David Duke’s CIA Connections
The below article is reprinted from People’s Weekly World, Long View Publishing Company, 235 West 23rd Street, New York, NY 1001L
by Tim Wheeler
David Duke, it is said, idolized his father, an engineer for Shell Oil Company, who, like his son, was a white supremacist. The father, David Hedger Duke, volunteered for service in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. He was sent to Laos as an agent of the U.S. State Department’s Agency for International Development (USAID.)
Young David, meanwhile, completed high school and enrolled at Louisiana State University, where he became notorious on “Free Speech Alley” for his racist and anti-Semitic harangues. Just before he dropped out of LSU, on March 4,1971, Duke was ordered to report for active duty. Selective Service records show that he was classified 1-A. But in a “highly unusual move,” reports Tyler Bridges of the Times-Picayune of New Orleans, “Duke was given a student deferment, March 18, even though he soon left school and didn’t return for eighteen months…None of the members of his draft board contacted said they knew why the injunction notice was rescinded.” When Bridges asked Duke why he hadn’t been drafted, Duke responded, “Well,I was in Laos during the war.” And indeed he was. He boasted that he spent nine months in Laos beginning in May 1971 flying twenty missions “behind enemy lines aboard CIA Air America transport planes, dropping supplies to CIA mercenary troops in the mountains. In attempting to debunk details of Duke’s story, critics only confirm the main point. Charles Green, for example, head of the Agency for International Development (AID) language school in Laos, said Duke served only six weeks as an English language instructor of Laotian army officers. Green claims he fired Duke when he walked into his classroom and saw that Duke had drawn a Molotov cocktail on the blackboard.
It is well known that the CIA used USAID as a cover for covert warfare in Southeast Asia. It is entirely plausible that David Duke was recruited as a covert agent of the CIA. That would explain why his induction into the military was mysteriously rescinded.
It would also explain Duke’s strange immunity in other criminal and terrorist activities. In September 1976 Duke was the sponsor of a conference of neo- Nazis and Klansmen at a hotel near his home in Métairies, an all-white suburb of New Orleans. When police arrived, Duke and his followers surrounded the squad car. Duke led the mob in chanting, “White Power.” Duke screamed at the officers, “You are a Jew. You work for the FBI. They are commie traitors and you are too.” The police radioed for help and Duke was among those arrested. He was tried but received a suspended sentence. Why?
On December 31,1980, Duke sat on a French quarter balcony in New Orleans with a convicted felon named Michael Perdue. According to Gwen Udell,a close friend of Duke’s who was there, the two men “hashed over Perdue’s plan to invade the Caribbean island of Dominica’ “ A small band of mercenaries would sail to the tiny black populated country, overthrow the government and set up a white supremacist junta,” reports the Times-Picayune, Perdue “dreamed of making millions by running a casino and exporting lumber.” Others say the real “export” was to be cocaine and other narcotics.
Duke reportedly helped Perdue find a charter boat to transport his mercenary commandos and put Perdue in touch with people who would finance the bizarre expedition, codenamed Operation Red Dog.
On April 27,1981, officers of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms arrested them just before they boarded the yacht in Lake Ponchartrain. Despite his ringleader role, Duke was not arrested. He was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury, where he pleaded the Fifth Amendment, refusing to testify. Nine of the ten other conspirators, including Duke’s co-hort Klanman Don Black, were found guilty and served time in prison. Why was Duke let off?
Echelon: Exposing the Global Surveillance System (Covert Action Quarterly 2/1998)
3 and 16 March 1998: Link to original sources on Echelon
2 February 1998
Source: http://206.13.40.11/1996/dec/echelon.html
Thanks to IB
EXPOSING THE GLOBAL SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM
by Nicky Hager
This article is reprinted with the permission of CAQ [to Ham Radio Online] (CovertAction Quarterly). CAQ subscription information follows the article.
This article appears in CAQ with the following sidebar articles:
NSA’S BUSINESS PLAN: GLOBAL ACCESS by Duncan Campbell
GREENPEACE WARRIOR: WHY NO WARNING? by Nicky Hager
NZ’s PM Kept in the Dark by Nicky Hager
Nicky Hager’s book Secret Power is available from CAQ for $33.
IN THE LATE 1980’S, IN A DECISION IT PROBABLY REGRETS, THE U.S. PROMPTED NEW ZEALAND TO JOIN A NEW AND HIGHLY SECRET GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM. HAGER’S INVESTIGATION INTO IT AND HIS DISCOVERY OF THE ECHELON DICTIONARY HAS REVEALED ONE OF THE WORLD’S BIGGEST, MOST CLOSELY HELD INTELLIGENCE PROJECTS. THE SYSTEM ALLOWS SPY AGENCIES TO MONITOR MOST OF THE WORLD’S TELEPHONE, E-MAIL, AND TELEX COMMUNICATIONS.
For 40 years, New Zealand’s largest intelligence agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) the nation’s equivalent of the US National Security Agency (NSA) had been helping its Western allies to spy on countries throughout the Pacific region, without the knowledge of the New Zealand public or many of its highest elected officials. What the NSA did not know is that by the late 1980s, various intelligence staff had decided these activities had been too secret for too long, and were providing me with interviews and documents exposing New Zealand’s intelligence activities. Eventually, more than 50 people who work or have worked in intelligence and related fields agreed to be interviewed.
The activities they described made it possible to document, from the South Pacific, some alliance-wide systems and projects which have been kept secret elsewhere. Of these, by far the most important is ECHELON.
Designed and coordinated by NSA, the ECHELON system is used to intercept ordinary e-mail, fax, telex, and telephone communications carried over the world’s telecommunications networks. Unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War, ECHELON is designed primarily for non-military targets: governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals in virtually every country. It potentially affects every person communicating between (and sometimes within) countries anywhere in the world.
It is, of course, not a new idea that intelligence organizations tap into e-mail and other public telecommunications networks. What was new in the material leaked by the New Zealand intelligence staff was precise information on where the spying is done, how the system works, its capabilities and shortcomings, and many details such as the codenames.
The ECHELON system is not designed to eavesdrop on a particular individual’s e-mail or fax link. Rather, the system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass of unwanted ones. A chain of secret interception facilities has been established around the world to tap into all the major components of the international telecommunications networks. Some monitor communications satellites, others land-based communications networks, and others radio communications. ECHELON links together all these facilities, providing the US and its allies with the ability to intercept a large proportion of the communications on the planet.
The computers at each station in the ECHELON network automatically search through the millions of messages intercepted for ones containing pre-programmed keywords. Keywords include all the names, localities, subjects, and so on that might be mentioned. Every word of every message intercepted at each station gets automatically searched whether or not a specific telephone number or e-mail address is on the list.
The thousands of simultaneous messages are read in “real time” as they pour into the station, hour after hour, day after day, as the computer finds intelligence needles in telecommunications haystacks.
SOMEONE IS LISTENING: The computers in stations around the globe are known, within the network, as the ECHELON Dictionaries. Computers that can automatically search through traffic for keywords have existed since at least the 1970s, but the ECHELON system was designed by NSA to interconnect all these computers and allow the stations to function as components of an integrated whole. The NSA and GCSB are bound together under the five-nation UKUSA signals intelligence agreement. The other three partners all with equally obscure names are the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Britain, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) in Canada, and the Defense Signals Directorate (DSD) in Australia.
The alliance, which grew from cooperative efforts during World War II to intercept radio transmissions, was formalized into the UKUSA agreement in 1948 and aimed primarily against the USSR. The five UKUSA agencies are today the largest intelligence organizations in their respective countries. With much of the world’s business occurring by fax, e-mail, and phone, spying on these communications receives the bulk of intelligence resources. For decades before the introduction of the ECHELON system, the UKUSA allies did intelligence collection operations for each other, but each agency usually processed and analyzed the intercept from its own stations.
Under ECHELON, a particular station’s Dictionary computer contains not only its parent agency’s chosen keywords, but also has lists entered in for other agencies. In New Zealand’s satellite interception station at Waihopai (in the South Island), for example, the computer has separate search lists for the NSA, GCHQ, DSD, and CSE in addition to its own. Whenever the Dictionary encounters a message containing one of the agencies’ keywords, it automatically picks it and sends it directly to the headquarters of the agency concerned. No one in New Zealand screens, or even sees, the intelligence collected by the New Zealand station for the foreign agencies. Thus, the stations of the junior UKUSA allies function for the NSA no differently than if they were overtly NSA-run bases located on their soil.
The first component of the ECHELON network are stations specifically targeted on the international telecommunications satellites (Intelsats) used by the telephone companies of most countries. A ring of Intelsats is positioned around the world, stationary above the equator, each serving as a relay station for tens of thousands of simultaneous phone calls, fax, and e-mail. Five UKUSA stations have been established to intercept the communications carried by the Intelsats.
The British GCHQ station is located at the top of high cliffs above the sea at Morwenstow in Cornwall. Satellite dishes beside sprawling operations buildings point toward Intelsats above the Atlantic, Europe, and, inclined almost to the horizon, the Indian Ocean. An NSA station at Sugar Grove, located 250 kilometers southwest of Washington, DC, in the mountains of West Virginia, covers Atlantic Intelsats transmitting down toward North and South America. Another NSA station is in Washington State, 200 kilometers southwest of Seattle, inside the Army’s Yakima Firing Center. Its satellite dishes point out toward the Pacific Intelsats and to the east.
The job of intercepting Pacific Intelsat communications that cannot be intercepted at Yakima went to New Zealand and Australia. Their South Pacific location helps to ensure global interception. New Zealand provides the station at Waihopai and Australia supplies the Geraldton station in West Australia (which targets both Pacific and Indian Ocean Intelsats).
Each of the five stations’ Dictionary computers has a codename to distinguish it from others in the network. The Yakima station, for instance, located in desert country between the Saddle Mountains and Rattlesnake Hills, has the COWBOY Dictionary, while the Waihopai station has the FLINTLOCK Dictionary. These codenames are recorded at the beginning of every intercepted message, before it is transmitted around the ECHELON network, allowing analysts to recognize at which station the interception occurred.
New Zealand intelligence staff has been closely involved with the NSA’s Yakima station since 1981, when NSA pushed the GCSB to contribute to a project targeting Japanese embassy communications. Since then, all five UKUSA agencies have been responsible for monitoring diplomatic cables from all Japanese posts within the same segments of the globe they are assigned for general UKUSA monitoring. Until New Zealand’s integration into ECHELON with the opening of the Waihopai station in 1989, its share of the Japanese communications was intercepted at Yakima and sent unprocessed to the GCSB headquarters in Wellington for decryption, translation, and writing into UKUSA-format intelligence reports (the NSA provides the codebreaking programs).
“COMMUNICATION” THROUGH SATELLITES: The next component of the ECHELON system intercepts a range of satellite communications not carried by Intelsat.In addition to the UKUSA stations targeting Intelsat satellites, there are another five or more stations homing in on Russian and other regional communications satellites. These stations are Menwith Hill in northern England; Shoal Bay, outside Darwin in northern Australia (which targets Indonesian satellites); Leitrim, just south of Ottawa in Canada (which appears to intercept Latin American satellites); Bad Aibling in Germany; and Misawa in northern Japan.
A group of facilities that tap directly into land-based telecommunications systems is the final element of the ECHELON system. Besides satellite and radio, the other main method of transmitting large quantities of public, business, and government communications is a combination of water cables under the oceans and microwave networks over land. Heavy cables, laid across seabeds between countries, account for much of the world’s international communications. After they come out of the water and join land-based microwave networks they are very vulnerable to interception. The microwave networks are made up of chains of microwave towers relaying messages from hilltop to hilltop (always in line of sight) across the countryside. These networks shunt large quantities of communications across a country. Interception of them gives access to international undersea communications (once they surface) and to international communication trunk lines across continents. They are also an obvious target for large-scale interception of domestic communications.
Because the facilities required to intercept radio and satellite communications use large aerials and dishes that are difficult to hide for too long, that network is reasonably well documented. But all that is required to intercept land-based communication networks is a building situated along the microwave route or a hidden cable running underground from the legitimate network into some anonymous building, possibly far removed. Although it sounds technically very difficult, microwave interception from space by United States spy satellites also occurs.4 The worldwide network of facilities to intercept these communications is largely undocumented, and because New Zealand’s GCSB does not participate in this type of interception, my inside sources could not help either.
NO ONE IS SAFE FROM A MICROWAVE: A 1994 expos of the Canadian UKUSA agency, Spyworld, co-authored by one of its former staff, Mike Frost, gave the first insights into how a lot of foreign microwave interception is done (see p. 18). It described UKUSA “embassy collection” operations, where sophisticated receivers and processors are secretly transported to their countries’ overseas embassies in diplomatic bags and used to monitor various communications in foreign capitals.
Since most countries’ microwave networks converge on the capital city, embassy buildings can be an ideal site. Protected by diplomatic privilege, they allow interception in the heart of the target country. *6 The Canadian embassy collection was requested by the NSA to fill gaps in the American and British embassy collection operations, which were still occurring in many capitals around the world when Frost left the CSE in 1990. Separate sources in Australia have revealed that the DSD also engages in embassy collection. On the territory of UKUSA nations, the interception of land-based telecommunications appears to be done at special secret intelligence facilities. The US, UK, and Canada are geographically well placed to intercept the large amounts of the world’s communications that cross their territories.
The only public reference to the Dictionary system anywhere in the world was in relation to one of these facilities, run by the GCHQ in central London. In 1991, a former British GCHQ official spoke anonymously to Granada Television’s World in Action about the agency’s abuses of power. He told the program about an anonymous red brick building at 8 Palmer Street where GCHQ secretly intercepts every telex which passes into, out of, or through London, feeding them into powerful computers with a program known as “Dictionary.” The operation, he explained, is staffed by carefully vetted British Telecom people: “It’s nothing to do with national security. It’s because it’s not legal to take every single telex. And they take everything: the embassies, all the business deals, even the birthday greetings, they take everything. They feed it into the Dictionary.” What the documentary did not reveal is that Dictionary is not just a British system; it is UKUSA-wide.
Similarly, British researcher Duncan Campbell has described how the US Menwith Hill station in Britain taps directly into the British Telecom microwave network, which has actually been designed with several major microwave links converging on an isolated tower connected underground into the station.
The NSA Menwith Hill station, with 22 satellite terminals and more than 4.9 acres of buildings, is undoubtedly the largest and most powerful in the UKUSA network. Located in northern England, several thousand kilometers from the Persian Gulf, it was awarded the NSA’s “Station of the Year” prize for 1991 after its role in the Gulf War. Menwith Hill assists in the interception of microwave communications in another way as well, by serving as a ground station for US electronic spy satellites. These intercept microwave trunk lines and short range communications such as military radios and walkie talkies. Other ground stations where the satellites’ information is fed into the global network are Pine Gap, run by the CIA near Alice Springs in central Australia and the Bad Aibling station in Germany. Among them, the various stations and operations making up the ECHELON network tap into all the main components of the world’s telecommunications networks. All of them, including a separate network of stations that intercepts long distance radio communications, have their own Dictionary computers connected into ECHELON.
In the early 1990s, opponents of the Menwith Hill station obtained large quantities of internal documents from the facility. Among the papers was a reference to an NSA computer system called Platform. The integration of all the UKUSA station computers into ECHELON probably occurred with the introduction of this system in the early 1980s. James Bamford wrote at that time about a new worldwide NSA computer network codenamed Platform “which will tie together 52 separate computer systems used throughout the world. Focal point, or `host environment,’ for the massive network will be the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. Among those included in Platform will be the British SIGINT organization, GCHQ.”
LOOKING IN THE DICTIONARY: The Dictionary computers are connected via highly encrypted UKUSA communications that link back to computer data bases in the five agency headquarters. This is where all the intercepted messages selected by the Dictionaries end up. Each morning the specially “indoctrinated” signals intelligence analysts in Washington, Ottawa, Cheltenham, Canberra, and Wellington log on at their computer terminals and enter the Dictionary system. After keying in their security passwords, they reach a directory that lists the different categories of intercept available in the data bases, each with a four-digit code. For instance, 1911 might be Japanese diplomatic cables from Latin America (handled by the Canadian CSE), 3848 might be political communications from and about Nigeria, and 8182 might be any messages about distribution of encryption technology.
They select their subject category, get a “search result” showing how many messages have been caught in the ECHELON net on that subject, and then the day’s work begins. Analysts scroll through screen after screen of intercepted faxes, e-mail messages, etc. and, whenever a message appears worth reporting on, they select it from the rest to work on. If it is not in English, it is translated and then written into the standard format of intelligence reports produced anywhere within the UKUSA network either in entirety as a “report,” or as a summary or “gist.”
INFORMATION CONTROL: A highly organized system has been developed to control what is being searched for by each station and who can have access to it. This is at the heart of ECHELON operations and works as follows.
The individual station’s Dictionary computers do not simply have a long list of keywords to search for. And they do not send all the information into some huge database that participating agencies can dip into as they wish. It is much more controlled.
The search lists are organized into the same categories, referred to by the four digit numbers. Each agency decides its own categories according to its responsibilities for producing intelligence for the network. For GCSB, this means South Pacific governments, Japanese diplomatic, Russian Antarctic activities, and so on.
The agency then works out about 10 to 50 keywords for selection in each category. The keywords include such things as names of people, ships, organizations, country names, and subject names. They also include the known telex and fax numbers and Internet addresses of any individuals, businesses, organizations, and government offices that are targets. These are generally written as part of the message text and so are easily recognized by the Dictionary computers.
The agencies also specify combinations of keywords to help sift out communications of interest. For example, they might search for diplomatic cables containing both the words “Santiago” and “aid,” or cables containing the word “Santiago” but not “consul” (to avoid the masses of routine consular communications). It is these sets of words and numbers (and combinations), under a particular category, that get placed in the Dictionary computers. (Staff in the five agencies called Dictionary Managers enter and update the keyword search lists for each agency.)
The whole system, devised by the NSA, has been adopted completely by the other agencies. The Dictionary computers search through all the incoming messages and, whenever they encounter one with any of the agencies’ keywords, they select it. At the same time, the computer automatically notes technical details such as the time and place of interception on the piece of intercept so that analysts reading it, in whichever agency it is going to, know where it came from, and what it is. Finally, the computer writes the four-digit code (for the category with the keywords in that message) at the bottom of the message’s text. This is important. It means that when all the intercepted messages end up together in the database at one of the agency headquarters, the messages on a particular subject can be located again. Later, when the analyst using the Dictionary system selects the four- digit code for the category he or she wants, the computer simply searches through all the messages in the database for the ones which have been tagged with that number.
This system is very effective for controlling which agencies can get what from the global network because each agency only gets the intelligence out of the ECHELON system from its own numbers. It does not have any access to the raw intelligence coming out of the system to the other agencies. For example, although most of the GCSB’s intelligence production is primarily to serve the UKUSA alliance, New Zealand does not have access to the whole ECHELON network. The access it does have is strictly controlled. A New Zealand intelligence officer explained: “The agencies can all apply for numbers on each other’s Dictionaries. The hardest to deal with are the Americans. … [There are] more hoops to jump through, unless it is in their interest, in which case they’ll do it for you.”
There is only one agency which, by virtue of its size and role within the alliance, will have access to the full potential of the ECHELON system the agency that set it up. What is the system used for? Anyone listening to official “discussion” of intelligence could be forgiven for thinking that, since the end of the Cold War, the key targets of the massive UKUSA intelligence machine are terrorism, weapons proliferation, and economic intelligence. The idea that economic intelligence has become very important, in particular, has been carefully cultivated by intelligence agencies intent on preserving their post-Cold War budgets. It has become an article of faith in much discussion of intelligence. However, I have found no evidence that these are now the primary concerns of organizations such as NSA.
QUICKER INTELLIGENCE, SAME MISSION: A different story emerges after examining very detailed information I have been given about the intelligence New Zealand collects for the UKUSA allies and detailed descriptions of what is in the yards-deep intelligence reports New Zealand receives from its four allies each week. There is quite a lot of intelligence collected about potential terrorists, and there is quite a lot of economic intelligence, notably intensive monitoring of all the countries participating in GATT negotiations. But by far, the main priorities of the intelligence alliance continue to be political and military intelligence to assist the larger allies to pursue their interests around the world. Anyone and anything the particular governments are concerned about can become a target.
With capabilities so secret and so powerful, almost anything goes. For example, in June 1992, a group of current “highly placed intelligence operatives” from the British GCHQ spoke to the London Observer: “We feel we can no longer remain silent regarding that which we regard to be gross malpractice and negligence within the establishment in which we operate.” They gave as examples GCHQ interception of three charitable organizations, including Amnesty International and Christian Aid. As the Observer reported: “At any time GCHQ is able to home in on their communications for a routine target request,” the GCHQ source said. In the case of phone taps the procedure is known as Mantis. With telexes it is called Mayfly. By keying in a code relating to Third World aid, the source was able to demonstrate telex “fixes” on the three organizations. “It is then possible to key in a trigger word which enables us to home in on the telex communications whenever that word appears,” he said. “And we can read a pre-determined number of characters either side of the keyword.” Without actually naming it, this was a fairly precise description of how the ECHELON Dictionary system works. Again, what was not revealed in the publicity was that this is a UKUSA-wide system. The design of ECHELON means that the interception of these organizations could have occurred anywhere in the network, at any station where the GCHQ had requested that the four-digit code covering Third World aid be placed.
Note that these GCHQ officers mentioned that the system was being used for telephone calls. In New Zealand, ECHELON is used only to intercept written communications: fax, e-mail, and telex. The reason, according to intelligence staff, is that the agency does not have the staff to analyze large quantities of telephone conversations.
Mike Frost’s expos of Canadian “embassy collection” operations described the NSA computers they used, called Oratory, that can “listen” to telephone calls and recognize when keywords are spoken. Just as we can recognize words spoken in all the different tones and accents we encounter, so too, according to Frost, can these computers. Telephone calls containing keywords are automatically extracted from the masses of other calls and recorded digitally on magnetic tapes for analysts back at agency headquarters. However, high volume voice recognition computers will be technically difficult to perfect, and my New Zealand-based sources could not confirm that this capability exists. But, if or when it is perfected, the implications would be immense. It would mean that the UKUSA agencies could use machines to search through all the international telephone calls in the world, in the same way that they do written messages. If this equipment exists for use in embassy collection, it will presumably be used in all the stations throughout the ECHELON network. It is yet to be confirmed how extensively telephone communications are being targeted by the ECHELON stations for the other agencies.
The easiest pickings for the ECHELON system are the individuals, organizations, and governments that do not use encryption. In New Zealand’s area, for example, it has proved especially useful against already vulnerable South Pacific nations which do not use any coding, even for government communications (all these communications of New Zealand’s neighbors are supplied, unscreened, to its UKUSA allies). As a result of the revelations in my book, there is currently a project under way in the Pacific to promote and supply publicly available encryption software to vulnerable organizations such as democracy movements in countries with repressive governments. This is one practical way of curbing illegitimate uses of the ECHELON capabilities.
One final comment. All the newspapers, commentators, and “well placed sources” told the public that New Zealand was cut off from US intelligence in the mid-1980s. That was entirely untrue. The intelligence supply to New Zealand did not stop, and instead, the decade since has been a period of increased integration of New Zealand into the US system. Virtually everything the equipment, manuals, ways of operating, jargon, codes, and so on, used in the GCSB continues to be imported entirely from the larger allies (in practice, usually the NSA). As with the Australian and Canadian agencies, most of the priorities continue to come from the US, too.
The main thing that protects these agencies from change is their secrecy. On the day my book arrived in the book shops, without prior publicity, there was an all-day meeting of the intelligence bureaucrats in the prime minister’s department trying to decide if they could prevent it from being distributed. They eventually concluded, sensibly, that the political costs were too high. It is understandable that they were so agitated.
Throughout my research, I have faced official denials or governments refusing to comment on publicity about intelligence activities. Given the pervasive atmosphere of secrecy and stonewalling, it is always hard for the public to judge what is fact, what is speculation, and what is paranoia. Thus, in uncovering New Zealand’s role in the NSA-led alliance, my aim was to provide so much detail about the operations the technical systems, the daily work of individual staff members, and even the rooms in which they work inside intelligence facilities that readers could feel confident that they were getting close to the truth. I hope the information leaked by intelligence staff in New Zealand about UKUSA and its systems such as ECHELON will help lead to change.
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Army Research Grant to Explore Communication Through Brain Waves (American Forces Press Service 2008)
News American Forces Press Service E-Mail A Copy | Printer Friendly | Latest News News Article Army Research Grant to Explore Communication Through Brain Waves By Donna Miles American Forces Press Service
The 1982 Clint Eastwood thriller “Firefox” seemed like the ultimate military science fiction story: A former Vietnam War pilot steals a state-of-the-art Soviet fighter plane armed with weapons controlled solely by thought.
More than 25 years later, the Army is funding research to explore the futuristic concept of using brain waves to communicate.
The Army Research Office awarded a $4 million grant in mid-August to lay the scientific foundation it hopes will someday enable soldiers in the field to communicate through a deliberate thought process.
Elmar Schmeisser, ARO program manager, described the revolutionary concept in terms of the way today’s field soldiers communicate with radios. “You’ll press the button on your harness, you’ll think, then you’ll throw the button off,” he said.
Gone will be the microphone. Gone will be the receiver. The message will go directly from the soldier’s head into a computer programmed to decipher his brain waves, Schmeisser explained.
The result will be communication that’s silent, secure and free of background noise.
“If I record what you are saying from your brain wave, … it is automatically noise-free, clear and secure,” he said. “No one can overhear you, because you are not saying anything out loud, so it is an absolutely secure system.”
But getting to that point will require a monumental scientific breakthrough – something researchers at the University of California, Irvine, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland hope to work toward with the ARO grant.
It could take 15 or 20 years before technology gets to the point to support the system. “The mathematics behind this is fierce. It is really difficult,” Schmeisser said.
But if scientists are successful, they could bring tremendous capability to future soldiers, he said, while providing a huge side benefit as well. The technology could provide a way for soldiers with brain injuries – as well as civilians with neurological problems such as Lou Gehrig’s Disease – to communicate without speaking or writing, he said.
Test subjects for the project will don special caps that take electroencephalography, or EEG, signals sent out by their brains. The readings register as squiggles on a computer screen. The challenge for scientists is to figure out how to translate the squiggles into messages a computer can type out or speak.
The decoded thoughts – translated brain waves – would be transmitted using a system that points to the person intended to receive the message.
But getting to that point could take decades, Schmeisser said, because of the huge amount of brain activity that takes place at the same time, and the fact that no two people have the same EEG blueprint.
“What makes this difficult is that everyone’s brain is unique and everyone’s EEG is unique, just like everyone’s speech is unique,” he said. “So it has to be individualized for every person.”
But users also need to be trained to think in a way the system will understand, he said. “For this thing to have any chance of working at all, the individual has to learn to think clearly and loudly,” he said.
Schmeisser compared the system to a computer-based voice-recognition program that translates speech into text. “You have to speak slowly and clearly, and at the end you have a certain amount of accuracy,” he said. He noted a variety of factors that can interfere: nasal congestion, an unfamiliar accent or background noise.
“So you will have to think the same way and train the machine so it understands your particular pattern,” he said.
Schmeisser dismissed claims that the technology could be used to read people’s minds without their knowledge or consent. “This is not about mind reading. It doesn’t even think about ‘mind’ at all,” he said. “For this to work, you are going to have to be fully involved, and that is going to take time.”
The program is among the Army’s research projects intended to build the scientific foundation for future breakthroughs. “We’re looking at long-term goals,” Schmeisser said. “By putting research like this in place now, in 15 years you may be able to harvest that. This is not going to be operational in any real military sense for quite awhile.”
The grant for the program comes from the Defense Department’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative Program, which supports research involving more than one science and engineering discipline.
“In that synergy, you might be able to generate a breakthrough and research that will allow invention,” Schmeisser said. “So this program is not focused on creating inventions. It is focused on creating the basic science foundation from which inventions flow.”
Few other organizations are able invest in such high-risk ventures, despite the high payoff they could provide. “The Army is interested in these breakthrough technologies,” he said. “They are high-risk, and they may not pay off, but when they do, they pay off big.”
And in many cases, the payoffs not only benefit the military, but also have civilian applications. Schmeisser pointed to just a few technologies that started as Army research programs, lasers and radar among them.
“The spinout for military technology has been here since the Bronze Age, he said, pointing to how early man first developed weapons, then turned them into tools. “Fighting and the development of military technology is something humans have been doing as far back as we can record,” he said. “But the peacetime dividend of military development has been huge.”
Another long-term Army-funded program, still in its infancy, is exploring how to use genetically modified viruses to produce nanocircuitry. Angela Belcher, the chief scientist behind that effort, won the 2004 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award for her efforts.
In addition to paving the way to low-cost production of nanoscale integrated circuits and other electronic components, Belcher’s program could also lead to a broad range of next-generation applications: medical implants and tissue growth, energy-efficient batteries and lighting, faster and smaller computers, detectors for hazardous agents and stronger armor for military craft, among them. Related Sites: Army Research Office
Emotional Abuse of Children #AndrewVachss (Parade Magazine 28/8/1994)
You Carry the Cure In Your Own Heart
Emotional abuse of children can lead, in adulthood, to addiction, rage, a severely damaged sense of self and an inability to truly bond with others. But—if it happened to you—there is a way out.
by Andrew Vachss
Originally published in Parade Magazine, August 28, 1994
The attorney and author Andrew Vachss has devoted his life to protecting children. We asked Vachss, an expert on the subject of child abuse, to examine perhaps one of its most complex and widespread forms—emotional abuse: What it is, what it does to children, what can be done about it. Vachss’ latest novel, “Down in the Zero,” just published by Knopf, depicts emotional abuse at its most monstrous.
Parade article cover photo
I’m a lawyer with an unusual specialty. My clients are all children—damaged, hurting children who have been sexually assaulted, physically abused, starved, ignored, abandoned and every other lousy thing one human can do to another. People who know what I do always ask: “What is the worst case you ever handled?” When you’re in a business where a baby who dies early may be the luckiest child in the family, there’s no easy answer. But I have thought about it—I think about it every day. My answer is that, of all the many forms of child abuse, emotional abuse may be the cruelest and longest-lasting of all.
Emotional abuse is the systematic diminishment of another. It may be intentional or subconscious (or both), but it is always a course of conduct, not a single event. It is designed to reduce a child’s self-concept to the point where the victim considers himself unworthy—unworthy of respect, unworthy of friendship, unworthy of the natural birthright of all children: love and protection.
Emotional abuse can be as deliberate as a gunshot: “You’re fat. You’re stupid. You’re ugly.”
Emotional abuse can be as random as the fallout from a nuclear explosion. In matrimonial battles, for example, the children all too often become the battlefield. I remember a young boy, barely into his teens, absently rubbing the fresh scars on his wrists. “It was the only way to make them all happy,” he said. His mother and father were locked in a bitter divorce battle, and each was demanding total loyalty and commitment from the child.
Emotional abuse can be active. Vicious belittling: “You’ll never be the success your brother was.” Deliberate humiliation: “You’re so stupid. I’m ashamed you’re my son.”
It also can be passive, the emotional equivalent of child neglect—a sin of omission, true, but one no less destructive.
And it may be a combination of the two, which increases the negative effects geometrically.
Emotional abuse can be verbal or behavioral, active or passive, frequent or occasional. Regardless, it is often as painful as physical assault. And, with rare exceptions, the pain lasts much longer. A parent’s love is so important to a child that withholding it can cause a “failure to thrive” condition similar to that of children who have been denied adequate nutrition.
Even the natural solace of siblings is denied to those victims of emotional abuse who have been designated as the family’s “target child.” The other children are quick to imitate their parents. Instead of learning the qualities every child will need as an adult—empathy, nurturing and protectiveness—they learn the viciousness of a pecking order. And so the cycle continues.
But whether as a deliberate target or an innocent bystander, the emotionally abused child inevitably struggles to “explain” the conduct of his abusers—and ends up struggling for survival in a quicksand of self-blame.
Emotional abuse is both the most pervasive and the least understood form of child maltreatment. Its victims are often dismissed simply because their wounds are not visible. In an era in which fresh disclosures of unspeakable child abuse are everyday fare, the pain and torment of those who experience “only” emotional abuse is often trivialized. We understand and accept that victims of physical or sexual abuse need both time and specialized treatment to heal. But when it comes to emotional abuse, we are more likely to believe the victims will “just get over it” when they become adults.
That assumption is dangerously wrong. Emotional abuse scars the heart and damages the soul. Like cancer, it does its most deadly work internally. And, like cancer, it can metastasize if untreated.
When it comes to damage, there is no real difference between physical, sexual and emotional abuse. All that distinguishes one from the other is the abuser’s choice of weapons. I remember a woman, a grandmother whose abusers had long since died, telling me that time had not conquered her pain. “It wasn’t just the incest,” she said quietly. “It was that he didn’t love me. If he loved me, he couldn’t have done that to me.”
But emotional abuse is unique because it is designed to make the victim feel guilty. Emotional abuse is repetitive and eventually cumulative behavior—very easy to imitate—and some victims later perpetuate the cycle with their own children. Although most victims courageously reject that response, their lives often are marked by a deep, pervasive sadness, a severely damaged self-concept and an inability to truly engage and bond with others.
We must renounce the lie that emotional abuse is good for children because it prepares them for a hard life in a tough world. I’ve met some individuals who were prepared for a hard life that way—I met them while they were doing life.
Emotionally abused children grow up with significantly altered perceptions so that they “see” behaviors—their own and others’—through a filter of distortion. Many emotionally abused children engage in a lifelong drive for the approval (which they translate as “love”) of others. So eager are they for love—and so convinced that they don’t deserve it—that they are prime candidates for abuse within intimate relationships.
The emotionally abused child can be heard inside every battered woman who insists: “It was my fault, really. I just seem to provoke him somehow.”
And the almost-inevitable failure of adult relationships reinforces that sense of unworthiness, compounding the felony, reverberating throughout the victim’s life.
Emotional abuse conditions the child to expect abuse in later life. Emotional abuse is a time bomb, but its effects are rarely visible, because the emotionally abused tend to implode, turning the anger against themselves. And when someone is outwardly successful in most areas of life, who looks within to see the hidden wounds?
Members of a therapy group may range widely in age, social class, ethnicity and occupation, but all display some form of self-destructive conduct: obesity, drug addiction, anorexia, bulimia, domestic violence, child abuse, attempted suicide, self-mutilation, depression and fits of rage. What brought them into treatment was their symptoms. But until they address the one thing that they have in common—a childhood of emotional abuse—true recovery is impossible.
One of the goals of any child-protective effort is to “break the cycle” of abuse. We should not delude ourselves that we are winning this battle simply because so few victims of emotional abuse become abusers themselves. Some emotionally abused children are programmed to fail so effectively that a part of their own personality “self-parents” by belittling and humiliating themselves.
The pain does not stop with adulthood. Indeed, for some, it worsens. I remember a young woman, an accomplished professional, charming and friendly, well-liked by all who knew her. She told me she would never have children. “I’d always be afraid I would act like them,” she said.
Unlike other forms of child abuse, emotional abuse is rarely denied by those who practice it. In fact, many actively defend their psychological brutality, asserting that a childhood of emotional abuse helped their children to “toughen up.” It is not enough for us to renounce the perverted notion that beating children produces good citizens—we must also renounce the lie that emotional abuse is good for children because it prepares them for a hard life in a tough world. I’ve met some individuals who were prepared for a hard life that way—I met them while they were doing life.
The primary weapons of emotional abusers is the deliberate infliction of guilt. They use guilt the same way a loan shark uses money: They don’t want the “debt” paid off, because they live quite happily on the “interest.”
When your self-concept has been shredded, when you have been deeply injured and made to feel the injury was all your fault, when you look for approval to those who can not or will not provide it—you play the role assigned to you by your abusers. It’s time to stop playing that role.
Because emotional abuse comes in so many forms (and so many disguises), recognition is the key to effective response. For example, when allegations of child sexual abuse surface, it is a particularly hideous form of emotional abuse to pressure the victim to recant, saying he or she is “hurting the family” by telling the truth. And precisely the same holds true when a child is pressured to sustain a lie by a “loving” parent.
Emotional abuse requires no physical conduct whatsoever. In one extraordinary case, a jury in Florida recognized the lethal potential of emotional abuse by finding a mother guilty of child abuse in connection with the suicide of her 17-year-old daughter, whom she had forced to work as a nude dancer (and had lived off her earnings).
Another rarely understood form of emotional abuse makes victims responsible for their own abuse by demanding that they “understand” the perpetrator. Telling a 12-year-old girl that she was an “enabler” of her own incest is emotional abuse at its most repulsive.
A particularly pernicious myth is that “healing requires forgiveness” of the abuser. For the victim of emotional abuse, the most viable form of help is self-help—and a victim handicapped by the need to “forgive” the abuser is a handicapped helper indeed. The most damaging mistake an emotional-abuse victim can make is to invest in the “rehabilitation” of the abuser. Too often this becomes still another wish that didn’t come true—and emotionally abused children will conclude that they deserve no better result.
The costs of emotional abuse cannot be measured by visible scars, but each victim loses some percentage of capacity. And that capacity remains lost so long as the victim is stuck in the cycle of “understanding” and “forgiveness.” The abuser has no “right” to forgiveness—such blessings can only be earned. And although the damage was done with words, true forgiveness can only be earned with deeds.
For those with an idealized notion of “family,” the task of refusing to accept the blame for their own victimization is even more difficult. For such searchers, the key to freedom is always truth—the real truth, not the distorted, self-serving version served by the abuser.
Emotional abuse threatens to become a national illness. The popularity of nasty, mean-spirited, personal-attack cruelty that passes for “entertainment” is but one example. If society is in the midst of moral and spiritual erosion, a “family” bedrocked on the emotional abuse of its children will not hold the line. And the tide shows no immediate signs of turning.
Effective treatment of emotional abusers depends on the motivation for the original conduct, insight into the roots of such conduct and the genuine desire to alter that conduct. For some abusers, seeing what they are doing to their child—or, better yet, feeling what they forced their child to feel—is enough to make them halt. Other abusers need help with strategies to deal with their own stress so that it doesn’t overload onto their children.
But for some emotional abusers, rehabilitation is not possible. For such people, manipulation is a way of life. They coldly and deliberately set up a “family” system in which the child can never manage to “earn” the parent’s love. In such situations, any emphasis on “healing the whole family” is doomed to failure.
If you are a victim of emotional abuse, there can be no self-help until you learn to self-reference. That means developing your own standards, deciding for yourself what “goodness” really is. Adopting the abuser’s calculated labels—”You’re crazy. You’re ungrateful. It didn’t happen the way you say”—only continues the cycle.
Adult survivors of emotional child abuse have only two life-choices: learn to self-reference or remain a victim. When your self-concept has been shredded, when you have been deeply injured and made to feel the injury was all your fault, when you look for approval to those who can not or will not provide it—you play the role assigned to you by your abusers.
It’s time to stop playing that role, time to write your own script. Victims of emotional abuse carry the cure in their own hearts and souls. Salvation means learning self-respect, earning the respect of others and making that respect the absolutely irreducible minimum requirement for all intimate relationships. For the emotionally abused child, healing does come down to “forgiveness”—forgiveness of yourself.
How you forgive yourself is as individual as you are. But knowing you deserve to be loved and respected and empowering yourself with a commitment to try is more than half the battle. Much more.
And it is never too soon—or too late—to start.
UK Licenses Human Embryo Creation (JAMA 7/2003)
The United Kingdom (UK) has granted a license to Roslin Institute, Edinburgh, Scotland, to create human embryos for stem cell research via parthenogenesis, a “virgin birth” technique that jolts oocytes into a fertilized state without sperm. The license also allows the institute—former home of Dolly the sheep, which died in February—and its lead cloning researcher, Ian Wilmut, PhD, to derive stem cells from embryos created for in vitro fertilization (IVF) .
These nonhuman primate eggs have developed into 8-day-old embryos via a process called parthenogenesis (Science . 2002;295:819) (Photo credit: AAAS)
It is the fourth license for embryonic stem cell research handed out by the government of the United Kingdom, but the first license allowing the creation of human embryos by any means.
Speaking at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md, Wilmut said that he supports research on all types of stem cells, whether from embryos or adult tissues.
But he added that cloned embryos offer the most promising means for identifying the origins of and treatments for genetic conditions such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig disease (JAMA. 2001;285:1691-1693). Embryos created using DNA from individuals with such diseases could provide researchers with an almost unlimited supply of stem cells, each carrying the key genetic defect. Such a pool would allow scientists to undertake more, and more sophisticated, experiments than any other available technology, said Wilmut, who spoke at a conference sponsored by the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation.
INCREASING THE EGG SUPPLY
INCREASING THE EGG SUPPLY
In an interview following his talk, Wilmut said that the aims of the newly licensed research are two-fold: to improve basic stem cell culturing technologies and to increase the supply of human eggs available for research.
INCREASING THE EGG SUPPLY
Roslin will immediately begin collecting embryos donated by patients from IVF clinics, which typically create several excess embryos per pregnancy attempt. The second route to boosting the egg supply, parthenogenesis, is much more technically challenging, said Harry Griffin, PhD, acting director at Roslin.
INCREASING THE EGG SUPPLY
The process involves gathering immature eggs from donors undergoing surgery for nonfertility-related reasons and then coaxing them to maturity in the laboratory. If successful, Roslin scientists will try to glean stem cells from the parthenotes (embryos grown from unfertilized eggs).
INCREASING THE EGG SUPPLY
Roslin’s agenda is the latest in a long line of advances involving parthenogenesis. Decades ago, scientists discovered that some plants and lower animals, including insects and corals, reproduce via the technique. Because the oocytes do not complete meiosis, they contain a full complement of the parent’s chromosomes—a clone.
INCREASING THE EGG SUPPLY
SUCCESS IN PRIMATES
Then in 1936, Gregory Pincus, MD, one of the scientists involved in developing the first birth control pill, induced parthenogenesis in rabbit eggs via temperature change and chemical agents. In 2001, Michael West, PhD, and colleagues at Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), Worcester, Mass, announced the creation of human parthenotes, although many scientists expressed skepticism about the embryos’ usefulness, as they died shortly after creation. A year later, though, a team led by ACT scientists and Kent Vrana, PhD, professor of physiology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, obtained embryonic stem cells from monkey parthenotes, an advance that sparked a wave of enthusiasm (Science. 2002;295:819).
SUCCESS IN PRIMATES
Roslin is the latest institute to ride that wave, and Wilmut expressed confidence that parthenogenic human embryos will eventually provide a rich source of stem cells for research. But constructing a steady supply of stem cells is just the first step in the research pipeline. Once collected, the cells need to be fed and kept stable.
SUCCESS IN PRIMATES
Because current stem cell lines rely on mouse “feeder” cells, in theory, Wilmut said, unknown viruses in animal feeder cells could find their way into the human cells, a concern that the US Food and Drug Administration has also raised. To avoid that possibility, scientists at Roslin are developing techniques that would rely instead on human feeder cells or, even more ambitiously, on completely cell-free media. That is, the embryonic stem cells would grow in a rich soup of organic compounds.
SUCCESS IN PRIMATES
According to an abstract posted on the Web site of the UK’s Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the agency that grants stem cell research licenses, Roslin now has permission to pursue this goal, too (http://www.hfea.gov.uk/aboutHFEA/researchLicenses.htm).
TO CLONE, OR NOT TO CLONE
TO CLONE, OR NOT TO CLONE
Like Roslin, the other three UK licensees—Guy’s Hospital, London; the Institute of Stem Cell Research at the University of Edinburgh; and the London Fertility Centre—are culturing stem cells from donated IVF embryos.
TO CLONE, OR NOT TO CLONE
Under a sweeping 1990 law, the HFEA regulates all IVF and human embryo research in the United Kingdom; a 2001 update to the HFEA banned all reproductive cloning and mandated that any artificially created human embryos must be destroyed within 14 days. In March, the House of Lords ruled that despite challenges from antiabortion groups, the HFEA holds the authority to license research involving embryo creation via parthenogenesis and cell nuclear replacement, although cloning for reproductive purposes remains off limits.
TO CLONE, OR NOT TO CLONE
Wilmut did not say if Roslin would pursue a license to attempt the more controversial nuclear replacement technique, the method used to create Dolly. In nuclear replacement, genetic material from an adult cell is transplanted into an oocyte, which is stimulated and begins embryonic development—a procedure that succeeds only rarely. While parthenogenesis allows cloning of reproductive-aged females, nuclear replacement could, hypothetically, clone any person, alive or dead (if viable DNA can be recovered).
TO CLONE, OR NOT TO CLONE
While tightly controlled in the United Kingdom, cloning research in the United States is largely unregulated. Bills outlawing the creation of cloned embryos for reproduction—and also for research, depending on the bill—have stalled in the US Congress, leaving the cloning landscape wide open for private companies. However, restrictions apply to researchers receiving federal funds, who may work with a handful of approved but largely uncharacterized embryonic stem cell lines and are not allowed to create cloned human embryos (JAMA. 2003; 289:1092).
New Stem Cell Center
New Stem Cell Center
As parthenotes and embryos evolve as a source of embryonic stem cells, other researchers are concentrating on adult cells with transformative potential.
New Stem Cell Center
One type, marrow stromal cells, have taken center stage with a 5-year, $4.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to Tulane University in New Orleans. The funds will support a new center to prepare and distribute standardized, high-quality marrow stromal cells.
New Stem Cell Center
Because producing the cells is technically challenging, the Tulane center will speed basic and, eventually, clinical research, said Judith Vaitukaitis, MD, director of the National Center for Research Resources at NIH.
New Stem Cell Center
Recent research has shown that, when injected into animals, marrow stromal cells populate bone, cartilage, lung, skin, liver, and brain tissue.—B.V.
#CIA #MindControl at #StanfordResearchInstitute #AlexConstantine #Scientology #ElectronicMindControl
CIA MIND CONTROL AT STANFORD RESEARCH INSTITUTE
By Alex Constantine
December 1996
Concrete evidence that electronic mind control was an object of study at SRI was exposed by the Washington Post on August 7, 1977:
“When the Navy awarded a contract to the Institute, the scientific assistant to the Secretary of the Navy, Dr. Sam Koslov, received a routine briefing on various research projects, including SRI’s. As the briefer flashed his chart onto the screen and began to speak, Koslov stormily interrupted, ‘What the hell is that about?’ Among the glowing words on the projected chart, the section describing SRI’s work was labeled:
ELF and Mind Control.
ELF stands for extremely [low] frequency electromagnetic waves, from the very slow brain frequencies up to about 100 cycles per second…. But the Mind Control label really upset Koslov. He ordered the SRI investigations for the Navy stopped, and canceled another $35,000 in Navy funds slated for more remote viewing work.”
Contrary to Koslov’s order to kill the research, the Navy quietly continued to fork out $100,000 for a two-year project directed by a BIONICS specialist.
Mind control is not a humanitarian pastime: the project was military, and if SRI was indeed a source of covert EMR brain experimentation, test subjects from the community at large were subjected to torture plied with the same thorough disregard for human rights as the radiation tests conducted at the height of the Cold War.
The treatment subjects have received at the hands of their own government would be considered atrocities if practiced in wartime.
Mind control was also used in domestic covert operations designed to further the CIA’s heady geopolitical ambitions, and during the Vietnam War period SRI was a hive of covert political subterfuge. The Symbionese Liberation Army, like the People’s Temple, was a creation of the CIA. The SLA had at its core a clique of black ex-convicts from Vacaville Prison. Donald DeFreeze, otherwise known as Cinque, led the SLA. He was formerly an informant for the LAPDs Criminal Conspiracy Section and the director of Vacaville’s Black Cultural Association (BCA), a covert mind control unit with funding from the CIA channeled through SRI. The Menlo Park behavior modification specialists experimented with psychoactive drugs administered to members of the BCA. Black prisoners were programmed to murder selected black leaders once on the outside.
The CIA/SRI zombie killer hit list included Oakland school superintendent Dr. Marcus Foster, and Panthers Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, among others. DeFreeze stated that at Vacaville in 1971-72, he was the subject of a CIA mind control experiment. He described his incarceration on the prisons third floor, where he was corralled by CIA agents who drugged him and said he would become the leader of a radical movement and kidnap a wealthy person. After his escape from Vacaville (an exit door was left unlocked for him), that’s exactly what he did.
EM mind control machines were championed at Stanford University by Dr. Karl Pribram, director of the Neuropsychology Research Laboratory: “I certainly could educate a child by putting an electrode in the lateral hypothalmus and then selecting the situations at which I stimulate it. In this was I can grossly change his behavior.” Psychology Today feted Pribram as “The Magellan of Brain Science.” He obtained his B.S. and M.D. degrees at the University of Chicago, and at Stanford University studied how the brain processes and stores sensory imagery. He is credited with discovering that mental imaging bears a close resemblance to hologram projection (the basis for transmitting images to the craniums of test subjects under the misnomer “remote viewing?”).
The Institute is bonded incestuously to corporate sponsors. Former SRI Chairman E. Hornsby Wasson, for example, was a director of several major companies, including Standard Oil of California, and he went on to become chairman of the Chamber of Commerce and CEO of Pacific Telephone & Telegraph and Bell Telephone of Nevada.
The SRI/SAIC psi experiments were supervised at Langley by John McMahon, second in command under William Casey, succeeding Bobby Ray Inman, the SAIC director. McMahon has, according to Philip Agee, the CIA whistle-blowing exile, an affinity for technological exotics for CIA covert actions. He was recruited by the Agency after his graduation from Holy Cross College (the alma mater of CIA contractees Edward Bennett Williams, attorney, and Robert Maheu, hit man). He is a former director of the Technical Services Division, deputy director for Operations, and in 1982 McMahon was appointed deputy director of Central Intelligence. He left the Agency six years later to take the position of president of the Lockheed Missiles and Space Systems Group. In 1994, he moved on to Draper Laboratories. He is a director of the Defense Enterprise Fund and an adviser to congressional committees.
Many of the SRI empaths were mustered from L. Ron Hubbard’s Church of Scientology. Harold Puthoff, the Institute’s senior researcher, was a leading Scientologist. Two remote viewers from SRI have also held rank in the Church: Ingo Swann, a Class VII Operating Thetan, a founder of the Scientology Center in Los Angeles, and the late Pat Price. Puthoff and Targ’s lab assistant was a Scientologist married to a minister of the church. When Swann joined SRI, he stated openly, “fourteen Clears participated in the experiments, more than I would suspect.” At the time he denied CIA involvement, but now acknowledges, “it was rather common knowledge all along who the sponsor was, although in documents the identity of the Agency was concealed behind the sobriquet of an east-coast scientist.”
The Agency’s interest was quite extensive. A number of agents of the CIA came themselves ultimately to SRI to act as subjects in remote viewing experiments, as did some members of Congress.
“If you recall,” astronaut Edgar Mitchell, another participant in the experiments, informed radio disinformation broker Art Bell on April 30, 1996, “back in the early ’70s, I did work at SRI with Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ and Uri Geller, and I was invited to brief the CIA on our results. George Bush was head of the CIA at that time. Subsequently, a great deal of psychic work was done by CIA, and very successfully because the Soviets were doing it at that time as well — very successfully.”
Mitchell spins a cocoon of mystical yarns as outrageously far-fetched as any of his SRI cronies. He claims to have traced the brain’s center of ESP to native creativity, a “relationship that exists in nature, it’s responsible for our inner-experience…. It involves the zero-point field, quantum physics, mystical experience, parapsychological functioning….” The ubiquitous “aliens,” he insists, are at the heart of the federal UFO cover-up, visitors from a civilization “a few million, or even a few billion years older than we are.” His book The Way of the Explorer is chock-a-block with the astronaut’s rambling Shamanic cover stories, supposedly the culmination of 25 years of research on intelligent life in the universe and the paranormal.
The Agency was purportedly so taken with the SRI experiments that the bankroll for “human augmentation” research swelled. Millions of dollars were thrown at “Grill Flame” under (DIA) and Navy auspices. The projects at SRI were augmented by a parapsychology team at Fort Meade in Maryland under INSCOM and the NSA. Military intelligence personnel were recruited, including Major Ed Dames, the Psi-Tech founder, occultist and communer with “demons.” General Stubblebine ran the project and broadened it to include tarot and the channeling of spirits. By this time, Puthoff and Swann left the Church of Scientology to join a spin-off religious movement.
The DIA inherited “Grill Flame.” A reporter for the BBC (requesting anonymity) offers a glimpse of the Army’s remote viewing project at Fort Meade, and declares he was given The Official Line, i.e., “we were about to be used for disinformation. As soon as I started asking hard questions, the project was taken away from us and [given] to a far more docile broadcaster.” The British correspondent learned that medical oversight for the psi experiments was provided by Dr. Louis Jolyon West, then a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, one of the most notorious CIA mind-control specialists in the country. Apart from monitoring the health of the subjects, according to SRI spokesmen, Dr. West conducted his own experimental studies of the
phenomenology of dissociative states,” or multiple personalities, at the Institute. Colin Ross, a specialist in dissociative disorders, confirms that Dr. West’s work for the CIA centered on the biology or personality of dissociative states.
In “Pseudo-Identity and the Treatment of Personality Change in Victims of Captivity and Cults” (1994), Dr. Louis “Jolly” West examines the creation of “changelings,” or dissociative personalities that enable the subject of mind-control conditioning to adapt to trauma. “Prolonged environmental stress,” UCLA’s own ranking CIA mind-control specialist observed (in a drastic departure from the public stance of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, an organization he formerly directed as a advisory board member, on multiplicity), “or life situations profoundly different from the usual, can disrupt the normally integrative functions of personality. Individuals subjected to such forces may adapt through dissociation by generating an altered persona, or pseudo-identity.”
Patricia Hearst (examined by Dr. West for trial) hosted an alternate personality named “Pearl,” he offers, a manifestation more distinct and individuated than “Tania.” The newspaper heiress was subjected to a regimen of “persuasive coercion” (a personal form of harassment by an organized group, any form of intimidation short of violence) and trauma-based programmimg of a sort developed by CIA specialists (like Dr. West) — “violently abducted by members of the [CIA-mustered] Symbionese Liberation Army in February of 1974, brutalized, raped, tortured, and forced to participate in illegal acts beginning with the bank robbery for which she was later (in our view wrongly) convicted. The traumatic kidnapping and subsequent 2 months of torture produced in her a state of emotional regression and fearful compliance with the demands and expectations of her captors. This was quickly followed by the coerced transformation of Patty into Tania and subsequently (less well known to the public) into Pearl, after additional trauma over a period of many months (Hearst & Moscow, 1988; The Trial of Patty Hearst, 1976). Tania was merely a role coerced on pain of death; it was Pearl who later represented the pseudo-identity which was found on psychiatric examination by one of us (West) shortly after Hearst’s arrest by the FBI. Chronic symptoms of PTSD were also prominent in this case.”
Many victims of the CIA-anchored experimentation have been left with multiple personalities induced at a young age, and it is certain that the CIA can trigger induced multiple personalities electronically from a remote source to commit any act on cue, the ultimate Manchurian Candidate. Under Dr. West’s tutelage at UCLA, parapsychology experiments of another sort were conducted by Kirlian aura researcher Thelma Moss, a writer for television and a human guinea-pig herself in LSD experiments conducted in 1957. Three years later, as a UCLA psychology student, she designed protocols for her own LSD experiments under the supervision of Dr. Oscar Janiger.
The CIA, of course, could not be far away. Dr. Janiger’s supplier of the drug was the legendary Captain Al Hubbard, the Johnny Appleseed of LSD. “Nothing of substance has been written about Al Hubbard,” Janiger once said, “and probably nothing ever should.” Hubbard, a convicted rum-runner, had a knack for electronic communications. He was recruited by the OSS by agents of Allen Dulles and surely reported to the CIA thereafter. Hubbard, an arch-arch-conservative, joined SRI at the urging of Willis Harman, director of the Institute’s Educational Policy Research Center, ostensibly as a security guard. Harman, an LSD experimenter himself, admits, “Al never did anything resembling security work.” Hubbard was employed on the Alternative Futures Project, a corporate strategy program. Al had a grandiose idea, one co-worker recalls, that “if he could give the psychedelic experience to the major executives of the Fortune 500 companies, he could change the whole of society.” Hubbard was a major supplier to university’s sponsoring experimentation, and flooded the youth subculture he despised with LSD in the 1960s. The massive drug-dealing operation at least as large as the government’s, and had Harmon’s was full support. Al Hubbard’s contract at SRI was canceled in 1974.
Among the labs closed in 1966 with the criminalization of LSD was Dr. Janiger’s. His protege, Thelma Moss, continued to pursue experimentation with the hallucinogen as a psychotherapeutic tool, later as an ESP trigger and for experiments in “behavior modification.” Her increasingly bizarre interests led her to Kirlian photography, and she set up a lab at the Neuropsychiatric Institute under Dr. West.
At least one volunteer in Moss’ experiments alleges to have been led down a blind alley to lifelong torture. D.S. (requesting anonymity) appeared on Moss’ doorstep in 1978. After the experiments, she was overwhelmed by back-to-back psychic experiences. Not true ones, she realized, but precognitive dreams that had to be fed to me. (Biotelemetric subjects routinely complain that their dreams are commandeered.) For 15 years she walked through a barrage of EM novelty effects. The psychic episodes gradually gave way to torture, including severe head pains and endless hours of persuasive coercion, the art of psychological paralysis honed by the CIA in the prison system.
In 1994 she began to receive non-stop audio transmissions that still torment her, cybernetic voices registering on her brain’s primary frequency allocation, her mental channel.
Another indication that military biotechnology, cyber-psi, was focal in Stargate research was the Agency’s choice of The American Institutes of Research (AIR) in Washington, D.C. to evaluate the validity of remote viewing. AIR could be counted on to keep the (mind control) secrets. In the 1970s, the Army’s Office of the Inspector General released declassified files disclosing a series of CIA-DoD behavior modification experiments conducted in prisons, mental hospitals and campuses from 1950 through 1971. The documents identified 44 laboratories enriched with public tax funds for secret, inhumane brain research. The first on the list was AIR. SRI also received funding. An in-house study ensured CIA personnel would not be dragged in from the cold.
Some of the aims of the research:
Inducing toxic psychosis, terminal cancer, stress, sleep, headaches and chemical lobotomies.
Developing foods that taste normal but stimulate fear and anxiety.
The concoction of drugs to facilitate the brainwashing of civilians.
Using LSD-25 and electrodes in the brain to pinpoint pain centers.
A number of SRI spinoffs have taken remote viewing into the private sector. A brochure for the Farsight Institute states flatly that technology is used, and promotes the alien diversion: The Farsight Institute (TFI) was founded by Courtney Brown, Ph.D., in 1995, evolving from a research program he conducted in the early 1990s, described in his book Cosmic Voyage: A Scientific Discovery of Extraterrestrials Visiting Earth (Dutton 1996). “Dr. Brown’s investigations began with his training in a remote viewing technology that had previously been used by the U.S. military during highly classified operations in the 1980s and ’90s,” according to his sales literature. “Historically, the principal breakthroughs with this technology were made at
Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s and 1980s by the gifted artist and natural psychic, Ingo Swann. The vision of The Farsight Institute is to promote the continued research and development of the most modern and effective forms of this continually evolving technology.” Other remote viewing gurus from the SRI program have sprung up like poison mushrooms around the country, ranting obliquely on the paranormal and scapegoating
“aliens.”
The rhetoric is a serious development in intelligence cult programming for mass consumption. The populace is subjected to the same crazed systems used to indoctrinate recruits of the mind control cults.
Psi-Tech founder Ed Dames claimed on Art Bell’s syndicated radio program that his company can comb “the collective unconscious” for answers to such mysteries as the origins of the AIDS virus. By scanning the “Global Mind,” Dames claims, “we perceived massive global weather changes that preclude growing crops, a tremendous problem with epidemics and pandemics in Third World countries because it appears the ozone problem is increasing the mutation rate. Were perceiving a bovine AIDS that kills a lot of babies. The future gets grimmer after that.”
Parapsychology, E.T.s and the “End Times” are not just for the cults anymore. The intelligence community wants the you to believe … believe …
… the Cold War-style propagandists. Current mind control disinformation has its foundations in anti-Communist propaganda. Lt. Col Thomas Beardon, an Army Reservist, was made to order in magazines published by the “Committee to Restore the Constitution” and other ultra-conservative organizations. Beardon had a loyal following. He made a career of writing about emergent Soviet EM mind-control technology, but somehow it rarely seemed to cross his mind that the U.S. might be pursuing the same initiative. Beardon warned that the Soviets were developing weapons that generate “time-reversed (TR) electromagnetic waves,” and were capable of launching a “TR Blitzkrieg War” of awful proportions. He warned grimly that the black-hearted Communists had their hands on “time-reversal” weapons that could “take Europe.” A single flying Soviet “TR wave weapon,” he claimed, was capable of knocking out all British and American radars. It could “kill personnel wholesale.”
[…]
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CIA-Initiated Remote Viewing At Stanford Research Institute (Related Articles)
CIA-Initiated Remote Viewing At Stanford Research Institute
by H. E. Puthoff, Ph.D.
Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin
4030 Braker Lane W., #300
Austin, Texas 78759-5329
Abstract – In July 1995 the CIA declassified, and approved for release, documents revealing its sponsorship in the 1970s of a program at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, to determine whether such phenomena as remote viewing “might have any utility for intelligence collection” [1]. Thus began disclosure to the public of a two-decade-plus involvement of the intelligence community in the investigation of so-called parapsychological or psi phenomena. Presented here by the program’s Founder and first Director (1972 – 1985) is the early history of the program, including discussion of some of the first, now declassified, results that drove early interest.
Introduction
On April 17, 1995, President Clinton issued Executive Order Nr. 1995-4-17, entitled Classified National Security Information. Although in one sense the order simply reaffirmed much of what has been long-standing policy, in another sense there was a clear shift toward more openness. In the opening paragraph, for example, we read: “In recent years, however, dramatic changes have altered, although not eliminated, the national security threats that we confront. These changes provide a greater opportunity to emphasize our commitment to open Government.” In the Classification Standards section of the Order this commitment is operationalized by phrases such as “If there is significant doubt about the need to classify information, it shall not be classified.” Later in the document, in reference to information that requires continued protection, there even appears the remarkable phrase “In some exceptional cases, however, the need to protect such information may be outweighed by the public interest in disclosure of the information, and in these cases the information should be declassified.”
A major fallout of this reframing of attitude toward classification is that there is enormous pressure on those charged with maintaining security to work hard at being responsive to reasonable requests for disclosure. One of the results is that FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests that have languished for months to years are suddenly being acted upon.1
One outcome of this change in policy is the government’s recent admission of its two-decade-plus involvement in funding highly-classified, special access programs in remote viewing (RV) and related psi phenomena, first at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and then at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), both in Menlo Park, CA, supplemented by various in-house government programs. Although almost all of the documentation remains yet classified, in July 1995 270 pages of SRI reports were declassified and released by the CIA, the program’s first sponsor [2]. Thus, although through the years columns by Jack Anderson and others had claimed leaks of “psychic spy” programs with such exotic names as Grill Flame, Center Lane, Sunstreak and Star Gate, CIA’s release of the SRI reports constitutes the first documented public admission of significant intelligence community involvement in the psi area.
As a consequence of the above, although I had founded the program in early 1972, and had acted as its Director until I left in 1985 to head up the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin (at which point my colleague Ed May assumed responsibility as Director), it was not until 1995 that I found myself for the first time able to utter in a single sentence the connected acronyms CIA/SRI/RV. In this report I discuss the genesis of the program, report on some of the early, now declassified, results that drove early interest, and outline the general direction the program took as it expanded into a multi-year, multi-site, multi-million-dollar effort to determine whether such phenomena as remote viewing “might have any utility for intelligence collection” [1].
Beginnings
In early 1972 I was involved in laser research at Stanford Research Institute (now called SRI International) in Menlo Park, CA. At that time I was also circulating a proposal to obtain a small grant for some research in quantum biology. In that proposal I had raised the issue whether physical theory as we knew it was capable of describing life processes, and had suggested some measurements involving plants and lower organisms [3]. This proposal was widely circulated, and a copy was sent to Cleve Backster in New York City who was involved in measuring the electrical activity of plants with standard polygraph equipment. New York artist Ingo Swann chanced to see my proposal during a visit to Backster’s lab, and wrote me suggesting that if I were interested in investigating the boundary between the physics of the animate and inanimate, I should consider experiments of the parapsychological type. Swann then went on to describe some apparently successful experiments in psychokinesis in which he had participated at Prof. Gertrude Schmeidler’s laboratory at the City College of New York. As a result of this correspondence I invited him to visit SRI for a week in June 1972 to demonstrate such effects, frankly, as much out of personal scientific curiosity as anything else.
Prior to Swann’s visit I arranged for access to a well-shielded magnetometer used in a quark-detection experiment in the Physics Department at Stanford University. During our visit to this laboratory, sprung as a surprise to Swann, he appeared to perturb the operation of the magnetometer, located in a vault below the floor of the building and shielded by mu-metal shielding, an aluminum container, copper shielding and a superconducting shield. As if to add insult to injury, he then went on to “remote view” the interior of the apparatus, rendering by drawing a reasonable facsimile of its rather complex (and heretofore unpublished) construction. It was this latter feat that impressed me perhaps even more than the former, as it also eventually did representatives of the intelligence community. I wrote up these observations and circulated it among my scientific colleagues in draft form of what was eventually published as part of a conference proceedings [4].
In a few short weeks a pair of visitors showed up at SRI with the above report in hand. Their credentials showed them to be from the CIA. They knew of my previous background as a Naval Intelligence Officer and then civilian employee at the National Security Agency (NSA) several years earlier, and felt they could discuss their concerns with me openly. There was, they told me, increasing concern in the intelligence community about the level of effort in Soviet parapsychology being funded by the Soviet security services [5]; by Western scientific standards the field was considered nonsense by most working scientists. As a result they had been on the lookout for a research laboratory outside of academia that could handle a quiet, low-profile classified investigation, and SRI appeared to fit the bill. They asked if I could arrange an opportunity for them to carry out some simple experiments with Swann, and, if the tests proved satisfactory, would I consider a pilot program along these lines? I agreed to consider this, and arranged for the requested tests.2
The tests were simple, the visitors simply hiding objects in a box and asking Swann to attempt to describe the contents. The results generated in these experiments are perhaps captured most eloquently by the following example. In one test Swann said “I see something small, brown and irregular, sort of like a leaf or something that resembles it, except that it seems very much alive, like it’s even moving!” The target chosen by one of the visitors turned out to be a small live moth, which indeed did look like a leaf. Although not all responses were quite so precise, nonetheless the integrated results were sufficiently impressive that in short order an eight-month, $49,909 Biofield Measurements Program was negotiated as a pilot study, a laser colleague Russell Targ who had had a long-time interest and involvement in parapsychology joined the program, and the experimental effort was begun in earnest.
Early Remote Viewing Results
During the eight-month pilot study of remote viewing the effort gradually evolved from the remote viewing of symbols and objects in envelopes and boxes, to the remote viewing of local target sites in the San Francisco Bay area, demarked by outbound experimenters sent to the site under strict protocols devised to prevent artifactual results. Later judging of the results were similarly handled by double-blind protocols designed to foil artifactual matching. Since these results have been presented in detail elsewhere, both in the scientific literature [6-8] and in popular book format [9], I direct the interested reader to these sources. To summarize, over the years the back-and-forth criticism of protocols, refinement of methods, and successful replication of this type of remote viewing in independent laboratories [10-14], has yielded considerable scientific evidence for the reality of the phenomenon. Adding to the strength of these results was the discovery that a growing number of individuals could be found to demonstrate high-quality remote viewing, often to their own surprise, such as the talented Hella Hammid. As a separate issue, however, most convincing to our early program monitors were the results now to be described, generated under their own control.
First, during the collection of data for a formal remote viewing series targeting indoor laboratory apparatus and outdoor locations (a series eventually published in toto in the Proc. IEEE [7]), the CIA contract monitors, ever watchful for possible chicanery, participated as remote viewers themselves in order to critique the protocols. In this role three separate viewers, designated visitors V1 – V3 in the IEEE paper, contributed seven of the 55 viewings, several of striking quality. Reference to the IEEE paper for a comparison of descriptions/drawings to pictures of the associated targets, generated by the contract monitors in their own viewings, leaves little doubt as to why the contract monitors came to the conclusion that there was something to remote viewing (see, for example, Figure 1 herein). As summarized in the Executive Summary of the now-released Final Report [2] of the second year of the program, “The development of this capability at SRI has evolved to the point where visiting CIA personnel with no previous exposure to such concepts have performed well under controlled laboratory conditions (that is, generated target descriptions of sufficiently high quality to permit blind matching of descriptions to targets by independent judges).” What happened next, however, made even these results pale in comparison.
Figure 1 – Sketch of target by V1
Figure 2 – Target (merry-go-round)
Coordinate Remote Viewing
To determine whether it was necessary to have a “beacon” individual at the target site, Swann suggested carrying out an experiment to remote view the planet Jupiter before the upcoming NASA Pioneer 10 flyby. In that case, much to his chagrin (and ours) he found a ring around Jupiter, and wondered if perhaps he had remote viewed Saturn by mistake. Our colleagues in astronomy were quite unimpressed as well, until the flyby revealed that an unanticipated ring did in fact exist.3
Expanding the protocols yet further, Swann proposed a series of experiments in which the target was designated not by sending a “beacon” person to the target site, but rather by the use of geographical coordinates, latitude and longitude in degrees, minutes and seconds. Needless to say, this proposal seemed even more outrageous than “ordinary” remote viewing. The difficulties in taking this proposal seriously, designing protocols to eliminate the possibility of a combination of globe memorization and eidetic or photographic memory, and so forth, are discussed in considerable detail in Reference [9]. Suffice it to say that investigation of this approach, which we designated Scanate (scanning by coordinate), eventually provided us with sufficient evidence to bring it up to the contract monitors and suggest a test under their control. A description of that test and its results, carried out in mid-1973 during the initial pilot study, are best presented by quoting directly from the Executive Summary of the Final Report of the second year’s followup program [2]. The remote viewers were Ingo Swann and Pat Price, and the entire transcripts are available in the released documents [2].
“In order to subject the remote viewing phenomena to a rigorous long-distance test under external control, a request for geographical coordinates of a site unknown to subject and experimenters was forwarded to the OSI group responsible for threat analysis in this area. In response, SRI personnel received a set of geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude in degrees, minutes, and seconds) of a facility, hereafter referred to as the West Virginia Site. The experimenters then carried out a remote viewing experiment on a double-blind basis, that is, blind to experimenters as well as subject. The experiment had as its goal the determination of the utility of remote viewing under conditions approximating an operational scenario. Two subjects targeted on the site, a sensitive installation. One subject drew a detailed map of the building and grounds layout, the other provided information about the interior including codewords, data subsequently verified by sponsor sources (report available from COTR).”4
Since details concerning the site’s mission in general,5 and evaluation of the remote viewing test in particular, remain highly classified to this day, all that can be said is that interest in the client community was heightened considerably following this exercise.
Because Price found the above exercise so interesting, as a personal challenge he went on to scan the other side of the globe for a Communist Bloc equivalent and found one located in the Urals, the detailed description of which is also included in Ref. [2]. As with the West Virginia Site, the report for the Urals Site was also verified by personnel in the sponsor organization as being substantially correct.
What makes the West Virginia/Urals Sites viewings so remarkable is that these are not best-ever examples culled out of a longer list; these are literally the first two site-viewings carried out in a simulated operational-type scenario. In fact, for Price these were the very first two remote viewings in our program altogether, and he was invited to participate in yet further experimentation.
Operational Remote Viewing (Semipalatinsk, USSR)
Midway through the second year of the program (July 1974) our CIA sponsor decided to challenge us to provide data on a Soviet site of ongoing operational significance. Pat Price was the remote viewer. A description of the remote viewing, taken from our declassified final report [2], reads as given below. I cite this level of detail to indicate the thought that goes into such an “experiment” to minimize cueing while at the same time being responsive to the requirements of an operational situation. Again, this is not a “best-ever” example from a series of such viewings, but rather the very first operational Soviet target concerning which we were officially tasked.
“To determine the utility of remote viewing under operational conditions, a long-distance remote viewing experiment was carried out on a sponsor-designated target of current interest, an unidentified research center at Semipalatinsk, USSR.
This experiment, carried out in three phases, was under direct control of the COTR. To begin the experiment, the COTR furnished map coordinates in degrees, minutes and seconds. The only additional information provided was the designation of the target as an R&D test facility. The experimenters then closeted themselves with Subject S1, gave him the map coordinates and indicated the designation of the target as an R&D test facility. A remote-viewing experiment was then carried out. This activity constituted Phase I of the experiment.
Figure 3 – Subject effort at building layout
Figure 4 – Subject effort at crane construction
Figure 3 shows the subject’s graphic effort for building layout; Figure 4 shows the subject’s particular attention to a multistory gantry crane he observed at the site. Both results were obtained by the experimenters on a double-blind basis before exposure to any additional COTR-held information, thus eliminating the possibility of cueing. These results were turned over to the client representatives for evaluation. For comparison an artist’s rendering of the site as known to the COTR (but not to the experimenters until later) is shown in Figure 5…..
Figure 5 – Actual COTR rendering of Semipalatinsk, USSR target site
Were the results not promising, the experiment would have stopped at this point. Description of the multistory crane, however, a relatively unusual target item, was taken as indicative of possible target acquisition. Therefore, Phase II was begun, defined by the subject being made “witting” (of the client) by client representatives who introduced themselves to the subject at that point; Phase II also included a second round of experimentation on the Semipalatinsk site with direct participation of client representatives in which further data were obtained and evaluated. As preparation for this phase, client representatives purposely kept themselves blind to all but general knowledge of the target site to minimize the possibility of cueing. The Phase II effort was focused on the generation of physical data that could be independently verified by other client sources, thus providing a calibration of the process.
The end of Phase II gradually evolved into the first part of Phase III, the generation of unverifiable data concerning the Semipalatinsk site not available to the client, but of operational interest nonetheless. Several hours of tape transcript and a notebook of drawings were generated over a two-week period.
The data describing the Semipalatinsk site were evaluated by the sponsor, and are contained in a separate report. In general, several details concerning the salient technology of the Semipalatinsk site appeared to dovetail with data from other sources, and a number of specific large structural elements were correctly described. The results contained noise along with the signal, but were nonetheless clearly differentiated from the chance results that were generated by control subjects in comparison experiments carried out by the COTR.”
For discussion of the ambiance and personal factors involved in carrying out this experiment, along with further detail generated as Price (see Figure 6) “roamed” the facility, including detailed comparison of Price’s RV-generated information with later-determined “ground-truth reality,” see the accompanying article by Russell Targ in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 10, No. 1. Click here to read the abstract.
Figure 6 – Left to right: Christopher Green, Pat Price, and Hal Puthoff.
Picture taken following a successful experiment involving glider-ground RV.
Additional experiments having implications for intelligence concerns were carried out, such as the remote viewing of cipher-machine type apparatus, and the RV-sorting of sealed envelopes to differentiate those that contained letters with secret writing from those that did not. To discuss these here in detail would take us too far afield, but the interested reader can follow up by referring to the now-declassified project documents [2].
Follow-on Programs
The above discussion brings us up to the end of 1975. As a result of the material being generated by both SRI and CIA remote viewers, interest in the program in government circles, especially within the intelligence community, intensified considerably and led to an ever-increasing briefing schedule. This in turn led to an ever-increasing number of clients, contracts and tasking, and therefore expansion of the program to a multi-client base, and eventually to an integrated joint-services program under single-agency (DIA)6 leadership. To meet the demand for the increased level of effort we first increased our professional staff by inviting Ed May to join the program in 1976, then screened and added to the program a cadre of remote viewers as consultants, and let subcontracts to increase our scope of activity.
As the program expanded, in only a very few cases could the clients’ identities and program tasking be revealed. Examples include a NASA-funded study negotiated early in the program by Russ Targ to determine whether the internal state of an electronic random-number-generator could be detected by RV processes [16], and a study funded by the Naval Electronics Systems Command to determine whether attempted remote viewing of distant light flashes would induce correlated changes in the viewer’s brainwave (EEG) production [17]. For essentially all other projects during my 14-yr. tenure at SRI, however, the identity of the clients and most of the tasking were classified and remain so today. (The exception was the occasional privately-funded study.) We are told, however, that further declassification and release of much of this material is almost certain to occur.
What can be said, then, about further development of the program in the two decades following 1975?7 In broad terms it can be said that much of the SRI effort was directed not so much toward developing an operational U.S. capability, but rather toward assessing the threat potential of its use against the U.S. by others. The words threat assessment were often used to describe the program’s purpose during its development, especially during the early years. As a result much of the remote-viewing activity was carried out under conditions where ground-truth reality was a priori known or could be determined, such as the description of U.S. facilities and technological developments, the timing of rocket test firings and underground nuclear tests, and the location of individuals and mobile units. And, of course, we were responsive to requests to provide assistance during such events as the loss of an airplane or the taking of hostages, relying on the talents of an increasing cadre of remote-viewer/consultants, some well-known in the field such as Keith Harary, and many who have not surfaced publicly until recently, such as Joe McMoneagle.
One might ask whether in this program RV-generated information was ever of sufficient significance as to influence decisions at a policy level. This is of course impossible to determine unless policymakers were to come forward with a statement in the affirmative. One example of a possible candidate is a study we performed at SRI during the Carter-administration debates concerning proposed deployment of the mobile MX missile system. In that scenario missiles were to be randomly shuffled from silo to silo in a silo field, in a form of high-tech shell game. In a computer simulation of a twenty-silo field with randomly-assigned (hidden) missile locations, we were able, using RV-generated data, to show rather forcefully that the application of a sophisticated statistical averaging technique (sequential sampling) could in principle permit an adversary to defeat the system. I briefed these results to the appropriate offices at their request, and a written report with the technical details was widely circulated among groups responsible for threat analysis [18], and with some impact. What role, if any, our small contribution played in the mix of factors behind the enormously complex decision to cancel the program will probably never be known, and must of course a priori be considered in all likelihood negligible. Nonetheless, this is a prototypical example of the kind of tasking that by its nature potentially had policy implications.
Even though the details of the broad range of experiments, some brilliant successes, many total failures, have not yet been released, we have nonetheless been able to publish summaries of what was learned in these studies about the overall characteristics of remote viewing, as in Table 5 of Reference [8]. Furthermore, over the years we were able to address certain questions of scientific interest in a rigorous way and to publish the results in the open literature. Examples include the apparent lack of attenuation of remote viewing due to seawater shielding (submersible experiments) [8], the amplification of RV performance by use of error-correcting coding techniques [19,20], and the utility of a technique we call associational remote viewing (ARV) to generate useful predictive information [21].8
As a sociological aside, we note that the overall efficacy of remote viewing in a program like this was not just a scientific issue. For example, when the Semipalatinsk data described earlier was forwarded for analysis, one group declined to get involved because the whole concept was unscientific nonsense, while a second group declined because, even though it might be real, it was possibly demonic; a third group had to be found. And, as in the case of public debate about such phenomena, the program’s image was on occasion as likely to be damaged by an overenthusiastic supporter as by a detractor. Personalities, politics and personal biases were always factors to be dealt with.
Official Statements/Perspectives
With regard to admission by the government of its use of remote viewers under operational conditions, officials have on occasion been relatively forthcoming. President Carter, in a speech to college students in Atlanta in September 1995, is quoted by Reuters as saying that during his administration a plane went down in Zaire, and a meticulous sweep of the African terrain by American spy satellites failed to locate any sign of the wreckage. It was then “without my knowledge” that the head of the CIA (Adm. Stansfield Turner) turned to a woman reputed to have psychic powers. As told by Carter, “she gave some latitude and longitude figures. We focused our satellite cameras on that point and the plane was there.” Independently, Turner himself also has admitted the Agency’s use of a remote viewer (in this case, Pat Price).9 And recently, in a segment taped for the British television series Equinox [22], Maj. Gen. Ed Thompson, Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, U.S. Army (1977-1981), volunteered “I had one or more briefings by SRI and was impressed…. The decision I made was to set up a small, in-house, low-cost effort in remote viewing….”
Finally, a recent unclassified report [23] prepared for the CIA by the American Institutes for Research (AIR), concerning a remote viewing effort carried out under a DIA program called Star Gate (discussed in detail elsewhere in this volume), cites the roles of the CIA and DIA in the history of the program, including acknowledgment that a cadre of full-time government employees used remote viewing techniques to respond to tasking from operational military organizations.10
As information concerning the various programs spawned by intelligence-community interest is released, and the dialog concerning their scientific and social significance is joined, the results are certain to be hotly debated. Bearing witness to this fact are the companion articles in this volume by Ed May, Director of the SRI and SAIC programs since 1985, and by Jessica Utts and Ray Hyman, consultants on the AIR evaluation cited above. These articles address in part the AIR study. That study, limited in scope to a small fragment of the overall program effort, resulted in a conclusion that although laboratory research showed statistically significant results, use of remote viewing in intelligence gathering was not warranted.
Regardless of one’s a priori position, however, an unimpassioned observer cannot help but attest to the following fact. Despite the ambiguities inherent in the type of exploration covered in these programs, the integrated results appear to provide unequivocal evidence of a human capacity to access events remote in space and time, however falteringly, by some cognitive process not yet understood. My years of involvement as a research manager in these programs have left me with the conviction that this fact must be taken into account in any attempt to develop an unbiased picture of the structure of reality.
Footnotes
1 – One example being the release of documents that are the subject of this report – see the memoir by Russell Targ elsewhere in this volume.
2 – Since the reputation of the intelligence services is mixed among members of the general populace, I have on occasion been challenged as to why I would agree to cooperate with the CIA or other elements of the intelligence community in this work. My answer is simply that as a result of my own previous exposure to this community I became persuaded that war can almost always be traced to a failure in intelligence, and that therefore the strongest weapon for peace is good intelligence.
3 – This result was published by us in advance of the ring’s discovery [9].
4 – Editor’s footnote added here: COTR – Contracting Officer’s Technical Representative
5 – An NSA listening post at the Navy’s Sugar Grove facility, according to intelligence-community chronicler Bamford [15]
6 – DIA – Defense Intelligence Agency. The CIA dropped out as a major player in the mid-seventies due to pressure on the Agency (unrelated to the RV Program) from the Church-Pike Congressional Committee.
7 – See also the contribution by Ed May elsewhere in this volume concerning his experiences from 1985 on during his tenure as Director.
8 – For example, one application of this technique yielded not only a published, statistically significant result, but also a return of $26,000 in 30 days in the silver futures market [21].
9 – The direct quote is given in Targ’s contribution elsewhere in this volume.
10 – “From 1986 to the first quarter of FY 1995, the DoD paranormal psychology program received more than 200 tasks from operational military organizations requesting that the program staff apply a paranormal psychological technique know (sic) as “remote viewing” (RV) to attain information unavailable from other sources.” [23]
References
[1] “CIA Statement on ‘Remote Viewing’,” CIA Public Affairs Office, 6 September 1995.
[2] Harold E. Puthoff and Russell Targ, “Perceptual Augmentation Techniques,” SRI Progress Report No. 3 (31 Oct. 1974) and Final Report (1 Dec. 1975) to the CIA, covering the period January 1974 through February 1975, the second year of the program. This effort was funded at the level of $149,555.
[3] H. E. Puthoff, “Toward a Quantum Theory of Life Process,” unpubl. proposal, Stanford Research Institute (1972).
[4] H. E. Puthoff and R. Targ, “Physics, Entropy and Psychokinesis,” in Proc. Conf. Quantum Physics and Parapsychology (Geneva, Switzerland); (New York: Parapsychology Foundation, 1975).
[5] Documented in “Paraphysics R&D – Warsaw Pact (U),” DST-1810S-202-78, Defense Intelligence Agency (30 March 1978).
[6] R. Targ and H. E. Puthoff, “Information Transfer under Conditions of Sensory Shielding,” Nature 252, 602 (1974).
[7] H. E. Puthoff and R. Targ, “A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer over Kilometer Distances: Historical Perspective and Recent Research,” Proc. IEEE 64, 329 (1976).
[8] H. E. Puthoff, R. Targ and E. C. May, “Experimental Psi Research: Implications for Physics,” in The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World, edited by R. G. Jahn (AAAS Selected Symposium 57, Westview Press, Boulder, 1981).
[9] R. Targ and H. E. Puthoff, Mind Reach (Delacorte Press, New York, 1977).
[10] J. P. Bisaha and B. J. Dunne, “Multiple Subject and Long-Distance Precognitive Remote Viewing of Geographical Locations,” in Mind at Large, edited by C. T. Tart, H. E. Puthoff and R. Targ (Praeger, New York, 1979), p. 107.
[11] B. J. Dunne and J. P. Bisaha, “Precognitive Remote Viewing in the Chicago Area: a Replication of the Stanford Experiment,” J. Parapsychology 43, 17 (1979).
[12] R. G. Jahn, “The Persistent Paradox of Psychic Phenomena: An Engineering Perspective,” Proc. IEEE 70, 136 (1982).
[13] R. G. Jahn and B. J. Dunne, “On the Quantum Mechanics of Consciousness with Application to Anomalous Phenomena,” Found. Phys. 16, 721 (1986).
[14] R. G. Jahn and B. J. Dunne, Margins of Reality (Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, New York, 1987).
[15] J. Bamford, The Puzzle Palace (Penguin Books, New York, 1983) pp. 218-222.
[16] R. Targ, P. Cole and H. E. Puthoff, “Techniques to Enhance Man/Machine Communication,” Stanford Research Institute Final Report on NASA Project NAS7-100 (August 1974).
[17] R. Targ, E. C. May, H. E. Puthoff, D. Galin and R. Ornstein, “Sensing of Remote EM Sources (Physiological Correlates),” SRI Intern’l Final Report on Naval Electronics Systems Command Project N00039-76-C-0077, covering the period November 1975 – to October 1976 (April 1978).
[18] H. E. Puthoff, “Feasibility Study on the Vulnerability of the MPS System to RV Detection Techniques,” SRI Internal Report, 15 April 1979; revised 2 May 1979.
[19] H. E. Puthoff, “Calculator-Assisted Psi Amplification,” Research in Parapsychology 1984, edited by Rhea White and J. Solfvin (Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ, 1985), p. 48.
[20] H. E. Puthoff, “Calculator-Assisted Psi Amplification II: Use of the Sequential-Sampling Technique as a Variable-Length Majority-Vote Code,” Research in Parapsychology 1985, edited by D. Weiner and D. Radin (Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ, 1986), p. 73.
[21] H. E. Puthoff, “ARV (Associational Remote Viewing) Applications,” Research in Parapsychology 1984, edited by Rhea White and J. Solfvin (Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ, 1985), p. 121.
[22] “The Real X-Files,” Independent Channel 4, England (shown 27 August 1995); to be shown in the U.S. on the Discovery Channel.
[23] M. D. Mumford, A. M. Rose and D. Goslin, “An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications,” American Institutes for Research (September 29, 1995).
Copyright 1996 by H.E. Puthoff.
Permission to redistribute granted, but only in complete and unaltered form.
Journal of Scientific Exploration
http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/articles.html
(pdf files)
An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning
by Jessica Utts
Division of Statistics, University of California, Davis, CA 95616
Volume 10 Number 1: Page 3.
Research on psychic functioning, conducted over a two decade period, is examined to determine whether or not the phenomenon has been scientifically established. A secondary question is whether or not it is useful for government purposes. The primary work examined in this report was government sponsored research conducted at Stanford Research Institute, later known as SRI International, and at Science Applications International Corporation, known as SAIC. Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of similar magnitude to those found in government-sponsored research at SRI and SAIC have been replicated at a number of laboratories across the world. Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud. The magnitude of psychic functioning exhibited appears to be in the range between what social scientists call a small and medium effect. That means that it is reliable enough to be replicated in properly conducted experiments, with sufficient trials to achieve the long-run statistical results needed for replicability. A number of other patterns have been found, suggestive of how to conduct more productive experiments and applied psychic functioning. For instance, it doesn’t appear that a sender is needed. Precognition, in which the answer is known to no one until a future time, appears to work quite well. Recent experiments suggest that if there is a psychic sense then it works much like our other five senses, by detecting change. Given that physicists are currently grappling with an understanding of time, it may be that a psychic sense exists that scans the future for major change, much as our eyes scan the environment for visual change or our ears allow us to respond to sudden changes in sound. It is recommended that future experiments focus on understanding how this phenomenon works, and on how to make it as useful as possible. There is little benefit to continuing experiments designed to offer proof, since there is little more to be offered to anyone who does not accept the current collection of data.
Evaluation of a Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena
by Ray Hyman
1227 University of Oregon, Department of Psychology, Eugene, OR 97403
Volume 10 Number 1: Page 31.
Jessica Utts and I were commissioned to evaluate the research on remote viewing and related phenomena which was carried out at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC) during the years from 1973 through 1994. We focussed on the ten most recent experiments which were conducted at SAIC from 1992 through 1994. These were not only the most recent but also the most methodologically sound. We evaluated these experiments in the context of contemporary parapsychological research. Professor Utts concluded that the SAIC results, taken in conjunction with other parapsychological research, proved the existence of ESP, especially precognition. My report argues that Professor Utts’ conclusion is premature, to say the least. The reports of the SAIC experiments have become accessible for public scrutiny too recently for adequate evaluation. Moreover, their findings have yet to be independently replicated. My report also argues that the apparent consistencies between the SAIC results and those of other parapsychological experiments may be illusory. Many important inconsistencies are emphasized. Even if the observed effects can be independently replicated, much more theoretical and empirical investigation would be needed before one could legitimately claim the existence of paranormal functioning. Note: This article is followed by a response from Jessica Utts.
Remote Viewing at Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s: A Memoir
by Russell Targ
Bay Research Institute, 1010 Harriet Street, Palo Alto, CA 94301
Volume 10 Number 1: Page 77.
Hundreds of remote viewing experiments were carried out at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) from 1972 to 1986. The purpose of some of these trials was to elucidate the physical and psychological properties of psi abilities, while others were conducted to provide information for our CIA sponsor about current events in far off places. We learned that the accuracy and reliability of remote viewing was not in any way affected by distance, size, or electromagnetic shielding, and we discovered that the more exciting or demanding the task, the more likely we were to be successful. Above all, we became utterly convinced of the reality of psi abilities. This article focuses on two outstanding examples: One is an exceptional, map-like drawing of a Palo Alto swimming pool complex, and the other is an architecturally accurate drawing of a gantry crane located at a Soviet weapons laboratory, and verified by satellite photography. The percipient for both of these experiments was Pat Price, a retired police commissioner who was one of the most outstanding remote viewers to walk through the doors of SRI.
The American Institutes for Research Review of the
Department of Defense’s STAR GATE Program: A Commentary
by Edwin C. May
Cognitive Sciences Laboratory, 330 Cowper Street, Suite 200, Palo Alto, CA 94301
Volume 10 Number 1: Page 89.
As a result of a Congressionally Directed Activity, the Central Intelligence Agency conducted an evaluation of a 24-year, government-sponsored program to investigate ESP and its potential use within the Intelligence Community. The American Institutes for Research was contracted to conduct the review of both research and operations. Their 29 September 1995 final report was released to the public 28 November 1995. As a result of AIR’s assessment, the CIA concluded that a statistically significant effect had been demonstrated in the laboratory, but that there was no case in which ESP had provided data that had ever been used to guide intelligence operations. This paper is a critical review of AIR’s methodology and conclusions. It will be shown that there is compelling evidence that the CIA set the outcome with regard to intelligence usage before the evaluation had begun. This was accomplished by limiting the research and operations data sets to exclude positive findings, by purposefully not interviewing historically significant participants, by ignoring previous DOD extensive program reviews, and by using the discredited National Research Council’s investigation of parapsychology as the starting point for their review. While there may have been political and administrative justification for the CIA not to accept the government’s in-house program for the operational use of anomalous cognition, this appeared to drive the outcome of the evaluation. As a result, they have come to the wrong conclusion with regard to the use of anomalous cognition in intelligence operations and significantly underestimated the robustness of the basic phenomenon.
FieldREG Anomalies in Group Situations
by R. D. Nelson, G. J. Bradish, Y. H. Dobyns, B. J. Dunne, and R. G. Jahn
Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research, School of Engineering/Applied Science,
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544
Volume 10 Number 1: Page 111.
Portable random event generators with software to record and index continuous sequences of binary data in field situations are found to produce anomalous outputs when deployed in various group environments. These “FieldREG” systems have been operated under formal protocols in ten separate venues, all of which subdivide naturally into temporal segments, such as sessions, presentations, or days. The most extreme data segments from each of the ten applications, after appropriate correction for multiple sampling, compound to a collective probability against chance expectation of 2 X 10^-4. Interpretation remains speculative at this point, but logbook notes and anecdotal reports from participants suggest that high degrees of attention, intellectual cohesiveness, shared emotion, or other coherent qualities of the groups tend to correlate with the statistically unusual deviations from theoretical expectation in the FieldREG sequences. If sustained over more extensive experiments, such effects could add credence to the concept of a consciousness “field” as an agency for creating order in random physical processes.
Anomalous Organization of Random Events by Group Consciousness:
Two Exploratory Experiments
by Dean I. Radin, Jannine M. Rebman, and Maikwe P. Cross
Consciousness Research Laboratory, Harry Reid Center,
University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV 89154-4009
Volume 10 Number 1: Page 143.
Two experiments explored the hypothesis that when a group of people focus their attention on a common object of interest, order will arise in the environment. An electronic random number generator was used to detect these changes in order. Events judged to be interesting to the group were called periods of high coherence and were predicted to cause corresponding moments of order in the random samples collected during those events; uninteresting events were predicted to cause chance levels of order in the random samples. The first experiment was conducted during an all-day Holotropic Breathwork workshop. The predictions were confirmed, with a significant degree of order observed in the random samples during high group coherence periods (p = 0.002), and chance order observed during low group coherence periods (p = 0.43). The second experiment was conducted during the live television broadcast of the 67th Annual Academy Awards. Two random binary generators, located 12 miles apart, were used to independently measure order. The predictions were confirmed for about half of the broadcast period, but the terminal cumulative probabilities were not significant. A post-hoc analysis showed that the strength of the correlation between the output of the two random generators was significantly related (r = 0.94) to the decline in the television viewing audience.
ce399 | research archive: (electronic) mind control 
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