Bihać // ‘Top Secret’ If We Critically Redefine the Term

Hidden beneath, a secret military air base. I say ‘hidden’, those runways are pretty big // © photosounds // Shutterstock.com

“How long do you think it would take for a fighter jet to get here from Belgrade?”

I’m useless at this sort of thing, to the point where even offering an answer was beyond my capabilities. I don’t even know how long it would take to drive from Belgrade to Željava. Lord, I don’t know how long it takes to drive from Željava to Bihać, and we’d made that journey not an hour earlier. I offered up a cheerful look of confusion and awaited the answer.

“Seven minutes”.

What.

I was aghast, unable to offer up anything more inspiring than the tired old comment about how I’d written songs longer than that, a quip that hadn’t been clever the first time I’d used it in Pivka all those years ago when confronted with the fate of a Soviet tank driver. Seven minutes is not many minutes.

Cold War curiosity is a weird thing. My basic assumption is that the whole thing is rooted in basic nostalgia, that people are always going to be fascinated by things that existed before their particular time, but isn’t there something about fetishizing the Cold War that sits a little different? After all, it was a forty-year period where the world was perpetually on the edge of total destruction, all because some people wanted to make money by any means and other people wanted to force farmers to toe the line? Okay, that simplifies the whole ideological side of things, but the Cold War kept billions of people in a constant state of fear because of those ideologies, and aliens would be appalled to hear about it. With that in mind, why the curiosity?

It is easy to write those words after the fact because my jaw was on the floor for the majority of our time at Željava. How could it not be? This was a top-secret underground airport built into the side of a mountain, after all. The largest underground military airbase in Yugoslavia, one of the biggest in Europe, another top-secret Yugoslav creation that was outrageously expensive and has since been abandoned. There’s a lot to be curious about, after all.

Somebody called Jonathan Aris // © John Bills

My curiosity had piqued before we’d properly arrived. An abandoned Douglas C-47 sits idly nearby, stirring up excitement in the loins of this Air Crash Investigation obsessive, although the presence of two Croatian policemen somewhat dulled that enthusiasm. The men in uniform weren’t overly bothered by our presence though, and we had a short chat and cigarette before they waved us through. They clearly knew my tour guide, and they even more clearly had no interest in me, which is just how I like it.

There wasn’t anything to see, but that was pretty much the point. We wandered past abandoned buildings that once housed impressionable young soldiers before moving to the equally abandoned underground complex. We didn’t go too deep into the subterranean network of intrigue, what with our lack of light and all that, but the power of Željava comes not from what you can see but more from what you are forced to imagine. Željava Air Base is in that same box as Tito’s secret bunker near Konjic, although this was far more vulnerable, far less secret and, you know, actually used.

The contradictions come early. Referring to it as Željava Air Base is incorrect, for one, as the place was never known by that name during its years of operation. It was known as Bihać Air Base, while Objekat 505 was its fancy name for those in the know. You know, the fans who saw it supporting Vex Red at Manchester Academy in front of 50 or so people. The name Željava comes from a village within the perimeters of the base, one of many that were impacted by the decision of the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) in 1958 to draw up new defence plans. In keeping with new trends, those plans were obsessed with the nuclear war that was obviously on its way. As such, the only option was to build underground. You can’t survive on the surface after total annihilation, after all.

Purpose isn’t eternal // © John Bills

Unsurprisingly, the governments of the world weren’t overly keen to share their defence plans with Yugoslavia, but Tito and his buddies found friends in Sweden, Yugoslavia was allowed to examine similar plans that the Swedes had been working on and, suitably impressed, drew up their own blueprints for something along the same lines in Yugoslavia. Bihać was chosen for this new base, largely because of its strategic location and the abundance of space. Plješevica mountain was going to house this new, state-of-the-art subterranean hush-hush military airbase. Nobody asked Plješevica.

And thus, construction began. All the underground work was completed by 1964, installation as good as done a year later, and the whole thing was completed and operational by 1968. That is a fairly malleable version of the term, of course, as changes were constantly required, but Objekat 505 was up and running just in time for the major crisis inspired by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. Yugoslavia was all sorts of anxious about this happening to themselves, and the decision was made to strengthen Objekat 505 in the wake of the invasion, although the Soviets were curiously invited to come and have a look at the airbase a little earlier in the year. Tito himself visited for the first time in May of 1969, although his visit was marred by the crash-landing and subsequent death of a Lieutenant by the name of Sluganović. In standard socialist style, Tito was made aware of the accident, and Big Joe offered to immediately transport Sluganović to Belgrade for the best medical care in the country. Tito was told that Sluganović was conscious in a nearby hospital.

Sluganović died an hour later.

Tito visited again a year later, joined by the Sudanese President Jaafar Muhammad an-Nimeiry. And that, once again, shines a bright light on the contradictions of Objekat 505. Despite being a top-secret military facility, it was never even remotely top-secret, because Yugoslavia had commercial ambitions for the place. The plans were on-sale to other countries in the Non-Aligned Movement, and the base was visited by delegations from Algeria, Iraq, Kuwait and others, as well as visitors from NATO, not to mention civilian journalists. Sure, everyone who went to serve there underwent a rigorous shake-down, but the pilots and soldiers forced to spend chunks of time there weren’t exactly in a position to buy the blueprints from the Yugoslav government.

Watch out // © John Bills

And thus, Objekat 505 continued to serve its fuzzy purpose until it was destroyed in May 1992. The wars of Yugoslav secession were underway by that point, and the JNA abandoned the facility in May 1992, a 07:47 am detonation of 56 tonnes of explosives doing the job. That explosion shook the city of Bihać, and a plume of black smoke was visible for months afterwards.

Today, people visit Željava to drown in the neurotic genius of Cold War-era planning and engineering. They come to gaze at the five runways, the near 3.5km of tunnels housing bunkers, generators, quarters and nostalgia. Owls too, if you’re lucky. The surrounding area remains heavily mined, making it a treacherous visit for the uninitiated, although it has also become a by-station for refugees trying to pass into the European Union.

The police who had waved us in were nowhere to be seen as we headed back towards Bihać, a drive that took longer than the seven minutes that had so astonished me some 1,200 words ago.