Smith reviewed his notes. He was stunned, he recalls. He had perceived the USS Stark incident fifty hours before it happened. He’d dedicated much of his recent life to the remote-viewing unit. His marriage had suffered. It had reordered his sense of what was real. But precognition? Seeing an event before it happened? That astounded him. “My impression had seemed real,” he says. “I was vicariously living an event that it turned out had not happened yet.”
Fred Atwater sent the details of Paul Smith’s precognitive remote-viewing session up the chain of command, where it was analyzed at DIA. But nothing came of it, says Smith. No positive feedback, no accolades, nothing, despite the fact that DIA was examining prophecy as a potential military intelligence tool and that remote viewers were specifically asked to “foresee future events… of foreign intelligence significance in the Persian Gulf.” When asked about this in 2016, Dale Graff said that “it was hard to evaluate.” When questioned further, he revealed that there were “some religious issues” involved, including with “some members of Congress and their associates.” For some in this group, says Graff, to hear about information received through extrasensory means was one thing, but to hear about remote viewers divining information about the future was considered heretical.
As summarized in the 1987 Sun Streak Report on Project P, “Except for a few, isolated, eye-catching successes, there was no evidence of consistency or reliability in the results obtained from remote viewing efforts conducted in a predictive mode. Remote viewing the future does not appear to be a feasible or marketable aspect of this program at this time.”
Paul Smith’s remarkably accurate prophetic viewing of the USS Stark incident would be filed away among the facilities targets, the Global Beacon tasks, and the imaginary research facilities on Saturn and on Mars.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Hostages and Drugs
In the mid-1980s Americans and western Europeans were being taken hostage by radical Islamic terrorist groups in the Middle East at an alarming rate. The remote viewers were detailed to help determine whether these hostages were dead or alive, and if they were alive to help find them. The effort was called Project 8808.
Over a ten-year period, from 1982 to 1992, a total of 104 foreign hostages were seized, including CIA bureau chief William F. Buckley in 1984, Associated Press reporter Terry A. Anderson in 1985, and Church of England envoy Terry Waite in 1987. The kidnappers called themselves Islamic Jihad, the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth, and Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine; hostage testimony later revealed that almost all the kidnappers were part of the same Shiite terrorist organization, Hezbollah.
On February 17, 1988, Marine Lieutenant Colonel William Richard Higgins was abducted in Lebanon after meeting with the Amal Militia, a local paramilitary group, in the coastal city of Tyre. Higgins, who served as chief of the United Nations Military Observer Group Lebanon, was returning from a meeting to discuss procedures between local militia and the UN in the event of a kidnapping when he was pulled from his vehicle and kidnapped. His abduction was an international incident. At the Pentagon it generated a crisis of some magnitude. Before joining the UN team, Higgins had served as a military aide to Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger from June 1985 until he went to Lebanon, in June 1987. His in-depth knowledge of classified military matters made him a high-value hostage. Unlike a captured journalist or church envoy kept alive for leverage purposes, there was reason to believe that Higgins would be tortured to death by the Hezbollah terrorists in their effort to extract classified information. Time was precious.
Four days after the kidnapping, on a Sunday, Angela Dellafiora, Paul Smith, and Ed Dames were brought to the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center (DIAC) at Bolling Air Force Base, in southeast Washington, D.C., to help in the effort. Inside a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility the trio of viewers were shown satellite images and video footage, some of which was from an Israeli drone (uncommon in 1988), of locations in Lebanon, including a small village. Was Colonel Higgins anywhere locatable in these images? DIAC officials asked the viewers.
Working the case was a DIA analyst named Louis Andre. He had never spoken to a reporter before. “The nature of this operation was so sensitive,” Andre said in 2016, “there are many aspects that are still classified.” What he could say was that before the operation began, “I was highly skeptical” of remote viewing. But this was a critical mission, and there was no room for pause, doubt, or distrust. There was strong reason to believe that Higgins’s abduction had been carefully orchestrated by Imad Mughniyah, the leader of Hezbollah’s terrorist operations. Mughniyah had overseen the 1983 suicide bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut in which sixty-three people, most of them CIA and embassy staff, were killed. And he had overseen the Beirut Marine barracks suicide bombing six months later, a terrorist attack in which 241 U.S. service personnel were killed, including 220 Marines. In the 1980s, Imad Mughniyah was considered one of the leading terrorist masterminds in the world. The DIA feared he was holding Higgins captive.
Dellafiora was shown a map of a Lebanese village. She identified where she thought Higgins was being held, and she perceived him to be alive. She said Higgins was being kept inside a “small structure.” Imagery analysts told Dr. Vorona that the area Dellafiora had pinpointed was a large, barren patch of land and that there were no structures there. Dellafiora said she was confident about the location, which was on a hill not far from a major road. Dale Graff had the analysts check the dates on the satellite images and learned that they were outdated, but newer photographs were not available. Smith and Dames also viewed targets, with different results. After a long day of intense work, the viewers went home.
Louis Andre suspected that working with remote viewers was a waste of time. But in another session, Angela Dellafiora produced phonetically the name of one of the Amal Militia commanders involved in the Higgins case, providing details about his role in the region that were accurate. This included his role in the militia and information about his family members. “It was astonishing,” Andre recalls. “These were incredibly sensitive components.” He could not comprehend how Dellafiora could have accessed this information, only that she had. The work continued. Seven months later, in September 1988, West German hostage Rudolf Cordes was released by the terrorists. Cordes had seen Colonel Higgins alive shortly after his capture and confirmed in a debriefing with a U.S. official that he had been held captive in a specially constructed shed. Cordes also confirmed the small structure as being “very likely near” the barren location Dellafiora had identified that first Sunday after Higgins’s capture.
Andre came to accept that Dellafiora’s information was valuable to the overall mission. “Her talents continued to be applied,” he says. The search for Higgins gained momentum over 113 sessions. Declassified memos indicate that Dellafiora perceived that Higgins was being moved from location to location and that he was “on water.” In March, Dellafiora continued to report that Higgins was alive and that he would eventually be released. Something about his “feet would be a clue to investigators,” she said. Dellafiora was wrong. Colonel Higgins was already dead. Intelligence agencies later confirmed that he had likely been killed between four and six weeks after his capture. Then it was learned that the terrorists had kept Higgins’s body on ice to preserve it, for reasons that would later be revealed. “Higgins had been on water,” says Dale Graff.
It would be eighteen months before the world learned the fate of Colonel Rich Higgins. In the summer of 1989, Israel Defense Forces captured Hezbollah leader Sheik Obeid. Forty-eight hours later, Hezbollah issued a statement demanding the return of the sheik or they would hang Higgins. When the sheik was not returned, Hezbollah released a video of Higgins’s dead body with a noose around his neck. An FBI forensics team examined the tape and determined that Higgins had died before he’d been hanged. “When a human body is suspended from the neck by rope, the feet naturally hang with toes pointed straight down at the ground,
” former DIA analyst Scott Carmichael explained in an interview for this book. Carmichael had also worked with Dellafiora. “The FBI’s examination of the videotape established, by contrast, that the Colonel’s feet projected [out] with the ankles at right angles, not with toes pointed straight down,” Carmichael clarifies. The terrorists put a rope around Higgins’s neck and videotaped him that way because they wanted to project power. Higgins’s body was not recovered for another two and a half years, when his mummified remains were found in a bag left in a school parking lot in southern Beirut.
Dellafiora’s signal about the feet had played into the investigation. “Higgins’s feet were the clue investigators used to prove he’d already been killed,” says Carmichael. When Higgins was confirmed dead, Dale Graff was again forced to confront a distressing reality. What good did remote viewing really do? None of the information divined had saved Colonel Higgins’s life. Yes, small details had proved correct after the fact, but the information was never of operational use. Remote viewing promised to be useful in intelligence collection; Dale Graff was convinced this was fact. But at times like this, he felt despondent. Higgins was dead, and the remote viewers had in essence failed.
As 1988 drew to a close, Captain Ed Dames was nearing the end of his assignment at Fort Meade. Declassified logs indicate his anomaly targeting had continued full bore to the end of his tenure, culminating in an anthology of reports entitled “Galactic Federation HQs,” full of colorful descriptions of “three types of entities associated with ET bases at various locations within the solar system.” When Dames was transferred out of Sun Streak at the end of the year, he received no recommendations or awards.
Shortly before Dames was set to retire, a new recruit arrived at the unit. He was Captain David Morehouse, a former Army Ranger commander. Paul Smith remembers getting along with him right away. “He was outgoing and friendly. He had been a successful combat-arms officer. He exuded charm.” Like Smith, Morehouse was a Mormon; he and Smith attended the same church. “He won people’s confidence, cultivating them as friends and allies,” recalls Smith. Morehouse’s commendations immediately placed him in the good graces of his superiors. In his first review, on May 24, 1989, branch chief Fern Gauvin wrote, “[his] eagerness to learn is equaled only by his ability and desire to be as highly proficient as possible in the pursuit of operational success.” In Morehouse’s second review, Gauvin had more praise: “Exercises strong leadership, demands high standards of performance while insuring genuine concern as a compassionate leader. A person of high moral fiber whose word is unquestionable. Maintains the highest level of physical fitness.”
Morehouse had been participating in remote-viewing training for roughly a year when several members of the unit noticed odd behavior on his part. “We began to realize Dave was around less and less frequently,” says Smith. Viewers Mel Riley, Lyn Buchanan, and Angela Dellafiora reported seeing the office phone number emblazoned on a sign attached to Morehouse’s van advertising a construction company called House-Tech. “I fielded at least one phone call from one of Morehouse’s prospective customers,” says Smith, who remembers telling the caller that the number was not for the House-Tech office but was a government telephone.
This kind of problem had been predicted by Jim Salyer, in his “Secret Working Papers,” written several years earlier. Regarding the operational structure of the Fort Meade unit, Salyer observed that “some potential disadvantages are that it is composed of mostly military personnel who have time limited assignments and that there is little to do during periods where there are no operational assignments.” The problem of too much free time was endemic to the unit.
It does not appear, in hundreds of declassified documents dating from this time, that Morehouse was ever reprimanded. The unit was rife with contention among personnel, making it difficult to discern how much was merely office politics. While moonlighting was not exemplary behavior, it did not appear to violate the Standards of Conduct for Department of the Army personnel, which focused more on the prohibition of unauthorized relationships, misuse of government equipment, and gambling. In Morehouse’s official performance evaluations he continued to earn high praise from his superiors and was promoted to Major. “Truly outstanding in every respect,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Douglas B. Hudson, a commander at INSCOM, Headquarters, in Major Morehouse’s exit review. “A rare, talented officer with unbelievable abilities. A true work horse that you want on your team.” No one in the unit foresaw that David Morehouse would eventually play a significant role in the downfall of the entire program.
In 1989, precipitated by an act of Congress, the DIA acquired a roster of new clients for its remote-viewing unit. America had been fighting a so-called war on drugs since the Reagan administration’s initiative. Then, in 1989, with the Defense Authorization Act, the military was formally enlisted in the national drug control program. This placed the Department of Defense at the helm of the war on drugs. Almost overnight a profusion of military assets were part of this protracted effort, including Navy radar frigates and airborne radar pickets, Air Force Airborne Warning and Control Systems, and U.S. Customs aviation units, as well as the full force of the Coast Guard. The operation escalated from state to federal, and from local to global. In addition to the Drug Enforcement Administration, the DIA’s new clients included the Coast Guard, Customs, and the Joint Interagency Task Forces in Florida and California. Key to narcotics work is knowing where to look for the drugs. Remote viewers were brought on board to help interdict cocaine coming into the United States from South America, to see into the cargo holds of huge vessels and to pinpoint exactly where drugs were being stored.
Declassified memos reveal that a new protocol was implemented in this effort, the pre-science invention known as dowsing. The DIA termed its protocol Remote Map Sensing, or RMS. “Remote Map Sensing is an intellectual process in which a person is able to identify the location of an object/person which is remote to him by simultaneously focusing his attention on the object/person and concentrating on a map,” one memo states. In this case, the objects being sought were cargo vessels. Viewers were encouraged to use a variety of tools historically associated with dowsing. Among them a pendulum—a weight hung from a string—described in an official memo as “a hand held tool [that] responds by gyrating when the proper location has been found.” Each member of the unit was given a thick file folder of articles to read on dowsing, including newspaper stories on how the Marines used dowsing rods to locate tunnel systems built by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. Each viewer was given a book of instructions titled, “The Study Guide for Use of the Pendulum as a Focusing Tool.” Paul Smith went the extra mile to learn the procedure by attending meetings of the Chesapeake Chapter of the American Society of Dowsers, which assembled at a Quaker meeting hall roughly twenty miles north of Fort Meade. Angela Dellafiora developed her own technique, she says. “I used my finger to pinpoint a location on a map.”
For the viewers involved in the DIA’s drug interdiction efforts, the top priority task was to locate the “big loads” of cocaine being trafficked into the States by the Medellín Cartel, in Colombia. The paranormal components of these drug operations were so classified that they had their own subcompartment within Sun Streak, code-named Switch Plate. Sun Streak was a black program to begin with, and yet deep within the Sun Streak/Switch Plate classified system, there were additional levels of compartmentalization, identifiable only by a single classified code word, one of which is indicated in declassified logs to have been “Stippled.” Even deeper within the Sun Streak/Switch Plate/Stippled black program was a compartmented, three-tiered level of access: administrative access, normal access, and highest-level access. “Program material is only transmitted or communicated point-to-point between named, cleared individuals,” notes one declassified cover sheet. Most of the Sun Streak/Switch Plate/Stippled counternarcotics programs were “eyes only,” meaning that information could only be viewed, never copied or written down. The primary c
lient controlling the information was the Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence. Because this information was so highly classified—compartmentalized within a black program that did not officially exist—the DIA’s clients wanted to protect their identities. To this end, they often used their own taskers, not the operations managers at Fort Meade. For this work, DIA wrote a briefing manual, some of which has been declassified.
“The information provided by SWITCH PLATE sources is obtained through a unique and highly sensitive collection technique,” the DIA manual states. “Your care in evaluating this information will insure that we are better able to assess or modify the technology to provide you, the customer, with a better product.” The anonymous author of the monograph gave a metaphorical example that unintentionally but brilliantly sums up the conundrum of the anomalous mental phenomena research that had been going on in the postwar era.
“Sources, like all humans, tend to be attracted to aspects of the target that attract them, personally. They also tend to ignore or gloss over aspects which do not attract them.” For example, wrote DIA, consider the story of four blind men asked to report the shape of an elephant. “One stood in front, felt the trunk, and said that an elephant is actually a huge variety of snake. Another felt the ear and described the elephant as being like a living leaf; another felt the tail and reported that it is like a long, hairy rope. The fourth man felt one leg and reported that the elephant is a tall, vertical animal, shaped like a tree trunk.” The point was—and remains—that one’s perspective is everything. Each viewer sees only a small part of the whole. How to differentiate between a tail and a rope, an ear and a living leaf? An elephant’s leg and a tree trunk? This was the puzzle: how to interpret and manage what people perceive.
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