by Jon Ronson
According to Prudence, Dr. Courtney Brown’s Farsight Institute dwindled from thirty-six students to twenty students to eight students to no students at all during the months that followed the suicides (although it has since recovered). He stopped giving interviews. He hasn’t spoken about what happened for seven years. (I think he went on Art Bell one more time to be shouted at.) I visited him in the spring of 2004.
He still lives in Atlanta. He is very thin now. He took me into his basement.
“Heaven’s Gate?” he said.
He acted for a moment as if he couldn’t quite remember who they were. He was wearing a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows.
“Heaven’s Gate?” he said again. His look suggested that he had the memory of a vague academic and that I should bear with him for a moment.
“Oh!” he said. “Oh, yes. That was an interesting group. They were eunuchs. That’s what I read in the newspaper. They castrated themselves and eventually they killed themselves.”
Dr. Brown fell silent for a moment.
“It was like Jim Jones,” he said. “Their leader was probably a crazy type of guy who was getting older and, seeing that his group was going to unravel in front of him, he was probably looking for some opportunity to finalize it.”
Dr. Brown took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
“Eunuchs!” He chuckled dryly and shook his head. “That’s pretty heavy psychological control to get people to castrate themselves, and eventually he had them all kill themselves as well, looking for an opportunity. You know, uh. That was an interesting group. That was a wild, wild group. That was a crazy group. That was a … that was a tragedy waiting to happen.”
Dr. Brown made me some herbal tea.
He said, “You have to understand, I’m an academic. I’m not trained in dealing with masses of people. I found out through the school of hard knocks that it is better not to deal with masses of people. It’s not that they don’t deserve the information but they really react in very strange ways. They get panicky and excited, or overexcited, and it is so easy for academics to forget that. We’re trained in math. We’re trained in science. We’re not trained in the masses.”
He paused.
“The public is extremely wild,” he said, “uncontrollably wild.”
Then he shrugged his shoulders.
“You have to understand,” he said, “I’m an academic.”
7. THE PURPLE DINOSAUR
If you walk about five hundred yards down the road from the Fort Bragg goats, you come to a large, modern, gray brick building with a sign at the front that reads C COMPANY 9TH PSYOPS BATTALION H-3743.
This is the army’s Psychological Operations headquarters.
In May 2003, a little piece of the First Earth Battalion philosophy was put into practice, by PsyOps, behind a disused railway station in the tiny Iraqi town of al-Qā’im, on the Syrian border, shortly after President Bush had announced “the end of major hostilities.”
The story begins with a meeting between two Americans—a Newsweek journalist named Adam Piore and a PsyOps sergeant named Mark Hadsell.
Adam was traveling in a PsyOps Humvee, driving into the town of al-Qā’im, past the coalition checkpoints, past the main road sign, which was shot up and dilapidated and now read A Q M. They pulled up in front of a police station. It was Adam’s second day in Iraq. He knew virtually nothing about the country. He badly needed to urinate, but was worried that if he peed in front of the police station or in the bushes, he might offend someone. What was the protocol regarding public urination in Iraq? Adam mentioned his concern to the PsyOps soldier sitting next to him in the Humvee. This was PsyOps’ job—to understand and exploit the psyche and the customs of the enemy.
“Just go on the front tire,” the soldier said to Adam.
So Adam jumped out of the Humvee, and that’s when PsyOps sergeant Mark Hadsell wandered over and asked him if he wanted to be shot.
Adam was telling me this story two months later, back in the Newsweek offices in New York. We were upstairs in the boardroom, which was decorated with blowups of recent Newsweek covers: a masked Islamic fundamentalist with a gun under the headline WHY THEY HATE US, and President and Mrs. Bush in the White House garden under the headline WHERE WE GET OUR STRENGTH. Adam is twenty-nine, he looks younger, and he trembled a little as he recounted the incident.
“So that’s how I met the guy,” said Adam. He laughed. “He said did I want to get shot? So I quickly zipped up… .”
“Was he smiling as he said it?” I asked.
I pictured Sergeant Hadsell, whoever he was, with a big, friendly smile on his face asking Adam if he wanted to be shot.
“No,” Adam said. “He just said, ‘Do you want to be shot?’”
Adam and Sergeant Hadsell ended up friends. They bunked together in the PsyOps squadron command center in a disused train station in al-Qā’im, and borrowed DVDs from each other.
“He’s a very gung-ho type of guy,” said Adam. “The squadron commander used to call him Psycho Six, because he was always ready to go in with firepower. Ha! He once told me that he pointed a gun at someone and pulled the trigger, and the gun wasn’t loaded, and the guy peed in his pants. I don’t know why he told me that story, because I didn’t think it was funny. In fact I thought it was somewhat twisted and disturbing.”
“Did he think it was funny?” I asked Adam.
“I think he thought it was funny,” Adam said. “Yeah. He was an American-trained killer.”
The people of al-Qā’im didn’t know that Baghdad had fallen to coalition troops, so Sergeant Hadsell and his PsyOps unit were there to distribute leaflets bearing this news. Adam was tagging along, covering the “end of major hostilities” from the PsyOps’ perspective.
May 2003 was a pretty calm month in al-Qā’im. By the end of the year, U.S. forces would be under frequent guerrilla bombardment in the town. In November 2003, one of Saddam Hussein’s air defense commanders—Major General Abed Hamed Mowhoush—would die under interrogation right there at the disused train station. (“Natural causes,” said the official U.S. military statement. “Mowhoush’s head was not hooded during questioning.”)
But for now it was peaceful.
“At one point,” Adam said, “somebody ran by and grabbed a pile of leaflets. Hadsell talked about how important it was, the next time that happened, to find the guy and punish him so he wouldn’t do it again. That was probably to do with studying Arabic culture. You have to show that you’re strong.”
One night, Adam was hanging out in the squadron command center when Sergeant Hadsell wandered over to him. Hadsell winked conspiratorially and said, “Go look out by where the prisoners are.”
Adam knew that the prisoners were housed in a yard behind the train station. The army had parked a convoy of shipping containers back there, and as Adam wandered toward them he could see a bright flashing light. He could hear music too. It was Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.”
From a distance it looked as though some weird and slightly sinister disco was taking place amid the shipping containers. The music sounded especially tinny, and the light was being joylessly flashed on and off, on and off.
Adam walked toward the light. It was really bright. It was being held by a young American soldier, and he was just flashing it on and off, on and off, into the shipping container. “Enter Sandman” was reverberating inside the container, echoing violently around the steel walls. Adam stood there for a moment and watched.
The song ended and then, immediately, it began again.
The young soldier holding the light glanced over at Adam. He continued flashing it and said, “You need to go away now.”
“Ha!” said Adam to me, back in the Newsweek offices. “That’s the term he used. ‘You need to go away.’”
“Did you look inside the container?” I asked him.
“No,” said Adam. “When the guy told me that I had to go away, I went away.” He paused. “But it was kind of obv
ious what was going on in there.”
Adam called Newsweek from his cell phone and pitched them a number of stories. Their favorite was the Metallica one.
“I was told to write it as a humorous thing,” said Adam. “They wanted a complete playlist.”
So Adam asked around. It turned out that the songs being blasted at prisoners inside the shipping container included Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”; the soundtrack to the movie XXX; a song that went “Burn Motherfucker, Burn”; and, rather more surprisingly, the “I Love You” song from Barney & Friends, the Barney the Purple Dinosaur show, along with songs from Sesame Street.
Adam e-mailed the article to New York, where a Newsweek editor phoned the Barney people for a comment. He was put on hold. The on-hold music was the Barney “I Love You” song.
The last line of the article, written by the Newsweek editor, was: “It broke us too!”
I first learned about the Barney torture story on May 19, 2003, when it ran as a funny, “and finally …” type of item on NBC’s Today show:
ANN CURRY (news anchor): U.S. forces in Iraq are using what some are calling a cruel and unusual tool to break the resistance of Iraqi POWs, and trust me, a lot of parents would agree! Some prisoners are being forced to listen to Barney the Purple Dinosaur sing the “I Love You” song for twenty-four straight hours… .
NBC cut to a clip from Barney, in which the purple dinosaur flopped around amid his gang of ever-smiling stage-school kids. Everyone in the studio laughed. Ann Curry put on a funny “poor little prisoners” kind of voice to report the story.
ANN CURRY: ... according to Newsweek magazine. One U.S. operative told Newsweek that he listened to Barney for forty-five minutes straight and never wanted to go through that again!
STUDIO: (laughter)
Ann Curry turned to Katie Couric, her cohost.
ANN CURRY: Katie! Sing it with me!
KATIE COURIC (laughing): No! I think after about an hour they’re probably spilling the beans, don’t you think? Let’s go outside to Al for the weather.
AL ROKER (weatherman): And if Barney doesn’t get ’em, they switch to the Teletubbies, and that crushes ’em like a bug … !
It’s the First Earth Battalion! I thought.
I had no doubt that the notion of using music as a form of mental torture had been popularized and perfected within the military as a result of Jim Channon’s manual. Before Jim came along, military music was confined to the marching-band type of arena. It was all about pageantry and energizing the troops. In Vietnam, soldiers blasted themselves with Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” to put themselves in the mood for battle. But it was Jim who came up with the idea of loudspeakers being used in the battlefield to broadcast “discordant sounds” such as “acid-rock music out of sync” to confuse the enemy, and the use of similar sounds in the interrogation arena.
Jim got these ideas in part, as far as I could tell, after he met Steven Halpern, the composer of ambient CDs such as Music for Inner Peace, in 1978. And so I called Jim right away.
“Jim!” I said. “Would you say that blasting Iraqi prisoners with the theme tune to Barney is a legacy of the First Earth Battalion?”
“I’m sorry?” said Jim.
“They’re rounding people up in Iraq, taking them to a shipping container, and blasting them repeatedly with children’s music while repeatedly flashing a bright light at them,” I said. “Is that one of your legacies?”
“Yes!” Jim said. He sounded thrilled. “I’m so pleased to hear that!”
“Why?” I asked.
“They’re obviously trying to lighten the environment,” he said, “and give these people some comfort, instead of beating them to death!” He sighed. “Children’s music! That will make the prisoners more ready to divulge where their forces are and shorten the war! Damn good!”
I think Jim was imagining something more like a day care center than a steel container at the back of a disused railway station.
“I guess if they play them Barney and Sesame Street once or twice,” I said, “that’s lightening and comforting, but if they play it, say, fifty thousand times into a steel box in the desert heat, that’s more...uh...torturous?”
“I’m no psychologist,” said Jim, a little sharply.
He seemed to want to change the subject, as if he was in denial about the way in which his vision was being interpreted behind the railway station in al-Qā’ im. He reminded me of a grandparent who wouldn’t countenance the idea that his grandchildren would ever misbehave.
“But the use of music …” I said.
“That’s what the First Earth Battalion did,” said Jim. “It opened the military mind to how to use music.”
“So,” I said, “it’s all about getting people to talk in a ... in a what?”
“A psychospiritual dimension,” said Jim. “Besides the basic fear of being hit, we have a mental, spiritual, and psychic component. So why not use that? Why not go straight for the place where the being actually decides whether to say something or not?”
“So are you certain,” I asked Jim, “given what you know about how your First Earth Battalion has disseminated its way into the fabric of the military, that blasting Iraqis with Barney and Sesame Street is one of your legacies?”
Jim thought about this for a moment and then he said, “Yes.”
Christopher Cerf has been composing songs for Sesame Street for twenty-five years. His large Manhattan townhouse is full of Sesame Street memorabilia—photographs of Christopher with his arm around Big Bird, and so on.
“Well, it’s certainly not what I expected when I wrote them,” Christopher said. “I have to admit, my first reaction was, ‘Oh my gosh, is my music really that terrible?’”
I laughed.
“I once wrote a song for Bert and Ernie called ‘Put Down the Ducky,’” he said, “which might be useful for interrogating members of the Ba’ath Party.”
“That’s very good,” I said.
“This interview,” Christopher said, “has been brought to you by the letters W, M, and D.”
“That’s very good,” I said.
We both laughed.
I paused.
“And do you think that the Iraqi prisoners, as well as giving away vital information, are learning new letters and numbers?” I said.
“Well, wouldn’t that be an incredible double win?” said Christopher.
Christopher took me upstairs to his studio to play me one of his Sesame Street compositions, called “Ya! Ya! Das Is a Mountain!”
“The way we do Sesame Street,” he explained, “is that we have educational researchers who test whether these songs are working, whether the kids are learning. And one year they asked me to write a song to explain what a mountain is, and I wrote a silly yodeling song about what a mountain was.”
Christopher sang me a little of the song:
Oompah-pah!
Oompah-pah!
Ya! Ya! Das is a mountain!
Part of zee ground zat sticks way up high!
“Anyway,” he said, “forty percent of the kids had known what a mountain was before they heard the song, and after they heard the song, only about twenty-six percent knew what a mountain was. That’s all they needed. You don’t know what a mountain is now, right? It’s gone! So I figure if I have the power to suck information out of people’s brains by writing these songs, maybe that’s something that could be useful to the CIA for brainwashing techniques.”
Just then, Christopher’s phone rang. It was a lawyer from his music publisher, BMI. I listened in to Christopher’s side of the conversation.
“Oh really?” he said. “I see … Well, theoretically they have to log that and I should be getting a few cents for every prisoner, right? Okay. Bye-bye.”
“What was that about?” I asked Christopher.
“Whether I’m owed some money for the performance royalties,” he explained. “Why not? It’s the American thing to do. If I can write songs that drive peopl
e crazy sooner and more effectively than others, why shouldn’t I profit from that?”
This was why, later that day, Christopher asked Danny Epstein—who has been the music supervisor of Sesame Street since the very first program was broadcast, in July 1969—to come to his house. It would be Danny’s responsibility to collect the royalties from the military if they proved negligent in filing a music-cue sheet.
For an hour or so, Danny and Christopher attempted to calculate exactly how much money Christopher might be due if—as he estimated—his songs were being played on a continuous loop in a shipping container for up to three days at a time.
“That’s fourteen thousand times or more over three days,” said Christopher. “If it was radio play I’d get three or four cents every time that loop went through, right?”
“It would be a money machine,” concurred Danny.
“That’s what I’m thinking,” said Christopher. “We could be helping our country and cleaning up at the same time.”
“I don’t think there’s enough money in the pool to pay for that rate,” said Danny. “If I’m going to negotiate for ASCAP [American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers], I’d say it would come in the category of a theme or jingle rate, some kind of knockdown… .”
“Which is an appropriate term because there’s evidence that the prisoners are being knocked down as they listen to the music,” said Christopher.
We all laughed.
The conversation seemed to be shifting uneasily between satire and a genuine desire to make some money.
“And that’s just in one interrogation room,” said Danny. “If there’s a dozen rooms, you’re talking money. This is non-sponsored?”
“That’s a good question,” said Christopher. “It’s state sponsored, I think. Would I get more money if it is or it isn’t?”
