The Men Who Stare at Goats (26 page)

—James Meek,
The Guardian.

I suppose this has been a book about the changing relationship between Jim Channon’s ideas and the army at large. Sometimes the army seems like a nation, and Jim a village somewhere in the middle, like Glastonbury, looked on fondly but basically ignored. At other times, Jim seems right in the heart of things.

Perhaps the story is this: In the late 1970s, Jim, traumatized from Vietnam, sought solace in the emerging human-potential movement in California. He took his ideas back into the army and they struck a chord with the top brass, who had never before seen themselves as new age, but in their post-Vietnam funk it all made sense to them.

But then, over the decades that followed, the army, being what it is, recovered its strength and saw that some of the ideas contained within Jim’s manual could be used to shatter people rather than heal them. Those are the ideas that live on in the War on Terror.

The “bureaucrat” referred to in
The Guardian
article, Paul Bremer, may have left the country today, but he has left behind him in Iraq 160,000 troops, the vast majority of them American. According to a July 2004 report by the Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy in Focus, 52 percent of those American soldiers are experiencing low morale, 15 percent have screened positive for traumatic stress, 7.3 percent for anxiety, and 6.9 percent for depression. The suicide
rate among American soldiers has increased from an eight-year average of 11.9 per 100,000 to 15.6 per 100,000.

As of September 2004, a total of 1,175 coalition soldiers have been killed since the war began, including 1,040 Americans. Some 7,413 more have been wounded. Military hospitals have reported a sharp increase in the number of amputations—the result of an “improved” design of body armor that protects vital organs but not limbs.

Between 12,800 and 14,843 Iraqi civilians are now dead as a result of the U.S. invasion and the ensuing occupation, with 40,000 more injured. These figures are less exact because nobody has really been keeping count.

Eighty percent of Iraqis say they have “no confidence” in either the U.S. civilian authorities or the coalition troops, in part, I’ve no doubt, because of the photographs that detailed the methods of interrogation employed by military intelligence at Abu Ghraib.

I have had the strangest telephone call. It was from somebody I’ve written about in this book, a man who continues to work within the U.S. military. I almost didn’t include what he told me because it is utterly outlandish and impossible to substantiate. But it also rings true. He said he’d tell me the secret on the condition that I didn’t reveal his name.

Before I repeat what he said, I should explain why I believe it rings true.

First, outlandishness hasn’t stopped them before.

I once asked Colonel Alexander if there had been some sort of post-9/11 renaissance of MK-ULTRA.

“Not necessarily LSD,” I added, “but a nonlethal weapon type of MK-ULTRA. Take the Guantanamo Bay ghetto-blaster story. Surely the most likely explanation is that they were playing him some kind of mind-altering noise, buried somewhere below Fleetwood Mac.”

“You’re sounding ridiculous,” he replied.

He was right. I was sounding just as ridiculous as I sounded when I asked friends of Michael Echanis if they knew whether Michael had ever been involved in “influencing livestock from afar.” But those were the cards this story had dealt me.

(Remember that the crazy people are not always to be found on the outside. Sometimes the crazy people are deeply embedded on the inside. Not even the most imaginative conspiracy theorist has ever thought to invent a scenario in which a crack team of Special Forces soldiers and major generals secretly try to walk through their walls and stare goats to death.)

“Listen,” said Colonel Alexander, crossly. “Nobody who lived through the trauma of MK-ULTRA” (he was talking about the trauma on the intelligence side, the trauma of being found out, not the trauma on the Olsons’ side) “would ever involve themselves in something like that again. Nobody who lived through all those congressional hearings, that media reaction …” He paused. Then he said, “Sure, you’ve got kids in intelligence who’ve read all about MK-ULTRA and think, ‘Gee. That sounds cool. Why don’t we try
that
out?’ But you’d never get a reactivation at command level.”

Of course, a bunch of young enthusiasts in military intelligence
thinking “that sounds cool” is exactly how these things can spring to life, and have done before.

The other reason why I think the secret rings true revolves around the mystery of why Major Ed Dames decided one day to reveal on the Art Bell show the existence of the psychic spying unit. When I asked Major Dames in Maui what his motive for this was, he shrugged and a faraway look crossed his face and he said, “I didn’t have any motive. I didn’t have any motive at all.”

But he said it in such a way as to lead me to think that he actually had a very shrewd, secret motive. At the time I put Ed’s pointedly enigmatic half-smile down to his well-deserved reputation as a somewhat self-aggrandizing mystery monger.

Many people blamed Ed for the closure of the unit, and some smelled a conspiracy. Ed’s former psychic colleague Lyn Buchanan once told me he’d come to believe there was
another
psychic unit, even more deeply hidden, and presumably with more glamorous offices than theirs, and that the reason why
their
unit was revealed to the world was to divert attention from this mysterious other psychic team. Lyn’s implication was that Ed was instructed to reveal the secrets by some high-up cabal.

At the time, I didn’t give this theory much credence. I have often found that people at the heart of perceived conspiracies are often conspiracy theorists themselves. (I remember once speaking with a high-ranking Freemason from their Washington, D.C., headquarters. He said to me, “Of course it is simply absurd to think that the Freemasons secretly rule the world, but I’ll tell you who does secretly rule the world: the
Trilateral Commission.”) I put Lyn’s assertion down to that peculiar facet of the conspiracy world.

But now I’m not so sure.

After Lyn Buchanan had presented his theory to me I e-mailed Skip Atwater, the extremely levelheaded former psychic headhunter from Fort Meade. Skip had been deeply involved in the unit, in an administrative capacity, between 1977 and 1987. Was there, I asked him, any truth to what Lyn had said?

He e-mailed me back:

It is true that if asked about the use of remote viewing, psychics, or whatever, the CIA can now say something like, “There was a program, but it has since been closed.” And that is a true statement, but it’s not the whole truth. For security reasons, I cannot detail further information about non [Fort Meade] programs. I would suppose however, that since the years that I was privy to such information, these efforts have changed direction a bit and are now highly focused on counterterrorism. For reasons of security management, it would be customary to … well, perhaps I shouldn’t go on at this point.

And that was the end of Skip’s e-mail.

I know that almost every former psychic spy from the old Fort Meade unit received a telephone call from the intelligence services in the weeks that followed 9/11. They were told that if they had any psychic visions of future terrorist attacks they shouldn’t hesitate to inform the authorities.

And they did, in their droves. Ed Dames had a terrible
vision of al-Qaeda sailing a boat full of explosives into a nuclear submarine in San Diego harbor.

“I knew bin Laden’s people were clever,” Ed said to me of his vision, “but I hadn’t realized they were
that
clever.”

Ed reported his findings to the California Coast Guard’s office.

Uri Geller had his telephone call from Ron, but that is all I know about Uri and Ron.

A number of second-generation remote viewers (psychic spies who learned the trade from members of the Fort Meade unit and subsequently set up their own training schools) were also contacted by the intelligence communities post-9/11. One—a woman named Angela Thompson—had a vision of mushroom clouds over Denver, Seattle, and Florida. I was present at a reunion convention of the former military psychics at a Doubletree Hotel in Austin, Texas, in the spring of 2002, when Angela presented her mushroom-cloud findings. The conference room was full of retired psychic spies and intelligence officers. When Angela said “mushroom clouds over Denver, Seattle, and Florida,” everybody in the room gasped.

Prudence Calabrese was in the room. All seemed to have been forgiven regarding the Heaven’s Gate mass suicides, because the FBI telephoned Prudence in late September 2001 and asked her to let them know as soon as she had any visions of future terrorist attacks.

Prudence did indeed have a vision, she told me, a truly awful vision. She FedExed the details of her vision to the FBI. They thanked her and have been requesting more psychic information ever since, she said.

“What was the vision?” I asked her.

There was a short silence.

“Put it this way,” she said. “London is an area of high concern. It’s certainly an area we’ve looked at and there’s reason to be concerned if you live in London.”

“I live in London,” I said.

Prudence tried to change the subject, but I wouldn’t let her.

“When?” I asked.

“Two-thirty in the morning!” she snapped. Then she laughed and turned serious. “Really, we’re not at liberty to give any more information on this.”

“Is there
anything
else you can tell me?” I asked.

“We know enough to be certain that something is going to happen,” she said, “and we know enough to know the general vicinity in which something will happen.”

“A landmark?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Prudence.

“A Houses of Parliament–type landmark?” I asked.

“I’m not going to tell you,” she said.

“Surely not Buckingham Palace,” I said, shocked.

It was at this point that my interrogation of Prudence finally cracked her.

“It’s London Zoo,” she said.

London Zoo was about to be hit by a dirty bomb, she said, one so powerful it would knock over the nearby BT Tower.

“How do you
know
this?” I asked, visibly upset.

“The elephants,” she said.

The elephants were screaming in agony in her psychic vision, Prudence explained. The pain of the London Zoo elephants
was the most intense and powerful image she had received. Prudence had gathered a team of fourteen psychic employees, based in Carlsbad, near San Diego. All fourteen of them, she said, had felt the pain of the elephants.

When I returned home to the United Kingdom I discovered to my relief that the London Zoo elephants had, some months prior to Prudence’s psychic vision, all been moved to the Whipsnade Wild Animal Park, in rural Bedfordshire, about thirty miles north of London. How could the elephants be collateral damage in a London Zoo dirty bomb if there weren’t any elephants left at London Zoo?

I have wondered whether Tom Ridge’s Department of Homeland Security has ever issued a nonspecific warning of a future terrorist attack based on intelligence provided by a psychic. I spent a few weeks trying to find out whether they had, but my calls got me nowhere and I gave up and the psychics drifted from my mind.

I hadn’t spent much time thinking about the psychics until I received the telephone call out of the blue and the man on the other end said he had a secret to reveal as long as I promised to protect his identity.

“Okay,” I said.

“Do you know about remote viewing?” he said.

“The psychic spies?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “There’s a
lot
of interest in it again.”

“I know
that,”
I said.

I told him about Ed and Angela and Prudence and Uri and the mysterious Ron.

“I don’t suppose you know who Ron is?” I asked him.

“I’m not talking about
those
remote viewers,” he said. “They’ve got some new guys in, and they’re using remote viewing in a
very
different way.”

“Mmm?” I said.

“They’re taking remote viewing out of the office,” he said.

“I’m sorry?” I said.

“They’re taking remote viewing
out—of—the—office.”

“Okay, thanks,” I said.

I had no idea what he was telling me but it didn’t sound like a particularly good secret.

“Do you understand?” he said, exasperated. “Remote viewing is no longer office based.”

“Uh,” I said.

I think he was beginning to suspect he had picked the wrong journalist to reveal his secret to.

“I’m sorry that I’m not savvy enough to understand what you are cryptically telling me,” I said.

“What do you know about the history of remote viewing?” he asked, slowly.

“I know it was office based,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said.

“And it is no longer so?” I said, my eyes narrowing.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he said. “If it’s no longer office based then …”

He paused. He had two choices. He could either continue to reveal the secret enigmatically—which was a method that was clearly annoying both of us a little—or he could just come right out and tell me. And so he did.

“Psychic assassins,” he announced. “Cool, eh? They’re
teaching the Special Op assassins, the Fort Bragg guys who go out into the field to track down and assassinate terrorists, how to be psychic. They used to rely on hard intelligence, but things are changing. Intelligence is so often flawed. So instead they’re going back to the power of the mind.”

“How does it work?” I asked.

“We drop a Special Op guy in a jungle or a desert or at a border,” he said. “We know the target is a few miles away but we don’t know exactly where. What do we do? Wait for the spy planes? Wait for an interrogator to crack a prisoner? Sure, we do these things, but now we can augment all that with the power of the mind.”

“So the assassins,” I said, “while waiting for hard intelligence, psychically envisage the location of their targets and start tracking straightaway?”