Michmutters

Lake Mead, a federal park as well as the country’s largest reservoir, has unveiled yet more secrets as human remains were discovered at Swim Beach on Saturday, officials said.

The find was reported in the late morning at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, the National Park Service said in a statement. Park rangers cordoned off the area while Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department divers helped with recovery, it said.

It was the fourth time since May possibly decades-old remains have been reported at the lake located in Arizona and Nevada 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas. The discoveries include the following:

• May 1: Remains were found in a barrel. A victim had suffered a gunshot wound and his or her demise might be dated to the 1970s or early ’80s based on clothing, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said.
• May 7: Remains were found in another barrel discovered along a shoreline, officials said.
• July 25: Remains were reported at Swim Beach.

The Clark County Medical Examiner is responsible for determining identities, where possible, and cause of death.

A July 6 discovery of remains near the reservoir’s Bolder Islands turned out to be the body of a woman who had gone missing after she fell off a jet ski June 30, authorities said.

Authorities and experts say the four discoveries of possibly much older remains could be the result of the lake’s receding waterline, which has dropped its telltale white “bathtub ring,” made of drying minerals, more than 170 feet since 1983. The reservoir is at about one-quarter of its capacity.

In May, the Southern Nevada Water Authority announced that one of its water supply intakes was exposed to the lake’s descending surface and could no longer be used to draw liquid. The authority said it had long planned for the event, and had a deeper intake ready to take over.

Nearly continuous drought in major regions of the West and Southwest has plagued the Colorado River since at least the dawn of the millennium. Other symptoms have included the mighty Colorado’s longtime failure to reach the Gulf of California until last year, when a binational agreement put water back in Mexico’s delta.

The growing Southwest’s dependence on the Colorado River — which feeds taps and helps grow food for an estimated 33 million people — has also played a role in the lake’s shrinking presence. Last year the federal government announced mandatory water cuts for the seven states that use the Colorado.

In June, Lake Mead’s surface elevation was measured at 1,044.03 feet, its lowest since the lake was filled in the 1930s. In July, that number was bested by a new low: 1040.92 feet.

Some observers have speculated that the lake could reveal some long-held secrets buried by mobsters who killed for power and money in Las Vegas in the decades following World War II.

Historian and Mob Museum Vice President Geoff Schumacher told NBC News affiliate KNSV of Las Vegas that it was unlikely the mob would dump bodies so close to town because it was averse the kind of publicity and law enforcement attention that might have created.

“The mob doesn’t want murder victims to be found in the city because it creates bad publicity in a tourist town,” he told the station in July.

However, Schumacher said in May a body in barrel is a different story.

“A barrel has a signature of a mob hit,” he said. “Stuffing a body in a barrel. Sometimes they would dump it in the water.”

Lake Mead was created by Hoover Dam, completed in 1935 and officially opened the next year. It held up the Colorado River’s flow through Black Canyon and pushed water into four basins that can help it hold two years’ worth of the river’s flow.

Dennis Romero

Dennis Romero is a breaking news reporter for NBC News Digital.

Associated Press contributed.

• The US killed Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in a precision airstrike this month.
• The circumstances of the strike suggest the US used the R9X variant of its Hellfire missile.
• The R9X is basically a missile packed with swords, and the US is very secretive about its use.

The US killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of Al Qaeda and a deputy of the late Osama bin Laden, in a precision airstrike earlier this month.

One of the most wanted terrorists in the world, al-Zawahiri was killed as he stood on a balcony of a house in Kabul. The early morning strike was conducted by a drone that fired two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles.

Unlike past drone strikes in Afghanistan, including one in the final days of the US withdrawal last year, this strike is believed to have only killed its intended target and caused little collateral damage — suggesting that the CIA-led attack made use of one of the most secretive weapons in the US arsenal.

The AGM-114 R9X Hellfire missile

Developed in an attempt to reduce collateral damage and civilian casualties, the R9X Hellfire missile is probably one of the most, if not the most, precise munitions of its kind in the world.

While other versions of the Hellfire take out targets in the expected ways — through explosive force or with shrapnel — the R9X crushes or slices a target to death. It is essentially a flying bundle of swords that can kill the occupant of a car without harming people around the vehicle.

The missile itself is about 6 feet long and 100 pounds with six 18-inch blades that pop out of its midsection seconds before impact. Propelled by the missile, they can slice through most anything in their path and have a reported kill radius of 3 feet.

Precision drone strikes are nothing new in the US-led war on terror. Since 2001, US leaders have turned to unmanned aerial systems to monitor, track, and take out terrorists all over the world.

The heavy reliance on drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere led to increased civilian casualties. That, along with terrorists’ attempts to surround themselves with civilians to avoid US airstrikes, prompted development of the R9X during the Obama administration, according to US officials who revealed the ammunition’s existence to The Wall Street Journal in 2019.

The US military has used the AGM-114 Hellfire for decades. Several variants tailored to different operational circumstances have been developed and become some of the most frequently used precision-guided munitions. In 2015 alone, units assigned to US Special Operations Command fired more than 1,000 Hellfire missiles of all variants, primarily against ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria.

The R9X variant is reserved for the most important and hardest-to-reach targets and doesn’t appear to be used often.

Some prominent cases of his employment include a 2019 strike in Yemen against Jamal al-Badawi, an Al Qaeda terrorist behind the USS Cole bombing in 2000; a 2017 strike in Syria against Ahmad Hasan Abu Khayr al-Masri, deputy leader of Al Qaeda; and a 2020 strike in Syria against Sayyaf al-Tunsi, a senior Al Qaeda member.

R9X Hellfire for special operators

The strike on al-Zawahiri was carried out by the CIA, but the US intelligence community isn’t the only one using the R9X.

US Special Operations Command is “the first purchaser” of the missile, the Pentagon says. SOCOM and the secretive unit within it, Joint Special Operations Command, have used the missile several times in the past to take out high-value targets across the Middle East.

The US special-operations community as a whole heavily invested in aerial drones after seeing early in the war on terror that they offer immense utility and flexibility to commanders. Today, all special-operations units use drones of all sizes.

The strike on al-Zawahiri was reportedly conducted with an MQ-9 Reaper, a newer, heavier version of the MQ-1 Predator. Another Predator variant, the MQ-1C Gray Eagle, remains in use with the “Night Stalkers” of the US Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.