At the very end of 1980 we had a major security leak, which occurred as a result of a press conference given by President Carter. When he appeared on national television to talk about the ongoing Iran hostage problem, he was photographed holding a folder labeled Grill Flame. This increased the curiosity of some of the reporters who watched the program. Knowing it must be directly connected in some way with the Iran Hostage problem, many began probing for connections to Grill Flame and what it might represent. Access to the project was tightened even further when ACSI General Thompson was replaced by then Maj. Gen. William E. Odom. He had actually taken over the reigns of ACSI in the previous year, but was becoming more and more negative about the Army's use of psychics—at least that was the general scuttlebutt. In reality, it was one of those "if it's working, don't mess with it" kind of things the Army is famous for.
The commanding general of INSCOM, General Rolya, had also been replaced by Brigadier General Flynn, the ex-commander of Field Station Augsburg who had refused to sign my fourth application for warrant officer. He came out to the Grill Flame project for his introductory briefing and probably felt as though he was stepping off into Dorothy's territory in the Wizard of Oz. I knew that he was a very religious man and I expected (prematurely and incorrectly) that he would have severe personal problems with what we were doing. It was not unusual for people to personalize their acceptance of what we were doing, regardless of extant proof. Rank also did not matter in that consideration or reaction—good or bad.
On the day of his visit, I stayed across the street, watching through a window as he was brought into the main building. After a thorough briefing with newly promoted Lt Col. Scotty Watt, he came into our building to meet the rest of the players. When he came in, he took one look at me and froze. A small grin crossed his face and he said, "Well . . . I might have known you would be involved with this unit." From that point on, we were friends, as if all of our differences just faded into the past. Flynn didn't stay long, but it was evident from the briefing that he was pleased with what we were doing and our progress. He encouraged us to continue, but to make sure we closely monitored the protocols.
The continuing Iran hostage problem weighed heavily on us and we continued to pump out the remote viewing in support of NSC requirements. We were also tasked with other problems of an operational nature and national import—one of which was later discussed openly by President Carter. During a presentation to a group of college students in 1995, he talked about a missing Soviet aircraft that had gone down over the central African Congo, Zaire. The Soviet bomber was thought to be carrying nuclear weapons or other technology, which would prove beneficial to anyone who could locate it—not only U.S. and other country's intelligence agencies, but terrorist organizations as well. So, there were a lot of people looking for this aircraft for some period of time.
Given the square miles involved, and the difficulty of the terrain, it was difficult finding the aircraft even with the aid of overhead surveillance and photography. Search after search failed. It was brought to the Grill Flame project as a target.
This would be the perfect test. If no one else could find it, it would take some extraordinary means to locate the remains of the wreckage.
Mel, Ken, and I placed the aircraft in a specific area of Zaire, our three locations overlapping a thirteen-kilometer circle. A location given by one of the remote viewers from SRI also put it within that circle. Search teams were sent into the area and the plane was located within a kilometer of the location given by the SRI remote viewer. All locations were within eight kilometers of the crash site. Search teams on the ground said as soon as they entered the circled area on the map they began encountering natives on the trail carrying pieces of the wreck to use in the construction or reinforcement of their village huts.
This one case was publicly known to have reached at least a presidential level of interest. It also belies later CIA claims that remote viewing information was never used as standalone information, or used at national levels of intelligence importance.
On the 18th of December, 1981, still reveling in no longer having to do Iranian RV targets and actually beginning to relax with a much slower pace, I entered the office and was immediately grabbed by Scotty and led into his office. He said he wanted me to just sit there and not speak with anyone, because a problem had just been brought in and he didn't want me to know specifics. I sat for some time and waited.
Eventually, Fred came and got me and we moved over to the RV building. After my cool-down period, when I said I was ready to proceed, he handed me a picture of a man and said that his name was Brigadier General Dozier. He told me that the general was taken by force from his apartment in Verona, Italy, and he asked me to tell him where he was located.
In actuality the general had been taken the day before and it was just beginning to hit the news in the United States. Dozier was kidnapped from his home at 5:30 P.M. on December 17th by Marxist terrorists known to be members of the Red Brigades, who were posing as plumbers. Dozier was the senior United States officer at the NATO Southern European Ground Forces base, in Verona, Italy. He was also deputy chief of staff for logistics and administration.
One of the kidnappers hit Dozier over the head with his pistol butt and forced him into a trunk, which they half carried and dragged to a waiting van. The van was a rented blue Fiat. Dozier's wife, Judith was bound hands and feet with chains, and her mouth and eyes were taped shut. The group searched the apartment, presumably for guns and documents. Later, police said that there were four who actually carried out the kidnapping, and at least four, including a woman, who acted as lookouts. On the day of my viewing, a Red Brigades terrorist called and said that the kidnapping was organized by the Venetian Column and branches of the Milan, Naples, and Rome brigade elements had participated. They referred to Dozier as the "hangman." This was the first action by the Red Brigades against a military officer and an American (Mickolus, Sandler, and Murdock 1989).
My first RV was not very good. I was getting a way too general area to be any good for locating a missing person. I had a sense that it was a place located between a very large city with a harbor and the place from which he had been taken, which was Verona. But where I had said that he had been fooled into opening the door to his home by these terrorists because they had been posing as some sort of repairmen, in fact the general and his wife had been preparing to attend a community event when his doorbell rang. They were the only two Americans living in the apartment building, so seeing a couple of plumbers at the door would not have been a surprise. The plumbers said they were there to fix a leak.
According to a later assessment, the Doziers had ignored two important tip-offs that something wasn't right. Normally, the downstairs doorbell rings before the one at their door, and the landlord would have warned them that they would receive a visit from plumbers.
I had also said that the event took place in the kitchen, but was wrong about only the general being in there at the time.
When a leak couldn't be found, everyone went back into the kitchen where his wife, Judy, was preparing dinner. As soon as the general turned away from the men, they pulled guns and jumped him.
I did not report a struggle in my RV, but later when he was asked the general stated that he did struggle, but when he saw his wife down on her knees with a gun pointed at her head, he immediately ceased. That is when they hit him on the head, handcuffed, blindfolded, and gagged him and his wife. Leaving his wife behind, they loaded him into a trunk about the size of a small refrigerator and moved him to an apartment in another town.
I didn't know at the time of my first RV that Hartleigh and Ken were giving approximately the same version of the kidnapping.
Over a number of days we were asked to target the general and try to develop enough information to aid in his being located.
Because the general's wife had been bound and gagged, it was some hours before the authorities were made aware that the general had been taken. By then, t
he terrorists had nearly a six-hour head start. Using the Italian Autostrada, which was much like the Autobahn in Germany, with no speed limit, they could have moved the general almost anywhere in that area of Europe, including Eastern bloc countries. It was a huge search area, and a very difficult problem.
We also didn't know at the time that the Italian police were being inundated with information from psychics—information from both inside and outside their country. At first they were open to using the more credible-sounding material in their search. However, after surrounding a number of remote villas and raiding them, only to find an important diplomat or other government official enjoying the attention of someone other than his wife, they ceased paying attention to any of the material of psychic origin—which included the Grill Flame information.
On December 20, United States Department of Defense (DoD) antiterrorist specialists joined the Italian forces in the nationwide manhunt for Dozier. Given the previous experiences of the Italians, they also ignored any suggestion that our information might be different from the normal psychic fare.
On December 22, a caller speaking perfect Arabic told the Italian ANSA news agency in Beirut "the Red Brigades of the Baader-Meinhof claim responsibility for the death sentence and execution of the American general, James Dozier, found guilty by the people's tribunal. The corpse of the American pig is in a country village and the police will find it after 8:00 P.M."
But two days earlier, Hartleigh, Ken, and I had all agreed that we were sensing the general being held alive in the same place and he wasn't being moved around.
During that same time period, Hartleigh stated that he felt as though the general were being held inside something that was located inside something, that this was something cloth, and very much like a tent. Ken reported the general as being secured by a sort of handcuff and long chain, which was connected to some pipes. We all reported him alive and having his eyes and mouth taped shut, with a set of earphones taped over his ears, as if he were being forced to listen to music he didn't like.
After his rescue it was determined that he was actually chained to a cot (the long edges of the cot would look like pipes because they were constructed from pipes.) The cot was located inside a tent, which had been set up inside the apartment. We reported that he was not in danger and that he was being treated if not well, adequately, which was true.
On Christmas Eve, I got angry over the whole situation. The thought that a fellow soldier could be held somewhere against his will during Christmas, and the fear that I sensed his wife was feeling, really got me stoked. I went into another session with only one goal in mind. To bring him home before the new year—alive.
During that RV session, I felt as though everything came together. I felt like I was locked solidly into my groove and whatever I was getting was pure signal line, as we sometimes referred to the source of all information we received that we felt was accurate. I started the session with an almost perfect image of a coastline, the right-hand side of Italy toward the north. I then got a vivid image of mountains to the north and northwest. I began to feel as though I was actually floating over the area and could see as far or as much of what I wanted to see. The city along the coast looked somewhat familiar to me; I knew that I had been there.
I followed my instinct and began moving away from the coastal city due west along the main road, toward what I sensed was the town from which he had been taken. I felt like I was actually following the track his kidnappers had originally taken; I was coming in on his location by following in their footsteps.
I suddenly found myself hovering directly over a fairly large town not far from the coast and just south and southeast of a very large mountain range. I moved closer to the ground and began to pick out roadways and buildings. I followed the roads and eventually found myself near a small central plaza, across from some kind of a fountain, and picked up the smells of a butcher shop, and the faint hint of a place where they did some kind of tanning, or worked with hides. I got an image of a very large apartment building and settled in on the second floor. I came out of the session knowing that I could pretty much replicate the images and streets that I had seen.
Fred asked me to draw my visions and recollections, which I did. I produced an overall map depicting the location of the city, seemingly specific enough to say that the city was Padua (the older name for Padova, located just inland from Venice). My familiarity with the coastal city then made sense, as I had visited Venice numerous times and have always loved the city and the people. It is my favorite city in Italy.
Fred asked me why I had used the older name Padua and not Padova. I commented that it must mean the older area of the city was more important than the newer area. I then sketched as best I could the city street map that I had seen, drawing the streets closely to scale, as best I could. I pointed out the location of the apartment house on the street map, and said that the apartment he was being held in was on the second floor.
After spending so much time with each viewer, Fred could tell the difference between when we were doing a so-so target and when we were really cooking. He knew from observation that my session was about as good as it gets. He quickly arranged to have the materials passed to U.S. representatives on the ground in Italy.
The Army INSCOM was not the major player in the operation to find and free Dozier. So, there were a number of other players involved. One of those was a man by the name of Dale Graff. He had recently moved from an Air Force assignment to the Defense Intelligence Agency. The nice thing was that he was familiar with remote viewing and how the information was collected, as well as how it could be used.
Just prior to the general's kidnapping, Dale had received information from a remote viewer at SRI that a senior American official would be taken in the near future. The viewer also said he would be removed with the use of a blue van with white markings by people with Mediterranean features. This viewer had gotten the information while doing a predictive/preemptive RV in support of a search for another suspected terrorist at large at the time, the infamous Carlos the Jackal.
Other information the SRI remote viewer provided proved to be equally accurate, but was somewhat ignored by the administration. The problem was, so many psychics were forwarding information, it was beginning to be difficult to tell the wheat from the chaff.
One person at DIA, seeing how effective the Grill Flame material had been on other targets, decided to fly his own psychic into Italy and manage him on site. This only resulted in embarrassing the Italian counterterrorist teams when they raided innocent civilian's houses. That specific psychic also made a lot of special demands regarding his treatment, which made him a further pain in the ass, souring people on-site even worse.
Because Dale had a long association with our material and was handling the RV information coming into DIA, and because he already knew the local authorities in Italy would probably not use it unless it was damned accurate, he picked through the material very carefully. In doing so, he found my most recent viewing, with the accompanying drawings and sketches of the streets near the apartment building I described. Surprisingly, it was an almost exact overlay for the search maps the Italian police were using to search the Padua area. He began making arrangements to hand-carry the remote viewing drawings and materials to Italy himself. Dale was thwarted in this effort by U.S. officials on-site in Italy, who had now become weary with all the previous psychic intervention and wanted no more of it. So, my information was never forwarded to Italy, although I was led to believe until recently that it had been.
About 42 days after he had been taken, General Dozier was freed from his captives unharmed in Padua, Italy. All of my drawings were accurate and would have contributed significantly to finding the building and floor within which he was being held. When General Dozier was later shown our materials, he stated that, in his opinion and with regard to his own memory, the material was significantly accurate and the more personal "thought-content" stunningly so. His only suggestion to our
project manager at the time was to think about designing a short class where high-ranking U.S. military and civilians could be trained on how to think and what to think, while being held captive.
It was clear from his comments that information in our reports had originated within his own thoughts while he was being held—blindfolded, tape across his mouth, being forced to listen to hard rock, heavy-metal music through headsets thousands of miles from our small RV rooms under the oaks at Fort Meade, Maryland.
Prior to 1981, I participated in another project that at least in some small degree ended up adding to the project's avowed enemies.
One of the first operational targets brought to the program around September of 1979 originated within the National Security Council. A naval lieutenant commander assigned to the council who had seen some of the previous OPSEC reports was enthusiastic about using RV for offensive intelligence-gathering purposes. He brought a photograph of a large building that was obviously an industrial type of building for targeting and development. The building was seen to be near a large body of water, but that was all one could tell about it. Materials were stacked on the exterior of the building, but they were general in nature and did not add clues about what might be going on inside the building. The building was huge, labeled as building number 402, and was located somewhere in Russia. (We were to find out much later that the facility was located at the port of Severodvinsk, on the White Sea, very near the Arctic Circle.) The NSC was very interested in knowing specifically what was going on inside.
The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy Page 16
