The Men Who Stare at Goats (10 page)

Ziad told Bert that he was a businessman who traveled a great deal and he wanted to learn how to defend himself if a group attacked him.

“I liked Ziad a lot,” Bert Rodriguez said when I called him. “He was very humble, very quiet. He was in good shape. Very diligent.”

“What did you teach him?” I asked.

“The choke hold,” said Bert. “You use it to put someone to sleep or kill them. I taught him the choke hold and the kamikaze spirit. You need a code you’d die for, a do-or-die desire. And that’s what gives you the sixth sense, the ability to see
into
the opponent and know if he’s bluffing. Yeah. I taught him the choke hold and the kamikaze spirit. Ziad was a soccer player. I’d much rather have a soccer player beside me in a fight than a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. The soccer player can dodge and dive.”

There was a silence.

“Ziad was like Luke Skywalker,” said Bert. “You know when Luke walks the invisible path? You have to believe it’s
there. And if you do believe it, it
is
there. Yeah. Ziad believed it. He was like Luke Skywalker.”

Bert trained Ziad for six months. He liked him, sympathized with his tough upbringing in Lebanon. He gave Ziad copies of three of his knife-fighting training manuals, and Ziad passed them on to a friend of his, Marwan al-Shehhi, who was staying up the road in room 12 of the Panther Motel and Apartments in Deerfield Beach, Florida.

We know this because when Marwan al-Shehhi checked out of the Panther Motel on September 10, 2001, he left behind a flight manual for a Boeing 757, a knife, a black canvas bag, an English–German dictionary, and three martial arts manuals written by Bert Rodriguez, the man Stuart Heller had called “the most First Earth Battalion guy I know.”

Marwan al-Shehhi was twenty-three years old when he checked out of the Panther Motel, flew to Boston, changed planes, took control of United Airlines flight 175, and crashed it into the south tower of the World Trade Center.

Ziad Jarrah was twenty-six when he took control of United Airlines flight 93, which came down in a field in Pennsylvania on its way to Washington, D.C.

“You know what?” said Bert. “I think Ziad’s role was to be the hijacker with brains. He’d hang back to ensure that the job was done properly, that the takeover of the plane was completed.” Bert paused. “If you love a son and he becomes a mass murderer, you don’t stop loving your son, do you?”

Guy Savelli’s role in the War on Terror began when half-a-dozen strangers, within days of one another, contacted him
via e-mail and telephone in the winter of 2003. They asked him if he had the power to psychically kill goats. Guy was bewildered. He did not go around publicizing this. Who were these men? How did they know about the goats? He feigned a casual tone of voice and said, “Sure I can.”

Then he immediately phoned Special Forces.

Everyone who had contacted him, he told them, was
Muslim,
with the possible exception of some British guy (me). The others were certainly e-mailing from Muslim countries, axis-of-evil countries, in fact. This had never happened to Guy before. Might they be al-Qaeda? Might they be bin Laden operatives hoping to learn how to stare people to death? Was this the start of a whole new paranormal subdivision of al-Qaeda?

Special Forces instructed Guy to meet me, because in all probability I was al-Qaeda too.

“Be careful what you say to him,” they advised.

Special Forces had even—I was startled to learn—been on the phone to Guy the very morning I had visited him. While I was getting coffee at the Red Lobster, they had phoned Guy and said, “Has he turned up yet? Be careful. And film him. Get him on tape. We want to know who these people are… .”

I’m not sure at what stage during the day we spent together Guy decided that I wasn’t an Islamic terrorist. Perhaps it was when I discovered that his daughter danced with Richard Gere in the movie
Chicago
and I screeched, “Catherine Zeta-Jones was
brilliant
in it!”

Even a deep-cover al-Qaeda terrorist wouldn’t think to go
that
fey.

I do know that throughout our entire hamster conversation,
Guy was still convinced that I wasn’t an actual journalist. When I spoke of my “hamster-owning readers” Guy had glanced dubiously at me because he believed I had no readers at all, and would be reporting the events of the day not to the public but to a terrorist cell.

That was the reason—Guy explained—why such a panicked scramble had ensued when I spotted the snapshot of the soldier karate chopping a goat to death. It was no ordinary karate chop, Guy revealed. It was the death touch.

“The death touch?” I asked.

Guy told me about the death touch. It was, he said, the fabled Dim Mak, also known as the quivering palm. The death touch is a very light strike. The goat is far from whacked. Its skin isn’t broken. There isn’t even a bruise. The goat will then stand there with a dazed expression on its face for about a day, before it suddenly topples over, dead.

“Imagine if al-Qaeda had that kind of power,” Guy said. “Staring is one thing. The death touch is quite another. That’s why we were all so freaked when you saw the picture. We still didn’t know if you were al-Qaeda.”

And so it was that Guy’s life had taken a strange new twist. Was he to be a dance and martial arts instructor by day and a covert agent infiltrating a hitherto unknown paranormal unit of al-Qaeda by night?

Over the next few weeks Guy and I kept in touch.

“I met with
another
department,” he told me during one call.

“Homeland Security?” I asked.

“I can’t tell you
that,”
said Guy. “But they’re sure one of the guys who contacted me is al-Qaeda. They’re
sure
of it.”

“How do they know?” I asked.

“The name checks out,” said Guy. “The phone number too. The phone number is on a
list.”

“What did the intelligence people say to you?” I asked.

“They said, ‘Yeah, yeah. He’s one of the guys for sure.’”

“Al-Qaeda?”

“Al-Qaeda,” said Guy.

“Are you
bait
?” I asked.

“That’s what it looks like,” said Guy. “It’s getting kinda hairy here.”

“You’re bait,” I said.

“I’ll tell you, Jon,” said Guy, “these intelligence people see me as a dog. A
dog
! I said to them, ‘I have a family.’ ‘Yeah yeah,’ they said. ‘Having a family is very, very nice.’ We’re really expendable. I’m going to end up hanging from a lamp-post. A fucking
lamppost.”

At this point I heard Guy’s wife say, “Very fucking funny.”

“Hang on,” said Guy.

Guy and his wife had a muffled conversation.

“My wife says I shouldn’t be talking like this on the phone,” he said. “I’m hanging up now.”

“Keep me informed!” I said.

And Guy did. As the various schemes to ensnare the possible al-Qaeda paranormal subdivision changed, Guy kept me informed of the developments. Plan A was for Guy to invite these people to America. Then the intelligence people had a change of heart, telling Guy, “We don’t want them
here.”

The much riskier plan B was for Guy to travel to
their
country. He would teach them a relatively benign psychic power and report back everything he saw and heard.

Guy told them, “No fucking way.”

Plan C was for Guy to meet them on neutral ground—maybe London. Or France. Plan C suited both camps and seemed the most likely to proceed.

“I would fucking love to have you there,” Guy said.

Guy sent me a scrap of an e-mail that, he told me, was “absolutely, positively” written by an al-Qaeda operative. It read:

Dear sir Savelli,

I hope you are fine and fit. I am bussy in my champion ship my champion ship is going success ful. Sir Savelli, please tell me if I apply to affiliation in your Federation so what is a prosiger please tell me a detal.

And that was it. It seemed that one of two scenarios was unfolding: Guy was either in the middle of a sensational sting operation, or a hapless young martial arts enthusiast who only wanted to join Guy’s federation was about to be shipped off to Guantanamo Bay. All we could do was wait.

This has so far been a story about secret things undertaken clandestinely inside military bases in the United States. From time to time tangible results of these covert endeavors have made their way into everyday life, but always far removed from their supernatural roots. Nobody who came into contact with Colonel Alexander’s Sticky Foam, for example—not the prisoners who were glued to their cells by it, not the TV crews who filmed its partially disastrous deployment in Somalia, not even, I would guess, the soldiers who carried it into Iraq in the hope of spraying it all over the WMDs—was aware that it was the product of a paranormal initiative from the late 1970s.

All of a sudden, though, in 1995, a palpable chunk of the craziness leaked from the military community into the civilian world. The man who did the leaking was an errant prodigy of General Stubblebine.

This is what happened.

As a child, growing up in the 1970s, Prudence Calabrese loved watching
Doctor Who
and science documentaries. She lived in a run-down mansion in New England. When her
parents went out on Saturday nights, the children would whip out their homemade Ouija board and try to contact the ghost of the previous owner who had apparently hanged herself in the barn as a result of being alcoholic and unpopular with the neighbors. They held pajama-party séances.

“We wanted to have unusual experiences,” Prudence told me as we sat at her kitchen table in Carlsbad, near San Diego. “We would all get together and light candles and turn the lights down and try to make a table rise just by touching it.”

“Did it ever rise?” I asked her.

“Well, yes,” said Prudence. “But we were kids. Looking back, I’m not sure if everybody just added a little bit of effort and that made it rise.”

“With your knees?” I said.

“Yeah,” said Prudence. “Hard to tell.”

Sometimes Prudence and her friends would run outside and try to spot UFOs. They thought they saw one once.

Prudence went to the local university but she got pregnant when she was eighteen, so she dropped out and began managing a local trailer park with her first husband, Randy. She moonlighted as a dancer in a pig costume at the state fair, went back to college, studied physics, dropped out, had another four children, taught belly dancing to pensioners in Indiana and finally ended up with a new husband named Daniel in an apartment in Atlanta, running a web-site-design business. It was here, in 1995, that Prudence turned on the TV one night. A military man was on the screen.

“What was he saying?” I asked Prudence. “Didn’t he say he was a real-life Obi-Wan Kenobi?”

“That’s exactly the words he used,” said Prudence. “A ‘real-life Obi-Wan Kenobi.’”

“Working for the U.S. military?”

“Working for the U.S. military,” said Prudence.

“And until that moment nobody even knew that these people existed?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Prudence. “Until that time they had been kept completely secret. He was talking about how he used just his mind to access anything in the whole universe. And how the military used him, and other psychic spies like him, to avert wars and discover secret things about other countries. He said they were called remote viewers. Yeah. According to his story, he was part of a secret team of psychic spies, and he was one of the leaders of the unit. And he just didn’t look like what you’d expect. He didn’t look like he had super secret powers.”

“What did he look like?”

Prudence laughed.

“He was short and scrawny and he had this crazy hairdo from the seventies, and a mustache. And he didn’t even look like a military guy, let alone a psychic spy. He just looked like a weird person, a person you’d see on the street.”

The man on the TV said he had top-level clearance. He said he knew the exact location of Saddam Hussein and the lost ark of the covenant. Prudence was transfixed. As she watched the TV, her long-forgotten childhood passions came back to her: the Ouija board,
Doctor Who,
the science projects she used to do at school.

“I remembered why I was so excited about science fiction and reading all those stories about psychics and aliens,” she said.

Prudence determined in that moment that this was what she wanted to do with her life. She wanted to be like the man on the TV, to know the things he knew, to see the things he could see.

His name was Major Ed Dames.

General Albert Stubblebine had been happy to discuss with me his inability to pass through walls and to levitate, and his apparent failure to interest Special Forces in his animal-heart-bursting initiative. He recounted those incidents to me in a jolly way, even though they can’t have been good memories for him. The only time during our meetings that an anguished look crossed his face was when the conversation turned to the subject of his prodigy, Major Ed Dames.

“It bothered me so badly that he talked,” he said. “There he was, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap.” The general paused. “Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap,” he said, sadly. “If anybody should have had a gag put in his mouth it was Ed Dames. He
clearly
was out talking when he should have been listening. Very upsetting, incidentally.”

“Why?”

“He’d taken the same oath I took: ‘I swear I will not divulge.’ But he ran over everyone to talk. He puffed up his chest. ‘I was one of them!’ He wanted to be king.”

Ed Dames had been one of General Stubblebine’s personal recruits. When the general took command of the secret psychic unit in 1981, he allowed a bunch of fellow enthusiasts from within the military to join the program. The government’s psychic research had, until that time, basically centered
on three men: an ex-policeman and building contractor named Pat Price, and two soldiers, Ingo Swann and Joe McMoneagle. These three were regarded by all but the most hardened skeptics to have some kind of unusual gift. (Joe McMoneagle’s gift apparently manifested itself after he fell out of a helicopter in Vietnam.)