ARTICLE FROM LONDON INDEPENDENT 27 AUG 95, THE SUNDAY REVIEW, PP 10-13. BY JIM SCHNABEL

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: STARGATE
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP96-00791R000200090001-7
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
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• Document Page Count: 9
• Document Creation Date: November 4, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 27, 1998
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: August 27, 1995
• Content Type: OPEN

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CLASSIFICATION/CONTROLS: UNCLASSIFIED
SOURCE: NEWSWIRES
SEQUENCE: NWS-95-01267263
PUBLICATION: FBIS WIRE
PUBLICATION DATE: 27-Aug-95
London "INDEPENDENT," 27 Aug 95, The Sunday Review pp 10-13
Article by Jim Schnabel: "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Psi"
In a desert country, a dictator is on the run. He moves from
house to house, Bedouin tent to underground bunker, never staying in
one place for more than a few hours. Angry at his regional bullying,
his sponsorship of terrorism, his production of chemical weapons,
America is armed to punish his country with bombers and cruise
missiles the dictator assumes, correctly, that he himself is on the
target list.
To find him, imagery satellites shift from their regular orbits tc
scrutinize his known hideouts. Signals, intelligence satellites and
listening posts prick up their electronic ears for radio or telephone
communications that might give his position away. Human agents
inside the dictator's government search for their own scraps and
clues.
And in a set of secluded buildings on a military base near
Washington DC, a very different sort of intelligence gathering is
taking place. There, a unit of officers and enlisted men are
searching for the dictator by way of Extra Sensory Perception -- or
as they call it, "remote-viewing". Some-are lying in trance states
in darkened rooms, and trying to visualise the dictator's
whereabouts. Others are sitting at brightly-lit tables, sketching
and verbalising whatever moves their pens or enters their minds.
Round the clock they track the dictator; eventually they are asked
to see into the future, to determine his movements in advance. Their
findings are collected and analysed and considered, alongside those
from more conventional sources. And, at the appointed hour the
attack is launched.
IT SOUNDS like a futurist's fantasy, but if a number of retired
servicemen and intelligence officials are to be believed, it's
recent history. They say that the US intelligence community has
been making serious use of psychic phenomena for the past two
decades: that the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), the CIA, the
NSA (National Security Agency), the FBI, the Secret Service, the
Navy, the Army, and the Air Force have all been involved, and that
"remote-viewers" have been employed on their behalf in hundreds of
military and intelligence operations -- including the 1986 bombing
raid on Libya, in which American bombs did indeed fall on President
al-Qadhdhafi's desert encampment, though narrowly missing the
dictator himself.
It all started, as so many things did, with the tit-for-tat
technological competition of the Cold War. Back in the Sixties, the
Soviet Union began to pour money and resources into the study of ESP
and psychokinesis, phenomena collectively termed "psi" by
researchers in the field. Much of this psi research came under the
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control of the Soviet military and KGB, and by the early Seventies,
US intelligence analysts -- formerly concerned about a possible
"missile gap" -- were beginning to grow anxious about a "psi gap".
An unclassified 1972 DIA report expressed concerns that "Soviet
efforts in the field of psi research sooner or later, might enable
them to do some of the following: (a) Know the contents of top
secret US documents, the movements of our troops and ships and the
location and nature of our military installations (b) Mould the
thoughts of key US military and civilian leaders at a distance (c)
Cause the instant death of any US official at a distance (d)
Disable, at a distance, US military equipment of all types,
including spacecraft."
This DIA analysis now sounds absurdly alarmist, almost a
caricature of Evil Empire doomsaying; at the time, though, it
genuinely did seem from both intelligence reports and the testimony
of emigres that the Soviets were trying to accomplish such goals. In
telepathy experiments, they decapitated baby rabbits. and
electrocuted kittens to see if the trauma registered simultaneously
in the brain wave patterns of their mothers in distant rooms. They
screened Red Army recruits for psychic abilities, and pumped
talented subjects full of dangerous drugs to promote psi-conducive
altered states. Subjects in psychokinesis or "remote-influencing"
experiments tried to stop the hearts of small animals, or
concentrated on foreign political leaders, beaming at them "negative
psi particles." Soviet and Czech scientists were said to be working
on electromagnetic devices that would cause strokes or heart
attacks, and it was even rumoured that they had perfected a
"psychotronic generator", which could scramble people's minds at
great distances..
All this was enough to spur the intelligence community into
action and, as well as increasing their scrutiny of Soviet and East
European work in this field, the CIA and the Pentagon began overtly
and covertly to fund psi research in the US. The best-known
beneficiary of this finding was Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a
respected, University-affiliated think-tank in Menlo Park,
California. The head of the SRI psi research programme was a young
laser engineer named Hal Puthoff.
"It seems like so long ago," Puthoff told me over a margarita
last year. He is now better known as a theoretical physicist, with
his own research institute in Texas. "It started as a lark" he says.
Curious about the possible relationship between psi and quantum
mechanics, he began doing experiments with a noted psychic, a New
York artist by the name of Ingo Swann. After circulating reports on
these experiments, Puthoff was visited at SRI by various
intelligence officials who expressed interest in funding further
research. He received an initial grant of $50,000 in late 1972; his
government funders, he says, "wanted to know if there was anything
to this stuff." Although he won't say so, the funds came from the
Puthoff's research with Swann soon
focused on a set of techniques by means of which Swann tried to pick
up visual and other impressions from distant sites. Anxious to
avoid the seance-room connotations of "clairvoyance" and other
psychic terminology, Puthoff began to refer to the new techniques by
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the more modern-sounding term "remote-viewing". At first Ingo Swann
claimed that, given only the targets' precise geographical co-
ordinates, he could do just that. In time, other remote-viewers
would set to work even without co-ordinates. "We would just sit the
viewer down and say 'Target'," remembers Puthoff. "We got some of
our best results that way."
The claims of the remote-viewers initially met with scepticism
from their CIA sponsors, but as stories spread of astounding
successes, support gew throughout the intelligence community. The
first such successes took place in early June 1973, when a retired
local politician and SRI remote-viewer named Pat Price appeared
psychically to "visit" a sensitive National Security Agency facility
on the East Coast and sparked an investigation by enraged NSA
officials. Price's verbal and graphic descriptions of the site were
particularly detailed, and included an overhead view, the layout of
underground offices, and even Top Secret code-word labels on file
folders. "He nailed it,." remembers a former senior.. CIA official
familiar with the episode. "From that moment on, there was no
trouble getting anyone to take it [SRI's remote-viewing programme]
seriously."
By the late 1970s, a stable of remote-viewers had been set up at
SRI, doing both experimental and operational work for government
clients. Government interest was so extensive that the various
agencies involved pooled their resources into one programme, managed
by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The programme was codenamed
"Grill Flame".
During 1978, also under. Grill Flame, the Army's Intelligence and
Security Command (INSCOM) set up its own unit of military remote-
viewers at Fort Meade, Maryland Major General Edmund Thompson,
then the Army's Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence had
encouraged the unit's establishment. "I became convinced that
remote-viewing was a real phenomenon, that it wasn't a hoax," he
remembers. "We didn't know how to explain it but we weren't so much
interested in explaining it as in determining whether there was any
practical use to it.,,
There was, though the techniques were refined as time went by.
Members of the dozen-strong Fort Meade unit, for instance, used
relatively deep altered-state methods of remote-viewing,
collectively known as "extended remote-viewing" or ERV. In an ERV
session, the viewer would lie on a couch in a darkened room, descend
into a self-hypnotic trance, and vocally describe the images and
other impressions that came into his or her mind. By the early
Eighties, Ingo Swann at SRI had developed what he claimed was a
superior co-ordinate-based remote-viewing technique, or CRV. An
ordinary, intelligent person trained in the technique could, he
said, be a more effective practitioner than the best natural
psychic. With CRV, the viewer went through a highly-structured set
of verbalisation and sketching procedures. Although usually in an
almost-normal state of consciousness, the CRVer would occasionally
report a brief but unnervingly vivid "bilocation", a sensation that
he or she was actually present at the target site. Swann taught the
technique to five new recruits to the Fort Meade unit.
"We often used CRV for target acquisition, and ERV for in-depth
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work on the target," remembers a long-time member of the unit who
prefers not to give his name. "With CRV, we'd give the viewer a set
of numbers or coordinates and he'd sketch some mountains, for
example, and some factories, and three white buildings. The next
day, we'd go back and use ERV to walk around inside the three white
buildings." But how good was the information gathered that way?
"It was very good," insists the source,, recalling one operation
where the unit was asked to psychically investigate a foreign agent
on the CIA's payroll. Clues generated by the remote-viewers he
says, pointed to specific financial misconduct by the agent. During
a subsequent lie-detector test conducted by his CIA handlers, the
agent was confronted with the information. "He nearly fell out of
his chair," says the source. And, according to Mel Riley, a former
Fort Meade remote-viewer, his unit was asked to remote-view a KGB
colonel who had been caught spying and was under interrogation by
South African counter-intelligence officers. "He was a hard nut to
crack," says.Riley. "They couldn't figure out how he was getting his
information out of the country. But I 'saw' him playing with a
pocket calculator-type thing; it seemed to be important. Later on,
someone else came up with the fact that he had a family in Russia,
and it was supposed to be his last assignment, and he was looking
forward to going home." As Riley tells it, the remote-viewers were
right; the "pocket calculator" turned out to be a covert
communications device, and the emotional reading of the KGB man was
accurate, too. When the South Africans presented the data to their
captive, says Riley, "he broke down and co-operated".
Even bigger fish. were fried. According to several former remote-
viewers, as well as officials familiar with the programme, America's
psychic spies were used to gather information on:, key facilities in
Tehran during the 1979-81 hostage crisis, terrorists and Western
hostages in the Middle East; the location of Manuel Noriega during
the US raid on Panama in 1989; and, of course, the location of
Mu'ammar al-Qadhdhafi prior to the 1986 bombing raid on Libya. Other
targets over the years included nuclear, chemical, and biological
weapons facilities in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; Silkworm
missiles along the Persian Gulf during the Iran- Iraq war; drug-
smuggling ships approaching US coasts; and the locations of Scud
missiles during Desert Storm.
Remote-viewers weren't always
successful, and their findings were often used only to help direct
more mundane intelligence-gathering systems. But they enjoyed
powerful support in Washington, and their budgets continued year
after year. "It was so small, and so closely-held," remembers
General Thompson, "that it wasn't a big controversy." A number of
congressmen who were prepared to believe in remote-viewing were
"read on" to the programme, and became staunch supporters. These
included Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell and North Carolina
Representative Charlie Rose, who told an interviewer in 1979 that
"if the Russians have remote-viewing, and we don't, we're in
trouble."
"I've briefed senators in their offices," says a retired Army
officer who was a member of the unit during the Eighties. "And I
know that Bush [as Vice President and a member of Reagan's National
Security Council] read some of our reports... He might have said,
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'they're doing what [preceding word in italics]! That's the
craziest thing I've ever heard!' The fact that he didn't say that
tells you something."
MEL RILEY was working as an apprentice machine repairmane in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when, in 1969, he was called up by y.
He joined the intelligence corps, and eventually wound up at Fort
Meade as an imagery interpreter, a specialist in the analysis of
overhead reconnaissance photographs. In 1977, he heard about plans
for a remote-viewing unit, and got himself selected as one of its
founder members. From an early age, he had considered himself open
to such things, for he had had his own premonitions and quiet
visions.
Seventeen years and thousands of remote-viewing sessions later,
Riley is retired from the Army. He lives in rural Wisconsin, amid
woods and lakes and quiet farm communities. He canoes, fishes, and
goes hunting for deer in the winter. He helps run a local museum,
and shares ,a comfortable house.on_the banks of a river with his
wife. He is also an expert on local Indian lore, and although he
has not a drop of Native American blood in him, he belongs to a
"medicine society" - a kind of club for properly initiated Native
American seers and healers, medicine men. "There are no lasting
side-effects to remote-viewing," Mel Riley has told me, "other than
the fact that it may change your whole life..."
Hal Puthoff saw a number of people changed in this way at SRI,
and he generally considers the changes to have been positive.
"Experiencing remote-viewing broadened their perspective," he says.
"They seemed to be warmer, more generous, more excited about life."
But can this personal transformation also have its dark side? Can
a life of introspection, half-lived. in.wha.t_remote-viewers call "the
ether", or "the matrix", warp the mind in ways that may not be
desirable? Every remote-viewer knows, for example, the case of Bert
Stubblebine.
Bert Stubblebine - Major-General Albert N. Stubblebine III -
became head of INSCOM (the Army's Intelligence and Security Command)
in 1981, the year that General Thompson (who as Assistant Chief of
Staff for Intelligence co-managed the Army's spy
for another posting. With Thompson gone, Stubblebine was remote-
viewing's chief supporter in the Army.
Stubblebine had a reputation as a lateral thinker, creative and
unafraid to take risks. Concerned about hidebound thinking among
his INSCOM staff officers, he would hold psychokinetic "spoon-
bending" sessions with them, just to shake up their world views.
There were also "neurolinguistic programming" sessions for marksmen,
and charisma-building courses for generals, making use of
"firewalks" and the wisdom of self-help gurus. Stubblebine himself
liked to engage in remote-viewing sessions.
Any of these exercises might have been defensible, in the proper
context, but as time went on, the perception grew that the general
had become obsessed by the paranormal and esoteric, above and beyond
any military justification. He had embarked on some kind of
spiritual journey and it seemed that he was trying to take the Army
with him.
Stubblebine's journey eventually took him to the Monroe
Institute, a privately-owned centre for investigation into the
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paranormal near Charlottesville, Virginia. At the Monroe Institute,
an audio process known as "hemi-sync" was used to help induce deep
altered states, which led in some cases to so-called out-of-body
experiences. Stubblebine began to send his INSCOM staff officers
there. And ripples of annoyance began to spread. "You wear your
pyjamas around every morning and hug each other," says Skip Atwater,
who is now the research director at Monroe. "You can't have that in
a military setting."
Stubblebine's own frequent trips to Monroe gave rise to more
serious concerns among some of his superiors at the Pentagon, whom
he was obliged to brief regularly on INSCOM operations. "He had
30,000 men and women out m the field," remembers Ed Dames, a former
Army major and remote-viewer, "and instead of talking about all his
units and field stations and things like that, he would spend half
he waof the
road when significance
the time in these briefings
the the
s down
that had watalking lked across about
yellow salamander
at the Monroe Institute."
Stubblebine had other problems, including a financial corruption
scandal involving some of his covert-action squads. But according
to former colleagues, the fatal blow to his career came in 1983 when
an INSCOM staff officer, Lieutenant Doug P-, visited the Monroe
Institute for the hemi-sync treatment. Shortly after he had started
the process, Lt P- emerged from his darkened room and began to
wander through the Monroe hallways, naked and incoherent. "He was
taken away literally in a straightjacket," says Dames. "He had some.
stability problems ever before he-got here," notes Atwater. "There
are thousands of.people .who come through the Institute and don't
have psychotic breaks."
Lt P- recovered, and remains.. on. active.
duty but Stubblebine retired from the Army in 1984 to become an
executive at BDM Corporation a Washington-area defence and
intelligence contractor. He left BDM a few years ago, and now lives
in New York, where he is married to Rima Laibow, a controversial
psychiatrist who has claimed that she is a UFO abduction victim. But
the damage had been done. "Bert gave remote-viewing a bad name,
because of all the other stuff he was involved in," says a former
senior Pentagon official who knew him. And although the unit never
left its offices at Fort Meade, by 1986 it had been expelled from
the Army. It still had its supporters, notably Jack Vorona, chief
of the DIA's science and technology directorate, who had since 1978
been the overall head of the remote-viewing programme. The DIA took
the Fort Meade unit under its wing, the project was renamed Center
Lane, and later, Sun Streak, and Vorona now exerted more direct
control of the Fort Meade unit. For the remote-viewers, this was a
fortunate development. Vorona was a man who was widely respected
throughout the intelligence community, and with him watching over
it, the unit seemed safe from outside threats.
But what of inside threats? Although Stubblebine was gone, his
spirit lingered, and in the mid and late 1980s, the unit seemed to
take on a garish tinge. In its first few years under DIA management
the unit included the "witches,", two women called Angela Dellafiora
and Robin Dahlgren. Dellafiora eschewed remote-viewing and instead
"channelled" her psychic data through a group of entities with names
like "Maurice" and "George". Dahlgren practiced tarot-card reading.
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In the eyes of Ed Dames and Mel Riley, Angela achieved an undue
influence on the unit when she began to give personal channelling
sessions, featuring advice on the most intimate matters of their
lives, to Jack Vorona and other officials. "Jack Vorona would sit at
one end of the table, and Angela at the other," recalls Dames. "She
would say, 'Good morning, Dr Vorona. Maurice says hello!'',
"Their eyes would be shining when they came out of those
sessions," recalls Riley. "They were told all the nice things they
wanted to hear, which reinforced Angela's position within the unit."
"Psychic blowjobs," says Ed Dames, referring to the activities of
Angela and Robin. To witness them, he told me, and the other antics
of "the witches", was "too much to bear for professional military
officers". But Dames as much as anyone was caught up in the
transformational dynamic of remote-viewing.
A linguist - his forte was Chinese - and former INSCOM
intelligence officer, Ed Dames was one of the group that had been
.trained in.the.early Eighties by Ingo._Swann at SRI. With his blond.
hair, California accent, and preternaturally boyish face, he looked
more like a teenage surfer than a soldier. Although widely
considered intelligent and creative, he also seemed, like
Stubblebine, to have an impulsive streak. "Everybody sort of looked
at Ed as a loose cannon," says Mel Riley. "I was in trouble all the
time, anywhere I. went," agrees Dames. "I was always pushing the
envelope."
Certainly, despite his professed distaste for the New Ageishness
of Vorona and the "Witches", Dames was frustrated by the increasing
scarcity of operational taskings.. In. his ample spare time at the
unit, he began to use remote-viewing techniques to exercise his own
spiritual and extraterrestrial interests. "Under the.. guise of
'advanced training, he says, "I began to see what [remote-viewing]
could do. You know what I mean?" Dames's advanced training
"targets" included apparitions of the Virgin Mary, the demise of
Atlantis ("it's at the bottom of Lake Titicaca," says Dames), the
Loch Ness monster ("a dinosaur's ghost"), and a great many flying
saucers. "He would tell me a lot of things about Martians,"
remembers Dames's now estranged wife Christine. "I didn't want to
hear about it." '
While Dames was at the Fort Meade unit, stories began to
circulate about certain "unusual experiences" during remote-viewing
sessions, particularly those engaged on "advanced training" targets.
"I think he had some kind of experiences, some kind of disturbances
from unknown spirits," remembers Christine Dames. "But he didn't
care -- he welcomed the challenge."
"We thrived on adventure," Dames remembers proudly. "You get men
of action -- we're not satisfied with sitting around and twiddling
our thumbs year after year," says Dames. "Unless something happens,
you're going to lose our interest. But there was enough happening
in there to hold our interest."
Dames left the unit in 1989, and formed a company, Psi Tech, to
make commercial use of his remote-viewing skills. But his clients
were few and far between. He separated from his wife and moved to
Albuquerque, New Mexico, believing that the nearby deserts harboured
a hidden Martian civilisation. A wilderness prophet for our time,
he predicted to the local media that in August 1992, the aliens
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would arise from their desert dwellings, shocking the world. When I
saw him in 1994, Ed Dames was almost out of money.
MOST OF the remote-viewers I've talked to are willing to admit,
when pressed, that their craft does have its psychiatric hazards. As
with any prolonged and forced alteration of consciousness, it
promotes altered states and a general mental instability, and thus
can be dangerous for those who are inherently unstable. They also
point out that in the absence of regular independent verification,
remote-viewing can quickly become a generator of idiosyncratic
fantasy. As Mel Riley says, "Without feedback, your remote-viewing
turns to shit."
And without proper oversight, it seems, the remote-viewing
programme turned foul, too, slowly strangled by its own isolation.
Following the Irangate scandal of 1987, Defense Secretary Frank
Carlucci had instituted a wide-ranging review of potentially
embarrassing Pentagon programs, and in 1988, a Defense Department
Inspector General's (IG) team.._des.cended on the.remote-viewing unit's
offices, demanding to see the files.
Dames and Riley both claim that some
of those responsible for the unit responded very much in the spirit
of Oliver North. "A lot of things," says Riley, "were being shredded
and disposed of which probably would not have been appropriate had
the IG team come across them." Dames remembers: "They were burning
the shredders all day and some of the night."
What the IG team finally reported is unclear, but Fort Meade.'s
contacts with operational intelligence consumers were curtailed, and
recruiting of new remote-viewers was suspended. The unit received a
further blow when its protector Jack Vorona retired from the DIA at
the end of 1989. The SRI remote-viewing. programme. also died that
year, was resurrected briefly at another think-tank, Scientific
Applications International Corporation, and then died again in 1994.
The Russian programme is rumoured to have met a similar fate, now
that the winds of the Cold War have abated.
Remote-viewing has not been abandoned, however. Ed Dames lives
in Beverly Hills now, with Joni Dourif, the wife of the actor Brad
Dourif. They continue to run Psi Tech as a company which provides a
private remote-viewing service, as well as training courses for
people who want to become remote-viewers themselves - Joni Dourif
was one such. Dames himself is now pursuing, he says, his own film
and television projects. He and Dourif plan to marry, following the
respective divorces they now await; the two say that they will
eventually open a remote-viewing training centre in Hawaii.
The DIA remote-viewing unit is still alive, but is, so to speak,
but a ghost of its former self. Recently transferred from its long-
time quarters at Fort Meade, it is now buried somewhere in the maze
of the Pentagon's bureaucracy. "The word is that they're going to
kill it," says Mel Riley, but a former colleague, who didn't want
his name used, is more optimistic: "It's gone through these cycles
before and survived, quite surprisingly, so I hope that happens this
time. It's got a lot of enemies, but it's also got a lot of
friends."
None of those were in evidence on a recent afternoon this summer,
when I visited the buildings at Fort Meade where the unit was housed
for most of its existence. Low wooden structures hastily built in
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the Second World War, but ideal in their isolation, they now sit
mouldering amid a quiet clump of trees. Their only inhabitants now,
one could say, are all those spirits evoked in remote-viewers'
reveries. What fantastic stories they could tell.
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