Psychics vs the revolution
The dozens of American diplomats taken hostage by revolutionary students who seized the US embassy in Iran in 1979 may have had some secret company during their 15-month captivity: US intelligence agencies had a squad of military-trained psychics using ESP to watch them, according to declassified documents in a newly available CIA database.
In an operation codenamed Grill Flame, half a dozen psychics working in a dimly lit room in an ancient building in Fort Meade, Maryland on more than 200 occasions tried to peer through the ether to see where the hostages were being held, how closely they were guarded and the state of their health.
Officially, the psychics worked for US Army intelligence. But the documents in the CIA database make it clear their efforts were monitored – and supported – by a wide array of government intelligence agencies as well as top commanders at the Pentagon.
They were even consulted before the super-secret military raid that attempted to free the hostages in April 1980, which ended in disaster when a plane and a helicopter collided at a desert staging area.
In a memo written on April 23, 1980, one day before the launch of the rescue mission, one of the chiefs of the psychic unit told a superior officer that a representative of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had contacted the unit and ‘‘requested we intensify our efforts and that we attempt to set to up a situation wherein the possibilities for aborting the mission would be sharply reduced’’.
Whether the psychics provided any useful intelligence was the subject of a debate among intelligence officials that was as heated as it was secret.
After the hostages were released in January 1981 and extensively questioned about the details of their experience, the Pentagon compared the information with 202 reports from the Grill Flame psychics. ‘‘Only seven reports’’ were proven correct, wrote an US Air Force colonel on the staff of the Joint Chiefs, underlining the number for emphasis.
More than half, he added, were ‘‘entirely incorrect’’. And although 59 contained information that was partly or possibly right, the colonel noted that ‘‘these same reports often included erroneous data’’.
Army officers supervising Grill Flame hotly contested the colonel’s evaluation, claiming that 45 per cent of the psychic reports contained some accurate information. They also argued that it was ‘‘information that could not be obtained through normal intelligence collection channels. The degree of success appears to at least equal, if not surpass, other collection methods’’.
The debate continues today. ‘‘The stuff that the CIA has declassified is garbage,’’ said one of the Grill Flame psychics, Joseph McMoneagle. ‘‘They haven’t declassified any of the stuff that worked.’’
Edwin May, a physicist who oversaw parapsychology research for government intelligence agencies for 20 years, agrees.
‘‘The psychics were able to tell, in some cases, where the hostages were moved to. They were able to see the degree of their health.’’
Others are more skeptical, to put it mildly.
‘‘The intelligence agencies might as well get a crystal ball out and stare into space and hope they see something,’’ says James Randi, a former professional magician who has made a career out of debunking ESP and psychics. ‘‘It’s a huge waste of time and money, and it doesn’t help the hostages one bit.’’
Randi’s skeptical perspective was shared by many inside the intelligence community. William J Daugherty, a CIA case officer working in Iran who was captured when the embassy was seized by the radical students, said he learned of the psychic probing from colleagues after his release.
‘‘It was at lunch, and they were laughing,’’ Daugherty said. ‘‘It was in the nature of, ‘Can you believe the crazy stuff we did?’.’’
Daugherty himself, while in captivity, had been wondering if the CIA might be monitoring the embassy with something else from its bag of odd tricks, the so-called ornithopter – a mechanical bird, wired with microphones to pick up nearby conversations as it perched on windowsills.
The spymasters kept the ornithopter in its coop, but Daugherty was impressed with another CIA ploy he learned about.
‘‘I guess, all these years later, they won’t shoot me for telling you this,’’ he said. ‘‘After we’d been captives for a while, one of the National Football League teams began sending us video cassettes of football games, and we got to watch them on the embassy TVs. We had no idea that the CIA had put little tracking devices inside them.
‘‘When they were played, the devices activated and they beamed a signal that could be picked up by a satellite beacon, which relayed word that at least one hostage was at such and such a location.’’
Operation Grill Flame was just one part of a broader US intelligence project involving psychics and ESP that continued for 20 years. It went through as many as 10 different codenames as its management shifted from agency to agency – though it was mostly supervised by army intelligence and the Defence Intelligence Agency – and carried out 26,000 telepathic forays by 227 psychics before the government down in 1995.
Scores of documents in the CIA database trace the programme’s history and its involvement in everything from searches for missing aircraft to tracking shipments of illegal drugs.
Established in 1975 after a series of more fleeting encounters between the intelligence community and the parapsychological world, the programme was originally more of a research project than a spy mission, one of the odder parts of the perpetual arms race of the Cold War.
‘‘Mostly at the beginning, we were doing foreign assessment – that is, what the other side was doing,’’ said May, who joined the programme nearly at its inception. ‘‘We’d get a report that China or Russia was experimenting with psychics who claimed to be able to do this or that, and our job was to judge whether this was possibly true and if so, what threat was it to us.’’ shut it News this week that Steve Sumner had died returned Kiwis all over the world to the incredible winter of 1982, when the All Whites made it to the football World Cup finals in Spain.
It was, of course, Espana ’82. My home town, Gisborne, was buzzing – Gisborne City AFC sent five players to the World Cup to play for New Zealand. Kevin Fallon, dad to two kids at my primary school, went as the assistant coach.
These men, with their floppy hair, Adidas V-necks and moustaches, were our heroes. We had watched them play for the Sky Blues at the Childers Road Reserve for years. Sitting on cold concrete. Munching on meat pies.
Sumner was remembered this week not only for scoring New Zealand’s first World Cup finals goal, but for his ‘‘precocious talent’’, strength of character, positivity, and for giving it everything he had – on the field, during his long association with New Zealand soccer, and during the illness that ultimately took his life.
This week in Houston, America witnessed its own sporting miracle. The New England Patriots came back from a 28-3 deficit halfway through the third quarter of the Super Bowl to win the game in overtime, 34-28. Tom Brady, husband to supermodel Giselle Bundchen, picked up his fourth Super Bowl ring out of six championship appearances.
Despite being down on their luck, the Patriots were brutally methodical as they came back, advancing down the field and converting that territory into points on the board. The Patriots earned 31 points while