CIA Files: US 'Psychic Spies' & Remote Viewing (1995)

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28 August 1995 
SG1I MEMORANDUM FOR: 
SGII FROM: 
SUBJECT: US Use of 'Psychic Spies' Reported 
REFERENCE: FYI. Interesting stuff. 
28 August 1995 
SG1I MEMORANDUM FOR: i=l 
SG1I FROM: sil 
SUBJECT: US Use of 'Psychic Spies' Reported 
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TITLE: 	UK: U.S. Use of 'Psychic Spies' Reported (Take 1 of 5) “¢ 
; SGt1J 
UK: U.S. Use of 'Psychic Spies’ Reported (Take 1 of 5) 
|D2708140195 London INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY in English 27 Aug 95 
The Sunday Review pp 10-13 
[Article by<Jim Schnabel: “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Psi"] 
[FBIS Transcribed Text] IN A desert country, a dictator is on 
the run. He moves from house to house, Bedouin tent to underground 
bunker, never staying in one place for more than a few hours. Angry 
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at his regional bullying, his sponsorship of terrorism, his 
production of chemical weapons, America is armed to punish his 
country with bombers and cruise missiles the dictator assumes, 
correctly, that he himself is on the target list. 
To find him, imagery satellites shift from their regular orbits 
to scrutinise his known hideouts. Signals, intelligence satellites 
and listening posts prick up their electronic ears for radio or 
telephone communications that might give his position away. Human 
agents inside the dictator's government search for their own scraps 
and clues. 
And in a set of secluded buildings on a military base near 
Washington DC, a very different sort of intelligence-gathering is 
taking place. There, a unit of officers and enlisted men are 
searching for the dictator by way of Extra Sensory Perception -- or 
as they callit, “remote-viewing". Some are lying in trance states 
in darkened rooms, and trying to visualise the dictator's 
whereabouts. Others are sitting at brightly-lit tables, sketching 
and verbalising whatever moves their pens or enters their minds. 
Round the clock they track the dictator; eventually they are asked 
to see into the future, to determine his movements in advance. Their 
findings are collected and analysed and considered, alongside those 
from more conventional sources. And, at the appointed hour the 
attack is launched. 
IT SOUNDS like a futurist's fantasy, but if a number of retired 
servicemen and intelligence officials are to be believed, it's 
recent history. They say that the US intelligence community has 
been making serious use of psychic phenomena for the past two 
decades: that the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), the CIA, the 
NSA (National Security Agency), the FBI, the Secret Service, the 
Navy, the Army, and the Air Force have all been involved, and that 
"ramote-viewers" have been employed on their behalf in hundreds of 
military and intelligence operations -- including the 1986 bombing 
raid on Libya, in which American bombs did indeed fail on President 
al-Qadhdhafi's desert encampment, though narrowly missing the 
dictator himself. 
It all started, as so many things did, with the tit-for-tat 
technological competition of the Cold War. Back in the Sixties, the 
Soviet Union began to pour money and resources into the study of ESP 
and psychokinesis, phenomena collectively termed "psi" by 
researchers in the field. Much of this psi research came under the 
control of the Soviet military and KGB, and by the early Seventies, 
US intelligence analysts -- formerly concerned about a possible 
"missile gap" -- were beginning to grow anxious about a “psi gap". 
An unclassified 1972 DIA report expressed concerns that “Soviet 
efforts in the field of psi research sooner or later, might enable 
them to do some of the following: (a) Know the contents of top 
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secret US documents, the movements of our troops and ships and the 
location and nature of our military installations (b) Mould the 
thoughts of key US military and civilian leaders at a distance (c) 
Cause the instant death of any US official at a distance (d) 
Disable, at a distance, US military equipment of all types, 
including spacecraft." 
This DIA analysis now sounds absurdly alarmist, almost a 
caricature of Evil Empire doomsaying; at the time, though, it 
genuinely did seem from both intelligence reports and the testimony 
of emigres that the Soviets were trying to accomplish such goals. In 
telepathy experiments, they decapitated baby rabbits and 
electrocuted kittens to see if the trauma registered simultaneously 
in the brain wave patterns of their mothers in distant rooms. They 
screened Red Army recruits for psychic abilities, and pumped — 
talented subjects full of dangerous drugs to promote psi-conducive 
altered states. Subjects in psychokinesis or “remote-influencing" 
experiments tried to stop the hearts of small animals, or 
concentrated on foreign political leaders, beaming /at-them “negative 
psi particles.". Soviet and Czech scientists were said to be working 
on electromagnetic devices that would cause strokes or heart 
attacks, and it was even rumoured that they had perfected a 
"nsychotronic generator", which could scramble people's minds at 
great distances. 
All this was enough to spur the intelligence community into 
action and, as well as increasing their scrutiny of Soviet and East 
European work in this field, the CIA and the Pentagon began overtly 
and covertly to fund psi research in the US. The best-known 
beneficiary of this finding was Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a - 
respected, University-affiliated think-tank in Menlo Park, 
California. The head of the SRI psi research programme was a young 
laser engineer named Hal Puthoff. 
“It seems like so long ago," Puthoff told me over a margarita 
last year. He is now better known as a theoretical physicist, with 
his own research institute in Texas. "It started as a lark" he says. 
Curious about the possible relationship between psi and quantum 
mechanics, he began doing experiments with a noted psychic, a New 
York artist by the name of Ingo Swann. After circulating reports on 
these experiments, Puthoff was visited at SRI by various 
intelligence officials who expressed interest in funding further 
research. He received an initial grant of $50,000 in late 1972; his 
government funders, he says, "wanted to know if there was anything 
to this stuff." Although he won't say so, the funds came from the 
CIA. 
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fiffrom the cia. 
UK: U.S. Use of 'Psychic Spies' Reported (Take 2 of 5) 
LD2708140895 
[FBIS Transcribed Text] Puthoff's research with Swann soon 
focused on a set of techniques by means of which Swann tried to pick 
up visual and other impressions from distant sites. Anxious to 
avoid the seance-room connotations of “clairvoyance” and other 
psychic terminology, Puthoff began to refer to the new techniques by 
the more modern-sounding term “remote-viewing". At first Ingo Swann 
claimed that, given only the targets' precise geographical co- 
ordinates, he could do just that. In time, other remote-viewers 
would set to work even without co-ordinates. "We would just sit the 
viewer down and say 'Target'," remembers Puthoff. "We got some of 
our best results that way." 
The claims of the remote-viewers initially met with scepticism 
from their CIA sponsors, but as stories spread of astounding 
successes, support gew throughout the intelligence community. The 
first such successes took place in early June 1973, when a retired 
local politician and SRI remote-viewer named Pat Price appeared 
psychically to "visit" a sensitive National Security Agency facility 
on the East Coast and sparked an investigation by enraged NSA 	fy gant 
officials. Price's verbal and graphic descriptions of the site were : are ver : 
particularly detailed, and included an overhead view, the layout of jee 
underground offices, and even Top Secret code-word labels on file 
folders. "He nailed it," remembers a former senior CIA official 
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familiar with the episode. "From that moment on, there was no 
trouble getting anyone to take it [SRI's remote-viewing programme] 
seriously." 
By the late 1970s, a stable of remote-viewers had been set up at 
SRI, doing both experimental and operational work for government 
clients. Government interest was so extensive that the various 
agencies involved pooled their resources into one programme, managed 
by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The programme was codenamed 
"Grill Flame". 
During 1978, also under Grill Flame, the Army's Intelligence and 
Security Command (INSCOM) set up its own unit of military remote- 
viewers at Fort Meade, Maryland. Major General Edmund Thompson, 
then the Army's Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence had 
encouraged the unit's establishment. "I became convinced that 
remote-viewing was a real phenomenon, that it wasn't a hoax," he 
remembers. “We didn't know how to explain it but we weren't so much 
interested in explaining it as in determining wHEnGt there was any 
practical use to it." 
There was, though the techniques were refined as time went by. 
Members of the dozen-strong Fort Meade unit, for instance, used 
relatively deep altered-state methods of remote-viewing, 
collectively known as "extended remote-viewing" or ERV. In an ERV 
session, the viewer would lie on a couch in a darkened room, descend 
into a self-hypnotic trance, and vocally describe the images and 
other impressions that came into his or her mind. By the early 
Eighties, Ingo Swann at SRI had developed what he claimed was a 
superior co-ordinate-based remote-viewing technique, or CRV. An 
ordinary, intelligent person trained in the technique could, he 
said, be a more effective practitioner than the best natural 
psychic. With CRV, the viewer went through a highly-structured set 
of verbalisation and sketching procedures. Although usually in an 
almost-normal state of consciousness, the CRVer would occasionally 
report a brief but unnervingly vivid "bilocation", a sensation that 
he or she was actually present at the target site. Swann taught the 
technique to five new recruits to the Fort Meade unit. 
"We often used CRV for target acquisition, and ERV for in-depth 
work on the target," remembers a long-time member of the unit who 
prefers not to give his name. “With CRV, we'd give the viewer a set 
of numbers or coordinates and he'd sketch some mountains, for 
example, and some factories, and three white buildings. The next 
day, we'd go back and use ERV to walk around inside the three white 
buildings." But how good was the information gathered that way? 
“It was very good," insists the source, recalling one operation 
where the unit was asked to psychically investigate a foreign agent 
on the CIA's payroll. Clues generated by the remote-viewers he 
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says, pointed to specific financial misconduct by the agent. During 
a subsequent lie-detector test conducted by his CIA handlers, the 
agent was confronted with the information. "He nearly fell out of 
his chair," says the source. And, according to Mel Riley, a former ee 	SG1J 
Fort Meade remote-viewer, his unit was asked to remote-view a KGB } a — - bon gh 
colonel who had been caught spying and was under interrogation by ‘ Clie A, bebe doo hale 
South African counter-intelligence officers. "He was a hard nut to i é : 
crack," says Riley. "They couldn't figure out how he was getting his 
information out of the country. But | 'saw' him playing with a 
pocket calculator-type thing; it seemed to be important. Later on, 
someone else came up with the fact that he had a family in Russia, 
and it was supposed to be his last assignment, and he was looking 
forward to going home." As Riley tells it, the remote-viewers were 
right; the “pocket calculator" turned out to be a covert 
communications device, and the emotional reading of the KGB man was 
accurate, too. When the South Africans presented the data to their 
captive, says Riley, "he broke down and co- operated’. 
Even bigger fish were fried. According to several former remote- 
viewers, as well as officials familiar with the programme, America's 
psychic spies were used to gather information on: key facilities in 
Tehran during the 1979-81 hostage crisis, terrorists and Western 
hostages in the Middle East; the location of Manuel Noriega during Pid Ba “4 Gee : ali 
the US raid on Panama in 1989; and, of course, the location of en oe intel lighs && 
Mu'ammar al-Qadhdhafi prior to the 1986 bombing raid on Libya. Other 
targets over the years included nuclear, chemical, and biological 
weapons facilities in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; Silkworm 
missiles along the Persian Gulf during the Iran- Iraq war; drug- 
smuggling ships approaching US coasts; and the locations of Scud 
missiles during Desert Storm. 
ook 
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TEXT: 
//iduring desert storm. 
UK: U.S. Use of 'Psychic Spies' Reported (Take 3 of 5) 
LD2708140995 
[FBIS Transcribed Text] Remote-viewers weren't always 
successful, and their findings were often used only to help direct 
more mundane intelligence-gathering systems. But they enjoyed 
powerful support in- Washington, and their budgets continued year 
after year. "It was socSmall,»and so closely-held," remembers 
General Thompson, "that it wasn't a big controversy." A ‘number of 
congressmen who were prepared to believe in remote-viewing were 
"read on" to the programme, and became staunch ‘supporters. These 
included Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell and North Carolina 
Representative Charlie Rose, who told an interviewer in 1979 that 
"if the Russians have remote-viewing, and we don't, we're in 
trouble." 
“I've briefed senators in their offices," says a retired Army 
officer who was a member of the unit during the Eighties. "And | 
know that Bush [as Vice President and a member of Reagan's National 
Security Council] read some of our reports... He might have said, 
‘they're doing what [preceding word in italics]! That's the 
craziest thing I've ever heard!' The fact that he didn't say that 
tells you something." 
MEL RILEY was working as an apprentice machine repairman in 
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when, in 1969, he was called up by the Army. 
He joined the intelligence corps, and eventually wound up at Fort 
Meade as an imagery interpreter, a specialist in the analysis of 
overhead reconnaissance photographs. In 1977, he heard about plans 
for a remote-viewing unit, and got himself selected as one of its 
founder members. From an early age, he. had considered himself a je iy eee 
to such things, for he had had his own premonitions and quiet 
visions. | 
Seventeen years and thousands of remote-viewing sessions later, 
Riley is retired from the Army. He lives in rural Wisconsin, amid 
woods and lakes and quiet farm communities. He canoes, fishes, and 
goes hunting for deer in the winter. He helps run a local museum, 
and shares a comfortable house on the banks of a river with his 
wife. He is also an expert on local Indian lore, and although he 
has not a drop of Native American blood in him, he belongs to a 
"medicine society" - a kind of club for properly initiated Native 
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at en 
; 	a 	. Tig Ape Gees FS : 
American seers and healers, medicine men. “There are no lasting — 
side-effects to remote-viewing," Mel Riley has told me, “other than fice Guy 
the fact that it may change your whole life..." 
Hal Puthoff saw a number of people changed in this way at SRI, 
and he generally considers the changes to have been positive. 
"Experiencing remote-viewing broadened their perspective," he says. 
"They seemed to be warmer, more generous, more excited about life." 
But can this personal transformation also have its dark side? Can 
a life of introspection, half-lived in what remote-viewers call “the 
ether", or "the matrix", warp the mind in ways that may not be 
desirable? Every remote-viewer knows, for example, the case of Bert 
Stubblebine. 
Bert Stubblebine - Major-General Albert N. Stubblebine Ill - 
became head of INSCOM (the Army's Intelligence and Security Command) 
in 1981, the year that General Thompson (who as Assistant Chief of ~~ 
Staff for Intelligence co-managed the Army's spy: network) departed 
for another posting. With Thompson gone, Stubblebine was remote- 
viewing's chief supporter in the Army. cs 
Stubblebine had a reputation as a lateral thinker, creative and 
unafraid to take risks. Concerned about hidebound thinking among 
his INSCOM staff officers, he would hold psychokinetic "spoon- 
bending" sessions with them, just to shake up their world views. 
There were also "neurolinguistic programming" sessions for marksmen, 
and charisma-building courses for generals, making use of 
“firewalks" and the wisdom of self-help gurus. Stubblebine himself 
liked to engage in remote-viewing sessions. 
Any of these exercises might have been defensible, in the proper 
context, but as time went on, the perception grew that the general 
had become obsessed by the paranormal and esoteric, above and beyond 
any military justification. He had embarked on some kind of 
spiritual journey and it seemed that he was trying to take the Army 
with him. 
Stubblebine's journey eventually took him to the Monroe 
Institute, a privately-owned centre for investigation into the 
paranormal near Charlottesville, Virginia. At the Monroe Institute, 
an audio process known as “hemi-sync" was used to help induce deep 
altered states, which led in some cases to so-called out-of-body 
experiences. Stubblebine began to send his INSCOM staff officers 
there. And ripples of annoyance began to spread. "You wear your 
pyjamas around every morning and hug each other," says Skip Atwater, 
who is now the research director at Monroe. “You can't have that in 
a military setting." 
Stubblebine's own frequent trips to Monroe gave rise to more 
serious concerns among some of his superiors at the Pentagon, whom 
he was obliged to brief regularly on INSCOM operations. "He had 
30,000 men and women out m the field," remembers Ed Dames, a former 
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Army major and remote-viewer, “and instead of talking about all his 
units and field stations and things like that, he would spend half 
the time in these briefings talking about the significance of the 
yellow salamander that had walked across the road when he was down 
at the Monroe Institute." 
Stubblebine had other problems, including a financial corruption 
scandal involving some of his covert-action squads. But according 
to former colleagues, the fatal blow to his career came in 1983 when 
an INSCOM staff officer, Lieutenant Doug P-, visited the Monroe 
Institute for the hemi-sync treatment. Shortly after he had started 
the process, Lt P- emerged from his darkened room and began to 
wander through the Monroe hallways, naked and incoherent. “He was 
taken away literally in a straightjacket," says Dames. "He had some 
stability problems ever before he got here," notes Atwater. "There 
are thousands of people who come through the Institute and don't 
have psychotic breaks." 	: , 
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TEXT: 
/Ifnave psychotic breaks." 
UK: U.S. Use of 'Psychic Spies' Reported (Take 4 of 5) 
LD2708141095 
[FBIS Transcribed Text] Lt P- recovered, and remains on active 
duty but Stubblebine retired from the Army in 1984 to become an 
executive at BDM Corporation a Washington-area defence and 
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intelligence contractor. He left BDM a few years ago, and now lives 
in New York, where he is married to Rima Laibow, a controversial 
psychiatrist who has claimed that she is a UFO abduction victim. But 
the damage had been done. "Bert gave remote-viewing a bad name, 
because of all the other stuff he was involved in," says a former 
senior Pentagon official who knew him. And although the unit never 
left its offices at Fort Meade, by 1986 it had been expelled from 
the Army. It still had its supporters, notably Jack Vorona, chief 
of the DIA's science and technology directorate, who had since 1978 
been the overall head of the remote-viewing programme. The DIA took 
the Fort Meade unit under its wing, the project was renamed Center 
Lane, and later, Sun Streak, and Vorona now exerted more direct 
control of the Fort Meade unit. For the remote-viewers, this was a 
fortunate development. Vorona was a man who was widely respected 
throughout the intelligence community, and with him watching over 
it, the unit seemed safe from outside threats. 
But what of inside threats? Although Stubblebine was gone, his te 
spirit lingered, and in the mid and late 1980s, the .unit seemed to 
take on a garish tinge. In its first few years under DIA management ie 
the unit included the “witches,", two women called Angela Dellafiora 
and Robin Dahlgren. Dellafiora eschewed remate-viewing and instead 
“channelled" her psychic data through a group of entities with names 
like “Maurice” and "George". Dahlgren practiced tarot-card reading. 
In the eyes of Ed Dames and Mel Riley, Angela achieved an undue 
influence on the unit when she began to give personal channelling 
sessions, featuring advice on the most intimate matters of their 
lives, to Jack Vorona and other officials. "Jack Vorona would sit at 
one end of the table, and Angela at the other,” recalls Dames. "She 
would say, 'Good morning, Dr Vorona. Maurice says hello!" 
"Their eyes would be shining when they came out of those 
sessions," recalls Riley. "They were told all the nice things they 
wanted to hear, which reinforced Angela's position within the unit." 
"Psychic blowjobs," says Ed Dames, referring to the activities of 
Angela and Robin. To witness them, he told me, and the other antics 
of "the witches", was "too much to bear for professional military 
officers". But Dames as much as anyone was caught up in the 
transformational dynamic of remote-viewing. 
A linguist - his forte was Chinese - and former INSCOM 
intelligence officer, Ed Dames was one of the group that had been 
trained in the early Eighties by Ingo Swann at SRI. With his blond 
hair, California accent, and preternaturally boyish face, he looked 
more like a teenage surfer than a soldier. Although widely 
considered intelligent and creative, he also seemed, like 
Stubblebine, to have an impulsive streak. "Everybody sort of looked 
at Ed as a loose cannon," says Mel Riley. "I was in trouble all the 
time, anywhere | went," agrees Dames. "I was always pushing the 
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envelope." 
Certainly, despite his professed distaste for the New Ageishness 
of Vorona and the "Witches", Dames was frustrated by the increasing 
scarcity of operational taskings. In his ample spare time at the 
unit, he began to use remote-viewing techniques to exercise his own 
spiritual and extraterrestrial interests. “Under the guise of 
‘advanced training," he says, "| began to see what [remote-viewing] 
could do. You know what | mean?" Dames's advanced training 
“targets" included apparitions of the Virgin Mary, the demise of 
Atlantis (“it's at the bottom of Lake Titicaca," says Dames), the 
Loch Ness monster ("a dinosaur's ghost"), and a great many flying 
saucers. "He would tell me a lot of things about Martians," 
remembers Dames's now estranged wife Christine. "I didn't want to 
hear about it." 
While Dames was at the Fort Meade unit, ‘stories began to 
circulate about certain "unusual experiences" during remote-viewing 
sessions, particularly those engaged on "advanced training" targets. 
"! think he had some kind of experiences, some kind of disturbances 
from unknown spirits," remembers Christine Dames: "But he didn't 
care -- he welcomed the challenge." 
"We thrived on adventure," Dames remembers proudly. “You get men 
of action -- we're not satisfied with sitting around and twiddling 
our thumbs year after year," says Dames. "Unless something happens, 
you're going to lose our interest. But there was enough happening 
in there to hold our interest." 	; 
Dames !eft the unit in 1989, and formed a company, Psi Tech, to 
make commercial use of his remote-viewing skills. But his clients 
were few and far between. He separated from his wife and moved to 
Albuquerque, New Mexico, believing that the nearby deserts harboured 
a hidden Martian civilisation. A wilderness prophet for our time, 
he predicted to the local media that in August 1992, the aliens 
would arise from their desert dwellings, shocking the world. When | 
saw him in 1994, Ed Dames was almost out of money. 
MOST OF the remote-viewers I've talked to are willing to admit, 
when pressed, that their craft does have its psychiatric hazards. As 
with any prolonged and forced alteration of consciousness, it 
promotes altered states and a general mental instability, and thus 
can be dangerous for those who are inherently unstable. They also 
point out that in the absence of regular independent verification, 
remote-viewing can quick}y become a generator of idiosyncratic 
fantasy. As Mel Riley says, "Without feedback, your remote-viewing 
turns to shit." 
And without proper oversight, it seems, the remote-viewing 
programme turned foul, too, slowly strangled by its own isolation. 
Following the Irangate scandal of 1987, Defense Secretary Frank 
Carlucci had instituted a wide-ranging review of potentially 
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embarrassing Pentagon programs, and in 1988, a Defense Department 
Inspector General's (IG) team descended on the remote-viewing unit's 
offices, demanding to see the files. 
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TEXT: 
/ifsee the files. 
UK: U.S. Use of 'Psychic Spies' Reported (Take 5 of 5) 
LD2708141195 
[FBIS Transcribed Text] Dames and Riley both claim that some 
of those responsible for the unit responded very much in the spirit 
of Oliver North. "A lot of things," says Riley, "were being shredded 
and disposed of which probably would not have been appropriate had 
the IG team come across them." Dames remembers: "They were burning 
the shredders all day and some of the night." 
What the IG team finally reported is unclear, but Fort Meade's 
contacts with operational intelligence consumers were curtailed, and 
recruiting of new remote-viewers was suspended. The unit received a 
further blow when its protector Jack Vorona retired from the DIA at 
the end of 1989. The SRI remote-viewing programme also died that 
year, was resurrected briefly at another think-tank, Scientific 
Applications International Corporation, and then died again in 1994. 
The Russian programme is rumoured to have met a similar fate, now 
that the winds of the Cold War have abated. 
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Remote-viewing has not been abandoned, however. Ed Dames lives 
in Beverly Hills now, with Joni Dourif, the wife of the actor Brad 
Dourif. They continue to run Psi Tech as a company which provides a 
private remote-viewing service, as well as training courses for 
people who want to become remote-viewers themselves - Joni Dourif 
was one such. Dames himself is now pursuing, he says, his own film 
and television projects. He and Dourif plan to marry, following the 
respective divorces they now await; the two say that they will 
eventually open a remote-viewing training centre in Hawaii. . 
The DIA remote-viewing unit is still alive, but is, so to speak, - oy 
but a ghost of its former-self. Recently transferred from its long- ot 
time quarters at Fort Meade, it is now buried somewhere in the maze : 
of the Pentagon's bureaucracy. "The word is that they're going to 
kill it," says Mel Riley, but a former colleague, who. didn't want 
‘his name used, is more optimistic: "It's gone through these cycles 
before and survived (‘quite surprisingly, so | hope’ that happens this 
time. It's got a lot of enemies, but it's also got a it of 
friends." 
None of those were in evidence on a recent aftemoon this summer, 
when | visited the buildings at Fort Meade where the unit was housed 
for most of its existence. Low wooden structures. hastily built in 
the Second World War, but ideal in their isolation, they now sit 
mouldering. amid a quiet clump of trees. Their only inhabitants now, 
one could say, are all those spirits evoked in remote-viewers' 
reveries. What fantastic stories they could tell. 
(endall) 
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