Thunder Mountain

few months ago, half a dozen coffins sat on the loading dock at the Thunder Mountain Evaluation Center, a technology-testing facility on the Army's sprawling Fort Huachuca military reservation in southern Arizona.

Naturally, visitors wondered what was in the coffins. So did federal officials-not what was in the coffins at Thunder Mountain specifically, so much as what was in the hundreds of coffins that enter the United States every year from abroad. In the post-Sept. 11 world, coffin inspections have become a national security issue. Because many nations require that occupied coffins be sealed before shipment, it's not a simple matter to look inside, and since most are lined with a layer of lead, taking X-rays is pointless. Figuring out how to solve this conundrum fell to Stacy Wright, Thunder Mountain's director.

"I can tell you I know more about coffins now than I ever really wanted to know," says Wright. He does most of his work for the Homeland Security and Defense departments.

Wright characterizes Thunder Mountain as a type of Consumer Reports for government officials in need of inspection devices, such as the particle-detection equipment used in airports when baggage handlers swipe luggage surfaces looking for explosive material, or the large gamma-ray machines used to look inside trucks at ports. "We can save agencies from duplicating the wheel, give them data for making sound decisions and help them screen out those products that don't live up to the claims of vendors," he says.

The role of the Thunder Mountain Evaluation Center and the way it operates says much about how government has changed in recent years. The center evolved in the early 1990s from a joint effort between the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Customs Service. It was created to test nonintrusive inspection technologies for use along the southwest border, primarily to detect illegal drugs being smuggled into the country. Today, Thunder Mountain has expanded testing to include detection of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

Unlike most federal agencies, Thunder Mountain does not receive appropriated funds. It is a fee-for-service organization, funded entirely by the client agencies that hire it for various projects. That status means Wright operates a lean staff. He has one other federal employee, eight contractors and 38 Arizona National Guard members working with him. Most of the Guard members, through years of experience in anti-smuggling operations, are viewed as experts in various inspection technologies and in interpreting the data they produce.

With such a small staff, Wright does without most of the niceties managers take for granted at other agencies-he doesn't have a secretary, for instance, and consequently ends up working six days a week.

What he does have, however, is flexibility. "Sometimes you need to ramp up and hire 10 people, but you only need those people for a couple of weeks," he says. He can do that, and quickly. "It's the old reinventing government thing. We try to stay as cost-effective as possible."

TESTING VENDOR CLAIMS

Douglas Murray, a senior program manager at New Technology Management Inc., based in Reston, Va.-one of the eight contractors Wright relies on for technical and administrative support-says many federal agencies are overwhelmed by the deluge of security products now on the market.

"There's a lot of money being spent on physical security, force protection, anti-terrorism and of course protection at the border," says Murray. Before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, big contractors weren't very interested in developing technology for things such as border inspections and controlling access to buildings, whereas now they see huge potential in such work. "Suddenly you're talking about billions of dollars," Murray says.

One vendor hoping to cash in on the security spending bonanza claimed to have equipment that could locate drugs, explosives and other dangerous contraband through 12 inches of steel. Federal officials asked Wright to evaluate the product.

"It looked like a divining rod with a couple of antennas you could pull out to do all this marvelous stuff," he says. "Everybody was claiming it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. We asked for the science behind it, but nobody could tell us how it worked. Finally this young man said he'd come down and show it to us. So he did, and he did a sweep of my building. I said, 'What did you find?' And he said, 'Nothing.'

The Thunder Mountain facility, which tests equipment against whatever material it is designed to identify, has enough drugs on the premises to register with even the most rudimentary detection devices. "I said, 'Well, that's funny you didn't find anything, because I've got some cocaine right here, and some marijuana over there,' Wright says.

"Well, he thought he might have a bad unit, so I told him I'd put some samples in a room and he could try again," Wright says. "So I put some simulated marijuana-alfalfa actually-and some simulated cocaine in the room, and we left him alone with it. You could hear him looking through drawers for it. Sure enough we came back in and he said he had found it. When I told him the 'cocaine' was actually a mixture of sugar and salt he got very embarrassed and he left. He didn't even bother to take his equipment."

Wright is intimately familiar with the qualities of many illegal drugs, particularly cocaine, heroin, LSD and methamphetamine. That's because he's manufactured them. A few years ago, a federal agency approached Wright and asked whether he could process some cocaine from coca leaf.

"It turns out it's actually not that hard to do," he says. "We had about 50 bags of leaves. You take X amount of leaves and you put it in a pit and you add water and acid in there and you stomp on the leaves and take the water out. That's basically it. You can make a kilo of cocaine in probably six to eight hours, depending on whether you air dry it or use a heat lamp."

Wright had to get a special permit to import the coca leaves into the United States. He ended up shipping them through a pharmaceutical company. The client provided the recipe, along with a demonstration video-"they actually had filmed this being done," he says. With about a dozen people working in a remote area outdoors at Fort Huachuca, they manufactured enough cocaine to develop an appreciation of the process. From the data they collected, researchers were able to develop crop yield estimates for coca production in South America.

SECURING BAT CAVES

Not all the assignments Thunder Mountain accepts are in the high-stakes world of narcotics trafficking and counterterrorism. A few years ago Army environmental officials asked Wright if he could help out with their bat problem. The lesser long-nosed bat, an endangered species that travels to southern Arizona from Mexico every spring to mate and reproduce, spends its summer in two caves at Fort Huachuca, where it eats the nectar and pollen of the Palmer agave plant. But the caves were popular with recreational cavers who threatened the bats' habitat. Because the Army couldn't seal off the caves to spelunkers without harming the bats, it needed to be able to monitor the caves so military police could respond to disturbances.

Because the caves are so remote, running power to them to operate surveillance cameras was not feasible. So Wright and a couple of his contract engineers installed solar-powered surveillance cameras.

"The caves were fairly inaccessible. You couldn't drive up there. Everything had to be lugged up there in backpacks-battery packs, a couple hundred pounds of concrete, it was a lot of heavy stuff. We hired young people for that," Wright says. Data from the cameras is relayed to an office at Fort Huachuca around the clock, which has proved to be a boon for environmentalists, who now have a wealth of information about the bats' activities.

"I'm not an environmentalist, but with technology we were actually able to help them and do the right thing," he says.