The Wizards of Langley (33 page)

By the time the paper was published in fall 1974, there were new directors of both OTS and ORD. In August, John McMahon took another step in his rise through the agency, becoming Associate Deputy Director for Administration. He was replaced by former FMSAC head David Brandwein, who was skeptical about the value of the program. Meanwhile, Stevens became Duckett’s deputy in June. He was replaced as head of ORD by James V. Hirsch, who had graduated from MIT with a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1959 and had been lured away from General Electric by the directorate’s ELINT office in 1968. Hirsch told Kress that he could not accept that paranormal capabilities existed, but, realizing his bias, would accept the advice of his staff.
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That willingness would give the project further life.

But an experiment conducted in summer 1974 and evaluated in the fall confirmed Brandwein’s and Hirsch’s skepticism. That experiment, the result of the push by Duckett and McMahon for viewing of sensitive targets, began on July 9 at SRI, four days after the United States had obtained satellite imagery of a target of special interest—located at 50 degrees, 9 minutes, 59 seconds north, and 78 degrees, 22 minutes, 22 seconds east. Targ and Puthoff informed Pat Price of the coordinates.
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Of interest to the CIA at those coordinates was an installation the agency had designated URDF-3 for Unidentified Research and Development Facility-3. The Air Force designated the same site, which was sixty miles southwest of the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site in Kazakhstan, as a PNUTS—possible nuclear underground test site. The chief of Air Force intelligence, Maj. Gen. George Keegan, and key aides believed the site could well be a center for particle-beam research. Concern that such activity might be taking place was first aroused in the late 1960s, when satellite images showed workers assembling four steel spheres nearly sixty feet in diameter. The spheres were then lowered into underground chambers that had been dug out of rock. In the particle-beam scenario, they would serve to contain nuclear low-yield explosions that would create the energy required for producing the particle beam’s “lightning bolt.”
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Price was shown maps of the area and told only that the target was a scientific military research and test facility and was 25–30 miles southwest of the Irtysh River. He was instructed to start with a view of the general area as it would be seen from 50,000 feet and get the layout of any complexes or buildings.
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The July 9 session, the first of four over four days, lasted about two hours. From the beginning, Price made the assumption, which was incor
rect, that the facility was related to ongoing Soviet space launch and recovery activities. He gave what the experiment’s evaluator, a Los Alamos scientist, judged to be “an almost perfect description of someone’s first look at the Operations Area of URDF-3”—as low one-story buildings partially dug into the ground.
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Price also reported seeing nine other items that the evaluator noted “simply don’t appear at or near URDF-3.” The imagined objects included a road from the river to the target area, a 500-foot-tall antenna, an array of outdoor telephone poles, an outdoor pool, an airstrip twelve miles from URDF-3, a small village to the northeast, a city sixty miles southwest of the facility, and a three-story building (which Price claimed was the dominant building in the complex).
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On the night of July 9, Price completed and turned over, presumably to Puthoff, drawings of part of a perimeter fence and a rail-mounted gantry crane; the drawings were then passed to the CIA monitors the next day. The fence, Price stated, was electrified, but he did not mention its unique shape or the existence of four perimeter fences at URDF-3. His drawing of the gantry crane was evaluated as “remarkably close in detail to the actual gantry crane at URDF-3.” Then, on the afternoon of July 10, Price described a complicated relationship involving three gantry cranes at the facility, which the evaluator wrote “does not exist at URDF-3.”
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Price also reported by phone to Targ that he saw a 55-foot-tall dome-shaped building as well as a 65- to 75-foot-tall cement silo-like building south of the dome-shaped building. However, there were no buildings at URDF-3 that resembled either of the buildings Price described. In the general area where Price claimed the buildings were located were a partially earth-covered tank and a tall cylindrical tank or tower.
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For the evaluator, it seemed impossible to imagine how Price came up with a likeness to the actual crane unless he either saw it through remote viewing or was “informed of what to draw by someone knowledgeable of URDF-3.” The evaluator also noted that “the experiment was not controlled to discount the possibility that [Price] could talk to other people—such as the Disinformation Section of the KGB.” (Price did speak to Targ, with only the SRI experimenter’s side of the conversation audible to the CIA monitors.) But the evaluator also found Price’s repeated reporting of objects that did not exist at URDF-3 as “difficult to understand.” He suggested one rather obvious explanation—if Price “mentions enough specific objects (such as three different types of gantry cranes when there is really only one), he will surely hit on one object that is actually present.”
He went on to ask, “if the user of Price’s remote viewing talents had no way of checking, how could he differentiate fact from fiction?”
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The third day produced “the most negative evidence yet and tends to discredit Price’s ability to remotely view URDF-3.” That evidence was Price’s response to a request that he investigate whether four buildings that he described as separate were really the surface elements of a single underground building. He “looked” underground as requested and reported, “No, that’s a concrete apron, and there’s nothing subterranean right in that particular area.” In fact, the four separate buildings were four sections of a 50-foot-deep underground building.
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The overall judgment of the evaluator was that “the validity of Price’s remote viewing of URDF-3 appears to be a failure . . . the only positive evidence of the rail-mounted gantry crane was far outweighed by the large amount of negative evidence noted in the body of this analysis.” The evaluator also said it was unfortunate that much of the experiment was conducted over the phone with only the SRI experimenter’s voice being recorded. He suggested that “future experiments be more tightly controlled to discount the possibility of the subject discussing the material with people not involved in the experiment.”
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(Only years later, after the fall of the Soviet Union, would American scientists tour the facility and discover what the Soviet scientists were working on there. They were not trying to avoid nuclear testing restrictions or build a particle-beam weapon. Rather, research at URDF-3 was geared to developing a nuclear-powered rocket for space flight.)
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In 1974 and in succeeding years, Puthoff and Targ claimed the experiment a success, pointing to the description of the large crane.* ORD officers did not agree, feeling that in the absence of control experiments, Price’s successes could be described as lucky guessing. Such skepticism led OTS to issue a challenge to SRI—do something of genuine operational value. A number of ideas were elicited from personnel in OTS and the Operations directorate. The idea selected was to seek to aid Division D in its job of installing audio collection systems.
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The targets chosen were the code rooms of two Chinese embassies, one of which was in Africa, whose interiors were known to the audio teams
because they had made surreptitious entries several years earlier. Price was instructed to view the embassies remotely, locate the code rooms, and extract information that could enable a member of the audio team to determine whether Price was likely to be of operational value in future undertakings.
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According to project officer Ken Kress, Price “correctly located code-rooms, produced copious data, such as the location of interior doors and colors of marble stairs and fireplaces that were accurate and specific.” At the same time, “much was also vague and incorrect.” One operations officer did conclude, according to Kress, that remote viewing “offers definite operational possibilities.”
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Not everyone was as enthusiastic. The experiments were followed by a review by the Operations directorate, OTS, and ORD. ORD project officers felt that the results “were not productive or even competent” and therefore decided to terminate funding to SRI. James Hirsch, then ORD director, later recalled that the experiments were conducted without proper scientific protocols—that CIA officers present during the experiments knew where the code rooms were and thus were subject to the “unconscious elicitation of information.” OTS also ceased funding SRI’s experiments—but it did sign Price to a personal services contract, and Price was assigned to work with an OTS psychologist.
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Several OTS staffers who had volunteered to attempt remote viewing were chosen and given the geographic coordinates of a site in Libya. They described new construction that “could be an SA-5 missile training site.” According to Kress, the “Libyan desk officer was immediately impressed” and told him that an agent had reported essentially the same story.
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The OTS psychologist passed a second set of Libyan coordinates to Pat Price, who quickly responded with a report describing a guerrilla training site along with a maplike drawing of the installation. He also described an alleged related underwater sabotage training facility several hundred kilometers away on the coast. The data were passed to the Libyan Desk, which evaluated part of the report immediately and part after obtaining special reconnaissance coverage. According to Kress, some of Price’s information was verified by reconnaissance, and his description of the underwater facility was similar to an agent’s report. A follow-up request to Price to provide information on activities inside the facilities as well as on plans and intentions went unanswered when Price, whose paranormal abilities apparently didn’t extend to precognition, died of a heart attack a few days later.
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Price had been the last vestige of the CIA’s remote-viewing effort, and his death soon ended the CIA’s efforts to employ parapsychology for intelligence purposes—although not the efforts of other agencies or the CIA’s study of Soviet efforts. In August 1977, Adm. Stansfield Turner, Jimmy Carter’s DCI, was asked about CIA support of parapsychology research after the
Washington Post
ran an article about the government’s support of psychic research. Turner noted that the CIA had a man gifted with “visio-perception” of places he had never seen but, he added with a smile, the man had died two years earlier, “and we haven’t heard from him since.” According to Gene Poteat, the CIA’s support of psychic research was a “dumb exercise” that produced “lots of laughing,” but it was born out of a knowledge that the Soviets were conducting such experiments and an attitude of “let’s not leave anything uncovered.”
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Before its transformation into OTS, the technical services division also was largely responsible for electronic agent communication systems—which for many decades had meant radio. During World War II and many years after, counterespionage agencies around the world monitored illicit radio signals that might reveal the identity, location, and activities of foreign agents. During the war, U.S. intelligence officers behind enemy lines sometimes transmitted data via a system designated JOAN-ELEANOR—receivers and tape recorders carried on an aircraft flying overhead.
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The space age brought new possibilities. Communications could be sent to a satellite. Depending on the satellite’s orbit, the message could either be stored onboard and then “dumped” when the satellite flew over the appropriate ground station or simply relayed immediately to a ground station. By the late 1970s, the Soviet Union was operating a network of
low-earth satellites, code-named STRELA, to communicate with illegals in the United States and elsewhere.

The first U.S. effort in the field dated back to 1965–1966. The system, designated BIRDBOOK, was, by subsequent standards, primitive. The intelligence officer or agent would carry the briefcase antenna system into a suitable building, encode the message, load it, go to a windowsill on an upper floor of a building directly under the path of the satellite, open the antenna, and point it in the direction of the satellite. The satellite would send an unlocking signal, and the transmission would begin. To verify that the signal had been properly received, the opening and closing portions were transmitted back by the satellite. The whole process had to be completed in less than five minutes, so that the Committee for State Security (KGB) would be unlikely to locate the site.
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That effort was, according to John McMahon, “not all that successful.”
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Two years later, plans for a new system involved only one satellite in low-earth orbit. In addition to collecting transmissions from agents, the CIA gave some consideration to using the satellite to transmit misleading data that would be intercepted by the Soviets. According to Victor Mar-chetti, “the Russians would go bananas trying to figure out what it meant, when actually it meant nothing.” But there was some concern that Soviet fears might lead the Soviet Union to take drastic action, including an attack on the satellite. In addition, there were doubts that the technology existed to develop the system properly.
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By late 1972, the concept for an agent communications satellite system had changed dramatically. In addition, the science and technology directorate, and particularly the Office of Special Projects, had taken the lead in managing the design of the planned system. Les Dirks, then the deputy director of OSP (and soon to become director of OD&E), was charged with supervising the project. A possible system was described in a December 14, 1972, TRW submission, “Proposal for Covert Communications Satellite Study.” That study, along with related studies, had been designated Project PYRAMIDER. So secret were the studies that the CIA specified that only individuals holding BYEMAN clearances—those cleared to know of NRO projects—were eligible to work on PYRAMIDER.
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