Anderson went on to describe a remote-viewing operation, code-named Project Grill Flame, that was producing “astonishing results.” In one test, a psychic was given latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates and, based solely on those numbers, stated that the site was a Soviet nuclear-testing area, a fact that U.S. satellites verified. Grill Flame and its variously named offshoots, including Sun Streak, Center Lane, and Star Gate (also Stargate), focused not only on espionage but also on predicting terrorist attacks and locating hostages, POWs, and kidnapped government officials.
In a follow-up piece on remote viewing, Jack Anderson claimed that former CIA director Stansfield Turner and General William Odom, the Army’s intelligence chief, were concerned that the Soviets might surpass the United States in psychic research. “Inside the Pentagon, [Odom] has raised the question of whether the Soviets could use psychics to penetrate our secret vaults,” Anderson stated in a sober tone. “This has led to talk in the backrooms about raising a ‘psychic shield’ to block this sort of remote viewing.” Anderson recognized how crack-potty this all seemed but still defended it: “At the risk of being ridiculed over a ‘voodoo gap,’ advocates like Rep. Charlie Rose (D-N.C.), support continued research into the more promising areas of this mysterious field. After all, the atomic bomb was once thought to be a harebrained idea.”
And Grill Flame was an idea with consequences. Whether the program led to actionable intelligence (and there’s debate about this) or was really just a major disinformation campaign to spook the Soviets, it consumed tens of millions of federal tax dollars and thousands of manpower hours that critics argue could have been used more productively.
By the mid-1990s remote-viewing operations were shut down and declassified. After reading through hundreds of pages of documents and autobiographical material by former “viewers,” I learned that Fort Meade was where Grill Flame was hatched. Buildings 2650 and 2651, to be exact. I contacted Meade’s public affairs office several times to ask where the buildings were and if I could come by to photograph them. The staff members were always courteous but never gave me a definitive reply. Running short on time, I decided to drive there and, without doing anything illegal or unethical, explore the base myself.
Located twenty-five miles northeast of Washington, D.C., Fort George G. Meade is named after the U.S. general who was wounded five times during the Civil War and unexpectedly given command of Union forces at Gettysburg right before the battle. Meade prevailed, and the victory was a turning point in the war. (His post-Gettysburg record was spottier. Lincoln rebuked him for not aggressively pursuing and destroying Lee’s army, and Meade’s luster dimmed as Ulysses S. Grant’s star began to rise.) Access to Fort Meade is generally restricted, but the public is allowed inside under certain circumstances.
A guard at the main gate asks me why I’m here.
“I’m going to the museum,” I say. This is true. I’m curious to see if they have any exhibits about remote viewing. The guard notices my camera in the front seat.
“No pictures, okay?”
“It’s for the museum,” I say. This is mostly true.
Photography isn’t exactly encouraged on any military base, but there’s particular reason for sensitivity here: Fort Meade is home to the NSA—the National Security Agency or, as Washington insiders joke, “No Such Agency” because its cryptological operations are so secretive. I place the camera inside my backpack, and after the guard completes a security check of my car, he tells me where to go. I follow his directions to the letter, and as much as I’d hoped to catch a glimpse of Buildings 2650 and 2651 along the way, there’s no sign of them.
Inside the museum, I start with the Meade Room, which features a plaster bust, portrait, and photographs of the general, along with numerous pictures of his beloved but battered horse Old Baldy. During the First Battle of Bull Run an artillery fragment bloodied Old Baldy’s nose; at Antietam his neck was gashed; a bullet ripped into his stomach at Gettysburg; and at Petersburg he got punched in the ribs by another shell, prompting Meade to retire him for the duration of the war. Old Baldy made his last ceremonial appearance as the “riderless horse” at Meade’s own funeral, and he outlived his owner by ten years. Euthanized and buried, Old Baldy was later disinterred and decapitated so a taxidermist could mount his head for public display.
There’s nothing in the museum about remote viewing anywhere. Machine guns, howitzers, and captured enemy uniforms, including a German Pickelhaube helmet with the little spiky thing on top, fill the glass cases, and the exhibit culminates with the prized “big toys,” as one docent calls them, in the last room—three full-sized tanks, the Mark VIII Liberty, the M3-A1, and a Renault FT-17. With such impressive weaponry on display, I suppose a bunch of guys sitting behind a desk squeezing their brows to envision Soviet sub bases overseas wouldn’t fit in.
Bob Johnson, the museum’s director, has agreed to meet with me, and he’s familiar with the remote-viewing program.
“Do you know where Buildings 2560 and 2561 are?” I ask.
“I’m pretty sure they’ve been torn down,” he says. “They were over near Kimbrough, the hospital. Those are all empty fields now.” I have a map of the base, and he indicates where he thinks they would have been.
Even broaching the subject makes me feel a little silly, and I emphasize to Bob that my overall trip is a serious enterprise. But researching Fort Meade’s psychic warriors did open up a whole category of historic sites that are unmarked for reasons of national security. Many a hair-raising moment has occurred in these tourist-unfriendly places—be they military bases, radar installations, nuclear-missile silos, or “undisclosed locations” where senior government officials are secreted away in public emergencies—and the relevant stories are barricaded behind steel-reinforced walls and razor-topped electric fences guarded by armed sentries. Stopping by to photograph them isn’t a question of bad manners, like visiting a private home uninvited. It’s grounds for arrest.
But as with private homes, for every great story that remains hidden for now, new ones crop up over time. Before leaving Fort Meade, I show Bob a memoir I’ve brought along by a former World War II soldier who did basic training here and then joined the 603rd Camouflage Battalion. Their main assignment, something of a ghost story in itself, was classified for decades. “The 603rd was one of four noncombat units that were part of a phantom division called the Twenty-third Headquarters Special Troops,” the seventy-eight-year-old veteran, William Ralph Blass, reminisced.
Our identity was kept secret for the simple reason that we were posing as other Allied troops in order to fool the enemy.… [We were] pretending to be Patton’s armor, the Fifteenth Tank Battalion. Except, that instead of Shermans, we had rubber ones that we inflated at night and left in his same tank tracks. We even had ways of faking tank fire and noise, which the men in the sonic unit blasted all night long at the Germans. So when Von Ramcke looked the next morning through the haze and battle smoke with his field glasses, he thought he was seeing Patton’s forces. In a matter of hours he would have known it was a ruse, but by then, Patton had attacked somewhere else, and we and our portable dummy tanks had vanished.
Hundreds of artists, many with theater and design backgrounds, served in the so-called Ghost Army painting inflatable rubber “tanks” to make them look real, constructing fake ammunition dumps and troop cantonments to dupe German air reconnaissance, and coloring and arranging camouflage netting to appear as if rows of warplanes and assorted military equipment lay hidden underneath, all to convince the Wehrmacht that Allied forces were more formidable than their actual numbers. This turned out to be handy training for Bill Blass, who after the war built a fashion empire worth half a billion dollars. Among his most cherished possessions were the notebooks he sketched in while at Fort Meade.
Bob photocopies the pages in my copy of Blass’s memoir about Fort Meade, and we discuss the remote-viewing buildings one more time. “Just don’t take any pictures,” he advises.
I
promise him I won’t.
After driving around the post for a few minutes, I locate the spot and pull off on a side road. As I’m surveying the empty fields, a pickup truck parks right behind me.
“You lost?” a helpful voice calls out.
I look over and see a guy in his early forties, sporting a crew cut. I’m almost certain he’s military, although he’s not wearing a uniform, just a light-brown polo shirt and jeans.
“Well …,” I begin, not sure who he is and how much I should say, “I’m trying to figure out where some buildings were.”
“What buildings?”
“They were numbered 2560 and 2561.”
“Can I see that?” he asks, pointing at the map sticking out of my front pocket.
“Uh, yeah.”
“I think they were demolished a while ago,” he says, tracing a small circle with his index finger over the same area Bob had indicated.
“It’s okay if they’re no longer there. I’m just curious where they used to be.… ”
Now he’s a bit wary. “Why’s that?”
I downplay it. “Oh, it’s just for this little project I’m working on.”
That sounds suspiciously evasive, so I elaborate. “It’s about a top-secret program the CIA was doing using psychics.”
Much better.
He looks at me like I’m a nutcase. “Sorry I can’t help you there. Do you know how to find your way back to the main exit?” he asks. “It can be confusing.”
“Not really.”
He turns toward the street and says, “Drive out here, make a left onto Llewellyn Avenue, take your first left onto Ernie Pyle Road, go right on Mapes Road, and then you’ll turn right to 175.”
“Left, left, right, right. Got it. And I’ll pass by the barracks, right?”
“I don’t believe so.”
I had forgotten to ask Bob where they were. “I need to find those, too. Bill Blass trained here during World War II.”
“The fashion guy?”
“That’s the one.”
He hands back the map and shakes his head. “Lotta funny stories about this place.”
“Any that come to mind?” I ask, smiling.
He thinks for a moment, gives me a long, hard look, and says, “Almost forgot. They’re doing construction on Llewellyn, so you might have to jog around that a bit.”
That would be a no.
It’s also a good indication, even I can intuit, that it’s time to move on.
MARY DYER’S FARM
We suppose you [in Rhode Island] have understood that last year a company of Quakers arrived at Boston upon no other account than to disperse their pernicious opinions had they not been prevented by the prudent care of that Government.… We therefore make it our request that you as well as the Rest of the Colonies take such order herein that Your Neighbors may be freed from that Danger; That you Remove those Quakers that have been Received, and for the future prohibit their coming amongst you.
—From a September 12, 1657, letter by the Commissioners of the United Colonies to Rhode Island’s governors, who ultimately refused the request on the grounds that laws enacted against the Quakers only encouraged them. “They delight to be persecuted,” Rhode Island replied.
IN THE FAMILY of American states, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (the state’s official name) is the runt of the brood. Wyoming is the least populated, but Rhode Island is geographically the smallest. And like many diminutive siblings, what the Ocean State lacks in physical brawn it compensates for in bravado and scrappy determination. Rhode Island was first to declare independence from Great Britain and boasts having fired the earliest shots of the Revolution; on June 9, 1772, almost three years before Massachusetts minutemen clashed with redcoats at Lexington and Concord, Sons of Liberty patriots from Warwick, Rhode Island, shot up and torched a British schooner, HMS Gaspée, that had been harassing colonial mailboats. Newspapers across the colonies cheered the brazen strike, which exacerbated tensions with England, and Warwick residents celebrate the Gaspée affair every June by burning the ship in effigy.
This rebellious streak dates back to the late 1630s, when Roger Williams, with other like-minded souls banished from Massachusetts because of their faith, established the colony as a haven from persecution. Among those exiled was Mary Dyer, an early heroine in the battle for religious freedom. (The correct spelling of her last name is somewhat elusive; Dyre, Dyer, and Dyar all appear on contemporaneous documents.) Today, a statue honoring Dyer stands in Boston, where she died. But there is no tribute or memorial to her of any kind in Newport, where she lived.
Described by her peers as “comely”—the Puritans’ uncomely word for “attractive”—Dyer was admitted to the Boston church in December 1635 at the age of twenty-four. She had emigrated from England a year before with her husband, William, but by the spring of 1638 she was cast out of Massachusetts. Her friendship with Anne Hutchinson, who was labeled a heretic for leading unauthorized Bible meetings, had already raised suspicions, and Governor John Winthrop became convinced that Dyer was wicked when he learned that she had prematurely given birth to a deformed, stillborn girl. To prove his case, Winthrop disinterred the tiny corpse that Dyer had secretly buried in grief and shame. “It was of ordinary bigness; it had a face, but no head,” Winthrop wrote in his journal. “The navel and all the belly, with the distinction of the sex, were where the back should be; and … between the shoulders, it had two mouths, and in each of them a piece of red flesh sticking out; it had arms and legs as other children; but, instead of toes, it had on each foot three claws, like a young fowl.”
For her “monster birth,” Dyer was expelled. She and her husband joined Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and other exiles from Massachusetts to found Rhode Island, the first government in the New World to establish freedom of worship as a fundamental human right.
In 1652 the Dyers traveled to England, where Mary came under the spiritual wing of George Fox and his newly formed Society of Friends, or Quakers. Mary converted and returned to New England in 1657. Her timing couldn’t have been worse. Massachusetts’s new governor, John Endicott (also spelled Endecott), was more intolerant than Winthrop and supported increasingly vituperative punishments against the Quakers, from extravagant fines and whippings to slicing off their ears and slitting their tongues. In October 1658, Massachusetts passed a law condemning them to death if they even entered the state.
Nine months later, Marmaduke Stephenson and William Robinson did just that, intentionally challenging the law. They were promptly tossed into prison. When Mary Dyer visited them, she, too, was jailed. William Dyer went ballistic, excoriating the magistrates by letter for mistreating his wife. “You have done more in persecution in one year than the worst bishops [back in England] did in seven,” he raged. Although William Dyer no longer lived in Massachusetts, he still commanded respect and was able to secure Mary’s release. Stephenson and Robinson were freed as well.
But precisely as the Rhode Island authorities had forewarned in their September 1657 letter to the United Colonies, the draconian laws only served as a magnet to the Quakers. Stephenson and Robinson marched right back into Massachusetts and were arrested, and Mary Dyer left Newport for Boston to offer moral support. Once again, she was incarcerated. All three received death sentences.
On October 27, 1659, Dyer, Stephenson, and Robinson were led to the gallows. Stephenson went first. “Be it known unto all this day that we suffer not as evil-doers, but for conscience sake,” he said when the noose was draped over his head. After a final prayer was uttered by the local minister, Stephenson went off the platform. The rope snapped straight; his body tensed, shuddered, and then went limp.
Robinson followed.
Dyer was saved for last so she could watch the other two die. Her legs and arms were bound, and the noose was placed around her neck. Suddenly a voice cried out, “Stop! For she is reprieved.” Unbeknownst to Dyer, Endicott had conceded to giving her one last chance, after first giving
her a memorable scare. Dyer was untied, taken down from the gallows, and escorted out of Boston.
Far from being shaken by the experience, Dyer was furious that she’d been spared while her fellow Quakers had been killed. Seven months later, on May 31, 1660, Governor Endicott and Dyer were once more face-to-face.
“Are you the same Mary Dyer that was here before?” he asked, incredulous.
“I am the same Mary Dyer that was here at the last General Court,” she said.
Endicott had lost all patience. “Tomorrow,” he told her, “[you will] be hanged till you are dead.”
“This is no more than what you said before,” Dyer replied.
“But now it is to be executed.”
The next morning she again calmly approached the gallows on Boston Common. The noose was tightened. A minister placed a handkerchief over her face so that the assembled crowd would not witness her final, involuntary contortions. A signal was given, and she dropped. Her neck broke the instant the rope went taut, and Mary Dyer was dead.
Dyer was not the last Quaker to be martyred; one year later, a man named William Leddra was hanged. Influenced by a prominent Quaker in England named Edward Burrough, King Charles II ordered that the executions stop.
A U.S. Naval Hospital stands where Dyer’s farm used to be in Newport, just off Third Street. Outside the hospital’s entrance, a security officer asks me the nature of my visit. I describe my search for unmarked sites and Mary Dyer’s connection to the place. He smiles and from out of nowhere asks: “Okay, history guy. Where’d the name Jeep come from?” (I’m thrown at first but then realize that my latest rental car is a Jeep, so the question isn’t totally irrelevant.)
His tone is playful, but for a moment I’m afraid that if I fail to answer correctly, he might actually turn me away, like the Sphinx blocking passage to Thebes. If memory serves, there are a couple of theories about the etymology of Jeep, but I’m so caught off-guard, I can’t recall a single one of them.
Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History Page 6