The Men Who Stare at Goats (2 page)

He glances anxiously at the clock.

“Let’s talk about time!” he says. “What would happen if time is not an instant? What if time has an X-axis, a Y-axis,
and a Z-axis? What if time is not a point but a space? At any particular time we can be
anywhere
in that space! Is the space confined to the ceiling of this room, or is the space
twenty million miles
?” The general laughs. “Physicists go
nuts
when I say this!”

Silence. He tries again.

“Animals!” says General Stubblebine.

The Special Forces commanders glance at one another.

“Stopping the hearts of animals,” he continues.
“Bursting
the hearts of animals. This is the idea I’m coming in with. You have access to animals, right?”

“Uh,” say Special Forces. “Not really …”

General Stubblebine’s trip to Fort Bragg was a disaster. It still makes him blush to recall it. He ended up taking early retirement in 1984. Now, the official history of army intelligence, as outlined in their press pack, basically skips the Stub-blebine years, 1981–84, almost as if they didn’t exist.

In fact, everything you have read so far has for the past two decades been a military intelligence secret. General Stub-blebine’s doomed attempt to walk through his wall and his seemingly futile journey to Fort Bragg remained undisclosed right up until the moment that he told me about them in room 403 of the Tarrytown Hilton, just north of New York City, on a cold winter’s day two years into the War on Terror.

“To tell you the truth, Jon,” he said, “I’ve pretty much blocked the rest of the conversation I had with Special Forces out of my head. Whoa, yeah. I’ve
scrubbed
it from my mind! I walked away. I left with my tail between my legs.”

He paused, and looked at the wall.

“You know,” he said, “I really thought they were great ideas. I still do. I just haven’t figured out how
my
space can fit through
that
space. I simply kept bumping my nose. I couldn’t … No.
Couldn’t
is the wrong word. I never got myself to the right state of mind.” He sighed. “If you really want to know, it’s a disappointment. Same with the levitation.”

Some nights, in Arlington, Virginia, after the general’s first wife, Geraldine, had gone to bed, he would lie down on his living-room carpet and try to levitate.

“And I failed totally. I could not get my fat ass off the ground, excuse my language. But I still think they were great ideas. And do you know why?”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you
cannot
afford to get stale in the intelligence world,” he said. “You
cannot
afford to miss something. You don’t believe that? Take a look at terrorists who went to flying schools to learn how to take off but not how to land. And where did
that
information get lost? You
cannot
afford to miss something when you’re talking about the intelligence world.”

There was something about the general’s trip to Fort Bragg that neither of us knew the day we met. It was a piece of information that would soon lead me into what must be among the most whacked-out corners of George W. Bush’s War on Terror.

What the general didn’t know—what Special Forces kept secret from him—was that they actually considered his ideas to be excellent ones. Furthermore, as he proposed his clandestine
animal-heart-bursting program and they told him that they didn’t have access to animals, they were concealing the fact that there were a hundred goats in a shed just a few yards down the road.

The existence of these hundred goats was known only to a select few Special Forces insiders. The covert nature of the goats was helped by the fact that they had been de-bleated; they were just standing there, their mouths opening and closing, with no bleat coming out. Many of them also had their legs bandaged in plaster.

This is the story of those goats.

It was Uri Geller who set me on the trail that led to the goats. I met him on the roof terrace of a central London restaurant in early October 2001, less than a month into the War on Terror. There had long been rumors (circulated on the whole, it must be said, by Uri himself) that back in the early 1970s he had been a psychic spy working secretly for U.S. intelligence. Many people have doubted his story—
The Sunday Times
once called it “a bizarre claim,” arguing that Uri Geller is nuts whereas the intelligence establishment is not. The way I saw it, the truth lay in one of four possible scenarios:

1. It just never happened.

2. A couple of crazy renegades in the higher levels of the U.S. intelligence community had brought in Uri Geller.

3. U.S. intelligence is the repository of incredible secrets, which are kept from us for our own good; one of those secrets is that Uri Geller has psychic powers, which were
harnessed during the Cold War. They just hoped he wouldn’t go around telling everybody.

4. The U.S. intelligence community was, back then, essentially nuts through and through.

Uri was quiet in the restaurant. He wore big, wraparound mirrored sunglasses. His brother-in-law, Shipi, was equally unforthcoming, and the whole thing was a bit awkward. I had met them once or twice before and had found them to be infectiously ebullient people. But there was no ebullience that day.

“So,” I said, “let’s start. How did you first become a psychic spy for the U.S. government?”

There was a long silence.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Uri said.

He sipped his mineral water and glanced over at Shipi.

“Uri?” I said. “What’s wrong? You
often
talk about it.”

“No I don’t,” he said.

“Yes you
do
!” I said.

I had been researching this for two weeks, and I had already amassed a file an inch thick of his reminiscences about his psychic spying days, dictated to journalists throughout the 1980s and 1990s, who then added sarcastic asides. In more or less every article, the line of reasoning was the same: The intelligence services wouldn’t
do
that. There was an almost frantic reluctance to accept Uri’s word, or even to make a few calls to verify or refute it. For all our cynicism, we apparently still invested the intelligence services with some qualities of rigor and scientific methodology. The
few journalists who accepted Uri’s claim implicitly expressed relief that all this happened a long time ago, back in the 1970s.

“I never talk about it,” Uri said.

“You spoke about it to the
Financial Times,”
I said. “You said you did a lot of psychic work for the CIA in Mexico.”

Uri shrugged.

A plane flew low overhead and everyone on the terrace stopped eating for a moment and looked up. Ever since 9/11, Attorney General John Ashcroft had been warning of imminent terrorist attacks—on banks, apartment blocks, hotels, restaurants, and shops in the United States. On one occasion President Bush announced that he couldn’t say
anything at all
about a particular looming cataclysm. Equally nonspecific high alerts were occurring in London too. Then, suddenly, Uri took off his sunglasses and looked me squarely in the eye.

“If you repeat what I am about to tell you,” he said, “I will deny it.”

“Okay,” I said.

“It will be your word against mine,” said Uri.

“Okay,” I said.

Uri moved his chair closer to mine. He glanced around the restaurant.

“This,” he said, “is no longer a history story.”

“I’m sorry?” I said.

“I have been reactivated,” said Uri.

“What?” I said.

I looked over at Shipi. He nodded gravely.

“I don’t suppose it was you who told John Ashcroft about the hotels and the banks and the apartment blocks?” I asked.

“I am saying nothing else,” said Uri.

“Uri,” I said, “please give me something to go on. Please tell me one more thing.”

Uri sighed.

“Okay,” he said. “I will tell you one more thing only. The man who reactivated me is …” Uri paused, then he said, “called Ron.”

And that was it. I have not spoken to Uri Geller since. He has not returned my calls. He refused to divulge anything further about Ron. Was Ron FBI? CIA? military intelligence? Homeland Security? Could Ron be MI5? MI6? Was Uri Geller playing a part in the War on Terror?

I had a minor breakthrough a year later, in a hotel in Las Vegas, when I was interviewing one of General Stubblebine’s former military spies, Sergeant Lyn Buchanan. I said, “Uri Geller says that the man who reactivated him is called Ron.” Sergeant Buchanan fell silent and then he nodded enigmatically and said, “Ah, Ron. Yes. I know Ron.”

But he wouldn’t tell me anything more about him.

General Stubblebine wouldn’t talk about Ron either.

“The damn psychic spies should be keeping their damn mouths shut,” he said, “instead of chitchatting all over town about what they did.”

The general, I discovered in the weeks after I met Uri, had commanded a secret military psychic spying unit between 1981 and 1984. The unit wasn’t quite as glamorous as it might sound, he said. It was basically half-a-dozen soldiers sitting inside a heavily guarded, condemned clapboard building in Fort Meade, Maryland, trying to be psychic. Officially the unit did not exist. The psychics were what is known in
military jargon as Black Ops. Because they didn’t “exist” they were not permitted access to the army’s coffee budget. They had to bring their own coffee into work. They had come to resent this. Some of them were in there, trying to be psychic, from 1978 until 1995. From time to time, one of them died or went stir-crazy, and a new psychic soldier would be brought in to replace the casualty. When one of them got a vision—of a Russian warship, or a future event—he would sketch it, and pass the sketches up the chain of command.

And then, in 1995, the CIA closed them down.

Many of the psychic soldiers have subsequently published their autobiographies, such as
The Seventh Sense: The Secrets of Remote Viewing as Told by a “Psychic Spy” for the U.S. Military,
by Lyn Buchanan.

“Everybody wants to be the first on the publicity stump,” said General Stubblebine. “I could wring some of their necks.”

And that was all the general would say about the psychic spies.

“Are they back in business?” I asked him.

“I hope so,” he said.

“Was Uri Geller one of yours?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “but I wish he had been. I am a great fan of his.”

And so it was that my quest to track down Ron took me to Hawaii, to a house on the road between Honolulu and Pearl Harbor, the home of retired Sergeant First Class—and onetime Special Forces psychic spy—Glenn Wheaton. Glenn was a big man with a tight crop of red hair and a Vietnamvet-style
handlebar mustache. My plan was to ask Glenn about his psychic spying days and then try to broach the subject of Ron, but from the moment I sat down, our conversation veered off in a wholly unexpected direction.

Glenn leaned forward in his chair. “You’ve gone from the front door to the back door. How many chairs are in my house?”

There was a silence.

“You probably can’t tell me how many chairs are in my house,” said Glenn.

I started to look around.

“A supersoldier wouldn’t need to look,” he said. “He would just
know
.”

“A supersoldier?” I asked.

“A supersoldier,” said Glenn. “A Jedi Warrior. He would know where all the lights are. He would know where all the power outlets are. Most people are poor observers. They haven’t got a clue about what’s really happening around them.”

“What’s a Jedi Warrior?” I asked.

“You’re looking at one,” said Glenn.

In the mid-1980s, he told me, Special Forces undertook a secret initiative, codenamed Project Jedi, to create supersoldiers—soldiers with superpowers. One such power was the ability to walk into a room and instantly be aware of every detail; that was level one.

“What was the level above that?” I asked.

“Level two,” he said. “Intuition. Is there some way we can develop you so you make correct decisions? Somebody runs up to you and says, ‘There’s a fork in the road. Do we turn
left or do we turn right?’ And you go”—Glenn snapped his fingers—“‘We go right!’”

“What was the level above that?” I asked.

“Invisibility,” said Glenn.

“Actual invisibility?” I asked.

“At first,” said Glenn. “But after a while we adapted it to just finding a way of
not being seen
.”

“In what way?” I asked.

“By understanding the linkage between observation and reality, you learn to dance with invisibility,” said Glenn. “If you’re not observed, you are invisible. You only exist if someone sees you.”

“So, like camouflage?” I asked.

“No,” sighed Glenn.

“How good are you at invisibility?” I asked.

“Well,” said Glenn, “I’ve got red hair and blue eyes, so people tend to remember me. But I get by. I’m alive today.”

“What was the level above invisibility?” I asked.

“Uh,” said Glenn. He paused for a moment. Then he said, “We had a master sergeant who could stop the heart of a goat.”

There was a silence. Glenn raised an eyebrow.

“Just by …” I said.

“Just by
wanting
the goat’s heart to stop,” said Glenn.

“That’s quite a leap,” I said.

“Right,” said Glenn.

“And did he make the goat’s heart stop?” I asked.

“He did it at least once,” said Glenn.

“Huh,” I said. I really didn’t know how to respond to this.

“But it’s not really an area you want to …”

“Go to,” I said.

“That’s right,” said Glenn. “Not an area you want to go to, because as it turned out in the evaluation he actually did some damage to himself as well.”

“Huh,” I said again.

“Sympathetic injury,” said Glenn.

“So it’s not as if the goat was psychically fighting back?” I asked.

“Goat didn’t have a chance,” said Glenn.