Working in the S-2 was something entirely different. One of the older counterintelligence warrant officers spent a considerable amount of time teaching me what I needed to know from a counterintelligence standpoint. He also taught me how to cut and form my own lock-pick tools, and taught me how to use them. He taught me the differences between the high-security locking mechanisms of various countries. I learned what to look for as a security weakness and how such a weakness might be capitalized on or manipulated.
I was spending more and more time away from home, on one job or another, traveling from one site to another, visiting one border site region or city or another. So my home life was not improving. However, my mind was. There is nothing more intuitive in the intelligence business than physical security. You begin to develop a feel for something wrong long before you know what it is that actually tips you off. This is especially useful when you are looking for the guy faking it in a crowd of people. I became very good at the job and stayed with it until the latter part of the following year.
In the fall of 1977, I had once again applied for warrant officer—the fourth time. This time I had the added problem of my commander not wanting to sign off on it. Colonel Flynn had taken over as field station commander and his signature was required for my packet to go forward. But he refused to sign it. He said, "Because if I show you such favor, then I'll have to show the same for anyone else who wants to apply."
I suspect the real reason was because I embarrassed him during a personnel security inspection one morning during a shift change. I used a counterfeit badge with the picture of a large male chimpanzee on the front to walk right into his Secure Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF). I believe he felt the subsequent security report reflected badly on how he was running his field station. He failed to understand that we were paid to violate a SCIF in order to improve its defenses. In any event, it didn't matter. I was turned down a fourth time, this time for being way too old. With more than twelve years overseas fighting the good fight, I was now considered over the hill. I might mention they had promoted three others to warrant that I had trained.
In reality, the Army quickly recognizes people who always get the job done and done well. The problem is, in doing so, they make themselves too valuable to the job they are doing. Hence whenever someone who is doing a valuable job applies for a promotion, like an appointment to warrant officer, it means the Army will have to move you and at the same time release you from the valuable job you are already doing so well. In the intelligence business, a senior noncommissioned officer or officer will spend an average of five to six years overseas, at which point they are usually moved to stateside assignments, where they train other people. What I didn't know at the time was that my fieldwork was considered by many to be exceptional enough to keep me overseas doing it. I was more valuable in an active mission overseas than I would have been back in the States. So, they once again turned down my request for warrant.
I spent a year doing physical security and counterintelligence missions along the Eastern bloc border, and earned one of the first Meritorious Service Medals awarded at Field Station Augsburg. It was a new medal created in 1969 to acknowledge outstanding meritorious achievement or service in a noncombat situation. It ranks between the Defense Meritorious Service Medal and the Joint Service Commendation Medal as a noncombat award.vii After more than twelve years overseas, I finally received my first orders reassigning me stateside—to a combat support unit located in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Anyone who has ever been in the Army will tell you that after more than twelve years overseas doing a real mission, such an assignment is the same thing as putting a gun to your head. I called the reassignments branch at Department of the Army to discuss it. It was patently clear that the assignment was in revenge for working out of my primary MOS.
I called everyone I could think of in the Washington, D.C., area to ask for help in averting the assignment, but no luck. I was going to Fort Bragg and nothing short of suicide was going to stop it from happening.
Once you've been in the Army long enough, you know that for every rule there is a counter rule, for every "no" there is a "yes" way of doing things. I took nearly a week off from work and spent the entire time trying to find a way out of going to Fort Bragg. Eventually, I discovered an answer to my problems. I only needed to volunteer for something they couldn't afford to say no to.
The next business day, I sent a back-channel message to the Office of Personnel, Department of the Army, Washington, D.C., asking what specific language qualification the Department of Defense considered to be the greatest need. Their response was—Mandarin Chinese.
I checked with my education office and was informed that my language skills test (ALAT) was two points too low to qualify for Mandarin. So, I arranged to be retested the following afternoon. I scored one point off perfect with the DLAT (the ALAT re-test) and submitted my request for reassignment to the language school in Monterey California, to study Mandarin.
The following day, the personnel office in Augsburg, Germany, received a telexed cancellation of my orders to Fort Bragg and an amendment to them, which read assignment to Monterey, California, for Mandarin Chinese. With a long sigh, I figured at least I wouldn't be going to Fort Bragg. I was already beginning to plan my eventual assignment to the first military assistance group mission to Beijing, China, which was in the rumor mill. I figured three to six years in China would round out my career. I might even find a good job speaking Chinese somewhere after I left the service.
When I returned to the States a couple of months later, I spent leave time in St. Louis, near Peggy's family. I wanted her to stay in St. Louis while I was in Monterey because I figured it would be better for both of us. I'd be burning the midnight oil trying to learn a new language and she would only be bored. Besides, we were fighting like cats and dogs and it wouldn't have helped my studies.
About halfway through my leave in St. Louis, I got a phone call from the Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. I recognized the voice. It belonged to the chief warrant officer in charge of my MOS, CW4 Richard Maher. He didn't beat around the bush. If they initiated the necessary paperwork to make me a warrant officer, would I give up my assignment to Monterey and accept a reassignment to headquarters? He was planning on retiring and they needed someone to take his place.
I didn't believe him, and told him so. I wanted confirmation from a higher authority. Moments later, I received a call from General Rolya, the commander of the INSCOM, who asked me if I would accept as a personal favor to him. Without hesitation I accepted, and two weeks later I was in Arlington looking for an apartment.
My new job was nearly overwhelming, nothing like anything I'd ever experienced. As a brand-new warrant officer, I was stepping into a job that had been filled for more than a decade by a very senior chief warrant. My new position was as the senior projects officer for the deputy chief of staff for Signals Intelligence and Electronic Warfare, INSCOM, and I was accepting responsibility for my MOS worldwide. I suddenly found myself buried in a mountain of paperwork. There were problems with training, equipment, and personnel that spanned the globe, and a number of multimillion-dollar research and development (R&D) programs already under way, and new ones in the works, and problems that hadn't yet been addressed.
Within a few months of my arrival at the headquarters, I found an apartment in Reston, about 25 miles from my work in Arlington, so Peggy was able to join me. I was fortunate, because they allowed dogs. I had brought my Dalmatian, Barney, from Germany with me. He had become one of my best friends, always at my side when I wasn't working. Unfortunately, none of us would be together very long.
Most of the R&D projects I found myself working on required an intimate knowledge of computers. So, I was sent to the advanced automated data processing (ADP) school in Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana.
Originally, the personnel office turned me down, because the primary prerequisite for attend
ing the school was a degree in computer science, which I didn't have. But, buried within the fine print was an exception. They waved this requirement for chief warrant officers. Of course the Army never intended for that exception to apply to people who had been promoted to warrant outside of the ADP field. But, since it didn't say that specifically, I applied under the exception and was accepted.
I spent the next six months at Fort Benjamin Harrison being taught all I could learn about computers. When I first arrived, the assistant director of the school suggested I repack my bags and return to my unit. He told me that no one without a computer science degree had ever attended the school, and the chances of my being able to keep up with my class, having no background at all in computers, were remote. I rejected the idea outright and told him it would take a direct order. I think he let me stay to watch me fail. I put in seven-day weeks and sixteen-hour days, burning the candle at both ends. To everyone's surprise, including my own, I successfully graduated. When I returned to Arlington, I completely immersed myself in my job, which was building one-of-a-kind computer-driven black boxes and managing our numerous overseas sites and assets.
Almost a year after I had arrived at Arlington Hall Station, sometime during the month of October of 1978, my immediate supervisor, a GS-14, Ralph Maahs, handed me a rather cryptic note. The note asked me to report at one in the afternoon to an unused room on the third floor of the headquarters building. He said he had no idea what it was about, but the request had come from the deputy chief of staff.
When I reported to the room later that day, I met two military intelligence (MI) officers dressed in civilian clothing. The younger of the two introduced the older as Scotty Watt, then identified himself as Fred Atwater. (He now goes by "Skip," and is my neighbor.) Fred asked me if I knew why I was there, and of course I said no.
They opened a briefcase and dumped a number of classified and unclassified documents out onto the desktop, and asked me to look them over, which I did. There were numerous documents addressing psychic programs in other countries and newspaper clippings containing some of the same subject matter. I took my time looking the material over. When I was through, they asked me what I thought about the material. How did I feel? Did I think it was bogus?
At the time, I was almost positive that I was being set up. I had a strange gut reaction to the material on the table, as well as a large "caution" feeling regarding the two men standing in front of me. It made me feel very wary, and on my guard. So, when I responded, I did so with something like, "I'm not sure I believe any of this, but if it is only half true, then it should be looked into." They then asked me where I worked, which I told them, then they cautioned me not to discuss the subject matter with anyone else, even my immediate supervisor, to which I agreed. Mr. Maahs later asked me what the meeting was all about, and I simply told him that it was a survey the operations security people were running. That seemed to satisfy him.
A number of weeks went by during which I heard nothing. Then one afternoon while I was working out some developmental scheduling, I got a phone call from Scotty Watt. He told me straight out that I had given all the right answers and they now wanted me to attend a larger meeting. I would be advised as to where and when that would take place. When I asked him what the meeting was intended for, he responded that he couldn't discuss it over the phone; I would have to come to the meeting to find out. He told me to tell Mr. Maahs that my attendance at the meeting was on the instructions of the chief of staff. I could tell by Ralph's reaction when I told him that he was getting peeved with my being called away to clandestine meetings he didn't know the reason for. I really couldn't blame him, as we were buried in enough work to keep half a dozen people inordinately busy.
It was the beginning of my second year of assignment at the headquarters of INSCOM. The new commander, Major General Freeze, had just promoted me from warrant to chief warrant officer, and I was beginning my second year in what was considered the top job within my military occupational specialty.
To demonstrate the width and breadth of the job without violating any subject matter classification, let's equate my job to something in the civilian world. In terms of responsibility, I was something akin to the director f product development for a major manufacturer. While such an example might seem at face value inappropriate, it demonstrates the level of technical and operational responsibility commensurate with my job.
To put it into an appropriate perspective, you need to understand that I shared that responsibility with a man named Ralph Maahs, a senior government civilian. Ostensibly, the reason for having a senior civilian within a military office especially a headquarters, is to ensure continuity between people like me and people who replaced people like me. Since I was an Army officer, and Army officers are generally moved from station to station on a rotational basis, assigning a senior government civilian is a way of ensuring the wheel doesn't get reinvested. (However, I have to add this may or may not be true with regard to my particular office, because the chief warrant officer I actually replaced held the job for a period exceeding fifteen years. It should also be noted that Ralph was also a retired chief warrant officer who held that same job before being hired as the senior civilian.) Therefore, while on the surface I may appear to be far more important than I actually was to the process, in my office there was continuity and experience going back probably to the date of Adam's original sin and we were all warrant officers originating from the same rib. This also meant that I was being groomed, which would have a major impact on my relationships there later, as a result of my involvement with the remote viewing project.
In any event, Ralph and I ran the MOS worldwide. This means we were responsible for everthing that happened operationally or technically—present or future. To equate it to the manufacturing example, this means we were responsible for all the items being manufactured, why they looked and operated the way they did, where they would be sold or used, how people were trained to use them, who would use them, and what they could or might be capable of doing—manned or unmanned, local or remote.
We were responsible for coming up with the designs and capabilities for the vehicles that might replace and/or carry the items, how and where they would be manufactured, what their ultimate distribution would be, and how new models would be paid for or by whom. In addition to the above, we were responsible for coordinating all in-house and out-of-house manufacturing, funding, and production. We directly interacted with and coordinated agreements with other parts/subsegment manufacturing companies (in this case other services with like MOSs), deciding which markets would be addressed, when they would be addressed, and how they would be addressed.
Imagine all the people, funding, software, hardware, and training it takes to do all of that, and you have covered approximately half the job description, the technical side. Balancing this out was the operational side. When you think of the operational, all I can suggest is that you start with the following two words—threat and world. This gives you some kind of idea of what my job was like.
Now why is this important? Well, I want to make a very specific point. Within my MOS, or group of peers, I was sitting in the catbird seat. There just weren't any jobs really that were better, more demanding, or more respected than the one I was sitting in. I was working right next to the flagpole, putting in ten-to twelve-hour days with lots of weekend overtime, dealing with unbelievable challenges, and loving every minute of it. No one else in my field had access to this exposure and experience.
But, I gave it all up.
In one brilliant flash of insight, I said what I said and changed my life forever. In that one small instant in time, I let a little voice from somewhere deep inside my head tell me what to do. Would the director of product development for General Motors do that? He probably wouldn't. Well then, why did I?
In hindsight, I think it had to do with a process of self-selection. The way I was approached, the material I was shown, and the almost derisive context in which it was present
ed did everything possible to ensure that I was completely turned off regarding any interest in the paranormal. In subsequent discussions the two men in suits—Skip and Scotty—implied that it was all part of an elaborate scheme they had for locating and recruiting sensitive (psychic) people, but I did not buy it. In reading further you will understand why.
Chapter Five
The Special Project
So, who were these two men? And, how did I end up sitting in a chair in a sterile room at the headquarters of U.S. Army INSCOM? Their story began some years earlier with a report floating throughout the intelligence community that was written by a CIA analyst named Dr. Kenneth Kress in the winter 1977 issue of Studies in Intelligence, an internal newsletter published within the Central Intelligence Agency (see appendix A). In this report, Dr. Kress talked about experiments in something called remote viewing, which had been ongoing at Stanford Research Institute (known now as SRI-International) since the 1972 time period. In these experiments, a man by the name of Pat Price, a retired police officer, was reputed to be describing the inside of controlled NSA operational sites, as well as providing information regarding code word materials stored within files located at those sites. An example of one of Pat's drawings, a crane, is included at the end of appendix A, and referenced within the Ken Kress document. The crane was part of a Soviet nuclear test site for which Pat also provided drawings of underground devices that were not known to exist at the time of his remote viewing.
It has subsequently come to be known that Mr. Ingo Swann was providing remote viewing support in that same time period. Swann is a psychic now residing in New York. He is also the author of numerous books of note in the paranormal field, both fictional and nonfictional. He is an exceptional artist and has produced paintings as well as prints coveted by people the world over. He is also a master at many other skills too numerous to list. While we've had our arguments and disagreements, I like to think of him as also a friend. He is certainly an exceptional remote viewer, and probably knows more about human superskills than any other man alive today. He is also a brother in arms—having served in the Army when his country called.
The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy Page 10