed-out moonscape, it was difficult to comprehend the enormity of what really occurred there, the physics of the arms race that has led us all, seventy years after it began, to the most dangerous time ever for our species.

No doubt there will be more subterfuge, more classified military projects, this time infused with artificial intelligence. And just like Georgiy Dudko and Porter Beck, young men and women will be pressed into service, patriotic and proud to be part of the community of snoops and secret agents, all convinced that their cause is the right one. All the while, the world inches closer to annihilation. Who knows, maybe one of these spies will save us all!

Enter The Bitter Past Sweepstakes!

About The Bitter Past by Bruce Borgos:

Porter Beck is the sheriff in the high desert of Nevada, north of Las Vegas. Born and raised there, he left to join the Army, where he worked in Intelligence, deep in the shadows in far off places. Now he’s back home, doing the same lawman’s job his father once did, before his father started to develop dementia. All is relatively quiet in this corner of the world, until an old, retired FBI agent is found killed. He was brutally tortured before he was killed and clues at the scene point to a mystery dating back to the early days of the nuclear age. If that wasn’t strange enough, a current FBI agent shows up to help Beck’s investigation.

In a case that unfolds in the past (the 1950s) and the present, it seems that a Russian spy infiltrated the nuclear testing site and now someone is looking for that long-ago, all-but forgotten person, who holds the key to what happened then and to the deadly goings on now.