Inside the CIA psychic squad that helped get US hostages out of Iran – New York Post
In a leaky old building in Fort Meade, Md., a psychic hired by American spies had a mind-bending breakthrough.
It was July 1980 when a vision of a sick man on stretcher in an airplane struck him.
He and five other psychics had already spent months on secret mission. Their job: Save the 52 Americans seized in November 1979 in the Iran hostage crisis and spy on the Iranian captors using only paranormal powers.
They are going to release one of the hostages, the psychic, a heavy-set 60-year-old man with glasses, name withheld by The Post, announced. I dont know his name yet but its found in a deck of cards. And he has multiple sclerosis.
Intelligence honchos were skeptical but nevertheless sent out orders to deploy doctors. Four days later, the Iranians let go Richard Queen, a 28-year-old US Embassy worker whose poor health had spiraled downhill after 250 days in captivity.
The world soon learned that Queen whose last name is indeed a playing card suffered from multiple sclerosis and would have likely died without specialized doctors and a quick flight out of Tehran.
We predicted some remarkable things, said Joseph McMoneagle, a 71-year-old retired military-trained clairvoyant, who worked on the operation. We were just as effective as any spy on the ground.
Freshly released CIA files, along with The Posts interviews with psychics, spies and hostages, tell the tale of Operation Grill Flame, a paranormal-intelligence program that unfolded like a Hollywood spy thriller. (Think James Bond meets The Sixth Sense.)
In the operation, military-trained clairvoyants met more than 200 times to conjure up visions about the health, treatment and whereabouts of the Iran hostages before they were finally released in January 1981.
The so-called remote viewing program was set up by Army intelligence and the Defense Intelligence Agency, supported by the CIA and lasted more than 20 years before it was shut down in 1995. It was used to attempt to track everything from soviet submarines to Chinese nuclear weapons and truckloads of drugs, under at least three different code names.
All told, a total of 227 psychics conducted 26,000 of the supernatural sessions, costing taxpayers roughly $20 million, according to documents and insiders.
The psychics came up with useful information less than half the time a rate the clairvoyants tout as a glowing triumph and former CIA officials slam as a laughable failure.
Its borderline ludicrous, said William Daugherty, a 69-year-old ex-CIA case officer who spent 15 months as a captive in Iran. Most of the time, they were dead wrong.
But Paul Smith a retired Army intelligence officer-turned-government-trained clairvoyant, who worked on the program said America has plenty to gain from the use of psychic spies.
I was a skeptic at first. But we did things I never thought were possible, Smith said. Ive become a true believer.
American intelligence agencies first started taking psychics seriously in the early 1970s, when the Stanford Research Institute launched its then-radical parapsychology program. The CIA took note of the remote viewing experiments and sponsored it.
By the late 1970s, American intelligence agencies began internally recruiting officers to become psychics. Recruiters believed that extrasensory perception was a skill anyone could learn with the right training, said Smith, who taught some of the training courses.
To find officers who wanted to sharpen their sixth sense, recruiters passed out surveys with questions about ESP. At total of 1,500 officers said they were interested, according to Smith.
But like playing basketball or writing poetry, some of them were more naturally gifted at viewing.
Officers with creative hobbies, including writing, painting and playing music, tended to be better at paranormal readings, Smith said. So were candidates who had miraculously lived through deadly missions.
They brought us in because they thought, Either you are extremely lucky or extremely intuitive, said McMoneagle, who survived a dangerous mission, in enemy territory in Vietnam before becoming a Grill Flame psychic.
Soon, hundreds of officers were narrowed down to just six. One of them had a near-death experience, another was a Native American whod had intuitive experiences, but none of them considered themselves psychics before that point, Smith said.
The psychics came up with useful information less than half the time a rate the clairvoyants tout as a glowing triumph and former CIA officials slam as a laughable failure.
The paranormal military training sessions looked more like a meditation retreat as officers learned to channel their minds. When it comes to you, it feels like a vague distant memory of an experience you once had, Smith said. It usually starts off with sensory experience, colors, sights and smells.
He added, You learn to recognize what the signal is like as it comes in. And you learn to recognize the difference between that and mental noise.
Once trained, the psychics met for months in a windowless, soundproof room inside a leaky building in Fort Meade.
The paint was flaking and it was badly run-down. It didnt look presentable, but it was a great cover, Smith said. No one would have ever guess what was going on inside.
Each day, the Grill Flame 6 showed up to work not knowing a thing about what theyd be asked to see. Usually, they sat at a table across from an interviewer, who gave them prompts in the form of random numbers and photographs in sealed envelopes.
Using a pen and a pad of paper, theyd sketch out the visions of the target, often of a building, person or event. The sessions lasted about 30 minutes and were sometimes recorded.
The mission included checking on the condition, location, and confinement of selected hostages, said Skip Atwater, a former training officer for the remote-viewing program.
For psychics who were skilled enough to get specific, for details like the health of an Iranian hostage, relevant medical inquiries were initiated, according to Atwater.
Sessions like that helped save Richard Queen, Atwater said.
In that case, the 60-year-old psychic, reported perceiving a man lying on some sort of gurney inside an airplane, Atwater said. The man had tubes connected to him and he was having difficulty breathing.
In another successful session, a psychic stopped an Iran hostage rescue attempt that would have likely ended in disaster, McMoneagle recalled.
There was a courtyard in one of the compounds. To plan a rescue, you would almost certainly have had to fly a helicopter into courtyard as part of a raid, or at least to create distraction, he said.
But the psychics warned government officials to hold off when one was struck by a powerful vision. He saw cobwebs linked to the trees around the courtyard, warning they were actually bomb-triggering trip wires.
He was right, McMoneagle said. If someone had flown in that way it, could have killed everyone.
But meanwhile the hostages who sat in cramped cells thousands of miles away were growing hopeless.
Daugherty had lost 50 pounds as he wasted away behind bars in Tehran.
At points, he said was interrogated from dusk until dawn, nearly starved and stuffed in a cell alone.
There were 52 of us spread over country heavily in guarded cell blocks, he said. Even if [the psychics] had been successful with their viewings, to what end? No rescue would have been possible.
He says the clairvoyants had almost no clue about what was really going in inside the heavily guarded compound.
The psychics were wrong about captors using tear gas and wearing flowing robes, and other logistics such as a large fireplace in the compound, said Daugherty, who has read through the Grill Flame files.
One transcript from a recorded session shows just how inaccurate the team could be.
In the file, an interviewer shows a psychic a photo of CIA station chief Tom Ahern, one of the hostages.
I want you to hold the image of that individual in your mind while you visualize the area where he is located, the interviewer says, according to the Miami Herald, which was first to report the documents.
Describe his locations and his surroundings. Relax and concentrate, relax and concentrate, the interviewer urges.
I seemed to be in the midst of an explosion of activity, the psychic says. [There] appeared to be a lot of people dressed in, of all things, flowing robes.
He adds, People were running helter-skelter all over the place, as if there were a crowd of people. Suddenly, somebody started shooting into the crowd.
None of those predictions not one detail was right, Daugherty said.
These days, the American government has higher-tech forms of spying, ranging from drones to robotic insects with hidden microphones. But those methods often fail, too, former intelligence officers point out.
In the two decades the paranormal program was active, it worked about 30 percent of the time, which is ultimately not bad, Mcmoneagle said. Thirty percent is a batting .300 you have to understand, thats very good in the world of intelligence.
The proof lies in how long the federal government paid for it, he added. We got our funding on a year-to- year basis, a million a year.
Each year, the psychics had to prove to the American government that their visions were useful, to keep the program alive, he said. If it didnt work, then why did it last 20 years?
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Inside the CIA psychic squad that helped get US hostages out of Iran - New York Post