Throughout the 1960s, as a result of the escalation in the ESP wars, electromagnetic weapons were having lethal real-world consequences, certainly on U.S. embassy personnel and Navy sailors. During this same time frame Soviet efforts in psychokinesis were also gaining momentum and garnering attention within the Defense Department and the CIA. One Russian individual commanded the Pentagon’s attention more than anyone else, and that was a pretty forty-four-year-old woman named Ninel Kulagina, who was purported to be able to move matter with her mind.
Born in Leningrad in 1926, Kulagina’s parents named her after Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Russian Communist Party and leader of the Bolshevik Revolution. Ninel, a popular girl’s name, is Lenin spelled in reverse. (In the West she was erroneously identified as “Nina,” and the name stuck.) Kulagina, a decorated war hero, had been a front-line soldier for Mother Russia during World War II. At the age of fourteen she joined a Red Army tank regiment along with her father, brother, and sister before the Nazis invaded Leningrad the following year. For her service as a tank radio operator, Kulagina was awarded the Military Merit medal. She left the army in 1946 and married a naval engineer. She’d always had psychokinetic abilities, Kulagina told Science News, which first manifested themselves when she was a child; sometimes when she got angry, objects around her spontaneously moved.
Starting in the mid-1960s, Kulagina’s mysterious ability to move matter with her mind became the subject of a state-run TV program called Science Films, produced by Leningrad Studios. Kulagina was filmed using psychokinesis to move objects sealed inside a glass aquarium, including metal salt shakers, matchsticks, and cigar canisters. In the United States, skeptics cried fraud. But the CIA and the Defense Department were not so sure, declassified documents indicate, owing to a film of a classified experiment in a research laboratory at the Ukhtomskii Military Institute, in Leningrad, on March 10, 1970. In the film, Kulagina was shown to be able to stop a frog’s heart with her mind. One explanation, analysts wrote, was that trickery or fraud was at play, and that the film was part of a Soviet disinformation campaign to trick U.S. defense officials into thinking Kulagina could actually accomplish this. An alternative explanation was that she had psychic powers. What is certain is that the film caused uproar within the American defense community.
Seated beside Kulagina was Genady Sergeyev, the Soviet military doctor in charge of the experiment. After roughly twenty minutes of mental preparation, Kulagina indicated she was ready to begin. On the table in front of her a technician placed a ceramic jar. Inside it was a small lump—the frog’s heart—still beating. The organ had been surgically removed from the animal’s body and set in Ringer’s solution, which can keep the heart of a small animal beating for roughly one hour. Thin wires and electrodes attached the heart to an electrocardiogram machine, allowing scientists to track the heart’s beats per minute. Kulagina’s physiology was similarly monitored. Sergeyev instructed her to start. With both hands in front of her on the table, she began concentrating with the “purposeful intent” of stopping the frog’s beating heart. According to the declassified documents, Kulagina’s heart rate rose to 240, her blood pressure became elevated, and “heightened biological luminescence radiated from her eyes.”
“In the first of the experiments the electrocardiogram (EKG) indicated [heart] activity ceased about 7 minutes after Kulagina began concentration on ‘stopping the heart,’” wrote a Defense Department analyst. After the measurement was recorded, Kulagina then “reactivated” the heart so that it began beating again. A second test followed. “In a second experiment, with [another] heart in a metallic container, heart activity ceased after 22 minutes,” wrote the Defense Department analyst. In both experiments, “Kulagina was 1.5 meters [4.9 feet] from the ‘target’ hearts.”
A separate experiment followed. “Kulagina attempted to increase the heart rate of a skeptical physician” who’d been hooked up to a separate EKG machine. “Abrupt changes were noted in both people [Kulagina and the skeptical physician] within one minute after the experiment began,” the analyst wrote. “After 5 minutes, [Dr.] Sergeyev judged the heart activity of the physician had reached dangerous levels and the experiment was terminated.” Disbelieving defense analysts argued that this was further proof of a Soviet disinformation campaign, that the ruse of the so-called skeptical physician was gilding the lily, so to speak. Others were not so sure. “This is perhaps the most significant PK test done and its military applications, if true, are extremely important,” cautioned an official with the Medical Intelligence Office of the U.S. Army.
In response the Defense Department called for a joint intelligence assessment of “the Soviet psychoenergetic threat,” a term invented by the Pentagon to include all matters related to Soviet anomalous mental phenomena research and electromagnetic weapons programs. The task fell to the Medical Intelligence Office of the U.S. Army, Office of the Surgeon General. During the Vietnam War this office had been moved to the newly formed Defense Intelligence Agency, where it assessed everything from a foreign country’s medical capabilities to its infectious diseases. In 1970, the office was transferred back to the Surgeon General’s office. Because it was the mandate of the Medical Intelligence Office to assess foreign biotechnical developments of military medical importance, assessing the Soviet psychoenergetic threat was its job.
The two-year effort resulted in a 174-page classified report called Controlled Offensive Behavior—USSR, published in 1972. “This study is a review and evaluation of Soviet research in the field of revolutionary methods of influencing behavior,” stated the author, Captain John LaMothe, “intended as an aid in the development of countermeasures for the protection of US or allied personnel.” Evidence indicated that the Soviets were rapidly developing “methods of controlling or manipulating human behavior through subtle, non-identifiable means,” LaMothe found, with influencing techniques including psychopharmacology (i.e., drugs), subliminal messaging, and electromagnetic weapons. With regard to extrasensory perception and psychokinesis research, LaMothe wrote, “Communist state authorities, the military and the KGB display an unusual, disproportionate interest in parapsychology,” and that “Military involvement in psi [i.e., psychic] research [is] confirmed.”
LaMothe broke down the danger into four categories of existential threat. Soviet agents with psychoenergetic abilities hypothetically could 1), “Disable, at a distance, US military equipment of all types, including space craft,” 2), “Know the contents of top secret US documents, the movements of our troops and ships and the location and nature of our military installations.” 3), “Mold the thoughts of key US military and civilian leaders, at a distance,” and 4), “Cause the instant death of any US official, at a distance.” In essence, wrote LaMothe, through the use of targeted extrasensory perception and psychokinesis, a Soviet agent could disrupt military technology, access state secrets, influence the action of national leaders, and assassinate U.S. officials. These threats were what U.S. military and intelligence scientists needed to focus on, he wrote.
Citing scientists and experts, LaMothe saw an immediate need to create a program to mirror the Soviets’ psychic warfare undertakings. “I am really disturbed,” Oliver J. Caldwell, a former Office of Strategic Services officer who was known to run operations for the CIA, told LaMothe, “because if the United States does not make a serious effort to move forward on this new frontier, in another ten years it may be too late.” Sybil Leek, whom LaMothe identified as a “noted astrologer and author,” warned that “there is a great danger that within the next ten years the Soviets will be able to steal our top secrets by using out-of-the-body spies.” Dubbed England’s “Most Famous Witch,” Leek advised the CIA on witchcraft and the supernatural. LaMothe’s report raised issues that merited further inquiry, but the alarmist nature of his text limited its distribution. To those in the know, LaMothe’s sources were biased in favor of ESP research programs.
The classified report circulated through the military and intellige
nce communities. It was the CIA, not the Defense Department, that took action first. If the Soviets were putting this much effort into psychic and psychotronic research, the United States needed to be one step ahead, and also needed to send that message back over the Iron Curtain. This was the nature of the Cold War, a contest of one-upmanship and the mandate to outperform the enemy in knowledge and weapons technology. The alarm bell had been sounded. The psychic warfare race with the Soviets had begun.
PART II
THE CIA YEARS
The chessboard is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call laws of nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us.
—Thomas Huxley
CHAPTER SIX
The Enigma of Uri Geller
It was the summer of 1970, and inside the Zahala, Tel Aviv, home of Moshe Dayan, Israel’s minister of defense, a twenty-six-year-old former army paratrooper named Uri Geller sat huddled over a map. Dayan, with his signature black eye-patch, was the most famous general in the world, having recently overseen the capture of East Jerusalem during the 1967 Six-Day War. Geller, with his boyish good looks and boundless charisma, was the most famous psychic in Israel. Soon he would be the most famous psychic in the world.
Unknown to most, General Dayan had an illicit pastime that involved digging up archeological treasures across Israel and the Sinai, without a license or scientific oversight. His process, he later explained in his memoir, was to drive around the countryside looking for possible ancient dwelling sites to pilfer. “Bulldozers preparing ground for construction and cultivation brought to light remains of ancient settlement[s],” wrote Dayan. Other times target sites came to him as “visions,” early in the morning after he woke up. “I am not superstitious,” said the general. “Nor am I a believer in the prevision of dreams… It may be that what I had dreamed was [an ancient site] I had passed earlier in the week.” Following this intuition, Dayan would then drive to the site, comb through the earth, and bring home whatever Canaanite or Philistine relics he found. After cleaning them off and sometimes gluing pieces together, he would put the relics on display in his home. It was dangerous work. In 1968, while looting ancient artifacts from a cave in Azur, Dayan was badly injured by a landslide. He spent three weeks in the hospital recovering.
At his Zahala home, the general’s gardens were filled with massive stone artifacts from antiquity: wishing wells, vestibules, cornices, and columns. Inside the study was where the smaller treasures were on display, including tiny statuettes and magic talismans dating back to the time of Eglon and the book of Judges. It was here, in the presence of this museum-quality collection, that Uri Geller recalls first using his “powers” to help Dayan find buried treasures, using an ancient form of clairvoyance called map dowsing. “I spent hours over the maps,” Geller recalled in 2016. “Moshe Dayan utilized my powers to help him locate ancient artifacts and archeological finds illegally. I was young and naïve at the time. Here I was, talking to the Moshe Dayan.”
Dowsing is the ability to locate water, minerals, or man-made objects buried underground by means of a divining rod, usually a forked twig, but also a pendulum or one’s hand. Few divinatory practices have incensed modern skeptics as much as dowsing has. In Fads and Fallacies, Martin Gardner pointed out that dowsing was decreed to be satanic by the Inquisition in 1701, only to become “a common and respectable practice” later in the eighteenth century, during what was supposed to be the Age of Enlightenment. Then, in 1917, the U.S. Geological Survey declared “the matter of water-witching to [be] thoroughly discredited.”
“Some of the most famous dowsers have been illiterates,” quipped Gardner, “completely puzzled by their odd ability and offering no explanation for it.” Dowsing was pure pseudoscience, he said, suspect in every way. “Far from a harmless and inexpensive superstition,” Gardner wrote, “an untold number of dowsers throughout the world were being paid handsomely for their services,” and to men of science that seemed unacceptable and wrong. While Geller was not being paid for his map dowsing services in 1970, eventually he would command extraordinary fees for his locating services. In 1986 the Financial Times of London reported Geller’s map dowsing fee to be £1 million per job (GBP).
The most common form of dowsing involves a divining rod or forked stick, believed to be the source of inspiration for the archetypal magic wand. Drawings of men with divining rods have been found in prehistoric cave paintings in North Africa and Peru, dating to 6000 BC. Egyptians, Scythians, and Persians adapted the practice to include swinging pendulums above maps. In medieval Germany, miners used dowsing forks to locate mineral deposits in gold and silver mines. When German miners were imported to England in the 1500s, they brought the art of dowsing with them. In America, dowsing became common in the late 1800s as a means to help homesteaders and farmers locate water and drill wells.
The first known use of dowsing techniques by the U.S. military in battle occurred during the Vietnam War. In the winter of 1967, Marines used dowsing rods to locate tunnel systems built by the Viet Cong. The man in charge of training the Marines was Louis J. Matacia, a former topographical surveyor with the Army and a longtime dowser. This classified project was briefly made public on March 13, 1967, when an article appeared in The Observer, a government publication for U.S. forces in Vietnam. Under the headline “Shades of Black Magic: Marines on Operation Divine for VC Tunnels,” a journalist reported that “an old-fashioned method of locating water in arid areas, the divining rod, has been updated and put to military use in Vietnam.”
Marines using what was identified in the article as “Matacia’s Wire Rudder” were skeptical at first, the reporter was told, until they “did locate a few Viet Cong tunnels.” Private First Class Don R. Steiner explained, “Marines operate the divining rod by holding one in each hand, level with the ground, pointing in the direction of their movement. As the carrier [of the two wires] moves over, under or along a hidden structure, the wires will swing into alignment with the structure” hidden underground. Steiner said that when he was out on patrol, he watched his rods spread apart as he passed by a Vietnam hut. “Upon checking inside the building, Marines discovered a tunnel that led to a family bunker underneath the trail, right where the rods had reacted,” Steiner said. The reporter could not locate anyone who could explain how the rods worked and surmised that their action depended—at least in part—on belief. “In this day of nuclear powered devices, it may seem there is still room for the old, if you happen to be a believer,” the reporter wrote.
In a 2016 interview for this book, Louis Matacia, age eighty-five, explained that in his opinion, “Dowsing is human intelligence. No one knows why it works, only that it works [in] all kinds of situations but not all the time.” (Matacia shared photographs of his time spent at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, teaching dowsing techniques to Marines with the Counter Guerrilla Warfare Command, using coat hangers as divining rods to locate booby traps, punji pits, and underground weapons depots, as described in the Observer article.) Next Matacia traveled to Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia, to demonstrate dowsing techniques for commanders with the Special Warfare Agency and ARPA. Here engineers had constructed a replica of a Vietnamese village, complete with tunnels and traps, waterways and bridges, and twenty structures, some of which had false ceilings and double walls. In this simulated environment Matacia used a divining rod to demonstrate how he could locate tunnels, traps, weapons caches, and more. The skill, he said, “could be taught to any open-minded Marine.”
But the commanders were skeptical, Matacia remembers, and declassified documents confirm that the Marine Corps did not go forward with a program involving his dowsing techniques. “The cause of an effect is just as important as the results produced in order to formulate doctrine,” a declassified memo states. “The Marine Corps will again become interested in dowsing only when it can be conclusively demonstrated that the average Marine can employ the technique without regard to his personal
convictions, confidence level, or subconscious development.” In the age of science and technology, the Corps was unwilling to endorse a technology that was based on something other than the scientific method.
In Israel, Moshe Dayan’s map dowsing endeavors with Uri Geller came to an end in 1971, after a group of twenty Israeli archeologists signed a petition urging the minister of defense to give up his “legally questionable hobby.” In his 1978 memoir, Living with the Bible, Dayan discusses his illegally acquired collection and how the “archeology of the Holy Land” can be used as a way “to reinterpret familiar Bible stories in a new light.” He does not mention using Geller as a map dowser. In 1971, Geller had plenty of other work to keep him busy. He was quickly becoming one of Israel’s most popular entertainers, bewildering audiences with his mysterious powers of extrasensory perception and psychokinesis. But he was a man at a crossroads, about to be transformed from an obscure Israeli citizen to one of the most scrutinized entertainers in the Western world. The fierce controversies over the authenticity of Geller’s powers would become their own hall of mirrors.
Born in Israel in December 1946, Uri Geller came into a world informed by war. His parents, Jews living in Budapest, Hungary, had fled Nazi persecution in the late 1930s and taken up residence in the British Mandate of Palestine. In 1946, as Israel fought for independence, sniper fire and street fighting were commonplace. In a BBC television interview in 1987, Geller’s mother, Manzy Freud, described the exterior of the family’s Tel Aviv apartment complex as being pockmarked with bullet holes. Once a stray bullet flew into her son’s bedroom where he lay sleeping, she said. It narrowly missed the boy and lodged in the wall.