The Men Who Stare at Goats (19 page)

The “high values” were what the U.S. army called the suspected terrorists, insurgent leaders, rapists, and child molesters, although things were so out of control in postwar Iraq that many of the high values might have just been passersby picked up at checkpoints because the soldiers didn’t like the look of them.

Joseph was in charge of the superclassified computer network at Abu Ghraib. He had set up the system and handed
out the user names and passwords. His job didn’t take him into the isolation block, even though it was just down the corridor. So he accepted the invitation. He got up from behind his desk and walked toward the model planes and the high values.

A few weeks before I met Joseph, it was revealed, by Seymour Hersh in
The New Yorker,
that on April 9, 2004, Specialist Matthew Wisdom told an Article 32 hearing (the military equivalent of a grand jury): “I saw two naked detainees [in the isolation block at Abu Ghraib], one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open. I thought I should just get out of there. I didn’t think it was right… . I saw SSG [Ivan] Frederick walk toward me, and he said, ‘Look what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds.’ I heard PFC [Lynndie] England shout out, ‘He’s getting hard.’”

The isolation block was where all the photographs were taken—Lynndie dragging a naked man across the floor on a leash, and so on.

Joseph turned the corner into the isolation block.

“There were two MPs there,” he told me. “And they were constantly screaming. ‘SHUT THE FUCK UP!’ They were screaming at some old guy, making him repeat a number over and over: 156403. 156403. 156403.

“The old guy couldn’t speak English. He couldn’t pronounce the numbers.

“‘I CAN’T FUCKING HEAR YOU.’

“The guy repeated the number, twice.

“‘LOUDER. FUCKING LOUDER.’

“Then they saw me. ‘Hey, Joseph! How are you? I CAN’T FUCKING HEAR YOU. LOUDER.’

“I repeated the numbers, twice.”

Joseph said that the MPs had basically gone straight from McDonald’s to Abu Ghraib. They knew nothing. And now they were getting scapegoated because they happened to be identifiable in the photographs. They just did what the military intelligence people, Joseph’s people, had told them to do. PsyOps was just a phone call away, Joseph said. And the military intelligence people all had PsyOps training anyway. The thing I had to remember about military intelligence was that they were the “nerdy-type guys at school. You know. The outcasts. Couple all that with ego, and a poster on the wall saying
BY CG APPROVAL
(Commanding General Approval), and suddenly you have guys who think they govern the world. That’s what one of them said to me. ‘We govern the world.’”

“Were there many intelligence officers at Abu Ghraib?” I asked Joseph.

“There were intelligence people turning up there I never even knew
existed,”
he said. “There was a unit from Utah. All
Mormons.
It was a real casserole of intelligence, and they all had to come to me to get their user names and passwords. They were from all kinds of units, civilian guys, and translators. Two British guys showed up. They were older, in uniform, and were getting themselves properly installed. They had laptops and a desk.”

An aide to Condoleezza Rice, the White House national security adviser, visited the prison also, to inform the interrogators sternly that they weren’t getting useful enough information from the detainees.

“Then,” Joseph said, “a whole platoon of Guantanamo people arrived. The word got around. ‘Oh God, the Gitmo guys are here.’
Bam!
There they were. They took the place over.”

Perhaps Guantanamo Bay was Experimental Lab Mark 1, and whatever esoteric techniques worked there were exported to Abu Ghraib. I asked Joseph if he knew anything about the music. He said, sure, they blasted loud music at the detainees all the time.

“What about quieter music?” I asked, and I told him Jamal’s story about the ghetto blaster and the Fleetwood Mac all-girl covers band and Matchbox Twenty.

Joseph laughed. He shook his head in wonderment.

“They were probably fucking with his head,” he said.

“You mean they did it just
because
it seemed so weird?” I asked. “The incongruity was the point of it?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“But that doesn’t make sense,” I said. “I can imagine that might work on a devout Muslim from an Arab country, but Jamal is British. He was raised in Manchester. He knows all about ghetto blasters and Fleetwood Mac and country-and-western music.”

“Hm,” said Joseph.

“Do you think ... ?” I said.

Joseph finished my sentence for me.

“Subliminal messages?” he said.

“Or something like that,” I said. “Something
underneath
the music.”

“You know,” said Joseph, “on a surface level that would be ridiculous. But Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib were
anything
but surface.”

Perhaps, I thought, one way of solving this mystery was to follow the patents, follow them like a tracker follows footprints in the snow, and then, like in a horror film, see how the footprints vanish. Was there, somewhere out there, a paper trail of patents for subliminal sound technologies, or frequency technologies, that simply vanished into the classified world of the United States government?

Yes. There was. And the inventor in question was a mysterious figure named Dr. Oliver Lowery.

On October 27, 1992, Dr. Oliver Lowery, of Georgia, was the recipient of U.S. Patent #5,159,703. His invention was something he called a Silent Subliminal Presentation System:

A silent communications system in which non-aural carriers, in the very low or very high audio-frequency range or in the adjacent ultrasonic frequency spectrum are amplitude or frequency modulated with the desired intelligence and propagated acoustically or vibrationally, for inducement into the brain, typically through the use of loudspeakers, earphones, or piezoelectric transducers. The
modulated carriers may be transmitted directly in real time or may be conveniently recorded and stored on mechanical, magnetic or optical media for delayed or repeated transmission to the listener.

The publicity material that accompanied this patent put it into plainer language. Dr. Lowery had invented a way in which subliminal sounds could be put onto a CD where they would “silently induce and change the emotional state in a human being.”

The following emotional states could, according to Dr. Lowery, be induced by his invention:

Positive emotions:
contentment, duty, faith, friendship, hope, innocence, joy, love, pride, respect, self-love, and worship.

Negative emotions:
anger, anguish, anxiety, contempt, despair, dread, embarrassment, envy, fear, frustration, grief, guilt, hate, indifference, indignation, jealousy, pity, rage, regret, remorse, resentment, sadness, shame, spite, terror, and vanity.

Twelve positive emotions, twenty-six negative ones.

Four years later, on December 13, 1996, Dr. Lowery’s company, Silent Sounds Inc., posted the following message on their web site: “All schematics have [now] been classified by the U.S. Government and we are not allowed to reveal the exact details … we make tapes and CDs for the German Government, even the former Soviet Union countries! All with the permission of the U.S. State Department, of course… . The system was used throughout Operation Desert Storm (Iraq) quite successfully.”

For weeks on end I repeatedly telephoned the number I
had found for Dr. Oliver Lowery—it was a Georgia area code, somewhere on the outskirts of Atlanta—but nobody picked up the phone.

Until, one day, someone did.

“Hello?” said the voice.

“Dr. Lowery?” I said.

“I’d prefer you didn’t call me that,” he said.

“What can I call you?” I said.

“Call me Bud,” he said.

I could almost hear him smile down the phone.

“Call me Hamish McLaren,” he said then.

I told Hamish/Bud/Dr. Oliver Lowery what I was doing, and he, in return, whoever he was, told me something about his life. He said he was seventy-seven years old, a Second World War veteran, a former Hughes aerospace engineer, and he had endured numerous operations, heart bypasses, and so on. Then he said, “You’re the first journalist to find us in four years.”

“Find ‘us’?” I said.

“You think you’re talking to
Georgia
?” he said.

There was a faint mocking tone to his voice.

“I’m sorry?” I said.

He laughed.

“I phoned a Georgia area code,” I said.

There seemed to be voices in the background, a lot of commotion, as if Oliver/Bud/Hamish was speaking from the middle of a busy office.

“You’ll never be able to print what I am about to tell you,” he said, “because there is no way you’ll be able to prove that this conversation ever took place.”

“So I’m not talking to someone in Georgia?” I said.

“You are talking to someone in a lab where there are numerous PhDs from sixteen countries, including Brits, and the lab is in a fourteen-story building behind three layers of barbed-wire defenses that sure as hell isn’t Georgia,” he said.

There was a long pause.

“So you’re using call divert?” I said, weakly.

I had no idea if this was true. Maybe he was a fantasist, or perhaps he was playing with me for the fun of it, but, as I say, there seemed to be many voices in the background. (Maybe he was just putting those voices in my head.)

The man said that the U.S. military has been researching silent-sound technologies for twenty-five years. He likened this “massive” research to the Manhattan Project.

He said there were good silent sounds—“children exposed to the good sounds in the womb turn out remarkably bright”—and bad silent sounds.

“We only use the bad stuff on the bad guys,” he said.

He said the Americans used bad subliminal sounds on Iraqi soldiers during the first Gulf War (“We warped their brains for a hundred days,”) but they have had “serious problems getting the subliminally implanted fears out of their heads” during the years that followed.

“Negative things are a devil to get out.” He chuckled.

He said ITN news once broadcast a story on the use of silent sounds in the first Gulf War.

(ITN later told me, categorically, that they had never run such a story. Nowhere within their archive database could I find anything approaching it.)

He said, “You can transmit silent sounds into people’s
heads via a window in the same way you can fire a laser beam through a window to eavesdrop on a conversation. Conversely, the sounds can be transmitted through the crummiest media—a satellite telephone or a crappy old tape recorder or a ghetto blaster.”

He said New Scotland Yard uses the technology, but he wouldn’t tell me how. He said the Russians use it too. And that was it. He cut the conversation short. He wished me the best and he hung up and I was left reeling and entirely unsure of everything he had said.

This man seemed to have verified one of the world’s most enduring and least plausible conspiracy theories. For me, the idea that the government would surreptitiously zap heads with subliminal sounds and remotely alter moods was on a par with the idea that they were concealing UFOs in military hangars and transforming themselves into twelve-foot lizards. This conspiracy theory has persisted because it contains all the crucial ingredients—the hidden hand of big government teaming up with Machiavellian scientists to take over our minds like body snatchers.

The thing is, in this context, Jamal’s Fleetwood Mac all-girl-covers-band-ghetto-blaster experience inside the Brown Block at Guantanamo Bay suddenly made sense.

Jamal seemed fine when I met him in Manchester. I asked him if he felt at all unusual after listening to Matchbox Twenty and he said no. But one shouldn’t read too much into this. There is a very strong chance, given the history of the goat staring and the wall walking and so on, that they blasted Jamal with silent sounds and it just didn’t work.

There was one thing I could chase up. Dr. Oliver Lowery (or whoever he was) had mentioned to me a Dr. Igor Smirnov. He said Igor Smirnov had undertaken similar U.S. government work in the field of silent sounds. I looked Dr. Smirnov up. I found him in Moscow. I corresponded with his office, and his assistant (Dr. Smirnov speaks little English) told me the following curious story.

It is a story the FBI has never denied.

Igor Smirnov was not prospering in the post-Cold War Moscow of 1993. His finances were so bleak that when the Russian mafia turned up at his laboratory one evening, pressed the bell marked, somewhat ominously, “Institute for Psycho-Correction,” and told Igor they’d pay him handsomely if he could subliminally influence certain unwilling businessmen to sign certain contracts, he almost accepted their offer. But in the end it seemed just too frightening and unethical and he turned the gangsters down. His regular clients—the schizophrenics and the drug addicts—may have been poor payers but at least they weren’t the mafia.

Igor’s day-to-day work in the early 1990s was something like this: A heroin addict would turn up at his lab very upset because he was a father-to-be but try as he might he cared more about the heroin than his unborn child. So he’d lie on a bed, and Igor would blast him with subliminal messages. He’d flash them onto a screen in front of the addict’s eyes and blast them through earphones, disguised by white noise, and the messages would say “Be a good father. Fatherhood is more important than heroin.” And so on.

This was a man once fêted by the Soviet government,
which—ten years earlier—had instructed him to blast his silent messages at Red Army troops on their way to Afghanistan. Those messages said, “Do not get drunk before battle.”

But the glory days were long gone by March 1993—the month Igor Smirnov received a telephone call, out of the blue, from the FBI. Could he fly to Arlington, Virginia, right away? Igor Smirnov was intrigued, and quite amazed, and he got on a plane.