18 SPOONBENDER

It scared the hell out of him, quite frankly.... He put the fork down and said, "I wish that hadn't happened."
-Former INSCOM staff officer Colonel John Alexander, recalling an Army colleague's fork bending experience
ACROSS THE CONTINENT AND ACROSS THE ATLANTIC, ON AN INSCOM base in Augsburg, West Germany, lived a soft-spoken, easygoing Texan, Sergeant Leonard "Lye" Buchanan. He spoke Russian, and worked on computers. One day, early in 1984, he was asked to demonstrate a piece of software that helped integrate Army intelligence computers all over his sector of NATO. A group of officers assembled to watch. They were in a room with a large screen on the wall, displaying a map of the border area, with symbols for various NATO and Warsaw Pact military units and installations.
Buchanan started his program, which among other things should have modified the information on the large wall screen. But nothing happened. The screen remained obstinately unchanged. As Buchanan could see from the computer monitor he was working from, his program had crashed. "Did you mess with my program?" he asked a colleague, Stan Snyder, who often did just that. "Just one small change," admitted Snyder. And at that moment, as Buchanan's anger rose, the big screen on the wall went blank. Buchanan didn't know it - he would, soon enough - but hundreds of other computers on the network were crashing, too. They shouldn't have been affected by Buchanan's own flawed software, but they crashed just the same - the entire network - through every fail-safe mechanism written into the code. Getting it all back on-line took hours.
Buchanan had his own theory for why the network had gone down. He believed that similar things had happened to him as a child. For instance, he had once seemed to knock another boy, a neighborhood bully, off a bike - just by looking at the boy and willing it to happen. He had thought all that had been drummed out of him, years before, by the fundamentalist preachers of his East Texas youth, who had no truck with such devilish displays. But for some reason, Buchanan believed, his strange ability had suddenly returned, here in a moment of rage in Augsburg.
A month or so later, a new commander was installed at the Augsburg base. The two-star general who now headed INSCOM came over for the ceremony. His name was Major General Albert N. Stubblebine III.
Stubblebine was the spitting image of the actor Lee Marvin, and he didn't seem to mind the comparison; some at INSCOM actually believed that the two men were brothers. Marvin had been in that World War II film, The Dirty Dozen, in which he commands a group of death row convicts on a suicide mission. It seemed as if the same character were now in charge of INSCOM, and he was as gung-ho as ever. Intelligence and covert-action budgets were booming, in the wake of the perceived espionage failures of the Carter administration. Morale at INSCOM was high; the men and women there seemed genuinely to love their commander.
On the day of the ceremony installing the new base chief at Augsburg, Lyn Buchanan's department head ordered him to go home and put on his dress uniform. Buchanan guessed he was going to be asked to cater for a lunch or a cocktail party associated with the ceremonies. But his boss told him to report to the commander's office. "I don't know what you've done this time, Buchanan, but the general wants to see you."
Several hours later, Buchanan sat in the reception area of the Augsburg commander's office. When the ceremonies outside ended, the new commander walked in with General Stubblebine. Stubblebine's face was a bit softer than Lee Marvin's, and his voice was a husky Oklahoma tenor, not a gravel-bottomed baritone like the actor's. Still, he was an impressive figure, a man who knew he was in command. Stubblebine turned to the new base commander and said, pointing to Sergeant Buchanan, "I want to talk to him in private." Stubblebine then ushered Buchanan into the commander's new office, and closed the door behind them.
Buchanan had no idea why he was there. Had he done something wrong? Stubblebine stood facing him, looking him over, watching his eyes for any sign of guile. Finally, frowning, he challenged the confused sergeant. "Did you crash my computers?"
Buchanan thought about it a few seconds, then replied, "Yes, sir, I did."
A grin stole slowly across the general's face. "Far f**king out!"
It happened that one of Stubblebine's aides had been at Augsburg when the computer network had crashed. He had heard some of the other officers talking about the incident, and had wondered, like Buchanan, whether the incident might be paranormal in nature. The aide knew that Stubblebine was looking for soldiers with psi abilities, especially those with psychokinetic-PK-abilities. The general believed that the remote-viewing program should be augmented with a PK program; Buchanan seemed to be an excellent recruit.
"Would you consider being in a special project?" Stubblebine now asked Buchanan. "Something that would let you make use of your abilities?" "Absolutely, sir," said Buchanan, seeing that a whole new world had opened up for him. A month later, the current commander of the Fort Meade remote-viewing unit, Lieutenant Colonel Brian Busby, came out from Washington with Joe McMoneagle. They discussed the project with Buchanan in general terms. Among other things, they noted that if he joined the project, he would be exposed to psychic phenomena at a level and with a frequency that most people had never experienced before. As a result, he might change in certain ways. Ultimately, no harm should come to him, but he might have a new perspective on himself, his work, his marriage, the universe. In a sense, he might become a new man, and a new husband. Busby took Buchanan and his wife, Linda, out to dinner one night, and made sure Linda got the message, too. She might not be ready for a new husband, he said. She and Lyn should talk this over before they made the final commitment to go to Fort Meade.
So Linda and Lyn talked it over. Linda surprised her husband by saying that his unusual abilities had always been apparent to her. He was the kind of man who always seemed to know who was on the other end of the phone when it rang, or even before it rang. She didn't think he would change that much, but if he did, she would try to be ready.
A few months later, Lyn Buchanan joined the remoteviewing program, and never looked back.
In the halls of the U.S. government in those years, it really was as if a New Age were dawning. The things that were happening seldom made it into the media, and when they did, they somehow lacked resonance. No one seemed to care. And yet, had someone suddenly taken off in a time machine, travelling from Washington in the 1950s to Washington in the early 1980s, he might have wondered if he had the right planet. Here are some examples:
Jim Wright, an influential Democratic congressman from Texas who would soon be House Speaker, was attending lectures on prophecy given by a Virginia psychic named Anne Gehman. She later said that she had evaluated Wright and had found him to have significant psychic powers.
Charlie Rose, Democrat from North Carolina and a friend of Ingo Swann and Jack Vorona, reportedly stood in the gallery of the House one day with a philanthropist named Judy Skutch (Skutch had funded some of SRI's research with Uri Geller.) and a group of psychics, beaming various telepathic pleas at House Speaker Tip O'Neill. They tried to get O'Neill to turn his head one way, then another. Later they psychically asked him to smile upon some projects that had been proposed in Rose's district. Another time, it is said, Rose supported a group of inventors trying to sell the Pentagon an electronic "paranoia inducer." Rose even had the device tested on himself, and concluded somehow that it worked, although the Pentagon apparently was unconvinced and never bought the device.
Rose was also unabashed about his support for the RV program. "I've seen some incredible examples of remote viewing," he told one journalist, "so much so that I think we ought to pay close attention to developments in this field, and especially to what the Soviets are doing." The Soviets, he said, "are up to their asses in this stuff."
Senator John Tower of Texas, ranking minority member of the Armed Services Committee, was said to be another supporter of the RV program, as was Claiborne Pell (D-RI). Pell by the early eighties was famously New Ageish; he consulted not only psychics but spirit mediums. The kindly Rhode Island senator used a medium to try to communicate with dead Soviet leaders, to encourage them to communicate, in turn, with current Soviet leaders and convince them of the need for peace. Pell didn't even try to conceal his interest; he hired a full-time staffer, a former Navy intelligence officer named C. B. "Scott" Jones, just to keep track of paranormal matters for him.
This enthusiasm for psi and other far-out areas was embodied by more than just a loose network of interested individuals; it was increasingly a collective, corporate enthusiasm. Congressional committees now regularly signed off on budget requests for the Fort Meade and SRI units, and small groups of congressional enthusiasts occasionally met with Hal Puthoff, Jack Vorona, General Stubblebine, and others involved in managing the program. In the summer of 1981, the House Science and Technology Committee issued a report, surveying science and technology "present and future," which declared: "Recent experiments in remote-viewing and other studies in parapsychology suggest that there is an 'interconnectedness' of the human mind with other minds and with matter.... The implication of these experiments is that the human mind may be able to obtain information independent of geography and time.... Given the potentially powerful and far-reaching implications of knowledge in this field, and given that the Soviet Union is widely acknowledged to be supporting such research at a far higher and more official level, Congress may wish to undertake a serious assessment of research in this country."
The FBI also seemed open to the idea of psychic information gathering. In early 1981, a psychic named Noreen Renier lectured at the Bureau's training center in Quantico, Virginia, and predicted - accurately, it turned out - that someone would attempt to assassinate President Reagan in the spring. The FBI later set up a network of references linking interested local police departments to psychics who might be able to help them with difficult cases.
The White House itself seemed to be cheering on these efforts. Nancy Reagan often consulted the astrologer Joan Quigley, and White House insiders knew that the President himself approved; in fact, he had been consulting astrologers ever since his days as governor of California. Claiborne Pell's staffer Scott Jones would later quote an administration source as telling him, "This is a very psychic White House."
Grill Flame had its own stables of psychics, at SRI and Fort Meade, but increasingly there seemed to be a robust market for freelance psi spying. Scott Jones was in touch with a ring of psychics around the United States, whom he occasionally put in touch with various intelligence officials on operational matters. One was a freelance psychic named Alex Tannous. In 1984, a few months after the terrorist kidnapping of William Buckley, the CIA's station chief in Beirut, the Agency's Directorate of Operations asked Tannous if he could visualize Buckley's condition in captivity. Tannous described the route Buckley's kidnappers had taken, from the abduction point to the place he was interrogated; he concluded that Buckley had already been tortured to death. The Agency officials hadn't wanted to hear that, but they later found out it was all true. The psychics in Jones's ring also tried to track a potential Reagan assassin, nicknamed "Cat," for the Secret Service.
Rumors would circulate about crystal ball gazers, palmreaders, and other storefront psychics whom CIA and Navy officials occasionally tasked with high-level intelligence targets. At least one of the rumors had truth in it. Sometime in 1980 or so, a young CIA employee, Donald Ebsen, on a lark with his wife, went to see an elderly palm-reader who worked from an office near Tyson's Corner, Virginia. The palm-reader, Jean MacArthur, had hardly begun to inspect Ebsen's palm before she looked up at him and said, "You work for the CIA."
Ebsen gulped, and the woman continued: "You should tell someone at the CIA that saboteurs are going to plant bombs on an oil-drilling platform in the North Sea. It's going to blow up, and a lot of people are going to die."
Ebsen and his wife thanked Mrs. MacArthur, and left. Ebsen wasn't about to mention the incident to anyone. Then, about a week and a half later, he saw on the news that a large Norwegian oil-drilling platform in the North Sea had capsized in a storm, with great loss of life. It had seemed that the platform's design should have enabled it to withstand the storm. Had Mrs. MacArthur been right all along? Ebsen decided to tell his boss about the incident, and eventually he was told to contact Norm Everheart. Everheart was now a technical adviser to the deputy director of operations, John McMahon, and served as the CIA's primary liaison to the psychic spies of Grill Flame.
Everheart listened to Ebsen's story, and sent a levelheaded operations officer he knew, Walt Jerome, to check out Mrs. MacArthur. He instructed Jerome to act just like an ordinary customer, paying Mrs. MacArthur's ordinary rates. But Jerome had barely made it through the door before Mrs. MacArthur said, "I know who you are! I know why you're here!" Norm Everheart was impressed enough by this to send a query through official channels to the Norwegians. How had the platform actually been destroyed? he wanted to know. Why do you want to know that? came the response. Everheart never found out the truth about the tragedy, and the official Norwegian investigation into the possibility of sabotage was "inconclusive."
Through Walt Jerome, Norm Everheart encouraged Mrs. MacArthur to stay in contact, reporting anything that seemed urgent or otherwise interesting. Mrs. MacArthur complied, but she also began to put pressure on Jerome and Everheart to hire her as a full-time CIA employee. She was getting on in years, had health problems, and desperately needed the insurance benefits that would come with government employment. Apparently to encourage the CIA to hire her, she told Jerome that the Israelis had already been consulting her, had given her numerous taskings, and at one point had even flown her over to Israel, to have her do a close-up psychic spying job in the Golan Heights. Neither Jerome nor Everheart knew whether any of this was true. In any case, they couldn't make her an official employee, and the relationship soon tailed off.
But Everheart and Jerome would always remember her strange predictions. One time, in the summer of 1980, just after the failure of the mission to rescue the U.S. hostages in Iran, Mrs. MacArthur had called up Jerome to request an urgent meeting. Jerome drove over to her office near Tysons Corner, and she explained what was bothering her: She wanted to let him know, she said, that she knew the Pentagon was planning a second rescue mission. The operation would swoop in from the west, at such a latitude and such a longitude, and it would involve tanks, planes, and paratroops. Some of the paratroops would land in the water.
A month or so later, at the latitude and longitude Mrs. MacArthur had specified, Iran was indeed invaded by tanks, planes, and paratroops. Some of the paratroops missed their targets and landed in the water. The only thing was, these invaders were not from the United States. They were the army of Iraq, firing some of the opening shots in a brutal war that was to last a decade.
The sun of a New Age shone on Washington in those years, but nowhere did it shine more brightly than on the U.S. Army. General Ed Thompson might have been a supporter of investigations into the paranormal, but the new INSCOM commander, General Stubblebine, seemed to be a true believer, an evangelist.
Stubblebine was a West Point man, with a master's degree in chemical engineering from Columbia University. He had a reputation not only for intelligence but for creativity, for lateral thinking, for viewing problems from unusual angles. His last command before INSCOM had been at the Army's intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. It was there that things had begun to go beyond lateral thinking. Never a religious man, he had started to read books on the paranormal, and had cultivated friendships with others who were interested in these realms.
Not long after Stubblebine reached INSCOM in 1981, Army intelligence began to blossom under his influence with alternative, New Age-style thinking. A "High Performance Task Force" was set up to promote new projects in these alternative areas. There were motivational training exercises for generals and staff colonels, using "neuro-linguistic programming." Taught by the self-help guru Tony Robbins, dozens of these senior officers even walked over beds of hot coals, to demonstrate their supposed hidden potentials. Think cold ice! cold ice! cold ice!
Altered-state and visualization techniques were used to try to enhance learning and boost performance among marksmen and linguists. Meanwhile, INSCOM staff officers were sent to a place called the Monroe Institute, a retreat center in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where they lay in darkened cubicles, listened to altered-state-inducing tapes, and tried to have out-of-body experiences.
An INSCOM staff colonel named John Alexander oversaw many of these projects for Stubblebine. Alexander was a slender Texan with Special Forces training. He had seen combat during the Vietnam War, but since then had felt himself drawn to the alternative realm. After he hooked up with Stubblebine, his career took off. Most officers involved with remote viewing or other paranormal subjects worried that the association would hurt their chances for quick promotions. Not Alexander. He often commented that in his case the reverse was true.
Before arriving at INSCOM, Alexander wrote an unusual article for Military Review, a respected Army journal. Titled "The New Mental Battlefield," the piece promoted remote viewing, and suggested that effective mind-influencing devices were already a "lethal" reality, presumably in Soviet and Eastern European hands. Over the next few years, a number of other stories like these came out of the military woodwork. Charles Wallach, science editor for the journal of Defense and Diplomacy, wrote an article calling for a "psychic service corps." Army Captain Richard Groller, in Military Intelligence, worried that "the Soviet psychotropic program is equivalent to roughly seven Manhattan projects." A retired lieutenant colonel and consultant named Tom Bearden actually obtained Army contracts for studies of "hyperspatial howitzers," alleged Soviet "photonic barrier modulators" - which he blamed for everything from UFOs to Legionnaires' disease - and other absurd-sounding weaponry. Even the Army's partly classified Fire Support Mission Area Analysis of 1981 talked about "cryptomental" technologies - "the relatively unexplored, unexploited human technologies in such areas as influence, communications, thinking, learning, and stress reduction. Discussions in this area represent an excursion into a largely unknown realm which appears to possess significant military application."
Taxpayer dollars were also lavished on something called Task Force Delta, an Army War College project whose mission was to investigate alternative philosophic realms for anything militarily useful. A Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon and several other like-minded officers from the task force soon came up with an idea for something called the "First Earth Battalion," an eco-friendly politically correct warrior-monk vision of the future soldier. Before long, Channon and the others were into role-playing games, acting out this New Age fantasy. In a 1982 report of a Task Force Delta meeting, a Colonel Mike Malone wrote:
I am one of the tribal elders . . . my name is "The Mullet Man." I am known as the one who casts nets. And I try to tell people that of all those who cast nets, most should be concerned with the catching, but some, at least, should focus more on the casting than the catching. I live with, fish for, and push the cause of the mullet, because he is a "low-class" fish. He is simple. He is honest. He moves around in great formations and columns. He does damn near all the work....
Next to Task Force Delta, the things Stubblebine was doing at INSCOM seemed hard-nosed. And although Stubblebine himself, behind closed doors, was arguably as starry-eyed as anyone in the Army, he did have his operational justifications for all the strange projects he supported. Aside from improving performance in specific hands-on skills, he wanted to shake his people up, wanted to get them thinking laterally, like him. He wanted them intellectually prepared for whatever exotic military technologies the Soviets or anyone else might throw at them.
That, at any rate, was how the general often talked about spoonbending.
Uri Geller had popularized the idea of spoonbending with his stage act in the early 1970s, but a decade later the actual manifestation of the phenomenon was being popularized, too. A defense consultant on the West Coast, Jack Houck, was throwing "spoonbending parties," at which people stood around with spoons - in fact, almost any piece of cutlery would do - and concentrated on them, waiting for a psychokinetic bend to begin. Some people tried to jump-start the effect by bending their spoons manually. At any rate, spoons would bend and stories would spread. Before long, Stubblebine, Houck, John Alexander and others were throwing spoonbending parties in the Washington area.
Occasionally, celebrities from the intelligence world came to these parties. One party, around 1983, was hosted by Stubblebine and Alexander and a female psychic they knew. John McMahon, now deputy director of the CIA, was there, along with General Thompson, now a directorate chief at the DIA. When it came time for the main event, there was a short lecture from someone on how to bring about psychokinetic spoonbending, and then the partygoers stood around and concentrated on their spoons and forks. They concentrated, and they concentrated some more. Finally someone's child, a boy of twelve or so, shouted that his spoon was bending. Suddenly a lot of other spoons were bending. General Thompson watched as his own spoon began to curve down at the point he was holding it, down and around as if it were melting in his hands. John McMahon's spoon bent, too; by the time all the psychokinesis had stopped, the deputy director's spoon looked vaguely like a corkscrew. He went into CIA headquarters the next day and told some of his friends and aides about it. He even showed them the spoon, and let Norm Everheart take it home - where it resides today.
That had been just a private party, a bit of entertainment. But for Stubblebine, spoonbending had an important role to play in the management of military intelligence. One weekend a "retreat" was held for senior INSCOM staff officers, at a Xerox-run conference facility near Leesburg, Virginia. Part of the retreat included a cutlery-bending demonstration. Someone handed out spoons and forks, and Stubblebine gave a short talk on how it was done, and then twenty-five to thirty colonels and generals stood around holding these eating utensils and staring at them, waiting for something to happen.
At one point, a somewhat skeptical colonel turned his head to say something to a colleague, and as he did, his fork suddenly drooped into a ninety-degree angle. Everyone looked at him and his fork, at which point the fork bent back up, then down again, and finally settled into an angle of about forty-five degrees. The colonel whose fork it was put the thing down, shaking his head, evidently unsettled. He was a Christian, and later would denounce the entire thing as the trickery of the devil. Alexander kept the fork.
Though some in Grill Flame considered it a mixed blessing, General Stubblebine was also enthusiastic about remote viewing. His support was important, for in 1981, the Army's greatest proponent and protector of remote viewing, Major General Thompson, had departed his post as the assistant chief of staff for intelligence. Thompson's successor, an up-and-coming major general named William Odom, was far less optimistic about the military use of the paranormal.
The center of control over the remote-viewing program therefore shifted from the ACSI's office, now occupied by Odom, to INSCOM, run by Stubblebine. Under Stubblebine, the remote-viewing unit was first turned into a formal detachment - Detachment G, or Det-G-within INSCOM's Operations Group. Then, in 1983, the unit received its own code name, "Center Lane," and shifted from the Operations Group to the more direct control of Stubblebine's office at INSCOM headquarters. The unit now became known as ICLP-for "INSCOM Center Lane Project."
Scotty Watt, his tour over, was replaced by a Lieutenant Colonel Jachim in 1982, and he in turn was replaced in 1983 by Lieutenant Colonel Brian Busby. Busby was reasonably well liked, and was seen by the unit as a highflier, a man with a good career ahead of him. Busby and Skip Atwater regularly briefed senior Army and DIA officials on the program, and at times even went up to Capitol Hill to discuss the remote-viewing unit's work with sympathetic senators and representatives.
Despite all the high-level attention and support, the Stubblebine years were an unsettling interlude for the unit. The first generation of viewers was fading away, and as it did, the unit was metamorphosing into something else, something whose ultimate shape was still unclear.
In the first phase of its existence, the unit had relied on more or less freestyle techniques for remote viewing. But in this new phase, a shift was beginning toward a more complex, standardized, and apparently "improved" style of remote viewing, based on Ingo Swann's work at SRI.
Atwater, Watt, and later Jachim searched the pool of talent coming out of the Army's advanced intelligence course at Fort Huachuca, and by early 1982, the remoteviewing unit had two new members, Captain Tom Nance and Captain Rob Cowart. The two began travelling out to SRI every few weeks for training. Swann was still developing his remote-viewing technique, and hadn't yet made it past Stage Three. He considered Nance and Cowart experimental prototypes of his eventual trainees, and warned INSCOM that their instruction in the fine arts of psi spying could take a long, long time.
While Nance and Cowart were in training, almost all of the operational RV work at Fort Meade was done by the unit's old-timers - Joe McMoneagle, Ken Bell, and Hartleigh Trent. But as the old-timers kept things running, they increasingly resented being treated as old-timers. Like Keith Harary and Gary Langford at SRI, they had doubts about the complex technique being pushed by Ingo Swann. They agreed with - even preached themselves - some of Swann's insights. But they believed that the specific "technique" a remote viewer used wasn't nearly as important as the viewer's own, natural psi ability. They didn't see enough evidence of strong natural ability in the newcomers. Convinced that the program was headed downhill, managerially and philosophically, Bell left the remote-viewing unit in 1982 for a more conventional intelligence posting.
McMoneagle, now only two years from retirement, stayed on, but continued to argue against the direction the program was taking. At the same time, ironically, he took on an increasing share of the work at the unit, and when health problems began to sideline Rob Cowart and Hartleigh Trent in 1982, McMoneagle became the sole viewer for almost every operational project that came in.
One of the first big remote-viewing operations of the Stubblebine era began very strangely, a week or so before Christmas 1981. The target was the international terrorist known as "Carlos." There were concerns, in some intelligence circles, that he might be planning an assassination attempt on President Reagan.
Reagan, of course, had already narrowly missed being assassinated in March 1981, when John Hinckley shot him on a Washington sidewalk. (According to one story, the FBI collected and destroyed Reagan's bloody clothes after the assassination attempt, to avoid the use of the material, voodoo-style, by enemy psychics.) In the months following the incident, it had become clear that assassination and terrorism were now major intelligence problems. In May, Pope John Paul II was shot and almost killed by a Turkish man with Bulgarian ties. In October, Egypt's President Anwar el-Sadat was assassinated in a massive assault by Islamic extremists. By the end of the year, threats by Libya's Muammar Qaddafi against President Reagan's life, and rumors of Libyan "hit squads" sent around the world to kill various American personnel, had created near hysteria in U.S. intelligence agencies. As a result, President Reagan began to travel around Washington in an unmarked limousine convoy, while decoy convoys roamed elsewhere. The Secret Service began to assign security guards to the children of some White House staffers, and advised the Reagans not to venture outdoors for the National Christmas Tree lighting ceremony, asking them instead to light the tree from indoors. And in case someone tried to get at the Reagans within the White House, say, by crashing a plane into the building, there were now a pair of heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles installed on the roof.
Like the rest of the intelligence community, the remote viewers at SRI and Fort Meade were caught up in this tide of worry. For the next several years, suspected terrorists and their sponsors were frequent targets of RV operations.
For the Carlos operation, Puthoff at SRI and Atwater at Fort Meade were asked to use the remote viewers to find out whether Carlos had entered the United States, and if so, where he was. One day, Gary Langford was in the remote-viewing room at SRI, attempting to come to psychic grips with Carlos, when Hal Puthoff heard him describe something completely unlike all the Carlos sessions that had gone before. Yet Langford was as sure of this as anything.
Langford saw a blue van, with odd white markings on the side. A group of Mediterranean-looking kidnappers were driving the van. In a large trunk in the back of the van, bound and gagged, was their captive - a high-ranking U.S. official. Langford even sketched the trunk, labelling its dimensions. He sensed that this was all taking place a few days in the future. He also sensed that it was somehow inevitable. Nothing that he or any other remote viewer did would prevent it, or would end it once it had happened.
Puthoff knew it was still worth a try. Via Jim Salyer, the DIA's contract representative at SRI, Langford's data quickly landed on the desks of FBI and DIA counterterrorist officers. An alert was secretly issued to certain federal offices, warning of a possible kidnapping attempt against a senior U.S. official, perhaps in the Washington area.
Several days later, at the time Langford had predicted, Red Brigades terrorists in the city of Verona, Italy, seven thousand miles away from Menlo Park, broke into the apartment of Brigadier General James Dozier, a senior officer in the U.S. Army's European Command and NATO's Southern European command. Leaving Dozier's wife bound and gagged in the apartment, the terrorists bundled the general into a trunk, put the trunk in their blue van - which had distinctive white markings on the side - and sped away.
Where they were now holding Dozier, no one knew. What everyone did know was that, three years earlier, the Red Brigades had carried out a similar kidnapping of the Christian Democratic leader Aldo Moro; eventually Moro's bullet-riddled body had been found in the back of an abandoned car.
U.S. authorities were determined to get Dozier back, and the kidnapping sparked a massive and international intelligence operation, with different U.S. agencies and military branches vying for control in Washington.
Stubblebine and INSCOM were relatively minor players, although Dale Graff, now at the DIA after his falling-out with the Air Force, managed to keep a line open to the remote viewers. Gary Langford, after his inadvertent success in describing the kidnappers' blue van, was flown to the Pentagon. He impressed officials there with further, precise descriptions of the kidnapping scene; he even noted, correctly, that one of Mrs. Dozier's earrings had ended up in a certain place on the floor of the apartment.
But of course, Pentagon officials wanted information they didn't already know; they wanted to know where Dozier was being held. Langford went on to provide details of where he thought the kidnappers' hideout was located, and with his data in hand, an Army officer flew to Europe to share the new intelligence with the Italians, who were running the day-to-day searches. Unfortunately, the officer soon found that Langford's leads on Dozier's whereabouts didn't appear to be accurate, or at any rate didn't provide enough information to find the kidnapped general.
Even worse, for SRI and Fort Meade, the Dozier case by this time was becoming overwhelmed by information from other psychics, most of them freelancers contacted by various military officials. At the urging of one DIA official, a Navy captain, a freelance psychic was flown out to the Dozier case operations center in Vicenza, Italy, to try to provide leads at close range. The psychic, Ted Wheatley, immediately began demanding special treatment, and kept U.S. and Italian officials busy with various dietary and lodging requirements. Finally, he told them where he thought Dozier was: "I see a small house, made of stone. It is surrounded by a stone wall and a few trees. It has a tile roof and there is a road junction nearby and mountains in the background." Wheatley's information, vague as it was, convinced the Italians that Dozier was being held in a specific house in a semirural area near Padua. They mounted an operation to free the general, and one morning, at dawn, a large team of Italian carabinieri sealed off the house from its surrounding neighborhood and then charged through the doors. Inside, they found an innocent - and presumably traumatized - Italian family.
Back at Fort Meade, Joe McMoneagle worked hard on the Dozier problem and eventually described a room on the second floor of a different building in Padua. He sketched a radiator on one wall, and a distinctive facade for the small store that he believed comprised the building's ground floor. The description seemed detailed enough to identify the location, but by this time, Pentagon planners were tiring of psychic data - there seemed to be no end of it - and McMoneagle's efforts didn't make it up the chain of command in time.
Dozier was eventually found in Padua, thanks in part to an extensive SIGINT operation by U.S. special-operations teams, which enabled the roundup of two dozen Red Brigades members in the area. One of the terrorists, who was either arrested or turned himself in for fear of imminent capture, gave Italian officials details of the hideout where Dozier was being kept. When Dozier was freed, he was in the second-story room McMoneagle had described, with the radiator on the wall and the store with the distinctive facade below.
Terrorism became a major focus again for the U.S. intelligence community in 1983, after the United States tried to establish a peacekeeping presence among warring Christian and Islamic militias in Lebanon. First a car bomb destroyed the U.S. Embassy, and a few months later another one demolished a barracks housing several hundred U.S. Marines. The bombings were carried out by the Hezbollah group of Shiite Muslim militants, sponsored by Iran and Syria and led by a cleric named Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah.
In response to the bombings, the Pentagon and the CIA wanted to strike Syrian military positions in Lebanon as well as Fadlallah himself. Concentrated on this effort were numerous intelligence assets, including reconnaissance satellites and aircraft, electronic intercepts, CIA-controlled Lebanese agents, and U.S. Army covert action squads. Fadlallah's house in southern Beirut was soon pinpointed and photographed, and Fort Meade and SRI remote viewers were asked to "go inside" and describe what they saw. They did, detailing floor plans, the positions of doors, windows, and locks, and who was normally in the house. Some of the information was later confirmed, but the operation to strike Fadlallah was abandoned by the Pentagon, ostensibly for fear of killing too many innocent bystanders. The operation may simply have been left to the Lebanese, for in early 1985, a Beirut militia group with CIA ties set off an enormous car bomb in front of Fadlallah's house, killing eighty people. Fadlallah, alas, was not among them.
One operation from the Stubblebine era was originated by Stubblebine himself. Part of an INSCOM project codenamed "Landbroker," it was aimed at Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.
The U.S. Army, with its huge Southern Command based in Panama, had a strange relationship with Noriega. He was on the one hand its host, and an occasional source of information, while on the other hand he was increasingly its adversary: He appeared to be running guns to leftist rebels in Central and South America, high-tech American goods to Moscow, and drugs to the United States; it was thought he had even managed to penetrate the U.S. Army with his own agents.
After INSCOM commander Stubblebine came back from one trip to Panama in 1983, angrily convinced that his room had been bugged by the dictator, he decided to set up Landbroker, an operation to spy directly on Noriega using an INSCOM special-operations squad called the Quick Reaction Team (QRT). One target was a villa where Noriega occasionally stayed in Panama City. QRT agents rented an apartment nearby, photographed the villa from several angles, and memorized the layout of the grounds. The photographs were sent back to Fort Meade, where they ended up, among other places, in sealed envelopes in building 2560. As Atwater held the envelopes and monitored the sessions, Joe McMoneagle tried to describe the inside layout of the house. He even tried to figure out what Noriega was saying and thinking at times when he was in the villa. Using the data provided by McMoneagle, two QRT agents went over the wall of the villa one night and attempted to break inside, to plant their own listening devices. Unfortunately they alerted two guard dogs, whose jaws just missed the feet of the agents as they quickly hoisted themselves back over the wall. Shortly afterwards, citing this and other security lapses by the QRT agents, INSCOM officials closed the operation down.
Sometime in 1983, with no more ceremony than a pat on the back and a handshake from Skip Atwater and Brian Busby, Joe McMoneagle completed his thousandth remoteviewing session at Fort Meade.
It was a bittersweet moment, because for McMoneagle, remote viewing had become an increasingly lonely business. By the middle of 1983, he and Tom Nance were the only ones left at the unit, and Nance was often away in training at SRI. Even when Nance was at Fort Meade, he often kept his distance from McMoneagle. Nance enjoyed the training at SRI, but McMoneagle often argued with him about it, insisting that Nance had to free himself from the Ingo Swann technique, if he really wanted to become a good remote viewer. Brian Busby eventually told McMoneagle, in essence, to shut up and remote-view.
Nance was the only trainee in the system now. Rob Cowart's training had been cut short by illness. He had developed a cancerous tumor in his upper back, and though he eventually recovered, the long radiation treatment he received damaged his spinal cord and left him paralyzed from the waist down. He soon left the Army with a medical discharge.
Hartleigh Trent, meanwhile, had had a pain in one of his hips since about 1980. It had become steadily worse, and he had gone through various diagnoses and treatments. One day Trent was in the hospital for surgery that doctors believed would correct the problem. It was thought that he had a damaged disk in his spine. Then the doctors found that Trent was running a low-grade fever, with no obvious origin, so they investigated, and found a cancerous mass in his leg. He was belatedly diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease. His incredulous colleagues - even Riley was in touch from Germany - tried to keep up his spirits as he went through months of chemotherapy and radiation treatments. He worked full-time for a while, then only a few days per week, and then not at all. He died at Walter Reed Army Hospital, with his wife and Joe McMoneagle at his bedside.
Four new recruits were selected for the program by Atwater and Busby in late 1983, and soon they began training at SRI. In early 1984, General Stubblebine unexpectedly handpicked three more recruits, including Lyn Buchanan. McMoneagle saw it was time to go, and began to arrange his retirement. The new guard would have to take over now he thought; God help them.

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