The Men Who Stare at Goats (9 page)

They couldn’t get their back door open. It had been locked and painted shut dozens of times over the years. Nobody knew where the key was. During one particularly hot day they began almost to faint in there, and so the talk got around to whether they should kick the door open and get a breeze going through.

“We can’t,” said Lyn Buchanan. “We don’t
exist.
If we kick it open, nobody will come and fix it.”

(It was Lyn Buchanan who recounted this story to me, when I met him in the summer of 2003 at a hotel in Las Vegas.)

“Leave it to me,” said psychic spy Joe McMoneagle. He disappeared and returned twenty minutes later with a detailed and psychically divined sketch of the missing key. Joe McMoneagle then drove into town to a local locksmith, got the key made from the sketch, returned to the unit, unlocked the back door, and pried through the paint.

“Oh, Joe’s good,” said Lyn Buchanan. “Joe is very good.”

I visited Joe McMoneagle a few months later. He lives in Virginia now. I mentioned Lyn Buchanan’s story about the key. After I told him what Lyn had said, Joe smiled somewhat guiltily.

“I, uh, actually picked the lock,” he admitted.

He explained that Lyn had seemed so bedazzled, and it had given the flagging morale of the psychic spies such a
boost, that he hadn’t had the heart to inform them of the fact that the door was opened using nonpsychic means.

Working conditions at Fort Meade were so grim that a conspiracy theory began to flourish within its condemned walls. There they were, hitherto ordinary soldiers who had been handpicked and initiated into a fabulously secret military psychic elite, which turned out to be utterly humdrum. Lyn Buchanan and some of his colleagues had consequently come to believe that there must be
another
secret psychic unit, even more deeply embedded, and presumably with more glamorous offices than theirs.

“I got to think that we were there in order to be caught,” Lyn said when I met him in Las Vegas.

Lyn is a soft-eyed, folksy-looking man who—for all the dismal working conditions—sees his time in the old unit as the happiest days of his life.

“What do you mean, ‘there to be caught’?” I asked him.

“You know,” said Lyn. “If the
National Enquirer
ever got wind of it, the army could have said to them, ‘Yes, we
do
have a secret psychic unit. Here they are.’”

Hang the psychics out to dry—postulated Lyn with some bitterness—so that the other psychics, whoever they were, would be left in peace to continue their even more secret work.

So in the summer of 1983, when General Stubblebine asked the team to divine in which room of a particular villa in Panama City Noriega was staying, and what Noriega was thinking about while he was there, they sprang into action, delighted for some distraction.

General Stubblebine simultaneously ordered a team of
nonpsychic spies to rent an apartment down the road from Noriega’s villa. The timing was critical. The moment the Fort Meade psychics delivered their divinations, General Stub-blebine phoned the nonpsychics in Panama and ordered them to climb over the wall, get inside the villa, and plant bugs in Noriega’s rooms. Unfortunately, two of Noriega’s guard dogs were alerted during the covert raid, and the nonpsychics were chased back over the wall.

General Noriega responded to this assault by placing a huge amulet around his neck and driving to a nearby beach where his personal sorcerer, a Brazilian named Ivan Trilha, erected an illuminated cross to ward off American intelligence operatives.

General Stubblebine had his adversaries at home too. His superior officer, General John Adams Wickham, the army’s chief of staff, was not a fan of the paranormal. General Stub-blebine had attempted to captivate him at a high-level black-tie party in a Washington hotel by producing from his tuxedo pocket a piece of bent cutlery, but General Wickham recoiled, horrified.

The reason General Wickham felt the way he did about bent cutlery can be found in Deuteronomy,
chapter 18
, verses 10–11:

“There shall not be found among you
any one
that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination ... or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.”

General Wickham believed, and in fact told colleagues, that Satan had somehow taken over General Stubblebine’s
soul. It was Satan, not General Stubblebine, who had bent the fork.

In later White House administrations, including that of George W. Bush, General Wickham has continued to command respect. In his autobiography, Colin Powell twice refers to him as “my mentor,” and in June 2002 he received George

W. Bush’s American Inspirations Award for his work as part of the Presidential Prayer Team, a 3-million-strong community of Americans who log on to
presidentialprayerteam.org
every week to be told what to pray for:

Pray for the ongoing efforts in the war on terror, that the President and all his intelligence sources will obtain the most helpful information in safeguarding America. Pray for them to have godly wisdom in the manner in which they handle each bit of information. Pray for the effectiveness of a new fingerprinting initiative that will screen foreign travelers entering America. Pray for the strong relationship between Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair. Pray that the President will continue to be guided by the Lord in his deliberations with the U.K.

And so on. General Stubblebine might have suggested to General Wickham that prayer groups were not dissimilar to spoon-bending-type initiatives, both being attempts to harness the power of the mind to influence things from afar, but the general’s unassailable enemy regarding this logic was Deuteronomy,
chapter 18
, verses 10–11.

Funnily enough, and unknown to General Wickham, General Stubblebine had in fact undertaken every one of the
above abominations before the Lord during his tenure as head of army intelligence, with the exception of making his son or daughter pass through fire, although he
had
fire-walked himself in the mountains of Virginia, under the tutelage of the self-help guru Anthony Robbins.

General Wickham’s hard-line interpretation of Deuteronomy was making General Stubblebine’s position untenable, hence his urgent need to come up with an indisputable miracle. Back home in Arlington, his late-night attempts at levi-tation met with no success. The general put this failure, too, down to his ever-burgeoning in-box, which is why he eventually flew to Fort Bragg in an attempt to persuade Special Forces to burst the hearts of animals just by staring at them. If he didn’t have the time to perfect these powers, perhaps they might.

It is hard to predict whether General Stubblebine might have found a kindred spirit in his commander in chief, President Reagan. The president seemed to have a foot in both camps. His chief of staff, Donald Regan, wrote in his memoirs that “virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House chief of staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise.”

This woman, whose name was Joan Quigley, fixed the exact time when the president would sign the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty in 1987. Joan Quigley now goes by the presumably unauthorized title Presidential Astrologer Joan Quigley.

But the president also shared, with his friend General
Wickham, an abiding respect for the fundamentals of the Bible. When the states of Arkansas and Louisiana passed a law stating that creationism be taught in public schools, the president cheered the initiative, announcing, “Religious America is awakening!”

When I telephoned General Wickham to ask for his account of that black-tie party, he said he remembered it well. It was a big dinner at a place called Quarters One. He couldn’t recall specifically blaming Satan. But, yes, he had recoiled, he said, because as a Christian you have to accept that the supernatural is alive, and it sometimes manifests itself in eerie ways. But General Stubblebine was, broadly speaking, “one of the good guys.”

“I became actually kinda intrigued,” he told me.

General Stubblebine had spotted a flash of curiosity cross General Wickham’s face at the party, and he recognized that this could be a watershed moment in military history. If he could only beguile his famously Christian chief of staff by performing an on-the-spot paranormal demonstration, might this be the moment when the supernatural began its journey toward official recognition by the U.S. army?

This is why General Stubblebine seized the opportunity to say to General Wickham, “I can do it for you
now
if you like. I can bend a spoon for you right now, if you like.”

And this, General Wickham told me, was General Stub-blebine’s error.

“I didn’t want him to bend a spoon in the middle of a
party,”
he said. “It was an inappropriate place to do it.”

It was exactly this sort of overenthusiasm that led to General Stubblebine’s enforced early retirement.

But the supernatural war against Manuel Noriega did not end with General Stubblebine’s departure. Five years later, in December 1989, the United States launched Operation Just Cause to depose Noriega and put him on trial for cocaine smuggling. But when American troops arrived in Panama, they discovered that Noriega had gone into hiding.

An agency within the U.S. government (Sergeant Lyn Buchanan told me he couldn’t remember which it was, and anyway, he said, the information was probably still classified) called up the psychic spies. Where was Noriega? Lyn Buchanan sat inside the clapboard building in Fort Meade, put himself into a trance, and received “a powerful impulse regarding Noriega’s location.”

“Ask Kristy McNichol,” he kept writing on a piece of paper. “Ask Kristy McNichol.”

Sergeant Buchanan was certain that the TV actress Kristy McNichol, who appeared in
Starsky & Hutch,
the ABC miniseries
Family, The Bionic Woman,
and
The Love Boat II,
held the key to the whereabouts of General Noriega. At that time, in December 1989, Kristy McNichol had just recorded the CBS special
Candid Camera! The First 40 Years,
had a guest role in
Murder, She Wrote,
and had starred in the erotic thriller
Two Moon Junction.

“Ask Kristy McNichol,” Lyn continually wrote, in his trance state.

Lyn Buchanan stopped at this point and said he didn’t know whether anyone had acted on his divination. The way the secret psychic unit was structured, he explained, meant that once his divinations had been passed upward, he was rarely given feedback about what happened next. He had
no idea if the authorities subsequently contacted Kristy McNichol.

So I attempted to ask her myself. I e-mailed her to inquire whether by chance she had known where General Manuel Noriega was holed up in December 1989. In addition, was I the first person to have approached her about this matter, or had others, perhaps U.S. intelligence operatives, contacted her in the past?

I never got a reply.

For everyday agnostics, it is not easy to accept the idea that our leaders, and the leaders of our enemies, sometimes seem to believe that the business of managing world affairs should be carried out within both standard and supernatural dimensions.

Over the course of a year or two I contacted everyone I could find who had met Jim Channon during his late-1970s Californian odyssey. One of them was Stuart Heller. Stuart had been introduced to Jim by their mutual friend Marilyn Ferguson—the renowned author of
The Aquarian Conspiracy.
Stuart told me that Jim was “just marvelous.”

These days, Stuart teaches business executives the art of stress control. He visits Apple and AT&T and the World Bank and NASA and coaches their managers in how to remain centered and tranquil amid the workplace hurly-burly. He is one of scores of similar gurus who travel from business to business throughout the Western world, fulfilling Jim’s 1979 prophecy that “what is developing today on the Coast will be the national value set ten years from now.”

At one point during my conversation with Stuart I happened to ask him if he knew anyone who was the living embodiment of the First Earth Battalion. Stuart instantly replied, “Bert Rodriguez.”

“Bert Rodriguez?” I said.

“He’s a martial arts guy down in Florida,” Stuart said. “My younger brother is one of his students. I’ve never met anybody like Bert. His gym is always full of ex-military guys, ex-Special Forces. Spooks. And in the middle there’s my skinny little brother.”

I typed Bert Rodriguez’s name into a search engine and my screen filled with a picture of an intense-looking shaved-headed Cuban with a black mustache, frozen in the act of slamming a huge and sweaty man into the wall of his gym—the US 1 Fitness Center in Dania Beach, Florida.

“Bert once got my brother to lie on the floor,” Stuart said, “and he put a cucumber on his chest, and he blindfolded himself and
wham
! He sliced the cucumber in half with a samurai sword. Didn’t cut my brother at all.
Blindfolded
!”

“Bloody hell,” I said.

“Bert’s one of the most spiritual guys I’ve ever met,” said Stuart. “No. Spiritual is the wrong word. He’s occultic. He’s like a walking embodiment of death. He can stop you at a distance. He can influence physical events just with his mind. If he catches your attention he can stop you without touching you.”

Stuart paused.

“But he doesn’t talk like this. He’s the most First Earth Battalion guy I know but he’s incapable of verbalizing it. He’s a street fighter from Cuba. With Bert it’s just instinctive.
But
everyone
can see it. That’s why people come and train under him.”

In April 2001, Bert Rodriguez took on a new student. His name was Ziad Jarrah. Ziad just turned up at the US 1 Fitness Center one day and said he had heard that Bert was good. Why Ziad chose Bert, of all the martial arts instructors scattered around the Florida shoreline, is a matter of speculation. Maybe Bert’s uniquely occultic reputation preceded him, or perhaps it was Bert’s military connections. Plus, Bert had once taught the head of security for a Saudi prince. Maybe that was it.