The Men Who Stare at Goats

by Jon Ronson

  Also by Jon Ronson

  THEM: ADVENTURES WITH EXTREMISTS

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  Copyright © 2004 by Jon Ronson

  Originally published in Great Britain in 2004 by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd.

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2005041263

  ISBN 978-0-7432-4192-2

  ISBN 978-1-4391-8177-5 (pbk)

  For John Sergeant and also for General Stubblebine

  CONTENTS

  1. The General

  2. Goat Lab

  3. The First Earth Battalion

  4. Into the Heart of the Goat

  5. Homeland Security

  6. Privatization

  7. The Purple Dinosaur

  8. The Predator

  9. The Dark Side

  10. A Think Tank

  11. A Haunted Hotel

  12. The Frequencies

  13. Some Illustrations

  14. The 1953 House

  15. Harold’s Club or Bust!

  16. The Exit

  Acknowledgments and Bibliography

  The Men Who Stare at Goats

  1. THE GENERAL

  This is a true story. It is the summer of 1983. Major General Albert Stubblebine III is sitting behind his desk in Arlington, Virginia, and he is staring at his wall, upon which hang his numerous military awards. They detail a long and distinguished career. He is the United States Army’s chief of intelligence, with sixteen thousand soldiers under his command. He controls the army’s signals intelligence, their photographic and technical intelligence, their numerous covert counterintelligence units, and their secret military spying units, which are scattered throughout the world. He would be in charge of the prisoner-of-war interrogations too, except this is 1983, and the war is cold, not hot.

  He looks past his awards to the wall itself. There is something he feels he needs to do even though the thought of it frightens him. He thinks about the choice he has to make. He can stay in his office or he can go into the next office. That is his choice. And he has made it.

  He is going into the next office.

  General Stubblebine looks a lot like Lee Marvin. In fact, it is widely rumored throughout military intelligence that he is Lee Marvin’s identical twin. His face is craggy and unusually still, like an aerial photograph of some mountainous terrain taken from one of his spy planes. His eyes, forever darting around and full of kindness, seem to do the work for his whole face.

  In fact he is not related to Lee Marvin at all. He likes the rumor because mystique can be beneficial to a career in intelligence. His job is to assess the intelligence gathered by his soldiers and pass his evaluations on to the deputy director of the CIA and the chief of staff for the army, who in turn pass it up to the White House. He commands soldiers in Panama, Japan, Hawaii, and across Europe. His responsibilities being what they are, he knows he ought to have his own man at his side in case anything goes wrong during his journey into the next office.

  Even so, he doesn’t call for his assistant, Command Sergeant George Howell. This is something he feels he must do alone.

  Am I ready? he thinks. Yes, I am ready.

  He stands up, moves out from behind his desk, and begins to walk.

  I mean, he thinks, what is the atom mostly made up of anyway? Space!

  He quickens his pace.

  What am I mostly made up of? he thinks. Atoms!

  He is almost at a jog now.

  What is the wall mostly made up of? he thinks. Atoms! All I have to do is merge the spaces. The wall is an illusion. What is destiny? Am I destined to stay in this room? Ha, no!

  Then General Stubblebine bangs his nose hard on the wall of his office.

  Damn, he thinks.

  General Stubblebine is confounded by his continual failure to walk through his wall. What’s wrong with him that he can’t do it? Maybe there is simply too much in his in-tray for him to give it the requisite level of concentration. There is no doubt in his mind that the ability to pass through objects will one day be a common tool in the intelligence-gathering arsenal. And when that happens, well, is it too naive to believe it would herald the dawning of a world without war? Who would want to screw around with an army that could do that? General Stubblebine, like many of his contemporaries, is still extremely bruised by his memories of Vietnam.

  These powers are attainable, so the only question is, by whom? Who in the military is already geared toward this kind of thing? Which section of the army is trained to operate at the peak of their physical and mental capabilities?

  And then the answer comes to him.

  Special Forces!

  This is why, in the late summer of 1983, General Stub-blebine flies down to Fort Bragg, in North Carolina.

  Fort Bragg is vast—a town guarded by armed soldiers, with a mall, a cinema, restaurants, golf courses, hotels, swimming pools, riding stables, and accommodations for forty-five thousand soldiers and their families. The general drives past these places on his way to the Special Forces Command Center. This is not the kind of thing you take into the mess hall. This is for Special Forces and nobody else. Still, he’s afraid. What is he about to unleash?

  In the Special Forces Command Center, the general decides to start soft. “I’m coming down here with an idea,” he begins.

  The Special Forces commanders nod.

  “If you have a unit operating outside the protection of mainline units, what happens if somebody gets hurt?” he says. “What happens if somebody gets wounded? How do you deal with that?”

  He surveys the blank faces around the room.

  “Psychic healing!” he says.

  There is a silence.

  “This is what we’re talking about,” says the general, pointing to his head. “If you use your mind to heal, you can probably come out with your whole team alive and intact. You won’t have to leave anyone behind.” He pauses, then adds, “Protect the unit structure by hands-off and hands-on healing!”

  The Special Forces commanders don’t look particularly interested in psychic healing.

  “Okay,” says General Stubblebine. The reception he’s getting is really quite chilly. “Wouldn’t it be a neat idea if you could teach somebody to do this?”

  General Stubblebine rifles through his bag and produces, with a flourish, bent cutlery.

  “What if you could do this?” says General Stubblebine. “Would you be interested?”

  There is a silence.

  General Stubblebine finds himself beginning to stammer a little. They’re looking at me as if I’m nuts, he thinks. I am not presenting this correctly.

  He glances anxiously at the clock.

  “Let’s talk abo
ut time!” he says. “What would happen if time is not an instant? What if time has an X-axis, a Y-axis, and a Z-axis? What if time is not a point but a space? At any particular time we can be anywhere in that space! Is the space confined to the ceiling of this room, or is the space twenty million miles?” The general laughs. “Physicists go nuts when I say this!”

  Silence. He tries again.

  “Animals!” says General Stubblebine.

  The Special Forces commanders glance at one another.

  “Stopping the hearts of animals,” he continues. “Bursting the hearts of animals. This is the idea I’m coming in with. You have access to animals, right?”

  “Uh,” say Special Forces. “Not really …”

  General Stubblebine’s trip to Fort Bragg was a disaster. It still makes him blush to recall it. He ended up taking early retirement in 1984. Now, the official history of army intelligence, as outlined in their press pack, basically skips the Stub-blebine years, 1981–84, almost as if they didn’t exist.

  In fact, everything you have read so far has for the past two decades been a military intelligence secret. General Stub-blebine’s doomed attempt to walk through his wall and his seemingly futile journey to Fort Bragg remained undisclosed right up until the moment that he told me about them in room 403 of the Tarrytown Hilton, just north of New York City, on a cold winter’s day two years into the War on Terror.

  “To tell you the truth, Jon,” he said, “I’ve pretty much blocked the rest of the conversation I had with Special Forces out of my head. Whoa, yeah. I’ve scrubbed it from my mind! I walked away. I left with my tail between my legs.”

  He paused, and looked at the wall.

  “You know,” he said, “I really thought they were great ideas. I still do. I just haven’t figured out how my space can fit through that space. I simply kept bumping my nose. I couldn’t … No. Couldn’t is the wrong word. I never got myself to the right state of mind.” He sighed. “If you really want to know, it’s a disappointment. Same with the levitation.”

  Some nights, in Arlington, Virginia, after the general’s first wife, Geraldine, had gone to bed, he would lie down on his living-room carpet and try to levitate.

  “And I failed totally. I could not get my fat ass off the ground, excuse my language. But I still think they were great ideas. And do you know why?”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because you cannot afford to get stale in the intelligence world,” he said. “You cannot afford to miss something. You don’t believe that? Take a look at terrorists who went to flying schools to learn how to take off but not how to land. And where did that information get lost? You cannot afford to miss something when you’re talking about the intelligence world.”

  There was something about the general’s trip to Fort Bragg that neither of us knew the day we met. It was a piece of information that would soon lead me into what must be among the most whacked-out corners of George W. Bush’s War on Terror.

  What the general didn’t know—what Special Forces kept secret from him—was that they actually considered his ideas to be excellent ones. Furthermore, as he proposed his clandestine animal-heart-bursting program and they told him that they didn’t have access to animals, they were concealing the fact that there were a hundred goats in a shed just a few yards down the road.

  The existence of these hundred goats was known only to a select few Special Forces insiders. The covert nature of the goats was helped by the fact that they had been de-bleated; they were just standing there, their mouths opening and closing, with no bleat coming out. Many of them also had their legs bandaged in plaster.

  This is the story of those goats.

  2. GOAT LAB

  It was Uri Geller who set me on the trail that led to the goats. I met him on the roof terrace of a central London restaurant in early October 2001, less than a month into the War on Terror. There had long been rumors (circulated on the whole, it must be said, by Uri himself) that back in the early 1970s he had been a psychic spy working secretly for U.S. intelligence. Many people have doubted his story—The Sunday Times once called it “a bizarre claim,” arguing that Uri Geller is nuts whereas the intelligence establishment is not. The way I saw it, the truth lay in one of four possible scenarios:

  1. It just never happened.

  2. A couple of crazy renegades in the higher levels of the U.S. intelligence community had brought in Uri Geller.

  3. U.S. intelligence is the repository of incredible secrets, which are kept from us for our own good; one of those secrets is that Uri Geller has psychic powers, which were harnessed during the Cold War. They just hoped he wouldn’t go around telling everybody.

  4. The U.S. intelligence community was, back then, essentially nuts through and through.

  Uri was quiet in the restaurant. He wore big, wraparound mirrored sunglasses. His brother-in-law, Shipi, was equally unforthcoming, and the whole thing was a bit awkward. I had met them once or twice before and had found them to be infectiously ebullient people. But there was no ebullience that day.

  “So,” I said, “let’s start. How did you first become a psychic spy for the U.S. government?”

  There was a long silence.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Uri said.

  He sipped his mineral water and glanced over at Shipi.

  “Uri?” I said. “What’s wrong? You often talk about it.”

  “No I don’t,” he said.

  “Yes you do!” I said.

  I had been researching this for two weeks, and I had already amassed a file an inch thick of his reminiscences about his psychic spying days, dictated to journalists throughout the 1980s and 1990s, who then added sarcastic asides. In more or less every article, the line of reasoning was the same: The intelligence services wouldn’t do that. There was an almost frantic reluctance to accept Uri’s word, or even to make a few calls to verify or refute it. For all our cynicism, we apparently still invested the intelligence services with some qualities of rigor and scientific methodology. The few journalists who accepted Uri’s claim implicitly expressed relief that all this happened a long time ago, back in the 1970s.

  “I never talk about it,” Uri said.

  “You spoke about it to the Financial Times,” I said. “You said you did a lot of psychic work for the CIA in Mexico.”

  Uri shrugged.

  A plane flew low overhead and everyone on the terrace stopped eating for a moment and looked up. Ever since 9/11, Attorney General John Ashcroft had been warning of imminent terrorist attacks—on banks, apartment blocks, hotels, restaurants, and shops in the United States. On one occasion President Bush announced that he couldn’t say anything at all about a particular looming cataclysm. Equally nonspecific high alerts were occurring in London too. Then, suddenly, Uri took off his sunglasses and looked me squarely in the eye.

  “If you repeat what I am about to tell you,” he said, “I will deny it.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “It will be your word against mine,” said Uri.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Uri moved his chair closer to mine. He glanced around the restaurant.

  “This,” he said, “is no longer a history story.”

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  “I have been reactivated,” said Uri.

  “What?” I said.

  I looked over at Shipi. He nodded gravely.

  “I don’t suppose it was you who told John Ashcroft about the hotels and the banks and the apartment blocks?” I asked.

  “I am saying nothing else,” said Uri.

  “Uri,” I said, “please give me something to go on. Please tell me one more thing.”

  Uri sighed.

  “Okay,” he said. “I will tell you one more thing only. The man who reactivated me is …” Uri paused, then he said, “called Ron.”

  And that was it. I have not spoken to Uri Geller since. He has not returned my calls. He refused to divulge anything further about Ron. Was Ron FBI? CIA?
military intelligence? Homeland Security? Could Ron be MI5? MI6? Was Uri Geller playing a part in the War on Terror?

  I had a minor breakthrough a year later, in a hotel in Las Vegas, when I was interviewing one of General Stubblebine’s former military spies, Sergeant Lyn Buchanan. I said, “Uri Geller says that the man who reactivated him is called Ron.” Sergeant Buchanan fell silent and then he nodded enigmatically and said, “Ah, Ron. Yes. I know Ron.”

  But he wouldn’t tell me anything more about him.

  General Stubblebine wouldn’t talk about Ron either.

  “The damn psychic spies should be keeping their damn mouths shut,” he said, “instead of chitchatting all over town about what they did.”

  The general, I discovered in the weeks after I met Uri, had commanded a secret military psychic spying unit between 1981 and 1984. The unit wasn’t quite as glamorous as it might sound, he said. It was basically half-a-dozen soldiers sitting inside a heavily guarded, condemned clapboard building in Fort Meade, Maryland, trying to be psychic. Officially the unit did not exist. The psychics were what is known in military jargon as Black Ops. Because they didn’t “exist” they were not permitted access to the army’s coffee budget. They had to bring their own coffee into work. They had come to resent this. Some of them were in there, trying to be psychic, from 1978 until 1995. From time to time, one of them died or went stir-crazy, and a new psychic soldier would be brought in to replace the casualty. When one of them got a vision—of a Russian warship, or a future event—he would sketch it, and pass the sketches up the chain of command.