The DIA advised its clandestine clients to understand that “sources using this technology tend to answer questions very literally,” and that the customer must understand that the more precisely he or she words a question, the more exact the source’s answer will be. “Time spans should be as exact as possible: Where will Mr. X be next Thursday at 3PM?” And when dealing with targets, “locations should be as exact as possible: Describe the den of X’s home.” Still, the problem remained. In military operations, events happen fast. The time spent learning to separate signal from noise, and then deciphering that the rope is really a tail, always seemed to get in the way of using remote-viewing information. For this reason, the holy grail of remote viewing was and remains the ability to access alphanumeric information. Numbers, letters, and words were actionable intelligence. But this kind of intelligence was extremely rare. In the history of the government’s ESP programs, only a few people had produced alphanumeric information. Now, after years of struggling to keep the program funded, one thing was becoming obvious to Dale Graff and Jack Vorona. Providing clients with alphanumeric information that they could act upon was likely going to be the only way the remote-viewing program could stay alive.
In December 1988 press reports indicated that Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Qaddafi was producing chemical weapons at a facility called Rabta, sixty miles south of Tripoli. The weapons included blister agents and sarin nerve gas, a weapon of mass destruction (WMD). Further reports indicated that President Reagan was considering using force to destroy the Libyan chemical weapons complex. Declassified documents indicate that DIA learned that Qaddafi was set to move a large stockpile of WMDs out of Rabta in anticipation of a possible U.S. airstrike. Angela Dellafiora was assigned to the operation. Because of the sensitivity of the case, Jack Vorona sat with her in the viewing room at Fort Meade, an action that incensed many of the other viewers, who had experienced no such high-level handling. The only time any of the viewers had sat with Vorona was the day after Higgins’s kidnapping, when Dames, Smith, and Dellafiora traveled to DIA. Dale Graff was also actively involved. Because of the urgency of the situation, and given that it involved a WMD, Dellafiora was given a prompt to help her focus on a specific geographical location. Graff recalls the single question as being “Where will a stockpile of weapons outside Tripoli be moved to?”
“It was one of those sessions where the signal line was very clear,” Dellafiora recalls. “I concentrated for a moment. A word came to me and I wrote it down.” She handed the paper to Dr. Vorona. “On the paper, Dellafiora had written ‘Potato’ or ‘Patuta,’” Graff recalls. When Vorona asked for clarification, Dellafiora said, “a ship by the name of Potato would arrive in Tripoli to transport chemicals to an eastern Libyan port.”
Graff explains what happened next. “Vorona walked into the DIAC with the piece of paper and the word ‘Potato’ or ‘Patuta’ on it and asked the analysts, ‘Does anyone know what this means?’” One analyst spoke up. “The analyst said Libya had a vessel in their inventory named Batato,” says Graff.
Two days later, New York Times reporter Stephen Engelberg broke a story headlined “U.S. Says Libya Moves Chemicals for Poison Gas away from Plant.” Engelberg reported that “The officials declined to specify the source of their information.” The source was Angela Dellafiora, confirms Graff.
“I was told that the U.S. Navy sent a submarine to hunt for Qaddafi’s” vessel, Dellafiora says. Graff is not at liberty to confirm this.
Positive reinforcement of people’s work generally affects their abilities. The reverse is also true. There was no question that Angela Dellafiora’s work was favored above that of the other viewers. Her results were being shared in congressional meetings, in intelligence committee meetings, and in briefings across the military and intelligence communities. This created its own chicken-and-egg scenario. Her intelligence information was more likely to be considered by analysts, and she continued to get more tasks and produce actionable results. In the summer of 1989, the results of a particular Dellafiora search-and-locate effort would become one of the most celebrated cases in the program’s twenty-five-year history. It involved a customs agent turned drug smuggler named Charles Frank Jordan.
Charles Jordan had worked for the U.S. Customs Service in South Florida as a special agent. In 1986 he was accused of taking bribes from drug traffickers smuggling big loads of cocaine into the United States. When Jordan realized that law enforcement was on to him, he became a fugitive. For more than two years he remained at large, earning a place on the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitives list. In federal law enforcement circles, a rogue agent on the run is a highly sought-after target. Jordan had been a fugitive for three years when in 1989 the Customs Service requested that the DIA’s viewers target him. Jordan was believed to be hiding in the Caribbean or South America, customs officials said.
All six viewers on the Fort Meade team were asked to locate the fugitive. After multiple sessions, the operations manager wrote a report stating that four viewers had put Jordan in four different locations. Viewer 003 said he was in Mexico, in the coastal area due west of Mexico City, where he lived in a large, multistory building with a red roof as a guest of the owner. Viewer 011 said Jordan was in south-central Minnesota, between the two small towns of Madelia and Lake Crystal, living in a farmhouse with an adjacent smokehouse. Viewer 025 said Jordan was in Florida, in the western coastal area near the southern tip of the state, living in an apartment in a one- or two-story clapboard house. Viewer 095 said he was in central Mexico, near the town of Ciudad de Rio Grande, living in a large, three-story white building with a brown roof. Mexico, Minnesota, Florida? Where to start? “My instinct was to go with Angela’s information,” says Graff.
According to declassified memoranda, operations manager Fern Gauvin supervised Angela Dellafiora while unit secretary Jeannie Betters took notes.
“Where’s the fugitive Charles Jordan?” Gauvin asked.
“He’s in Lowell, Wyoming,” Dellafiora said. In 2016, she clarified, “It just came to me as two words. Fern wanted more information, and I said something like, Well, you don’t need any more information because that’s where he is.”
“There’s a Lowell, Massachusetts,” said Gauvin. “Is that what you mean?
Jeannie Betters said, “She said Wyoming, Fern.”
Gauvin asked for more information, but Dellafiora said she’d better end the session immediately. “We’d been doing a lot of drug interdiction,” Dellafiora recalls. “I told Fern I was getting flooded with information, and if I didn’t get out of the session right then and there, I was going to put the fugitive Jordan in Florida or the Caribbean.” That is, somewhere where the drugs were and where Jordan wasn’t, she explains.
Gauvin went to the office bookshelves and pulled down a world atlas. He flipped through the index. “There’s a Lovell, Wyoming, not Lowell,” he said.
“Well, that’s probably it,” Dellafiora confirmed.
Automatic writing is not science, Dellafiora explained in 2016, and it is definitely not an exact science in the literal or metaphorical sense. “When you do automatic writing, you get things phonetically. Lowell sounds like Lovell.” At least it did as Dellafiora heard it.
Gauvin sent the information to Dale Graff at DIA. After the success of the Qaddafi chemical weapons assignment, Dellafiora’s clear signal information was generally passed along to superiors, according to Graff. A few days later, Fern Gauvin asked Dellafiora if she could work another session on the fugitive Jordan.
“Absolutely not,” she recalls saying. “It was the same problem,” she clarified in 2016. “Too much overlay on the counternarcotics operations,” which involved scores of customs agents in a myriad of places “like South America, the Caribbean, and South Florida.”
Graff and Vorona agreed that Dellafiora’s lead was solid and worth following up. Lovell, Wyoming, “was not a heavily populated area,” says Graff. “We arranged to have FBI send the fugitive’s photograph around to fede
ral employees at post offices and national parks” in the surrounding area. Several weeks passed. Gauvin approached Dellafiora again. Could she work the fugitive Jordan case one more time? Dellafiora said fine. The signal line came to her right away, she recalled in 2016.
“Angela said, ‘If you don’t go get him now, you’ll lose him. He’s moving from Lowell,’” Graff remembers. She sensed that Jordan was living “at or near a campground that had a large boulder at its entrance.” And she said that she “sensed an old Indian burial ground is located nearby.”
Customs agent William Green increased the local law enforcement effort regarding the fugitive alert. A ranger at Yellowstone National Park spotted Jordan and notified the FBI. Agents were sent into the field. Graff recalls being on the telephone with the Customs Service when the news broke: “They found the fugitive Charles Jordan at a campground located on the border of an old Indian burial ground. He was roughly fifty miles from Lovell, Wyoming.” When the FBI retraced Jordan’s movements, it determined he’d been in Lovell, Wyoming, a few weeks earlier.
Between March 1989 and March 1990 remote viewers conducted 982 counternarcotics sessions; 565 were training sessions and 417 were operational. Declassified documents reveal the number of “search projects of intelligence value” to have been 52 percent, while 47 percent were listed as being “of no value.” Because there is no narrative description of other factors involved in the operations, it is impossible to determine exactly what these numbers meant. But a new conflict loomed on the horizon. In the spring of 1990, the Defense Department began pulling resources from the war on drugs and directing them toward the coming Persian Gulf War. Paul Smith was transferred out of the Fort Meade unit and sent to the war theater in Iraq on an assignment that had nothing to do with remote viewing. He served as part of a helicopter assault unit attached to the 101st Airborne Division, and was one of the first U.S. Army units into Iraq. There, he was involved in the capture of Iraqi infantry troops. He missed the remote-viewing unit immensely, he says, and that his efforts at Fort Meade were, by far, the most interesting assignments in his twenty-year Army career.
In October 1990 Dale Graff was notified by DIA security personnel that the Sun Streak code name needed to change. Given the classified nature of the program, a name change helped throw off foreign spies seeking information about military intelligence. Graff was allowed to pick the new name from a list of computer-generated words; he settled on Star Gate. The wheels of bureaucracy churned, creating a new Project Review Board, a new Project Oversight Panel, and a new Scientific Oversight Committee. Jack Vorona was no longer head of the Directorate of Science and Technology; now he was chief scientist, thereby severing his ties with the Psychoenergetic Phenomena program. Shortly thereafter Jack Vorona retired after twenty-five years of service at DIA. (In 2011, he was inducted into the DIA’s Torch Bearers Hall.) The new DIA division chief, John Berberich, gave Dale Graff the position of branch chief at Fort Meade, replacing Fern Gauvin. Graff would be in charge of the remote viewers now, with close proximity and a hands-on role.
Graff saw the creation of this so-called new program, Star Gate, as a perfect opportunity to redesign a program to be as operationally effective as possible. This meant “draw[ing] heavily from lessons learned,” he wrote in an early Star Gate briefing. His first order of business was to allow the program to return to its scientific roots. “Star Gate is a new, dynamic approach for pursuing this largely unexplored area of human consciousness/subconscious interaction,” his program overview declared, a document that was distributed to the intelligence community working group. Star Gate planned to undertake research programs that would foster “discoveries into how this phenomena work.” After sixteen years immersed in anomalous mental phenomena programs, Graff knew that until a general theory about the sources and origins of paranormal phenomena was developed, programs like the remote-viewing unit would be relegated to the fringe.
Thus Graff wanted to widen the program so it was not limited to remote viewing. Star Gate would research a wide range of anomalous mental phenomena, including “psychological, physiological/neurophysiological, advanced physics (new wave concepts) and other leading-edge scientific areas.” All of the programs would have a “strong focus on applications research and an eye toward U.S. national security,” Graff wrote. Blue-sky thinking would be encouraged. Scientists and researchers would be asked to develop better scientific methodology and evaluation procedures in order to provide DIA with better documentation of activities and plans. The program would also develop a database to track foreign efforts in psychic research, particularly efforts by the Soviets and the Chinese.” This database would be available to military and intelligence officers alike. The concept of training also needed to change, wrote Graff, because the attempt to train nonpsychic people during Grill Flame and Sun Streak had proved problematic. Star Gate would identify individuals with “talent,” people like Rosemary Smith, Gary Langford, Joe McMoneagle, and Angela Dellafiora. The concept of Extraordinary Human Functioning developed by Albert Stubblebine and John Alexander in the early 1980s would be reintroduced. Locating the sources of anomalous mental phenomena such as extraordinary human body functions, extrasensory perception, and psychokinesis “could lead to break-through achievements in human potential,” he wrote. This is what the Chinese were doing.
Graff sought to rid the program of its Special Access designation. That classification added unnecessary concealment to an already esoteric program, he said, and the draconian rules that came with a black program fostered not just secrecy but furtiveness. Keeping the Psychoenergetic Phenomena program so tightly under wraps “did more harm than good,” he says. As the new branch chief, he hoped that by giving the program Limited Distribution Status, they could dismantle the program’s distorted image. He hoped to stimulate other branches of the federal government to engage in similar research. Limited Distribution Status would help cast a wider net and attract like-minded individuals—at least that was Graff’s hope.
By the end of the Persian Gulf War only three remote viewers were left at Fort Meade. In May 1991, a little over a month after war’s end, DIA branch chief John Berberich, Dale Graff, and the three viewers, one of whom was Angela Dellafiora, traveled to England, Germany, and Israel as part of an annual intelligence exchange. The trip to Israel was particularly notable, an exchange between DIA and its Israeli counterparts, remembers Graff. After giving his Star Gate briefing to Israeli intelligence in Tel Aviv, British intelligence, in London, and German intelligence representatives in the Munich area, Graff felt the future of the Star Gate program was on the upswing.
But the aspirations, optimism, and confidence about where Star Gate was headed couldn’t prevent the program from beginning to unravel after a single newspaper story was released by the Associated Press in November of 1991.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Downfall
The beginning of the end of the government’s twenty-three-year history in extrasensory perception and psychokinesis began on November 19, 1991, when the Associated Press ran a three-column story under the headline “U.N. Enlists Psychic Firm to Find Iraqi’s Weapon Sites.” According to the AP, the “Psychic Firm,” identified as a private business called PSI Tech, was run by a retired major in military intelligence named Edward Dames.
“A United Nations team is turning to extrasensory powers to help it find Saddam Hussein’s weapon sites,” wrote Washington correspondent Ruth Sinai. The story focused on the work of a UN inspector and Army major named Karen Jansen, who was said to have carried with her to Baghdad “sketches of two sites where the Iraqi leader has supposedly stashed biological weapons.” The sketches had been provided to Jansen by PSI Tech president Ed Dames, according to the AP. Dames told the news agency that he and five PSI Tech associates, “mostly retired military officers… drew the sketches through ‘remote viewing,’ the ability to locate and accurately describe unknown things and events from afar.” Remote viewing was a U.S. government weapon, said D
ames, but “remote viewing doesn’t require psychic powers. It’s more a matter of suppressing one’s imagination and concentrating on a target with rigorous discipline,” he said.
Dames told Ruth Sinai that Jansen had contacted him about Iraq’s biological weapons sites after she saw him discuss remote viewing on a Seattle television show. Asked to provide a copy of the invoice for the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) assignment, Dames said he’d provided the information to the UN team for free, but that normally he charged between $6,000 and $8,000 a week. PSI Tech’s mission statement, he explained, was “solving the unsolvable,” and added that PSI Tech also trained people to become remote viewers, because the talent was a learned technique.
According to legal documents filed in California, PSI Tech had been in business since 1989. The three individuals who signed PSI Tech’s official documents were Ed Dames, David Morehouse, and Mel Riley. The trio, along with Paul Smith—all government employees with secret or top-secret clearances—had been moonlighting their services to private clients.
“Yes,” says Smith, “I agreed that as long as no classified information was compromised and I was not put into any conflict of interest with my military duties, I would be willing to moonlight as a viewer… And I did.” He also says he was not violating any military code in doing so: he did not personally work on any PSI Tech assignments from the UN during the Gulf War, only ones from wealthy individuals interested in solving such mysteries as whether crop circles and the Tunguska explosion (over Siberia, in 1908) could be attributed to aliens. In 1990, Colonel John Alexander and General Bert Stubblebine, both of whom had retired from the military, joined PSI Tech’s corporate board. “It was a mistake,” John Alexander said in 2016.