The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy

by Joseph McMoneagle

  For instance, if I had described the building correctly, and had mentioned a room where something was being constructed. I would be shown the same envelope and the conversation would be something like this:

  Fred: "Remember this target?"

  Joe: "Yes."

  Fred: "We're interested in the room in which you said something was going on."

  I'd then retarget the room and try to describe with better accuracy what I had seen going on in the first targeting.

  This material would be summed up in a report and passed back to the office requesting support. Since they were the only ones who knew or suspected what was going on in the building, it would then be compared to other information they possessed and deemed either supportive or non-supportive. In any event, it would be used to generate newly formed leads for more traditional methods of collection, but it was never used as material that stood alone, nor was it material that was fed in to the viewer with a specific expectation or preconceived notion of any sort. Multiple remote viewers might revisit the target a dozen times before a final summary or report was issued. In some cases, it was so overwhelmingly clear what the viewer saw, it was reported immediately.

  Working at Fort Meade instead of Arlington Hall Station created a huge increase in personal discomfort for me. The closest place I could afford to live on my salary as a chief warrant officer while working at Arlington Hall Station was Reston, Virginia. Commuting to the office from home was, depending on traffic, a minimum of an hour and thirty minutes one way. Sometimes I would leave for work in Arlington at 5:30 A.M. just so I could shave twenty minutes off the trip and have a leisurely cup of coffee before all hell broke loose when the general got to work at 7:30 A.M. Changing work locations to Fort Meade more than doubled the driving distance in traffic and put me on the Beltway, which as everyone who works in the D.C. area knows is a moving deathtrap. You can almost hone your psychic abilities just driving on it every day.

  To get to the Fort Meade office by 7:30 A.M., especially in the winter, I was sometimes forced to depart Reston at 4:30 A.M. If it snowed while I was at work, I could look forward to not having dinner at home until sometime around 10:00 P.M. One miserable night in the middle of winter in 1979, it took me two hours just to get through one traffic light between the off ramp from the Beltway and Rt. 7, the main thoroughfare to Reston. The road had iced over and, because most people who drive in the D.C. area have not heard of snow tires with chains, or spikes, I burned a quarter tank of gas in my little Fiat 124 watching them run up and slide backward, down the slight rise in the road in front of the light, one after another. As crazy as it sounds, the only place you could pull off the road was into the huge shopping mall at Tysons Corner.

  Sometimes I tried hanging around the office to wait out the worst part of the traffic, but this could be very unhealthy. By the time you got onto the road it had become what I called the "witching hour." All the people who hung out in the watering holes and taverns decided to hit the road after waiting out the same period sipping on double vodka martinis or gin and tonics. The traffic was lighter, but the people in adjacent cars were either a lot more aggressive or stupid.

  Leaving for work every day a couple of hours before my wife got up, and getting home about the time my wife wanted to go to bed really had a tendency to trash the relationship. Since ours was fast-tracking it to the disposal anyway, it actually seemed to help. It saved us from a lot of fighting that would have otherwise been going on had we spent more time together.

  This really ground on me a lot. Peggy was a beautiful woman who really cared about me and I was doing to her exactly what I had done to my first wife—putting job before everything else. My heart would ache sometimes, when I would get up to leave or come in so late she was already in bed asleep. I'd look down at her lying there so peacefully, and hate myself to the very core. But there didn't seem to be any way for me to extricate myself from the situation. I thought about moving a lot closer to Fort Meade, which would have actually been a lot cheaper and less expensive for us, but I couldn't get more than a year-to-year commitment out of anyone with regard to how long the project would last.

  This was a problem inherent within the project all along. We were essentially allowed to exist and operate as a result of the degree of competency we displayed in our work. If the remote viewing efforts weren't good to excellent, we would not survive. If it was, then we were approved on a year-to-year basis and re-funded accordingly. That may be the proper way to run an iffy program, but it was not very supportive to making personal decisions. I was the only one not living in on-post quarters at Fort Meade, or in a house within a few miles of there. The round trips were very trying on me, and my psyche.

  I raised the issue about this with Scotty and the man who replaced him, but was told that since they couldn't guarantee continuance of the program, they couldn't justify moving me into on-post quarters.

  During this same time period, I received a call from "Branch" at the Department of the Army, the senior chief warrant officer who managed all the chief warrant officers in intelligence. The Military Personnel Center office or the specific management office at Department of Army headquarters in Washington, D.C., had a specific "Branch" that maintained my personnel records and was responsible for the management of my career as a warrant officer in the Army. He—or sometimes she, depending on the year—was responsible for guaranteeing equity in assignments and equal operational exposure for all warrant officers in the intelligence business. Without this kind of management, warrants requiring special schools or experience would probably never get it, and those working as the liaison officer to the military assistance group in Tahiti would never rotate out of their jobs. Those who were really good in combat situations of course would end up only in combat until their number ran out or they could find a volunteer to take their place, whichever came first.

  Anyway, he called me and asked me to send him a job description for my new assignment, because it was a special slot, called a 99 position. The space I filled had to be a 99 position, because there were no military occupational specialties that called specifically for "chief warrant officer psychic spy." But my being carried in a 99 position meant that INSCOM headquarters was officially listing me as "being in excess." This had two immediate effects.

  First: A very complex cover story had to be written for what my daily duties were and why I was doing them, all of which had absolutely nothing to do with my primary or any of my secondary MOSs—not something that would slip by Branch.

  Second: Because I was being carried as excess, I was automatically moved to the top of the list by the system for reassignment. It was just the kind of thing the people at Branch were always looking for. They were always in need of a warm body to replace someone overseas; or in a hardship tour, an unaccompanied tour of twelve to eighteen months, where you spent the time without your family; or in a job that was usually undermanned by 20 percent or more, ensuring fifteen to eighteen-hour days.

  So, a special envoy from the Office of the Army Chief of Staff for Intelligence (ACSI), General Thompson's office, made a trip over to Branch and had a chat with the senior chief warrant who managed my file, and took a copy of my new job description with him.

  Unfortunately, this made matters even worse. As was quickly pointed out to the envoy, I was one of (then) only 23 warrant officers in my specific MOS (they had lost six through attrition in two years—a result of being overworked) in an MOS that historically never exceeded 75 percent fill worldwide. They said I was desperately needed to fill a slot—one of those suggested places, of course, being the place I had vacated at Arlington Hall Station. Because of the immense workload the job carried and the intensity of the mission, it was historically avoided like the plague. The only way they got me in the first place at Arlington Hall was to bribe me with the warrant commission and a shortened period to promotion to chief warrant officer.

  The senior warrant officer manager was promptly put in his place with a direct order fr
om the ACSI office (to which he owed his own job) to cease and desist pursuit of the matter and pretend that I just didn't exist, which he promptly did, and I became a nonentity.

  The problem with being a nonentity is that you no longer have someone looking out for your welfare within your MOS structure, so where you may fit in the promotion line is then conveniently misplaced. When annual officer evaluations that attest to your ability to do your job become due, and they aren't filed, no one cares. When too many evaluations go missing, there is no hope of ever seeing a promotion.

  The storm abated and I accepted total banishment to the nether world of the special program, figuring my career was now dead, which it most assuredly was.

  Chapter Eight

  Fighting the System

  In the early part of November 1979, I received a call at 4:00 A.M. asking me to report directly to the office; at the same time I was ordered not to listen to any radios, watch any television, or read any current news reports en route. As strange as that sounded, I followed my orders and traveled to the office at Meade. So, I arrived not knowing that the American Embassy located in Tehran, Iran, had been invaded by Iranian revolutionaries.

  It was still dark when all six permanent and part-time remote viewers joined the operations officer, Fred, in the office. He said it was going to sound like a strange request, but that a number of Americans had been taken hostage in a location overseas, and they needed our help in identifying them. He then threw a pile of a more than a hundred photographs onto the tabletop—tell us which are the hostages and which are not. He left the room and left us to the problem. This began a yearlong problem involving hundreds of individual remote viewings trying just about everyone's patience.

  It is almost impossible to describe how difficult it is to target the same thing over and over, day in and day out for months on end. The front-loading problem, born out of repetitive targeting on the same people, buildings, and areas, becomes overwhelming. You quickly become quite confused about what is real and what isn't, and what you imagined the day or week before and what is real in your remote viewing of today. The amount of tasking that was coming out of the National Security Council, the CIA, and other agencies with respect to the same target also had to be kept separate, as well as the results. Eventually, that issue was transferred to a higher echelon at the Pentagon.

  What was targeted? Everything! Every building, every room, every person in each of those rooms, what everyone was doing, what they were wearing, what they were carrying, what they were eating, what their health was like, what the furniture looked like, what kind of paint or pictures were on the wall. How long the grass was in the quadrangles between buildings. Essentially, they wanted to know just about whatever one could ask about everything five cubic blocks of space had in it, within a city thousands of miles away, on a day-to-day basis. What they got was more than they expected.

  They got a separate location for hostages who really weren't hostages and a different embassy where they were being held (the Canadian Embassy, where they were actually being protected). They got descriptions of three individuals who were not in the original pack of pictures, and a description of a separate building they were being held captive in (our agents who were picked up and held in a separate location.) The descriptions of the floor layouts and rooms were accurate enough to amaze people brought in who had just left the country and who had previously worked in them. The actual physical locations of each of the hostages was reported, specifically where they were being held, and how they were being treated, to the point that when one of the hostages was released early because of medical reasons, and shown the information we had accumulated, he was enraged. In his mind, the only way we could have possibly had such accurate information, would be to have someone inside the embassy with the hostages, all the time they were being held, and if that was the case then why were they still being held? He was not allowed to know.

  While all of this was going on, we viewers were keeping to our word by continuing to avoid listening to radios, not watching news programs or special bulletins on TV, and avoiding newspapers and news magazines. The impact on us was that our social world collapsed. It was like being inside our own kind of self-designed jail.

  Throughout the Iranian affair, we continued to do OPSEC missions, as well as other operational collection missions in support of other agencies, primarily the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Council (NSC), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and most branches of the Department of Defense (DoD). The workload just continued to grow exponentially.

  In the early part of 1980, we began to pick up on other things. We were picking up on U.S. military exercises, which at least to our psychic minds seemed related to the situation there. Other things were happening in and around Tehran that were quite sensitive and seemingly mysterious or out of place, involving other Americans or at least people allied to the American cause. When we began reporting these mysterious observations, we were almost shut down. We had stumbled quite blindly onto the preparations for the rescue attempt being planned. Rather than turn off the spigot of information that was flowing in, they suggested that we focus on this as well, thus performing an OPSEC mission as well as continuing to focus on filling the more conventional intelligence requirements.

  When the rescue operations finally occurred, we were all moved to a single floor of an inn located in Laurel, Maryland, where we did round-the-clock remote viewing, providing a minute-by-minute description of the operation.

  One of the women viewers who worked part-time was actually remote viewing at the time of the explosion at Desert One. She broke down into tears, reporting a huge fire, which she couldn't understand the reason for. Minutes later the telephone rang and Scotty informed us that Desert One was terminated for lack of surviving resources.

  Upset at the sudden turn of events, the viewers as a group left the motel and went looking for a way to relieve the pressure that had been building for many months. We decided to blow off steam together in the motel, so we bought a few bottles of self-medication and brought them back to one of the rooms, where we all began to get politely obliterated.

  Scotty found four of us still drinking sometime well after midnight, and one thing was quite clear, we were feeling absolutely no pain. The problem was that this included an enlisted man, and one of the three officers was a woman—all drinking and socializing, all drunk together. I guess this was more than he could take. He ordered us to go to our respective rooms and to go to bed. The following day he chose to call onto the carpet only the enlisted man (Mel) and the woman. He read them the riot act for what he believed was conduct unbecoming. In my opinion, this was totally incorrect and uncalled for. We were all workmates and close friends and we were only blowing off steam, and shaking off the result of being driven like psychic slaves for so many months.

  Mel relocated himself permanently to the smaller building opposite the one Scotty resided in at work and refused to leave it. The woman, on the other hand, let Scotty know what she thought of him, firing back with as good as she got. She was an officer in the United States Army, and she had every right to be anywhere any male officer wanted to be, and do any damn thing any male officer wanted to do. She had behaved well within the expectations of proper conduct, and besides we were her friends and damned if anyone was going to tell her how to be with her friends. She scorched the walls of Scotty's office and walked out of the building never to return. It did not go unnoticed by the rest of us, that he never mentioned a thing about it to any of the rest of us. This underscored the differences in how the Army was run back then, and how it is run today. I hope the women in today's Army continue to fight for their equality, at least in regard to treatment and respect.

  A few weeks later, one of the other part-time viewers quit. He said he was burned out and fed up, and would never do any more remote viewing. We were down to four. The demands for RV increased. The Iranians had moved the hostages to other sites located throughout Tehran, and we
needed to relocate them all and begin from ground zero helping to prepare for a second hostage rescue attempt—only now we were operating with a 35 percent reduction in collection personnel.

  About the middle of 1980, Jackie Keith came by the unit—just to visit, he said. Actually, he was supposed to be on a plane traveling to a meet with another agent. When he entered the building, I met him and said hello. His response was strangely phrased and he said he was feeling, well . . . sort of funny and very tired. This was unlike him. He was usually a ball of nervous, kinetic energy. I suggested he get a cup of coffee and go over to the RV building and take a nap on the couch there. A few minutes later Fred came in yelling for someone to call 911.

  I rushed across the street and found Mel rolling Jackie over and checking him for a pulse. There was none. Mel immediately began CPR, pausing every sixth push so that I could give him mouth-to-mouth air. Many in the military are trained for it, but up until this point I had never been in a position to have to do it. No one had warned me that someone getting CPR will sometimes begin puking into your mouth. When that began happening, neither Mel nor I hesitated. I'd stop to spit to the side and Mel would use the break to give him CPR. I guess we were in a zone, because when the medics arrived with the ambulance, it seemed like only a few minutes had passed, but it had actually been almost a half an hour. We were located directly across the street from the hospital, but the only available ambulance was all the way across the base. When the medics took over, I also noticed that Mel and I were alone. I guess the sight was too much for the others. They called Mel and me over to the hospital later that afternoon, where we sat down with the coronary specialist in the emergency room who said our CPR had been impressive and we should not feel like we failed our friend. He said that Jackie's blood gasses were about as good as any he had ever seen, but his heart had been seriously damaged from the kind of heart attack he had suffered. There was nothing anyone could have done better. I'm not sure, but I think Jackie was 29 years old when he died. A gray cloud the size of Minnesota hung over the unit for quite some time. We might have done all we could have, but it hurt deep inside, losing Jackie. I dealt with it the way I'd always dealt with loss over the years. I buried it and carried on.