The Men Who Stare at Goats

by Jon Ronson

  The reason General Wickham felt the way he did about bent cutlery can be found in Deuteronomy, chapter 18, verses 10–11:

  “There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination ... or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.”

  General Wickham believed, and in fact told colleagues, that Satan had somehow taken over General Stubblebine’s soul. It was Satan, not General Stubblebine, who had bent the fork.

  In later White House administrations, including that of George W. Bush, General Wickham has continued to command respect. In his autobiography, Colin Powell twice refers to him as “my mentor,” and in June 2002 he received George

  W. Bush’s American Inspirations Award for his work as part of the Presidential Prayer Team, a 3-million-strong community of Americans who log on to presidentialprayerteam.org every week to be told what to pray for:

  Pray for the ongoing efforts in the war on terror, that the President and all his intelligence sources will obtain the most helpful information in safeguarding America. Pray for them to have godly wisdom in the manner in which they handle each bit of information. Pray for the effectiveness of a new fingerprinting initiative that will screen foreign travelers entering America. Pray for the strong relationship between Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair. Pray that the President will continue to be guided by the Lord in his deliberations with the U.K.

  And so on. General Stubblebine might have suggested to General Wickham that prayer groups were not dissimilar to spoon-bending-type initiatives, both being attempts to harness the power of the mind to influence things from afar, but the general’s unassailable enemy regarding this logic was Deuteronomy, chapter 18, verses 10–11.

  Funnily enough, and unknown to General Wickham, General Stubblebine had in fact undertaken every one of the above abominations before the Lord during his tenure as head of army intelligence, with the exception of making his son or daughter pass through fire, although he had fire-walked himself in the mountains of Virginia, under the tutelage of the self-help guru Anthony Robbins.

  General Wickham’s hard-line interpretation of Deuteronomy was making General Stubblebine’s position untenable, hence his urgent need to come up with an indisputable miracle. Back home in Arlington, his late-night attempts at levi-tation met with no success. The general put this failure, too, down to his ever-burgeoning in-box, which is why he eventually flew to Fort Bragg in an attempt to persuade Special Forces to burst the hearts of animals just by staring at them. If he didn’t have the time to perfect these powers, perhaps they might.

  It is hard to predict whether General Stubblebine might have found a kindred spirit in his commander in chief, President Reagan. The president seemed to have a foot in both camps. His chief of staff, Donald Regan, wrote in his memoirs that “virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House chief of staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise.”

  This woman, whose name was Joan Quigley, fixed the exact time when the president would sign the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty in 1987. Joan Quigley now goes by the presumably unauthorized title Presidential Astrologer Joan Quigley.

  But the president also shared, with his friend General Wickham, an abiding respect for the fundamentals of the Bible. When the states of Arkansas and Louisiana passed a law stating that creationism be taught in public schools, the president cheered the initiative, announcing, “Religious America is awakening!”

  When I telephoned General Wickham to ask for his account of that black-tie party, he said he remembered it well. It was a big dinner at a place called Quarters One. He couldn’t recall specifically blaming Satan. But, yes, he had recoiled, he said, because as a Christian you have to accept that the supernatural is alive, and it sometimes manifests itself in eerie ways. But General Stubblebine was, broadly speaking, “one of the good guys.”

  “I became actually kinda intrigued,” he told me.

  General Stubblebine had spotted a flash of curiosity cross General Wickham’s face at the party, and he recognized that this could be a watershed moment in military history. If he could only beguile his famously Christian chief of staff by performing an on-the-spot paranormal demonstration, might this be the moment when the supernatural began its journey toward official recognition by the U.S. army?

  This is why General Stubblebine seized the opportunity to say to General Wickham, “I can do it for you now if you like. I can bend a spoon for you right now, if you like.”

  And this, General Wickham told me, was General Stub-blebine’s error.

  “I didn’t want him to bend a spoon in the middle of a party,” he said. “It was an inappropriate place to do it.”

  It was exactly this sort of overenthusiasm that led to General Stubblebine’s enforced early retirement.

  But the supernatural war against Manuel Noriega did not end with General Stubblebine’s departure. Five years later, in December 1989, the United States launched Operation Just Cause to depose Noriega and put him on trial for cocaine smuggling. But when American troops arrived in Panama, they discovered that Noriega had gone into hiding.

  An agency within the U.S. government (Sergeant Lyn Buchanan told me he couldn’t remember which it was, and anyway, he said, the information was probably still classified) called up the psychic spies. Where was Noriega? Lyn Buchanan sat inside the clapboard building in Fort Meade, put himself into a trance, and received “a powerful impulse regarding Noriega’s location.”

  “Ask Kristy McNichol,” he kept writing on a piece of paper. “Ask Kristy McNichol.”

  Sergeant Buchanan was certain that the TV actress Kristy McNichol, who appeared in Starsky & Hutch, the ABC miniseries Family, The Bionic Woman, and The Love Boat II, held the key to the whereabouts of General Noriega. At that time, in December 1989, Kristy McNichol had just recorded the CBS special Candid Camera! The First 40 Years, had a guest role in Murder, She Wrote, and had starred in the erotic thriller Two Moon Junction.

  “Ask Kristy McNichol,” Lyn continually wrote, in his trance state.

  Lyn Buchanan stopped at this point and said he didn’t know whether anyone had acted on his divination. The way the secret psychic unit was structured, he explained, meant that once his divinations had been passed upward, he was rarely given feedback about what happened next. He had no idea if the authorities subsequently contacted Kristy McNichol.

  So I attempted to ask her myself. I e-mailed her to inquire whether by chance she had known where General Manuel Noriega was holed up in December 1989. In addition, was I the first person to have approached her about this matter, or had others, perhaps U.S. intelligence operatives, contacted her in the past?

  I never got a reply.

  For everyday agnostics, it is not easy to accept the idea that our leaders, and the leaders of our enemies, sometimes seem to believe that the business of managing world affairs should be carried out within both standard and supernatural dimensions.

  Over the course of a year or two I contacted everyone I could find who had met Jim Channon during his late-1970s Californian odyssey. One of them was Stuart Heller. Stuart had been introduced to Jim by their mutual friend Marilyn Ferguson—the renowned author of The Aquarian Conspiracy. Stuart told me that Jim was “just marvelous.”

  These days, Stuart teaches business executives the art of stress control. He visits Apple and AT&T and the World Bank and NASA and coaches their managers in how to remain centered and tranquil amid the workplace hurly-burly. He is one of scores of similar gurus who travel from business to business throughout the Western world, fulfilling Jim’s 1979 prophecy that “what is developing today on the Coast will be the national value set ten years from now.”

  At one point during my conversation with Stuart I happened to ask him if he knew anyone who was the livin
g embodiment of the First Earth Battalion. Stuart instantly replied, “Bert Rodriguez.”

  “Bert Rodriguez?” I said.

  “He’s a martial arts guy down in Florida,” Stuart said. “My younger brother is one of his students. I’ve never met anybody like Bert. His gym is always full of ex-military guys, ex-Special Forces. Spooks. And in the middle there’s my skinny little brother.”

  I typed Bert Rodriguez’s name into a search engine and my screen filled with a picture of an intense-looking shaved-headed Cuban with a black mustache, frozen in the act of slamming a huge and sweaty man into the wall of his gym—the US 1 Fitness Center in Dania Beach, Florida.

  “Bert once got my brother to lie on the floor,” Stuart said, “and he put a cucumber on his chest, and he blindfolded himself and wham! He sliced the cucumber in half with a samurai sword. Didn’t cut my brother at all. Blindfolded!”

  “Bloody hell,” I said.

  “Bert’s one of the most spiritual guys I’ve ever met,” said Stuart. “No. Spiritual is the wrong word. He’s occultic. He’s like a walking embodiment of death. He can stop you at a distance. He can influence physical events just with his mind. If he catches your attention he can stop you without touching you.”

  Stuart paused.

  “But he doesn’t talk like this. He’s the most First Earth Battalion guy I know but he’s incapable of verbalizing it. He’s a street fighter from Cuba. With Bert it’s just instinctive. But everyone can see it. That’s why people come and train under him.”

  In April 2001, Bert Rodriguez took on a new student. His name was Ziad Jarrah. Ziad just turned up at the US 1 Fitness Center one day and said he had heard that Bert was good. Why Ziad chose Bert, of all the martial arts instructors scattered around the Florida shoreline, is a matter of speculation. Maybe Bert’s uniquely occultic reputation preceded him, or perhaps it was Bert’s military connections. Plus, Bert had once taught the head of security for a Saudi prince. Maybe that was it.

  Ziad told Bert that he was a businessman who traveled a great deal and he wanted to learn how to defend himself if a group attacked him.

  “I liked Ziad a lot,” Bert Rodriguez said when I called him. “He was very humble, very quiet. He was in good shape. Very diligent.”

  “What did you teach him?” I asked.

  “The choke hold,” said Bert. “You use it to put someone to sleep or kill them. I taught him the choke hold and the kamikaze spirit. You need a code you’d die for, a do-or-die desire. And that’s what gives you the sixth sense, the ability to see into the opponent and know if he’s bluffing. Yeah. I taught him the choke hold and the kamikaze spirit. Ziad was a soccer player. I’d much rather have a soccer player beside me in a fight than a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. The soccer player can dodge and dive.”

  There was a silence.

  “Ziad was like Luke Skywalker,” said Bert. “You know when Luke walks the invisible path? You have to believe it’s there. And if you do believe it, it is there. Yeah. Ziad believed it. He was like Luke Skywalker.”

  Bert trained Ziad for six months. He liked him, sympathized with his tough upbringing in Lebanon. He gave Ziad copies of three of his knife-fighting training manuals, and Ziad passed them on to a friend of his, Marwan al-Shehhi, who was staying up the road in room 12 of the Panther Motel and Apartments in Deerfield Beach, Florida.

  We know this because when Marwan al-Shehhi checked out of the Panther Motel on September 10, 2001, he left behind a flight manual for a Boeing 757, a knife, a black canvas bag, an English–German dictionary, and three martial arts manuals written by Bert Rodriguez, the man Stuart Heller had called “the most First Earth Battalion guy I know.”

  Marwan al-Shehhi was twenty-three years old when he checked out of the Panther Motel, flew to Boston, changed planes, took control of United Airlines flight 175, and crashed it into the south tower of the World Trade Center.

  Ziad Jarrah was twenty-six when he took control of United Airlines flight 93, which came down in a field in Pennsylvania on its way to Washington, D.C.

  “You know what?” said Bert. “I think Ziad’s role was to be the hijacker with brains. He’d hang back to ensure that the job was done properly, that the takeover of the plane was completed.” Bert paused. “If you love a son and he becomes a mass murderer, you don’t stop loving your son, do you?”

  Guy Savelli’s role in the War on Terror began when half-a-dozen strangers, within days of one another, contacted him via e-mail and telephone in the winter of 2003. They asked him if he had the power to psychically kill goats. Guy was bewildered. He did not go around publicizing this. Who were these men? How did they know about the goats? He feigned a casual tone of voice and said, “Sure I can.”

  Then he immediately phoned Special Forces.

  Everyone who had contacted him, he told them, was Muslim, with the possible exception of some British guy (me). The others were certainly e-mailing from Muslim countries, axis-of-evil countries, in fact. This had never happened to Guy before. Might they be al-Qaeda? Might they be bin Laden operatives hoping to learn how to stare people to death? Was this the start of a whole new paranormal subdivision of al-Qaeda?

  Special Forces instructed Guy to meet me, because in all probability I was al-Qaeda too.

  “Be careful what you say to him,” they advised.

  Special Forces had even—I was startled to learn—been on the phone to Guy the very morning I had visited him. While I was getting coffee at the Red Lobster, they had phoned Guy and said, “Has he turned up yet? Be careful. And film him. Get him on tape. We want to know who these people are… .”

  I’m not sure at what stage during the day we spent together Guy decided that I wasn’t an Islamic terrorist. Perhaps it was when I discovered that his daughter danced with Richard Gere in the movie Chicago and I screeched, “Catherine Zeta-Jones was brilliant in it!”

  Even a deep-cover al-Qaeda terrorist wouldn’t think to go that fey.

  I do know that throughout our entire hamster conversation, Guy was still convinced that I wasn’t an actual journalist. When I spoke of my “hamster-owning readers” Guy had glanced dubiously at me because he believed I had no readers at all, and would be reporting the events of the day not to the public but to a terrorist cell.

  That was the reason—Guy explained—why such a panicked scramble had ensued when I spotted the snapshot of the soldier karate chopping a goat to death. It was no ordinary karate chop, Guy revealed. It was the death touch.

  “The death touch?” I asked.

  Guy told me about the death touch. It was, he said, the fabled Dim Mak, also known as the quivering palm. The death touch is a very light strike. The goat is far from whacked. Its skin isn’t broken. There isn’t even a bruise. The goat will then stand there with a dazed expression on its face for about a day, before it suddenly topples over, dead.

  “Imagine if al-Qaeda had that kind of power,” Guy said. “Staring is one thing. The death touch is quite another. That’s why we were all so freaked when you saw the picture. We still didn’t know if you were al-Qaeda.”

  And so it was that Guy’s life had taken a strange new twist. Was he to be a dance and martial arts instructor by day and a covert agent infiltrating a hitherto unknown paranormal unit of al-Qaeda by night?

  Over the next few weeks Guy and I kept in touch.

  “I met with another department,” he told me during one call.

  “Homeland Security?” I asked.

  “I can’t tell you that,” said Guy. “But they’re sure one of the guys who contacted me is al-Qaeda. They’re sure of it.”

  “How do they know?” I asked.

  “The name checks out,” said Guy. “The phone number too. The phone number is on a list.”

  “What did the intelligence people say to you?” I asked.

  “They said, ‘Yeah, yeah. He’s one of the guys for sure.’”

  “Al-Qaeda?”

  “Al-Qaeda,” said Guy.

  “Are you bait?” I asked.


  “That’s what it looks like,” said Guy. “It’s getting kinda hairy here.”

  “You’re bait,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you, Jon,” said Guy, “these intelligence people see me as a dog. A dog! I said to them, ‘I have a family.’ ‘Yeah yeah,’ they said. ‘Having a family is very, very nice.’ We’re really expendable. I’m going to end up hanging from a lamp-post. A fucking lamppost.”

  At this point I heard Guy’s wife say, “Very fucking funny.”

  “Hang on,” said Guy.

  Guy and his wife had a muffled conversation.

  “My wife says I shouldn’t be talking like this on the phone,” he said. “I’m hanging up now.”

  “Keep me informed!” I said.

  And Guy did. As the various schemes to ensnare the possible al-Qaeda paranormal subdivision changed, Guy kept me informed of the developments. Plan A was for Guy to invite these people to America. Then the intelligence people had a change of heart, telling Guy, “We don’t want them here.”

  The much riskier plan B was for Guy to travel to their country. He would teach them a relatively benign psychic power and report back everything he saw and heard.

  Guy told them, “No fucking way.”

  Plan C was for Guy to meet them on neutral ground—maybe London. Or France. Plan C suited both camps and seemed the most likely to proceed.

  “I would fucking love to have you there,” Guy said.

  Guy sent me a scrap of an e-mail that, he told me, was “absolutely, positively” written by an al-Qaeda operative. It read:

  Dear sir Savelli,

  I hope you are fine and fit. I am bussy in my champion ship my champion ship is going success ful. Sir Savelli, please tell me if I apply to affiliation in your Federation so what is a prosiger please tell me a detal.

  And that was it. It seemed that one of two scenarios was unfolding: Guy was either in the middle of a sensational sting operation, or a hapless young martial arts enthusiast who only wanted to join Guy’s federation was about to be shipped off to Guantanamo Bay. All we could do was wait.