The Men Who Stare at Goats (21 page)

The FBI flew Dr. Smirnov from Moscow to Arlington, Virginia, where he found himself in a conference room with representatives of the FBI, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Advance Research Projects Research Agency.

The idea, the agents explained, was to use the telephone lines. The FBI negotiators would bargain with Koresh as usual but, underneath, the silent voice of God would tell Koresh whatever the FBI wanted God to say.

Dr. Smirnov said this was possible.

But then bureaucracy crept into the negotiations. An FBI agent said he was concerned that the endeavor might somehow
lead to the Branch Davidians’ committing mass suicide. Would Dr. Smirnov sign something to the effect that if they did kill themselves as a result of the voice of God being subliminally implanted in their heads, he would take responsibility?

Dr. Smirnov said he wouldn’t sign something like that.

And so the meeting broke up.

An agent told Dr. Smirnov it was a shame it didn’t work out. He said they had already co-opted someone to play the voice of God.

Had Dr. Smirnov’s technology been put into practice at Waco, the agent said, God would have been played by Charlton Heston.

I was passing through Georgia, and thinking a lot about my telephone conversation with Dr. Oliver Lowery, and so I decided to drive past the address I had for him. It was somewhere in the suburbs of Atlanta. I wondered if I’d find a normal house or something like a fourteen-story building behind three layers of barbed-wire defenses. A gale was blowing so strongly I thought it would tip over my car.

It was a normal, slightly dilapidated wooden house on a middle-class leafy street, and the leaves were swirling around so violently I had to switch on my windshield wipers.

I parked the car and walked up his drive, shielding myself against the gale. I was feeling quite nervous. I knocked. The whole thing happened so fast I can’t even describe the person who opened the door. I have an impression of a craggy-looking man in his seventies, his white hair blowing in the wind.

I said, “I’m really sorry to just turn up at your house. If you remember we—”

He said, “I hope the wind doesn’t blow you over on your journey back to your car.”

And then he closed the door on me.

I walked back down his drive. And then I heard his voice again. I turned around. He was shouting something through a crack in his door. He was shouting, “I hope the wind doesn’t blow you away.”

I smiled uneasily.

“You’d better take care,” he shouted.

The shipping container behind the disused railway station in al-Qā’im, Iraq, in which the “I Love You” song from Barney the Purple Dinosaur was played through a loudspeaker to detainees.

In late June 2004 I sent an e-mail to Jim Channon and everyone else I had met during my two-and-a-half-year journey who might have some inside knowledge about the current
use of the kinds of psychological interrogation techniques that had first been suggested in Jim’s manual. I wrote:

Dear———

I hope you are well.

I was talking with one of the British Guantanamo detainees (innocent—he was released) and he told me a very strange story. He said at one point during the interrogations the MI officers left him in a room—for hours and hours—with a ghetto blaster. They played him a series of CDs—Fleetwood Mac, Kris Kristofferson, etc. They didn’t blast them at him. They just played them at normal volume. Now, as this man is Western, I’m sure they weren’t trying to freak him out by introducing him to Western music. Which leads me to think …

… Frequencies? Subliminal messages?

What’s your view on this? Do you know any time when frequencies or subliminal sounds have been used by the U.S. military for sure?

With best wishes,

Jon Ronson

I received three replies straightaway:

COMMANDER SID HEAL
(the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department nonlethals expert who told me about the Bucha Effect): Most interesting, but I haven’t a clue. I know that subliminal messages can be incorporated and that they have a powerful influence. There are laws prohibiting it in the U.S., but I’m not aware of any uses like you describe. I would
imagine, however, that it would be classified and no one without a “need to know” would be aware anyway. If it were frequencies, it would probably need to be in the audible range or they wouldn’t need to mask them with other sounds.

SKIP ATWATER:
(General Stubblebine’s former psychic spying headhunter): You can bet this activity was purposeful. If you can get anybody to talk to you about this, it would be interesting to know the “success rate” of this technique.

JIM CHANNON:
Strikes me the story you tell is just plain kindness (which still exists).

I couldn’t decide if Jim was being delighfully naive, infuriatingly naive, or sophisticatedly evasive. (Major Ed Dames, the mysterious Art Bell psychic-unit whistleblower and a neighbor of Jim’s, had once described him to me in an unexpected way. He’d said, “Don’t be taken in by Jim’s hippie demeanor. Jim isn’t airy at all. He’s like the local warlord. He
runs
that part of Hawaii. Jim is a very shrewd man.”)

Then Colonel John Alexander responded to my e-mail. Colonel Alexander remains the army’s leading pioneer of nonlethal technologies, a role he created for himself in part after reading and being inspired by Jim’s manual.

COLONEL ALEXANDER:
Re your assertion he was innocent. If so, how did he get captured in Afghanistan? Don’t think there were many British tourists who happened to be traveling there when our forces arrived. Or maybe he was a cultural anthropologist studying the progressive social order of
the Taliban as part of his doctoral dissertation and was just mistakenly detained from his education. Perhaps if you believe this man’s story you’d also be interested in buying a bridge from me? As for the music, I have no idea what that might be about. Guess hard rockers might take that as cruel and unusual punishment and want to report it to Amnesty International as proof of torture.

Jokes about the use of music in interrogation didn’t seem that funny anymore—not to me, and I doubt they did to him either. Colonel Alexander has spent a lifetime in the world of plausible deniability and I think he’s got to the stage where he just trots these things out. Colonel Alexander has just returned from four months in Afghanistan advising the army on something he wouldn’t talk about.

I e-mailed him back:

Is there anything you can tell me about the use of subliminal sounds and frequencies in the military’s arsenal? If anyone alive today is equipped to answer that question, surely you are.

His response arrived instantly. He said my assertion that the U.S. army would ever entertain the possibility of using subliminal sounds or frequencies “just doesn’t make sense.”

Which was strange.

I dug out an interview I’d conducted with the colonel the preceding summer. I hadn’t been that interested in acoustic weapons at that point—I was trying to find out about Sticky Foam and goat staring—but the conversation had, I now remembered, briefly touched on them.

“Has the army ever blasted anyone with subliminal sounds?” I had asked him.

“I have no idea,” he said.

“What’s a ‘psycho-correction’ device?” I asked him.

“I have no idea,” he said. “It has no basis in reality.”

“What are silent sounds?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” he said. “It sounds like an oxymoron to me.”

He gave me a hard look, which seemed to suggest that I was masquerading as a journalist but was, in fact, a dangerous and irrational conspiracy nut.

“What’s your name again?” he said.

I felt myself blush. I was suddenly finding Colonel Alexander quite frightening. Jim Channon has a page in his manual dedicated to the facial expression a Warrior Monk should adopt when meeting an enemy or a stranger for the first time. “A consistent, subtle and haunting smile,” Jim wrote. “A deep and unblinking look indicating the real person is home and comfortable with all. A quiet and calm stare indicating a willingness to be open.” Colonel Alexander was now giving me what I can only describe as a haunting and unblinking stare.

I told him my name again.

He said, “Pixie dust.”

“Sorry?” I said.

“This is not something that has been brought up or addressed, and we have covered the waterfront of nonlethal technologies,” he said. “We are not warping people’s brains or monitoring people or da da da da da. It’s just nonsense.”

“I’m confused,” I said. “I don’t know much about this
subject but I’m sure I’ve seen your name linked with something called a ‘psycho-correction device.’”

“It makes no sense,” he said. He looked baffled. Then he said that yes, he had sat in on meetings where this sort of thing was discussed, but there was no evidence that machines like this would ever work. “How would you do that [blast someone with silent sounds] without it affecting us? Anybody who’s out there would hear it.”

“Earplugs?” I said.

“Oh, come on,” he said.

“Of course,” I said. “You’re right.”

And then the conversation had moved on to the subject of staring goats to death—“In a scientifically controlled environment,” said Colonel Alexander—and that’s when he told me that the man who achieved this feat was not Michael Echanis but Guy Savelli.

How could you blast someone with silent sounds “without it affecting us?”

This struck me at the time as an unassailable argument, and one that cut through all the paranoid theories circulating on the Internet about mind-control machines putting voices into people’s heads. Of course it couldn’t work. In fact, it was a relief to believe Colonel Alexander because it made me feel sensible again, and not the nut his look had suggested I was. Now we were once again two sensible people—a colonel and a journalist—discussing rational things in a sagacious manner.

The thing is, I now realized, if silent sounds
had
been used against Jamal inside an interrogation room at Guantanamo
Bay, there was a clue in Jamal’s account, a clue that suggested that military intelligence had craftily solved the vexing problem highlighted by Colonel Alexander.

“He put the CD in,” Jamal had said, “and he left the room.”

Next, I dug out the recently leaked military report titled
Non-Lethal Weapons: Terms and References.
There were a total of twenty-one acoustic weapons listed, in various stages of development, including the Infrasound (“Very low-frequency sound which can travel long distances and easily penetrate most buildings and vehicles ... biophysical effects: nausea, loss of bowels, disorientation, vomiting, potential internal organ damage or death may occur. Superior to ultra-sound …”).

And then the last but one entry—the Psycho-Correction Device, which “involves influencing subjects visually or aurally with embedded subliminal messages.”

I turned to the front page. And there it was. The coauthor of this document was Colonel John Alexander.

And so our e-mails continued.

I asked for the colonel’s permission to include in this book his views on the Guantanamo story, and he replied:

Not sure what you mean by the Guantanamo story. My take on this whole thing is much bigger. IMHO [in my humble opinion] World War X is on, and it is religious. We are now faced with a problem of how to handle prisoners caught in a war that never ends. Nobody has asked that before. The traditional response (over millennia) is to kill them or put them into slavery. Tough to do in today’s environment.

It seemed obvious to me what his alternative was, knowing what I did about his area of expertise. If you couldn’t kill your adversaries, or keep them imprisoned forever, there was surely only one option left in the Colonel Alexander canon: You change their minds.

The
First Earth Battalion Operations Manual
had encouraged the development of devices that could “direct energy into crowds.” History seems to show that whenever there is a great American crisis—the War on Terror, the trauma of Vietnam and its aftermath, the Cold War—its military intelligence is drawn to the idea of thought control. They come up with all manner of harebrained schemes to try out, and they all sound funny until the schemes are actually implemented.