This is an excel­lent arti­cle in a rep­utable news source, US News and World Report.

Ene­mies in the mind’s eye

For more than 20 years, the CIA funded psy­chic experiments

By Mar­i­anne Szegedy-Maszak and Charles Fenyvesi, Jan 27 2003.

His name would even­tu­ally be revealed as Joseph McMonea­gle, but for the pur­poses of the Army’s psy­chic intel­li­gence unit, he was sim­ply Remote Viewer No. 1. One fall day in 1979 he reclined in an easy chair in an office at Fort Meade, Md. The lights were dim. Sit­ting nearby was an inter­viewer, who gave him a series of geo­graph­i­cal coor­di­nates that were sup­posed to be his mind’s destination.

After about 20 min­utes, McMonea­gle brought him­self out of a deep med­i­ta­tion and, as he describes it, “opened my mind.” Grad­u­ally images began to appear: a low, win­dow­less build­ing; a smoke­stack. He smelled “a strange stink,” a mix­ture of sul­fur and nat­ural gas. There was also a “smelt­ing or melt­ing activ­ity.” After an image came to mind, he drew it roughly on a piece of paper. Another viewer, No. 29, could “see” heavy metal equip­ment, includ­ing tubes con­duct­ing a “heat exchange.” For him, the site emanated a “sense of power.“

Far-fetched as it sounds, the remote view­ers at Fort Meade were engaged in deadly seri­ous work–an odd mar­riage of Amer­i­can intelligence-gathering and para­nor­mal exper­i­men­ta­tion. Unbe­knownst to them­selves, view­ers No. 1 and No. 29 seemed to be describ­ing Lop Nor, a Chi­nese nuclear complex.

The exper­i­ment was only one episode in a remark­able research pro­gram run by the Defense Intel­li­gence Agency and CIA from 1972 until 1996. The project, known var­i­ously as Grill Flame, Sun Streak, and finally Star Gate, explored a vari­ety of para­psy­cho­log­i­cal phe­nom­ena but espe­cially one known as “remote view­ing,” the process by which some­one in, say, Mary­land visu­al­izes an office in the Krem­lin and describes it both in words and draw­ings. The view­ers were shad­owy and unac­knowl­edged par­tic­i­pants in the quest for intel­li­gence about a range of secu­rity con­cerns: nuclear weapons sites, the Iran­ian hostage cri­sis, the kid­nap­ping of Gen. James Dozier by the Red Brigades, the loca­tion of Col. Muam­mar Qad­hafi dur­ing the raids on Tripoli in 1986, and the espi­onage case of Aldrich Ames.

The out­lines of Star Gate have been sketched before, but new details of the project have come to light in 73,000 pages of pre­vi­ously clas­si­fied records released by the CIA last Novem­ber and made avail­able just this month. (An addi­tional 20,800 pages are under­go­ing review, and 17,700 pages were deemed too sen­si­tive to release.) The doc­u­ments illu­mi­nate a chap­ter of spy­ing that bears closer resem­blance to Miss Cleo than to James Bond.

In a sense, it was inevitable. From the early 1950s on, United States intel­li­gence explored psy­chic research, hop­ing to use extrasen­sory per­cep­tion (ESP) for intel­li­gence oper­a­tions. After all, the Sovi­ets were doing it. Nonethe­less, offi­cials were torn between wor­ries that the Soviets–and later the Chinese–were ahead of the United States in the psy­chic arms race and the skep­ti­cism of many Amer­i­can offi­cials about spend­ing money in the field seen as dom­i­nated by kooks.

Even such hard­headed oper­a­tives as Richard Helms, who later became the direc­tor of the CIA, were intrigued. The declas­si­fied doc­u­ments reveal a memo writ­ten when Helms was deputy direc­tor for plans in 1963. For 10 years a small group in the Tech­ni­cal Ser­vices Divi­sion had been study­ing hyp­no­sis and telepa­thy for use in clan­des­tine oper­a­tions but con­cluded that these fields were not ready for oper­a­tional appli­ca­tions. Helms dis­agreed and sent a memo sug­gest­ing more research in “this some­what eso­teric (and per­haps sci­en­tif­i­cally dis­rep­utable) range of activ­i­ties.” He argued that given the Soviet pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with “cyber­net­ics, telepa­thy, hyp­no­sis, and related sub­jects … recent reported advances … may indi­cate more poten­tial than we believed existed.“

Remote view­ing was added to the ros­ter of psy­chic phe­nom­ena in 1972 when the CIA became inter­ested in the pub­lished view­ing exper­i­ments of Hal Puthoff at the Stan­ford Research Insti­tute. In 1972, the CIA gave the insti­tute $50,000 to study remote view­ing. Rus­sell Targ, who joined the project in 1972, recalls a CIA offi­cial telling him: “You are wast­ing your time look­ing at churches and swim­ming pools in Palo Alto.” Two years later, the insti­tute received the geo­graph­i­cal coor­di­nates of a “Soviet site of ongo­ing oper­a­tional sig­nif­i­cance.“

“Turn­ing point.”

The tar­get was Semi­palatinsk, in what is now Kaza­khstan. Aside from sus­pi­cions that the site was impor­tant, noth­ing was known about it. Given the coor­di­nates, a remote viewer pro­vided a lay­out of a clus­ter of build­ings and drew a puz­zling, “damned big crane.” He iden­ti­fied the under­ground facil­ity as stor­age for Soviet mis­siles. Satel­lite pho­tos ver­i­fied the viewer’s report, accord­ing to Don­ald Jame­son, then a senior CIA Soviet spe­cial­ist, who called the event a “turn­ing point.” One group within the agency refused to look at the Semi­palatinsk data, object­ing to the unsci­en­tific method­ol­ogy. Another group allowed that the data might be real but called the process “demonic.“

Still, offi­cials were con­vinced enough of the program’s poten­tial that a train­ing pro­gram was designed, as well as an ESP teach­ing machine. Ques­tions designed to detect ESP tal­ent sup­ple­mented the stan­dard per­son­al­ity test used by the CIA. Some employ­ees were deemed psy­chi­cally gifted. When the CIA cut the pro­gram in 1975, the funds shifted first to the Air Force and then, in 1980, to the Defense Intel­li­gence Agency. The mil­i­tary also looked for poten­tial tal­ent. That meant, says Paul H. Smith, a retired intel­li­gence offi­cer who spent seven years in Star Gate, “cer­tain odd pro­cliv­i­ties, like a cre­ative pur­suit in music or art, an inter­est or apti­tude in for­eign lan­guages. They were also look­ing for peo­ple who didn’t report any ESP experiences.“

Between 1979 and 1994 Fort Meade’s view­ing site con­ducted roughly 250 projects involv­ing thou­sands of mis­sions. One, in 1987, was an attempt to find a mole in the CIA. The view­ers came up with a com­pos­ite: The man lived in the Wash­ing­ton area, drove an expen­sive for­eign car, per­haps gray, lived in a pala­tial home, was inti­mate with a woman from Latin Amer­ica, pos­si­bly Colom­bia. Aldrich Ames lived in a pala­tial house in the Wash­ing­ton area. He drove a Jaguar and was mar­ried to a Colom­bian. The car was red; the house was gray. Not that the infor­ma­tion was used; Ames was appre­hended in 1994.

By 1995, the end of the Cold War, along with increas­ing con­cerns about unfa­vor­able scrutiny, drained the remote-viewing pro­gram of both its vital­ity and its sup­port­ers, and CIA direc­tor John Deutch ended it. All told, it had cost $20 mil­lion. The CIA says it no longer funds remote-viewing research, but the mil­i­tary is less emphatic in its denials. In the end, the weak­ness of remote view­ing, says Smith, “is the weak­ness of any phe­nom­e­non that deals with the thresh­old of human per­cep­tion. There are false pos­i­tives, vague notions, and con­fused data that go with the territory.“

Para­dox­i­cally, for nearly a quar­ter of a cen­tury of Amer­i­can spy­ing, that was also a strength.

Arti­cle from US News and World Report »