Vets say they were sickened at secret base near nuclear test site

In the mid-1980s, Air Force technician Mark Ely's job was to inspect secretly obtained Soviet fighter planes.

The work, carried out in hidden hangars known as silent houses, was part of a classified mission in the Nevada desert, 140 miles from Las Vegas, at the Tonopah Proving Ground – sometimes called Area 52. The mission was so secret that Ely said he had to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

“Defending the national interest was more important than my own life,” Ely told CBS News, and it’s not just words.

Ely was in his twenties and in good physical shape when he worked at the secret base. Now 63 years old and living in Naperville, Illinois, he faces the potentially deadly consequences of the radiation he says he was exposed to.

For decades, the U.S. government conducted nuclear bomb tests near Area 52. According to a 1975 federal environmental assessment, these tests dispersed toxic radioactive materials nearby.

“It left me with scarring on my lungs. I had cysts on my liver. … I started getting lipomas, tumors inside my body that I had to remove. The lining of my bladder came loose,” he said.

All these years later, his service record includes numerous missions, but not the mission inside the Tonopah Shooting Range, meaning he can't prove he was ever there.

“There's a slogan that people say: 'Deny, deny until you die.' That’s kind of true here,” Ely told CBS News.

Dave Crete says he also worked as a military police officer at the same site. He now has breathing problems, including chronic bronchitis, and has had to have a tumor removed from his back.

He's spent the past eight years tracking down hundreds of other veterans who worked at Area 52 and said he's seen “all kinds of cancers.”

Although the government's 1975 assessment acknowledged the presence of toxic chemicals in the area, it asserted that halting work was against the national interest and that the “costs…were low and reasonable in relation to the benefits received.

Other government employees who were stationed in the same area, primarily from the Department of Energy, received $25.7 billion in federal aid, according to publicly available Department of Labor statistics. But those benefits don't apply to Air Force veterans like Ely and Crete.

“It makes me incredibly angry and it hurts me too because they’re supposed to support me,” Ely said. “I had theirs and I want them to have mine.”

When contacted for comment, the Ministry of Defense confirmed that Ely and Crete had served, but would not say where.

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