The Pandora Project

From The Soldier Spies: The Secret History of the Defense Intelligence Agency

In all recorded campaigns before Julius Caesar's, military intelligence was inseparable from what might be called "psychic" phenomena. The ancients relied chiefly on a form of "ESP" -- omens, auguries, portents, the analysis of bird entrails. The Greeks read in their sacrifices disaster at Thermopylae, abandoned war plans due to earthquakes, mapped troop routes by dream. The unconquerable Persian general Xenophon preferred to starve his own troops than to defy the interpreted advice of eagles. Even Alexander the Great considered the counsel of sweating statues -- though, as a student of Aristotle, it was only logical that he should be also the earliest-known skeptic. Alexander attacked and crushed the Scythians despite contrary omens, and showed perhaps some frustration with the paranormal method when he "solved," with one sword-stroke, the riddle of the Gordian knot. Yet no one, least of all Alexander, could resist reading in that very act his destined rule of Asia.

After Caesar, most military commanders discarded psychic methods. But in the late 19th century America's intellectuals, though not yet her warriors or scientists, had become interested in "parapsychology." For alienated agnostics it was perhaps but bootlegged religion: Hard-bitten "realist" Mark Twain obsessed about a "precognitive dream," and Harvard philosopher William James, founder of pragmatism, enhanced greatly the reputation of paranormal research with his own willingness to believe. Eventually, in 1969, an American Parapsychological Association was attached to the mainstream American Association for the Advancement of Science.

By then the Pentagon had become interested in psychic matters. The idea that US Korean War POWs had been "brainwashed" by the communists lent a sense that there was much about human consciousness that remained to be understood. Were some minds more suggestible than others, more sensitive perhaps to electromagnetic waves or mental energies? Dr. J. B. Rhine conducted ESP tests for the Army (1952), and Air Force scientists tested college women for ESP (1962). But little was learned, and interest waned.

In 1965 came a "mind control" scare at the US embassy in Moscow. Ambassador Walter Stoessel suffered immobilizing headaches and bleeding from the eyes, symptoms of exposure to low-intensity microwaves. Were the Soviets trying to remotely influence his thoughts and feelings? Inquiry shifted from the suggestibility of the mind to the means of suggestion. CIA funds flowed to DARPA and DIA for a project, code-named Pandora, to study "novel biological information transfer systems." Richard Helms called it a "battle for the minds of men."

It was known that directed electromagnetism could pacify or confuse. But how could it steer behavior or impart mental content? In the early 1970s, DIA beamed an electro-encephalogram (EEG) with "informational significance" to human subjects at Lorton prison, and achieved auditory hallucinations -- "tones seem in the head." Around the same time, at the Walter Reed Army Research Institute, a Pandora participant reportedly recognized spoken words modulated on a microwave frequency by an "audiogram," an analog of the words' sound vibrations. But these successes, if such they were, were apparently not "repeatable." Had they been, DIA would hardly have reported in 1972 that "Soviet knowledge in this field [psi research] is superior to that of the West."

The DIA report, "Controlled Offensive Behavior -- USSR," was a chilling document. After Yuri Andropov took over the KGB in 1967, the Soviets had apparently made a big push in telepathic communications and telekinetics. "Soviet efforts in the field of psi research, sooner or later, might enable them to... [k]now the contents of top secret US documents, the movements of our troops and ships and the location and nature of our military installations." The KGB might thus achieve the perfect spy -- an agent who could wander the world undetected, without even leaving Moscow.

Steered by a perceived Soviet emphasis on "remote viewing," Pandora shifted back to questions about suggestibility of mind. Could some people see "objects or people which are hidden from the five senses"? The problem was tackled from late 1972 in the aptly named Project BIZARRE. At the Stanford Research Institute, in Menlo Park California, a laser engineer (Hal Puthoff) tested whether an avowed psychic (Ingo Swann), and a businessman (Pat Price) could describe distant locations. Swann and Price later wrote publicly (and certainly selectively) of their "successes." Swann made a "fairly accurate sketch" of an island in the South Indian Ocean. In June 1973, Price appeared psychically to "visit" an NSA facility on the East Coast, reading even the code-word labels on files. But Puthoff's criteria for validating these experiments were questioned. In one "validated" viewing, DIA tried to "transmit" an image to a clairvoyant in California, who was given "only" the geographic coordinates (i.e., a means of knowing the target was in New York City). The clairvoyant was credited with a "hit" for saying: "makes me think of a restaurant or museum."

But while SRI efforts were sometimes laughable, Moscow seemed to be making real progress. A DIA 1975 report, "Soviet and Czechoslovakian Parapsychology Research, described "a scientific breakthrough of tremendous significance." Soviet scientists had reportedly learned that "psychic" abilities stemmed from a kind of brain energy. This energy, it was claimed, had been extracted from the brain into a beam. The beam was focused on houseflies, who "died instantly." A Soviet "killer psychic," one Nina Kulagina, was even able to "stop" the heart of a laboratory frog. If such breakthroughs were actual, the DIA report warned, the Soviets might disable "U.S. or allied personnel in (nuclear) missile silos." After reading the report, General Graham had said: "There's enough suggestive evidence around, so that you want to keep your eyes open."

Graham's statement could be taken more than one way. Reports on KGB psi traced ultimately to Soviet sources -- scientific literature, émigrés, defectors -- all too easily polluted by disinformation. At times these sources played calculatedly to Western preconceptions of totalitarian brutality. The KGB, it was said, "decapitated baby rabbits and electrocuted kittens to see if the trauma registered simultaneously in the brain wave patterns of their mothers in distant rooms." Sam Wilson had wondered whether Moscow was simply manufacturing stories to scare the West.

General Tighe suspected the KGB was trying to trick the Pentagon into wasting time and money. Soviet disinformation specialist John Dziak saw a possible precedent for this: a Soviet deception against the Germans in World War II, Operation Scherhorn. The German High Command was duped into devoting energy, men, and materiel to the rescue and resupply of 2,500 troops who were already dead. Soviet generals, Dziak noted, "evidently... enjoyed the game." Knowing, from open Congressional hearings, that the Pentagon wanted new programs in beam weapon research, Moscow might have tried to steer that research down blind alleys. Thus, perhaps, the 1975 report of a "breakthrough brain-energy beam."

There was yet another, possibility, however. Perhaps the US was being haunted by its own deception games against the Soviets. In 1960 the Navy had planted false reports about telepathic communication with the nuclear sub Nautilus, which could not be radioed while under the Arctic icecap. This ruse had apparently touched off a flurry of psi Soviet projects. Some have suggested, on the other hand, that DIA deliberately misattributed its own Psi findings to the Soviets, in order to conceal PANDORA from Congress.

Whatever the provenance of the reports, by the later 1970s they had surfaced in the American press. Soon the alleged Soviet inroads were being cited, at USC and other universities, in successful grant proposals in Parapsychology. Even the venerable Smithsonian put up an exhibit on psychic phenomena. Soviet psychic Yuri Geller, invited to the White House, told President Carter that all children in Russia were being screened for psychic abilities. Carter befriended Geller and began to consult him on the problems of world peace. On Capitol Hill, a "Psi Lobby" formed around Rep. Charles Rose (D-NC), a member of the House Intelligence Committee. "If the Russians have remote-viewing and we don't," Rose warned, "we're in trouble."

Beginning in January 1979, the Committee appropriated a half-million dollars annually for Psi, and tasked DIA with stepping up research. Tighe was averse, but did not testify against the move. His own skepticism, he feared, might alienate Rose and any other true believers on the Committee, whose votes he needed for programs he did want. So DIA got to work on what it called Grill Flame.

Two new labs were built. At SRI, the third floor of the Radio Physics building became a windowless gray cocoon, complete with remote-viewing "isolation" chamber and monitoring room. Taskings were fed by DIA's contract monitor, Jim Salyer, from his own office in a temporary trailer, just outside the building. At Fort Meade, meanwhile, a "Special Action Branch" of the Army Intelligence and Security Command (Inscom) was customized to DIA "requirements." Inscom took over Building 2560, a single-story wooden structure with a green metal door, and set to work beneath a mural-sized poster of a supernova.

Supervision of Grill Flame fell to Dr. Vorona. He sometimes went out to Fort Meade, chatted with prospective remote viewers, monitored practice sessions. Ingo Swann called him "the super god in the sky over us." That Vorona tried to take a balanced view was evident in one exchange with Congressional skeptics:

Q. Do you believe in ghosts?
A. No, sir.
Q. Somewhere between ghosts and supernatural we have some sort of natural phenomena that are unexplainable?
A. I think that is a correct statement. There are some who are adamant in their opposition to scientific inquiries. But there is nothing in physics which says these phenomena do not exist or cannot exist. Quite to the contrary, the laws of physics very explicitly allow for these phenomena.

Like the Soviets were thought to do be doing, Vorona sought to study psychic abilities as type of brain energy. Grill Flame thus coupled with another Vorona project, a study of remote microwave mind-influencing techniques, code-named Sleeping Beauty. Could DIA reproduce the pilot disorientation connected with the Korean Airlines incident in Barents? Researchers could disorient a subject in an adjoining chamber, even make him hear inter-cranial mumblings. But longer-distance experiments had never been mounted. So it was decided to try bouncing microwaves off the ionosphere, to affect the mental functions of target subjects on earth (Operation PIQUE). The goal was to not simply to cause a subject so feel affected, but to condition him to perform specific acts. Vorona set high standards for success, however, and the results of PIQUE were ambiguous at best.

Research continued also in old-school or "swami" Psi. The open literature mists up with unverifiable claims by cashiered clairvoyants, whose veracity DIA has never officially addressed. Remote viewing targets reportedly included nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons facilities in communist countries, and Silkworm missiles in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq war. In one case, a Navy officer in a plain civilian suit even carried a briefcase, handcuffed to his wrist, into the parlor of psychic and palm reader, "Madame Zodiac." By looking at top-secret photographs and charts, she attempted to predict the movements of Soviet submarines off the East Coast. She failed, but collected $400 in cash.

In some of these tests, it is possible that DIA was trying to suggest to its swamis, via microwaves, the answers to questions that it already knew. Avowed psychics in test environments, sensitized and open to suggestion, would have been promising test-targets for energy-beam stimulation. But the seers were also directed to problems to which DIA clearly did not have answers. Grill Flame was tapped, for instance, during the event that would define President Carter's term, and consume Tighe's own brain energy for much of 1979-80: the hostage crisis in Iran.

Posted by Mark Riebling @ 02 06 200411:35 PM [