Ex-spy opens the US codebook

WASHINGTON - Have you heard of Power Geyser, Titrant Ranger, Toychest or Barracuda?

If you had before now, you were remarkably privy to the innermost workings of the United States defence establishment.

Now, however, those secrets threaten to become fodder for late night talk show hosts.

In a remarkable book to be published this week, former intelligence officer and analyst William Arkin lists and defines 3000 codenames for military and national security plans past and present, many of them still classified.

There is Project 19 for the defence of Taiwan against an attack by China, as well as Beady Eye, Barracuda, Soothsayer, Delphin, Pinemartin and Odette - six of 13 names listed by Arkin for British intelligence operations related to the war on terror.

Arkin, a long time campaigner in Washington for greater government disclosure, says the 600-page Codenames is intended as "a sort of DNA map of American national security".

Titrant Ranger apparently refers to a top secret counter-terrorism unit once engaged in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Among other titbits in the book, Sites 51 to 56 are said to be secret US bases in Israel.

Toychest was the plan for the deployment of US nuclear weapons in the Netherlands.

Similar plans existed for Germany (Tool Chest), Italy (Stone Ax) and Belgium (Pine Cone.)

The book may even resolve the mystery of the "secret undisclosed location" of Vice-President Dick Cheney during the months after the September 11 attacks.

Site R, a granite mountain shelter about 80km north of Washington, was built in the 1950s to withstand a Soviet nuclear attack.

A Pentagon spokesman would not comment on classified programmes, saying that to reveal classified information could place the country and its citizens at risk.

- INDEPENDENT