“It smells like a gas plant,” McMoneagle said, “like there’s a smelting or a melting or something [going on] inside the building.” McMoneagle described “lots of people in funny hats… arc welding activity… standing on catwalks. They’re cutting metal or bending metal, welding metal, shaping metal,” he said. “Very unusual. Very, very large.… There’s some kind of a ship. Some kind of a vessel. I’m getting a very, very strong impression of props,” meaning propellers, he said. Atwater asked McMoneagle if he could be more specific.
“Jesus! This is really mind blowing,” McMoneagle said next. “I’m seeing fins, but they’re not rocket fins or [air]plane fins. They’re… They look like shark fins.”
“Alright, fine,” Atwater said—a standard prompt.
“Very much like shark fins,” McMoneagle clarified.
“Alright, fine,” Atwater said again. He asked McMoneagle to try and describe what was inside the building but McMoneagle had trouble getting off the notion of the shark. He repeated the word “fin” nine times. “I wish I could tell what that God damn fin was too, because I think that’s very significant,” McMoneagle said.
“I’m seeing what looks like part of a submarine in this building,” he said finally. “I’m getting a strong impression of a huge, coffin-type container. A giant coffin-type thing. It’s like they created part of a submarine to… to… fasten this modification to.”
Atwater asked how the coffin was connected to the submarine.
“I think this is like a prototype,” McMoneagle responded. “Perhaps four, five stories or six stories tall.… I’m asking myself the question, what is this thing? This coffin-like thing? And the answer that I keep giving myself is that it’s a weapon. And I don’t know why. I don’t see any weapon,” he said. The transcript of the session was forty-seven pages long.
The Army’s Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff of Intelligence sent Det G’s intelligence collection report to the National Security Council for review. The report was interesting to some, including Commander Jake Stewart of the Office of Naval Intelligence, and dismissed by others including Robert Gates, an analyst on loan to the NSC from CIA. That the Soviets would build a submarine inside this building, and not in a dry dock located at the water’s edge, seemed to defy logic. The building McMoneagle had been asked to view was located roughly one hundred yards inland from the shore at the naval yard. At one point in McMoneagle’s session he had described “a concrete structure, like in Holland in a canal. For you know, controlling the flow of water.” But the KH-9 spy satellite photographs from September 1979 showed no canal between the mysterious building and the navy docks—only flat, frozen earth.
Four months later, in January 1980, new images captured by a KH-9 spy satellite over Severodvinsk sent shock waves through the intelligence community. The January photographs revealed a massive submarine tethered alongside a navy dock at the Severodvinsk Naval Base, the likes of which had never been seen before. The photographs also revealed that a channel had been dynamited and dug—sometime in the past four months—between the building McMoneagle had remotely viewed and the dock. These new satellite images made clear to the CIA that the Soviets had covertly constructed a prototype for an entirely new generation of nuclear-powered, ballistic missile submarines. The Soviets called this clandestine effort Project 941, codename “Акула,” or “Shark” in Russian. The Shark submarine would become known in the West by its NATO reporting name “Typhoon.” Tom Clancy would make the Typhoon famous in his 1984 novel, The Hunt for Red October.
The Typhoon class submarine carries twenty submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), each outfitted with ten multiple independent reentry vehicle (MIRV) warheads for a total of two hundred nuclear weapons on board a single submarine. Built for arctic patrols, the Typhoon was designed to quickly break through polar ice, surface, and launch enough nuclear weaponry to annihilate the United States in a single preemptive strike. It is the largest class of submarine ever built, its massive size owing to the fact that the prototype Typhoon was the product of two delta class submarine hulls welded together. It would become one of the most feared weapons of the Cold War. Joe McMoneagle had provided seminal information on the Typhoon submarine before any other intelligence asset in the United States. Fort Meade’s Detachment G now had what is known in military and intelligence circles as an “intelligence first.”
For the Army, it was imperative to determine whether regular military personnel could learn remote viewing as a discipline, or skill. As a general rule, psychics and the Army did not mix, so the plan was to spend year one establishing that the phenomena was real; year two would be for training; and year three for developing Army protocols. That was the plan. Instead, on November 4, 1979, one of the most dramatic national security crises of the twentieth century came to pass. In Tehran, revolutionaries stormed the U.S. embassy and the Iranian Foreign Ministry, taking sixty-six Americans hostage. It was a crisis of epic proportions, unprecedented in American history. Aware of the experimental unit at Fort Meade, the National Security Council authorized the Army’s psychics-in-training to become an operational unit in support of the hostage crisis in Iran.
“I received a call at 4:00 a.m.,” McMoneagle recalls, “asking me to report directly to the office.” He was told not to listen to the radio, not to turn on the television, and not to look at any newspaper headlines. When he arrived at Fort Meade, his Det G team members were already assembled, seated around a large conference table covered with more than one hundred photographs. Atwater briefed the unit about the crisis in Tehran and gave the viewers a real-time operational task. They were asked to determine which individuals were hostages and which were not. Following SRI protocols, they worked to identify three Americans they believed were being held separately from the other hostages and whose whereabouts were not yet known to the Pentagon. When the National Security Council verified the accuracy of the information with the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff became involved. The unit was then asked to provide information regarding people, places, and infrastructure in Tehran.
“What was targeted?” McMoneagle asks rhetorically. “Every building, every room, every person in each of those rooms… what they were wearing, what their health was like, what the furniture looked like, what kind of paint or pictures were on the wall.” Weeks passed and the workload ballooned. NSA assigned the viewers to locate any underground infrastructure near where the hostages were being held. When they identified a pre-Roman sewer system running beneath Tehran with an entrance beneath the embassy, the Joint Chiefs determined the information to be “actionable intelligence.” As hostages were shuffled between locations, the viewers worked to track movements between “Komiteh prison, Qom Prison, Evin Prison, Jahroum, Shiraz, Area J (Ambassador’s Residence), Staff Quarters No. 7, The Chancery and the Mushroom Inn.”
In mid-April, Grill Flame’s work on the Iranian hostage situation was affected by a series of destabilizing twists. The remote viewers arrived at the office one morning to learn that they were being moved from their secure facility at Fort Meade to a suite of hotel rooms down the road in Laurel, Maryland. They were now part of a highly classified Special Access Program in support of the hostage crisis, they were told. Sequestered from the outside world, viewers worked around the clock. Then, during a session in the second week of April 1980, Hartleigh Trent went off-subject from his requested target in Tehran and described a dramatic scene in a stark desert environment. Trent told Atwater he saw American soldiers rappelling out of a helicopter, commando style. The session was abruptly ended. Several days later, viewer Fern Gauvin reported seeing a similar scene involving “fire and death,” but not in a city.
Declassified documents indicate that on April 24, 1980, Nancy S. was conducting Remote Viewing (RV) Session CCC84 when she broke down. The tasker noted, “Admin note 0300 Hours in Iran,” or at 3:00 a.m. local time, Nancy S. reported she was having trouble getting the target she’d been sent to, which was a building in Tehran code-named I
ndia. Instead, she said she saw “an attacking force of some kind.” She apologized and stated that perhaps she was “hallucinating.” What she saw was “weird and illogical” but “very vivid, horrible. Like a bad dream…” Her descripion was of “Big chest, big big gorillas. Great big chest beating gorilla leading these apes… they had tiny 9 inch long rockets, hundreds of them.” She apologized again and said she’d “never lost control like this before.” According to a report declassified by the CIA, she saw “a very boring sequence and all of a sudden you are aware something is amiss and something is very wrong, people are running… with great stealth.… And all of a sudden you find you are in an attack.… You, the audience in the middle of an attack.” There was “Ground equipment… large caliber machine gun. Three or four of them, in a row.”
The way McMoneagle recalls what happened, Nancy S. reported “a huge explosion… a huge fire she couldn’t understand what for.” And then she became overwhelmed with emotion and broke down in tears. The situation was intense: the viewers were exhausted from the stress of the situation, the hotel environment, and the hours involved. Then, late that same night, Scotty Watt declared the mission over. He turned on the TV. To a stunned nation, President Carter announced a failed hostage rescue attempt and helicopter crash in the Iranian desert, 200 miles southeast of Tehran. The desert location was code-named Desert One; the rescue operation was Operation Eagle Claw. The crash killed eight U.S. servicemen and one Iranian civilian. Scores more were injured. What would happen to the hostages now, as a result of the failed rescue operation, was unknown.
Had Hartleigh Trent and Nancy S. experienced precognition? What about Fern Gauvin? Had they traversed the barrier of time and obtained information about a future event? Were they seeing events in real time? Were the gorillas some kind of gestalt for, or a symbolic representation of, Special Forces operators? The Army remote viewers were not born psychics. They did not pretend to be like Ingo Swann, Uri Geller, or Pat Price. They were only recently trained in an experimental collection tool whose value had not yet been determined by the Army. Precognition was a nightmarish skill to possess. To see the future was to see death; who would want to cultivate this ability?
Nancy S. quit the unit, says Joe McMoneagle. So did Fern Gauvin. Reached in 2014 by telephone at his home in Maryland, Gauvin confirmed the events that took place at the Maryland hotel but refused to discuss further what had happened during the remote viewing of Operation Eagle Claw. “If you ask me, I will hang up,” he said.
On April 25, 1980, Ayatollah Khomeini held a press conference. In a speech heard around the world, Khomeini condemned President Carter and credited Allah with throwing sand to protect Iran from the American invaders. “The big Satan has taken up his foolish mischief,” Khomeini said. “God the omnipotent has defeated them.”
At Fort Meade, the viewers continued to provide information for the National Security Council, the CIA, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Three months later, with the hostages still in captivity, President Carter took to the podium in the White House press room to provide facts about the ongoing Iran hostage crisis. In one hand he carried a folder. On the tab were two words, “Grill Flame.” At the time, few people had any idea what those code words meant.
It is generally accepted that the failure of Operation Eagle Claw cost President Carter the election. On January 20, 1981, just minutes after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the new president of the United States, the government of Ayatollah Khomeini released all fifty-two remaining hostages.
An eerie chill descended on the Det G unit at Fort Meade. The unspoken question on everyone’s mind was What are we dealing with here? The answer, also unspoken, was We don’t know, so don’t ask. Gone now was any sense of playing or practicing to be psychic. If the outbounder-beacon experiments carried the patina of a new age consciousness-expanding exercise, what happened during the Tehran crisis resulted in a paradigm shift. The U.S. Army’s remote-viewing unit had been squeezed into an impossible position. On the one hand the message from the establishment was clear: We don’t know what this is; we can’t verify if it’s real, but we’re going to move forward anyway, scrapping the original three-year plan. But while such an open-ended situation might be accepted at an ashram in India, on a mountaintop in Tibet, or even at the Central Intelligence Agency, it was an unlikely undertaking for the U.S. Army. At Fort Meade the stage was now set for a state of utter confusion and chaos.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Qigong and the Mystery of H. S. Tsien
On March 11, 1979, an article appeared a world away on the front page of one of China’s top newspapers, Sichuan Daily, about a twelve-year-old boy named Tang Yu who was able to “read” with his ears. At CIA and DIA, analysts followed the story with acute interest, translating, interpreting, and analyzing what this might mean for U.S. national security. Before this article appeared, very little attention was paid to China as a possible threat in the realm of psychic warfare and military research into anomalous mental phenomena. This article changed all that, literally overnight. Intelligence analysts were startled by what they discovered about China and psychic functioning.
China has a long and rich tradition of spirit culture, extrasensory perception, and superstition. The I Ching, or Book of Changes (1000–750 BC), is one of the oldest and most widely read ancient divination texts in the world. It is said to have shaped Chinese philosophy, science, and statecraft for thousands of years. In the post–World War II era, after the 1949 Chinese Communist Revolution, activities such as ESP and divination were officially forbidden, much as the Soviets had sought to eliminate religion and mysticism in the wake of the Russian Revolution. But starting in the early 1960s, Russian government research into extrasensory perception was allowed to move out of the shadows and into the mainstream, justified, ironically, by international reports of American ESP experiments on the USS Nautilus. In Russia, ESP and PK research had been quietly gaining momentum ever since, but in China the revival was nonexistent or at least unknown to the U.S. intelligence community—until this front-page article appeared about a boy who could read with his ears. The CIA and the DIA had a mystery on its hands.
China’s Politburo, or ruling party, controlled the nation’s press. That a story about a boy apparently endowed with a bizarre form of extrasensory perception had been published in such a high-profile newspaper as the Sichuan Daily was unusual. That the article featured a photograph of Tang Yu standing beside a powerful Communist Party provincial secretary, both of them smiling, was unprecedented. For analysts at CIA, this signified a government seal of approval. Intelligence analysts sought to understand this phenomenon, referred to in classified documents as “skin-reading.” But an equally important mystery was why the Communist Party had seemingly decided to endorse extrasensory perception.
The story had begun five months earlier, the CIA learned, in a remote mountain village in Dazu District. One day in October 1978, Tang Yu and his friend Chen Xiaoming were walking home from school when the two boys decided to stop on the footpath and have an impromptu wrestling match. “We were tussling together when my ear brushed against his coat pocket and immediately two Chinese characters sprang into my mind,” Tang Yu told a reporter. The words he had seen with his ear were “flying” and “swan,” he said.
The experience struck him as so powerful that he stopped wrestling in order to describe his vision to his friend. Chen Xiaoming unbuttoned his coat, reached into the inside breast coat pocket, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes he’d secreted inside. The brand, Flying Wild Goose, featured the image of a long-necked bird in flight. So awestruck were the two schoolboys that they agreed not to tell their parents. Chen Xiaoming was far too young to be smoking cigarettes and would surely get in trouble. Instead, the boys began to test Tang Yu’s skin-reading abilities on local townsfolk, the CIA learned.
Villagers were asked to jot a few Chinese characters onto a small slip of paper, roll the paper into a little ball, and place it inside one of Tang’s ears.
Time and again, the boy would “read” the words or phrase that had been written down. News of the boy’s phenomenal abilities spread throughout the village and beyond. A local official with the People’s Commune was summoned to conduct a test, then a top district authority with the county government, and finally a Sichuan Province Communist Party figurehead. In demonstration after demonstration, Tang Yu displayed his powers with astonishing regularity. “When the [paper] ball is placed into my ear, I feel a tingling and an image of the characters appears in my head like a film projected onto a screen,” he told officials. Finally the governor of Sichuan Province—a powerful official named Zhao Ziyang—became personally involved.
Zhao was hardly a household name in the West, but to the CIA he was a formidable force, a rising star among Chinese Communist Party officials. Two years before, in 1977, he had been promoted to the position of alternate member of the Politburo by the Chinese Communist leader himself, Deng Xiaoping. By 1979 Zhao was made a full Party member, and in October 1980 he would succeed Deng as premier of the People’s Republic of China. Why was Zhao involved? CIA analysts wondered. Who was behind this? U.S. intelligence analysts rushed to learn what exactly was going on, acquiring hoards of Chinese documents and scouring them in translation.
In China, the story about Tang Yu reached millions of Chinese citizens, and news of the boy’s extraordinary powers spread. Officials of the Science Commission in Beijing were summoned to investigate. After laboratory tests, China’s top party scientists determined that Tang possessed what they now officially called Extraordinary Human Body Function, or EHBF. Within weeks, what would soon become known as the first Extraordinary Powers Craze took hold. The CIA was puzzled by this remarkable turn of events. All across China people wanted to meet Tang Yu, the extraordinary boy who could read with his ears.