Remote Viewers

Remote Viewers is a tale of the Pentagon's attempts to develop the perfect tool for espionage: psychic spies. These psychic spies, or "remote viewers," were able to infiltrate any target, elude any form of security, and never risk scratch. For twenty years, the government selected civilian and military personnel for psychic ability, trained them, and put them to work, full-time, at taxpayers' expense, against real intelligence targets. The results were so astonishing that the program soon involved more than a dozen separate agencies, including the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Secret Service, the Navy, the Army, the Air Force, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the US Customs Service, the US Special Forces Command, and at least one Pentagon drug-interaction task force. Most of this material is still officially classified. After three years of research, with access to numerous sources in the intelligence community--including the remote viewers themselves--science writer Jim Schnabel reveals for the first time the secret details of the strangest chapter in the history of espionage.

Zusammenfassung
Remote Viewers is a tale of the Pentagon's attempts to develop the perfect tool for espionage: psychic spies. These psychic spies, or "remote viewers," were able to infiltrate any target, elude any form of security, and never risk scratch. For twenty years, the government selected civilian and military personnel for psychic ability, trained them, and put them to work, full-time, at taxpayers' expense, against real intelligence targets. The results were so astonishing that the program soon involved more than a dozen separate agencies, including the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Secret Service, the Navy, the Army, the Air Force, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the US Customs Service, the US Special Forces Command, and at least one Pentagon drug-interaction task force. Most of this material is still officially classified.

After three years of research, with access to numerous sources in the intelligence community--including the remote viewers themselves--science writer Jim Schnabel reveals for the first time the secret details of the strangest chapter in the history of espionage.

Leseprobe
1
THE ZONE
 
THE DREAM FADED, AND MEL RILEY AWOKE. SIX O’CLOCK; THE SUN was not yet up. Brigitte, his wife, still lay asleep beside him. But the birds outside were awake and chattering, and they were Riley’s usual alarm clock. He rose, showered, shaved, and dressed.
 
Riley was a morning person. He liked the dark calm of the predawn hours, the unsleeping stillness, half in this world, half in that. Downstairs in the kitchen he sat quietly, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette, listening to his thoughts, watching through the window as the light changed on the trees and in the sky.
 
Riley was five feet eight, slim and fit, with wavy blond hair and an Irish, vaguely leprechaunish face. He had a tattoo on each arm—an eagle, a rabbit—and a large winged dragon across his chest. But it was Riley’s eyes that people tended to notice. Sometimes with surprise, or merely concentration, they would open widely, intensely, as if Riley were about to hypnotize someone—or had already hypnotized himself and were staring inward at his own soul.
 
Thirty-three years old, Mel Riley was a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army. He and his wife and their two young daughters lived in a town house at Fort Meade, Maryland, about twenty-five miles northeast of Washington, D.C. “Meade,” as its inhabitants abbreviated it, was the sprawling, town-like base for, among other things, the National Security Agency, the U.S. First Army, and a part of the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). Until recently, Riley had been a photo-interpreter at INSCOM, studying reconnaissance imagery from satellites and spy planes. But just now the Army was using him for something else.
 
Dressed in civilian clothes, which his new job required for security reasons, Riley drove the mile or so to work, past a golf course, parade grounds, a convenience store, and dozens of low buildings. Some of the buildings were brick, some were wood, some were named for dead generals, and some were simply numbered; many had obvious purposes, while others would always remain obscure. Riley’s unit worked in two single-story wooden structures numbered 2560 and 2561. They were secluded beneath trees on a large open lot on the north side of Llewellyn Street, a quarter mile from Kimbrough Army Community Hospital. There beneath the trees, the buildings seemed strangely lonely and rural, almost forgotten. On the far end of 2560, the smaller building to the east, the land sloped down to an open field with a creek that ran south, under the road, into a park and a lake. To the north of the buildings was a field with sparse trees, photogenically bleak in winter. The two buildings were remnants of the great military construction boom of the Second World War, and had once housed a bakery school and mess hall. Here in September 1979, they looked like two cottages huddling together in the woods.
 
Riley parked in the driveway between the buildings. He walked up a set of wooden steps to a porchlike entrance near the right corner of 2561. He opened a heavy forest green metal door and went inside.
 
To a visitor, 2561 might have looked like a normal if somewhat makeshift military office. There was an entrance room, or foyer, with a secretary’s desk, a refrigerator, a table with a coffeepot and mugs, and doors to two outer offices for the unit’s commander and operations officer. Behind the secretary’s desk, a narrow corridor led west, past half a dozen small cubicles with desks. The corridor terminated in a conference room.
 
There were still a few signs of the building’s original function. Two large metal chimneys jutted from the roof of an old furnace room next to the entrance, and in the un-carpeted foyer the floor was covered with red heavy-duty tiles. Across the outer wall of the commander’s office, next to the secretary’s desk, lay a quarter-inch steel plate, a heat shield where a large oven had once stood. In the only hint of the current goings-on, someone had covered the plate with a painted mural, a dream of deep space: a supernova unfolding silently, in slow motion, across dark light-years.
 
The unit was known, formally, as “Special Action Branch,” and was ostensibly attached to INSCOM headquarters. But it took its orders from the Pentagon office of the Army’s assistant chief of staff for intelligence, and its tasking requests originated from a variety of offices throughout the U.S. intelligence community: the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, even the President’s National Security Council. The orders that came into the office, and the information that went out, were stamped not only with the standard Army intelligence SECRET, but with the Pentagon code word, GRILL FLAME. Only a few dozen officials in the intelligence community had been briefed on the existence of the Grill Flame project. “Access is limited,” an Army memorandum of the time would note, “to those personnel approved on a ‘by name’ basis.”
 
Riley was often the first to arrive at the unit in the morning; he would then go through the solitary routine of opening doors and safes, and making coffee. He had an office to himself in 2560, the operations building next door, but he would usually linger in 2561, where the rest of th…