General Dozier had been kidnapped by a Marxist-Leninist paramilitary group called the Red Brigades, a terrorist organization whose stated goal was to foster revolution in Italy and force its withdrawal from NATO. The Red Brigades had been conducting kidnappings and murders for a decade, the most notorious of which had occurred two years before. In March 1978 the group ambushed and kidnapped former prime minister Aldo Moro. They held Moro for fifty-five days, then murdered him. Now the group had Dozier. Word reached Washington roughly six hours after the abduction. The Pentagon went into action; every moment mattered. The FBI offered a $2 million reward for information that could lead authorities to the general. A Joint Special Operations Command team left for Italy.
In Washington, Dale Graff was deeply concerned about Dozier’s abduction, as were many of the other individuals involved. Five days after the kidnapping, an Arabic speaker called the Italian wire service Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata to say that the Red Brigades “claim responsibility for the death sentence and execution of the American general, James Dozier, found guilty by the people’s tribunal,” and that his corpse would soon turn up in a country village. At Fort Meade, Graff worked remote-viewing sessions with Joe McMoneagle, Hartleigh Trent, and Ken Bell, all three of whom had strong perceptions that General Dozier was still alive, still in the same place, and not being moved around. Every remote viewer was enlisted to try to pinpoint where in Italy the general was being held, but the multiple sessions produced an overload of vague and disparate information: Dozier was being held “near a small, Gothic style church with a watchtower nearby”; he was “in a large house with a tile roof in the rolling countryside with a domed structure and a large river nearby”; he was “in an open space, near the water or a shoreline, with lots of buildings close together, towers, and yellow hills, like sand,” or “in a dome-shaped building near a shoreline and water with machinery nearby.”
Graff culled the information to narrow search parameters and home in on what might be significant and what was merely noise, or analytical overlay, according to protocols SRI had developed for the Army. As time ticked on, the possible locations grew more scattered and less clear, and Graff feared that with every passing day the noose grew tighter and time was running out. The Red Brigades were known killers. To make matters more complicated, a raft of unsolicited information from civil-sector psychics flooded into the Pentagon. Declassified logs indicate that a trio of psychics living in Kent, Washington, insisted they knew where Dozier was being kept. “He is dressed as a shepherd… on a mountain tending his sheep. Please contact us,” they wrote.
The general had been in captivity for two weeks when a powerful snowstorm brought the city of Washington to a near standstill. With twenty-one inches of snow on the ground, all government employees who were not in security or facility maintenance were advised to stay home. This included Dale Graff. Not one to sit inside, Graff ventured outside to hike through Arlington National Cemetery. He put on his snow boots, grabbed his new 35mm camera, and swung by a 7-Eleven to get a coffee. “It was 8:30 in the morning, sunny and clear. I was taking photographs when suddenly I got this overwhelming feeling: I’ve to go to the office,” he recalls. The subways were closed, and it was a four-mile walk. Graff set out, trudging through the deep snow to the DIA office in Arlington, across the river from Georgetown.
At the front door, the guard asked him why he was there. “I wasn’t about to say I wasn’t exactly sure why, so instead I said I’d come in to catch up on some work,” he responded. He was standing in the office looking around when he heard a phone ringing in Jack Vorona’s office. “It rang and rang, ten, eleven times,” recalls Graff. This was long before the days of answering machines. “I thought, Someone is really trying to get through. It must be important, to let it ring that many times.” Graff walked into Vorona’s office and picked up the telephone. “The voice on the line said something like ‘We’re calling from the Pentagon. We need to talk to someone who knows about remote viewing.’”
Graff said Vorona wasn’t in, “but you’ve got one of the right guys. That’s me.”
The person told Graff the situation was urgent and asked, “Can you come to the Pentagon and explain this program to us?”
Graff called Vorona at his house to make sure he was authorized to conduct this briefing. Vorona told him to head over there at once. Public transit was finally running. Graff took the metro from the Rosslyn stop to the Pentagon.
The Pentagon parking lot was empty. He’d been instructed to go into a classified briefing room in the basement. When he arrived, “the room was full of Army brass,” Graff recalls. “I learned later this was the first grouping of Delta Force. They’d just been mobilized for quick reaction response, [to go] anywhere in the world.”
One of the Army officers asked Graff to explain what remote viewing was. Graff talked and the men listened, took a few notes, and thanked him. The way Graff recalls the meeting, the officers got up as a group and left him sitting alone at the table. A few minutes later, a colonel came in. “He began making insulting remarks about remote viewing,” recalls Graff. “‘This is terrible stuff,’ he said. ‘Nobody believes in this crap.’ It was very confrontational. I remained calm, showing no defensive responses, and I wondered if it was some kind of psychological test.” After a while the colonel left.
The original group returned. “Can you travel to Italy starting tomorrow evening?” one of the officers asked. “For a few moments, I was speechless,” remembers Graff. “Travel to Italy!” Regaining focus, he said sure, except he didn’t have a passport. The officer told him not to worry, that the Pentagon could provide that, and a translator, too. He explained to Graff that the idea was to see whether the Army could use remote viewing operationally, in the field. Graff headed home and packed his bags. The following day at 6:00 p.m., with the approval of DIA director General Edmund R. Thompson, Graff and an Army translator headed to Washington National, where they caught a commercial flight to Italy. When they landed, they drove to the U.S. Army garrison in Stuttgart. There, Graff and his translator were told they were being recalled. Since they’d left Washington, the commander of the American forces in Europe had decided there were too many people in the field working on the Dozier case. The military staffer who met them at the airport suggested that Graff and his translater turn around and catch the next flight home. Graff responded that since he was already there, he should at least have a brief discussion with the commander in charge. The staffer went away and came back. The commander will give you five minutes, the staffer said. Make it to the point and fast.
Graff walked into the commander’s office. “Big desk. Tough looking guy. In charge of the Dozier operation,” Graff recalls. He made a pitch for the merits of using extrasensory perception in a search-and-rescue operation. He told the commander he was convinced that remote viewing could add value to the effort to locate Dozier. The commander interrupted, Graff recalls. “I’m not sending anybody down there,” he said. Graff recalls asking the commander whether he could at least explain the phenomenology involved. The commander interrupted him. “He told me to stop right there. He said, ‘I don’t believe a word of what you are saying. I know all about [J. B.] Rhine and that it’s a bunch of fraud.’” Then came the part Graff found illuminating. “He said to me, ‘I know it’s hard to believe, but my aunt lived in Durham,’” where Rhine had his parapsychology lab at Duke University. The commander’s aunt was part of a carpool of locals who knew all about this J. B. Rhine fellow and his fraudulent claims of ESP.
In the early 1980s, J. B. Rhine was still considered the most famous parapsychologist in modern American history. Starting in the 1920s, at the Institute for Parapsychology in Durham, North Carolina, he’d performed tens of thousands of now famous ESP experiments with Zener cards. But in 1974, one of his assistants, Walter Levy, was caught cheating. The experiment involved testing rats in an apparatus designed to see if they could use extrasensory perception to increase the number of pleasurable bra
in stimulations the apparatus was rigged to deliver. When Levy’s research assistants spotted him tampering with the lab equipment, they rigged up a recorder and caught him on videotape. When confronted with the evidence against him, Levy confessed and resigned. The scandal became fodder for anyone skeptical of Rhine or his parapsychology research—skeptics who included the commander’s aunt. What fascinated Graff was how a person’s strong opinion is often shaped by the strong opinion of someone else.
Quickly and to the point, Graff filled in details of the Rhine cheating scandal as well as details of some of the work Rhine had done for the Navy. Graff recalls the commander taking a moment to digest what he’d said. “He said, ‘Tell me more,’” Graff recalls. The two men had a debate about ESP for roughly twenty-five minutes. Graff remembers the high-ranking senior officers in the room sitting patiently, but also eyeballing a clock on the wall and giving him puzzled looks.
“Here was a commander who knew his stuff,” explains Graff. “Great men don’t become great leaders by being narrow-minded. He wanted knowledge, and I had the information. He was genuinely interested in what I had to say.” As the meeting ended, Graff recalls the commander’s parting remark. “There’s one thing I really need to understand,” he said. “This precognition stuff. That’s a tough one. I was with you until you got to that. That part is beyond belief. You lost me there.”
Graff told the commander that there was no theoretical explanation as of yet, and that ESP research was still in the hypothesis, or conjecture, stage. One hypothesis, he recalls saying, “has to do with electromagnetic modeling of the phenomena.” Another involves quantum entanglement, or what Einstein famously referred to as “spooky action at a distance.” Then Graff presented in basic terms how the electromagnetic wave equation has two potential solutions involving the forward and backward movement of time, that “although the reverse or precognitive solution is actually ignored in practice, and that some emerging concepts in quantum physics permit precognitive phenomenon.”
The commander interrupted, remembers Graff: “Go south!” he said.
On the commander’s authority, Dale Graff was now an ancillary member of Delta Force. He and his translator headed south to Vincenza, where the 584th Military Intelligence Detachment was working with the Joint Special Operations Command to find and rescue General Dozier. Graff was given a working space in a secure annex to the main headquarters. The place was teeming with people coming and going—operators, analysts, officers, and staff. From his secure telephone, Graff worked on information from the remote-viewing unit at Fort Meade.
Halfway across the world, in Room 2654 at Fort Meade, Joe McMoneagle worked session after session. He saw Dozier in an apartment inside a building in a town he identified as Padova, or Padua. He drew details of the inside of what he thought was the apartment and the exterior of the building. But as the DIA office would later learn, the time difference made direct communication difficult. The action officer at DIA was out sick, and McMoneagle’s information never reached Graff in Vincenza. As the days wore on, the pressure ratcheted up as the general’s abduction passed the thirty-day mark.
In Italy, when Graff tried to sleep he experienced strange, vivid dreams. “The Dozier operation was a life-or-death situation. In a dream state, I began to get impressions,” says Graff. It was as if he were doing remote-viewing sessions himself. “I saw the general upstairs in a room above a grocery store. I said to my translator, he’s in Padua.” Graff wrote up his experiences and gave them to his superior in Vincenza. “I didn’t identify myself as the remote viewer,” he remembers.
The following day, a U.S. signals intelligence team provided Italian police with information that led to the capture of key informants with direct knowledge about the activities of the Red Brigades. The informants’ data broke the case and led Italian Special Forces to the exact street address where the general was being held, above a grocery store in Padua. The largest manhunt in Italian history ended with ten men from Italy’s Central Operative Security Nucleus storming the apartment. Inside, Red Brigades member Antonio Savasta was holding a gun to General Dozier’s head, but before Savasta could pull the trigger, a commando hit him from behind with the butt of a machine gun, knocking him to the floor. The forty-two-day ordeal was over, and the general was alive and free. Dozier was flown home and given a hero’s welcome. Ronald Reagan invited him to the White House for lunch.
When the elation over Dozier’s release wore off, Graff grappled with fundamental questions. “It was distressing, really,” he recalled in 2015. “I had to ask myself, What good did ESP dreaming or remote viewing do? Once in the field, I learned quickly that there was no way to actually pass on any remote viewing information to the Italian search team. We had to wait until the operation was over to understand what information was correct.” Yes, the location of Padua proved to be correct, but that was one data point in the volume of information that was coming in. It was the same old question again: How does one discern what is signal and what is noise? Yes, Gary Langford’s precognitive information was remarkable after it became a fact. But what good did it do? It neither stopped the kidnapping, nor did it help locate Dozier once he’d been taken hostage.
Back at DIA, Graff wrote up an after-action report in which he identified the positives and the negatives from the Fort Meade remote-viewing involvement in the Dozier search. A few weeks later, he was invited to attend a conference with General Dozier at Fort Meade. The emphasis was on Special Forces, Graff recalls. “I wanted to talk about remote viewing. I waited until the end of the Q&A, until after most of the audience thinned out.” With just a few individuals remaining, Graff introduced himself to the general and asked whether he’d ever heard of the remote-viewing program at INSCOM, the Intelligence and Security Command. Graff recalls Dozier asking if he meant ESP.
“Some call it that,” Graff said. Dozier stated that the way he finally figured out where he was being held involved listening to voices and realizing that groceries were being sold. He said that later he heard his captors building a box. He thought it might be a coffin and started focusing hard on his wife, Judy, and his love for her. Dozier said he thought that if he concentrated hard, she might pick up on his thoughts, like a lighthouse or a beacon sending out a signal.
“Not using any names, I told him that two remote viewers had given us the name ‘Padua.’ He seemed genuinely interested,” Graff recalls. “I did not say one of the remote viewers was me.”
Graff returned from Italy to find himself in the middle of a heated battle over the military’s involvement in remote viewing. The existence of the classified program had made its way into the upper echelons of the Defense Department, various congressional intelligence committees, and the White House National Security Council. The subject matter was so contentious—the U.S. Army using psychics in military operations—that individuals felt compelled to take sides. The undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, William Perry, stated in a memo that it was “not appropriate for Army to fund technology programs aimed at scientific development of parapsychology.” Congressman Charlie Rose, a democrat from North Carolina, disagreed. “It seems to me that it would be a hell of a cheap radar system,” Rose said during a debate on psychic research in a House Select Committee on Intelligence meeting for which he served as chairman. “And if the Russians have it and we don’t, we are in serious trouble.”
Religious elements crept into the debate. A fundamentalist Christian group aligned with a powerful congressman declared remote viewing to be the Devil’s work and lobbied to have the program canceled. CIA director Stansfield Turner, a Christian Scientist and former Navy admiral, did not allow theology to get in the way. In an interview in 2002, Turner said, “When I was first introduced to this idea of parapsychology I was very skeptical. Then I began to think about it, and we all know of people who seem to have some kind of psychic powers.”
Leading the charge in support of the remote-viewing program was Senator Claiborne Pell,
a powerful Democrat from Rhode Island and a ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. A former Foreign Service officer who had worked behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied Hungary, Pell was a proponent of extrasensory perception and reached out personally to Graff offering his support. National Security Council member Lieutenant Commander Jake Stewart of the Office of Naval Intelligence had been impressed when he first learned about the remote-viewing program during the MX missile basing era and like Senator Pell offered his unwavering support. Stewart had direct access to the president and other leading White House officials.
Polemics aside, for the Army’s INSCOM program to survive, it needed clients, meaning operational requests from the military and intelligence services. In the spring of 1982, two months after Graff’s return from Italy, the program caught the break it needed after Lieutenant General Lincoln D. Faurer, director of the National Security Agency, was given a briefing. Faurer saw extrasensory perception as a form of signals intelligence and believed in its potential operational value. In April 1982, he assigned the remote-viewing unit at Fort Meade a dozen new tasks.