The Men Who Stare at Goats

by Jon Ronson

  Documents reveal that Frank never saw a psychiatrist in New York. He was taken instead, by Gottlieb’s deputy, to the office of the former Broadway magician John Mulhol-land, who probably hypnotized him, and Frank probably failed that test too.

  Housing a possibly deranged and desperate man in a hotel room high above Seventh Avenue no longer seemed a regrettable error of judgment. It seemed the prelude to murder.

  When Eric had his father’s body exhumed in 1994, the pathologist, Dr. James Starrs, found a hole in Frank’s head that—he concluded—came from the butt of a gun and not a fall from a tenth-floor window.

  There were around forty journalists at Eric’s press conference—crews from all the networks and many of the big newspapers. Eric had decided—for the purposes of clarity—to tell the story primarily through the narrative of his weekend with Norman Cournoyer. He repeatedly stressed that this was no longer a family story. This was now a story about what happened to America in the 1950s and how that informs what is happening today.

  “Where’s the proof?” asked Julia Robb, the reporter from Eric’s local paper, the Frederick News Post, when he had finished. “Does all this rest on the word of one man, your father’s friend?”

  Julia looked around her to make the point that this Norman Cournoyer wasn’t even in attendance.

  “No,” said Eric. He looked exasperated. “As I’ve tried to tell you, it conceptually rests on the idea that there are two vectors in this story and they only intersect in one place.”

  There was a baffled silence.

  “Are you in any way motivated by ideology over this?” the man from Fox News asked.

  “Just a desire to know the truth.” Eric sighed.

  Later, as the journalists milled around, eating from the buffet laid out on picnic tables, the conversation among the Olsons and their friends turned to Julia Robb, the reporter from the Frederick News Post. Someone said he thought it was a shame that the most hostile journalist present represented Eric and Nils’s local paper.

  “Yeah, it is,” said Nils. “It’s painful to me. I’m a professional here in town. I have connections with local people as a dentist, and I see people on a daily basis who come in and read the local paper, and that affects me.”

  Nils looked over across the garden at Eric, who was saying something to Julia, but we couldn’t hear what.

  Nils said, “At times you go through a phase of believing that maybe the story is a bunch of hooey, and that it was just a simple LSD suicide and that”—Nils glanced at Julia—“can trigger a kind of shame spiral. It’s like the feelings you’ve had in the middle of the night, at three A.M., when you’re trying to get to sleep and you start having some thought and the thought spins you into another negative thought and it kind of spins out of control and you have to shake yourself and maybe turn the light on and get grounded in reality again.”

  Eric and Julia were arguing now. Julia said something to Eric and then she walked away, back to her car. (Later, Eric said to me that Julia seemed “incensed, as if the entire story made her furious in some deep way that she was completely at a loss to articulate.”)

  “I mean,” said Nils, “America fundamentally wants to think of itself as being good, and that we’re fundamentally right in what we’re doing, and we have a very compelling responsibility for the free world. And looking at some of these issues is troubling, because if America does have a darker side it threatens your hold on your view of America and it’s kind of like, ‘Gee, if I pull out this one underpinning of the American consciousness, is this a house of cards? Does it really threaten the fundamental nature of America?’”

  We drifted back down to the swimming pool, and an hour passed, and then Eric joined us. He’d been in the house on the telephone. He was laughing.

  “You hear the latest?” he said.

  “Bring me up-to-date,” said Nils. “I’m dying to hear.”

  “Julia,” said Eric, “called Norman. I just called her and she said, ‘Eric, I’m glad you phoned. I just called Norman. He says he has no reason to believe that the CIA would murder Frank Olson.’ I said, ‘Julia, thanks for respecting my wishes about not calling Norman.’ She said, ‘Eric, I’m a reporter. I have to do what’s necessary to get the story.’”

  Eric laughed, although nobody else did.

  And so I drove to Connecticut, to Norman Cournoyer’s house. I was slightly shaken by the news of the telephone call between Julia Robb and Norman. Had I got Eric wrong? Was he some kind of fantasist?

  Norman lives in a large white bungalow in an upmarket suburban street. His wife answered the door and led me into the living room, where Norman was waiting for me. He pointed to the table and said, “I dug out some old photographs for you.”

  They were of Norman and Frank Olson, arm in arm, somewhere in the middle of Fort Detrick, circa 1953.

  “Did you tell the reporter from the Frederick News Post that you had no evidence to suggest that Frank was murdered by the CIA?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Norman.

  “Why did you do that?” I asked.

  “Over the phone?” said Norman. “I think a journalist is making a big mistake in trying to get somebody to talk over the phone.”

  “So you do think Frank was murdered?” I said.

  “I’m sure of it,” said Norman.

  And then he told me something he hadn’t told Eric.

  “I saw Frank after he’d been given the LSD,” he said. “We joked about it.”

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “He said, ‘They’re trying to find out what kind of guy I am. Whether I’m giving secrets away.’”

  “You were joking about it?” I said.

  “We joked about it because he didn’t react to LSD.”

  “He wasn’t tripping at all?” I said.

  “Nah,” said Norman. “He was laughing about it. He said, ‘They’re getting very, very uptight now because of what they believe I am capable of.’ He really thought they were picking on him because he was the man who might give away the secrets.”

  “Was he going to talk to a journalist?” I asked.

  “He came so close it wasn’t even funny,” said Norman.

  “Did he come back from Europe looking very upset?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Norman. “We talked about a week, ten days, after he came back. I said, ‘What happened to you, Frank? You seem awfully upset.’ He said, ‘Oh, you know … ’ I must admit, in all honesty, it’s just coming back to me now. He said …”

  Suddenly, Norman fell silent.

  “I don’t want to go on further than that,” he said. “There are certain things I don’t want to talk about.”

  Norman looked out the window.

  “It speaks for itself,” he said.

  Eric hoped his press conference would, at least, change the language of the reporting of the story. At best it would motivate some energetic journalist to take up the challenge and find an unequivocal smoking gun that proved Frank Olson was pushed out of the window.

  But in the days that followed the press conference it became clear that every journalist had decided to report the story in much the same way.

  Eric had finally found “closure.”

  He was on the way to being “healed.”

  He had “laid his mystery to rest.”

  He could “move on” now.

  Perhaps we will “never know” what really happened to Frank Olson, but the important thing was that Eric had achieved “closure.”

  The story was fun again.

  16. THE EXIT

  June 27, 2004

  Jim Channon faxes me his Iraq exit strategy. This is the same document he sent to the army’s chief of staff, General Pete Schoomaker, after Donald Rumsfeld had asked the general to bring “creative” thinkers into the fold.

  Jim’s strategy begins:

  When we left Vietnam, we did so with our tails between our legs. We were leaving at an undignified pace. In the eyes of the world
that watches, the last moments are as telling as the first.

  THE FIRST EARTH BATTALION SOLUTION

  1. A touching and heartfelt ceremony [consisting of] mothers, children, teachers, soldiers, nurses and doctors from both sides. Where possible children will carry the actual awards (i.e., medals, trophies, small statues) of appreciation and recognition to those [American and Iraqi soldiers] honored.

  2. The ceremonial surroundings we design are themselves a gift to the future of Iraq. We recommend that a beautiful global village be built as a setting. It can showcase the kinds of alternative energy, sanitation and agricultural technology appropriate for this part of the world.

  3. [The ceremony will include the giving of] gifts from other parts of the world. United Nations translators will be available to interpret those gifts. An elder might speak and a teen might speak about the promise of cooperation.

  June 29, 2004

  Today, sovereignty is transferred from the coalition forces to the new Iraqi government. Whoever organized the ceremony obviously chose not to implement Jim’s ideas:

  Behind silver miles of new razor wire, behind high concrete barriers stronger than most medieval fortifications, behind sandbags, five security checks, U.S. armoured vehicles, U.S. armoured soldiers, special forces of various countries and private security guards, an American bureaucrat handed a piece of paper to an Iraqi judge, jumped on a helicopter and left the country.

  The first thing reporters saw as they came into the sunshine from the banal auditorium where the newly sworn-in Iraqi government hailed the new era was two U.S. Apache helicopter gunships, pirouetting low in the furnace sky.

  Fear of the bombers gave the occasion all the pomp of an office leaving do. It lasted only 20 minutes.

  —James Meek, The Guardian.

  I suppose this has been a book about the changing relationship between Jim Channon’s ideas and the army at large. Sometimes the army seems like a nation, and Jim a village somewhere in the middle, like Glastonbury, looked on fondly but basically ignored. At other times, Jim seems right in the heart of things.

  Perhaps the story is this: In the late 1970s, Jim, traumatized from Vietnam, sought solace in the emerging human-potential movement in California. He took his ideas back into the army and they struck a chord with the top brass, who had never before seen themselves as new age, but in their post-Vietnam funk it all made sense to them.

  But then, over the decades that followed, the army, being what it is, recovered its strength and saw that some of the ideas contained within Jim’s manual could be used to shatter people rather than heal them. Those are the ideas that live on in the War on Terror.

  The “bureaucrat” referred to in The Guardian article, Paul Bremer, may have left the country today, but he has left behind him in Iraq 160,000 troops, the vast majority of them American. According to a July 2004 report by the Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy in Focus, 52 percent of those American soldiers are experiencing low morale, 15 percent have screened positive for traumatic stress, 7.3 percent for anxiety, and 6.9 percent for depression. The suicide rate among American soldiers has increased from an eight-year average of 11.9 per 100,000 to 15.6 per 100,000.

  As of September 2004, a total of 1,175 coalition soldiers have been killed since the war began, including 1,040 Americans. Some 7,413 more have been wounded. Military hospitals have reported a sharp increase in the number of amputations—the result of an “improved” design of body armor that protects vital organs but not limbs.

  Between 12,800 and 14,843 Iraqi civilians are now dead as a result of the U.S. invasion and the ensuing occupation, with 40,000 more injured. These figures are less exact because nobody has really been keeping count.

  Eighty percent of Iraqis say they have “no confidence” in either the U.S. civilian authorities or the coalition troops, in part, I’ve no doubt, because of the photographs that detailed the methods of interrogation employed by military intelligence at Abu Ghraib.

  I have had the strangest telephone call. It was from somebody I’ve written about in this book, a man who continues to work within the U.S. military. I almost didn’t include what he told me because it is utterly outlandish and impossible to substantiate. But it also rings true. He said he’d tell me the secret on the condition that I didn’t reveal his name.

  Before I repeat what he said, I should explain why I believe it rings true.

  First, outlandishness hasn’t stopped them before.

  I once asked Colonel Alexander if there had been some sort of post-9/11 renaissance of MK-ULTRA.

  “Not necessarily LSD,” I added, “but a nonlethal weapon type of MK-ULTRA. Take the Guantanamo Bay ghetto-blaster story. Surely the most likely explanation is that they were playing him some kind of mind-altering noise, buried somewhere below Fleetwood Mac.”

  “You’re sounding ridiculous,” he replied.

  He was right. I was sounding just as ridiculous as I sounded when I asked friends of Michael Echanis if they knew whether Michael had ever been involved in “influencing livestock from afar.” But those were the cards this story had dealt me.

  (Remember that the crazy people are not always to be found on the outside. Sometimes the crazy people are deeply embedded on the inside. Not even the most imaginative conspiracy theorist has ever thought to invent a scenario in which a crack team of Special Forces soldiers and major generals secretly try to walk through their walls and stare goats to death.)

  “Listen,” said Colonel Alexander, crossly. “Nobody who lived through the trauma of MK-ULTRA” (he was talking about the trauma on the intelligence side, the trauma of being found out, not the trauma on the Olsons’ side) “would ever involve themselves in something like that again. Nobody who lived through all those congressional hearings, that media reaction …” He paused. Then he said, “Sure, you’ve got kids in intelligence who’ve read all about MK-ULTRA and think, ‘Gee. That sounds cool. Why don’t we try that out?’ But you’d never get a reactivation at command level.”

  Of course, a bunch of young enthusiasts in military intelligence thinking “that sounds cool” is exactly how these things can spring to life, and have done before.

  The other reason why I think the secret rings true revolves around the mystery of why Major Ed Dames decided one day to reveal on the Art Bell show the existence of the psychic spying unit. When I asked Major Dames in Maui what his motive for this was, he shrugged and a faraway look crossed his face and he said, “I didn’t have any motive. I didn’t have any motive at all.”

  But he said it in such a way as to lead me to think that he actually had a very shrewd, secret motive. At the time I put Ed’s pointedly enigmatic half-smile down to his well-deserved reputation as a somewhat self-aggrandizing mystery monger.

  Many people blamed Ed for the closure of the unit, and some smelled a conspiracy. Ed’s former psychic colleague Lyn Buchanan once told me he’d come to believe there was another psychic unit, even more deeply hidden, and presumably with more glamorous offices than theirs, and that the reason why their unit was revealed to the world was to divert attention from this mysterious other psychic team. Lyn’s implication was that Ed was instructed to reveal the secrets by some high-up cabal.

  At the time, I didn’t give this theory much credence. I have often found that people at the heart of perceived conspiracies are often conspiracy theorists themselves. (I remember once speaking with a high-ranking Freemason from their Washington, D.C., headquarters. He said to me, “Of course it is simply absurd to think that the Freemasons secretly rule the world, but I’ll tell you who does secretly rule the world: the Trilateral Commission.”) I put Lyn’s assertion down to that peculiar facet of the conspiracy world.

  But now I’m not so sure.

  After Lyn Buchanan had presented his theory to me I e-mailed Skip Atwater, the extremely levelheaded former psychic headhunter from Fort Meade. Skip had been deeply involved in the unit, in an administrative capacity, between 1977 and 1987. Was there, I asked
him, any truth to what Lyn had said?

  He e-mailed me back:

  It is true that if asked about the use of remote viewing, psychics, or whatever, the CIA can now say something like, “There was a program, but it has since been closed.” And that is a true statement, but it’s not the whole truth. For security reasons, I cannot detail further information about non [Fort Meade] programs. I would suppose however, that since the years that I was privy to such information, these efforts have changed direction a bit and are now highly focused on counterterrorism. For reasons of security management, it would be customary to … well, perhaps I shouldn’t go on at this point.

  And that was the end of Skip’s e-mail.

  I know that almost every former psychic spy from the old Fort Meade unit received a telephone call from the intelligence services in the weeks that followed 9/11. They were told that if they had any psychic visions of future terrorist attacks they shouldn’t hesitate to inform the authorities.

  And they did, in their droves. Ed Dames had a terrible vision of al-Qaeda sailing a boat full of explosives into a nuclear submarine in San Diego harbor.

  “I knew bin Laden’s people were clever,” Ed said to me of his vision, “but I hadn’t realized they were that clever.”

  Ed reported his findings to the California Coast Guard’s office.

  Uri Geller had his telephone call from Ron, but that is all I know about Uri and Ron.

  A number of second-generation remote viewers (psychic spies who learned the trade from members of the Fort Meade unit and subsequently set up their own training schools) were also contacted by the intelligence communities post-9/11. One—a woman named Angela Thompson—had a vision of mushroom clouds over Denver, Seattle, and Florida. I was present at a reunion convention of the former military psychics at a Doubletree Hotel in Austin, Texas, in the spring of 2002, when Angela presented her mushroom-cloud findings. The conference room was full of retired psychic spies and intelligence officers. When Angela said “mushroom clouds over Denver, Seattle, and Florida,” everybody in the room gasped.