Complex 13

PROLOGUE: THE PRISON OF NO RETURN

There are several Great Military Myths out there.

One of the most well-known is the Area 51 myth: that the US Air Force holds a crashed alien spacecraft—and the aliens that arrived in it—inside a hangar complex in the Nevada desert.

Another is that Adolf Hitler did not commit suicide in his fortified bunker in Berlin before the Soviet armies stormed it. Rather, the Soviets caught him and took him back to Moscow where he ended his days in an isolation cell, going mad.

A third is that the Israeli Mossad, the most ruthless secret service organisation in the world, knew of the September 11 attacks in advance and did not tell its ally America, thinking that such a shocking Islamist attack would only enhance US support for Israel.

Interesting conspiracy theories, yes.

But one myth has long prevailed over them all.

A legend which many in the United States intelligence community swear is true—especially those CIA operatives who eavesdropped on the former Soviet Union in the early years of the Cold War.

It was they who heard the radio intercepts of whispered, frightened Russian voices speaking of a place named “КОМПЛЕКС ТРИНАДЦАТЬ.”

Complex 13.

It was the USSR’s Area 51, a high-security facility nineteen miles outside Tunguska—the site of a famous meteor impact in 1908—where the Soviets supposedly held their own array of extra-terrestrial creatures.

The myths about Complex 13 are terrifying: that no prisoner who entered the complex ever left; that the Soviets fed human prisoners to the aliens there; and that the Soviets did foul experiments on the aliens themselves.

Members of the Soviet prison system—political prisoners, anti-socials and military deserters—knew Complex 13 by another name.

The prison of no return.

But then an odd thing happened.

According to the CIA, Complex 13 was decommissioned in December 1959, its furnaces extinguished, its iron doors shut, its place on maps obliterated. It is not mentioned in any Soviet transmission—radio or otherwise—after that date.

It has not been found since.

In 1959, Complex 13 vanished from history.