by Jon Ronson
He said the Americans used bad subliminal sounds on Iraqi soldiers during the first Gulf War (“We warped their brains for a hundred days,”) but they have had “serious problems getting the subliminally implanted fears out of their heads” during the years that followed.
“Negative things are a devil to get out.” He chuckled.
He said ITN news once broadcast a story on the use of silent sounds in the first Gulf War.
(ITN later told me, categorically, that they had never run such a story. Nowhere within their archive database could I find anything approaching it.)
He said, “You can transmit silent sounds into people’s heads via a window in the same way you can fire a laser beam through a window to eavesdrop on a conversation. Conversely, the sounds can be transmitted through the crummiest media—a satellite telephone or a crappy old tape recorder or a ghetto blaster.”
He said New Scotland Yard uses the technology, but he wouldn’t tell me how. He said the Russians use it too. And that was it. He cut the conversation short. He wished me the best and he hung up and I was left reeling and entirely unsure of everything he had said.
This man seemed to have verified one of the world’s most enduring and least plausible conspiracy theories. For me, the idea that the government would surreptitiously zap heads with subliminal sounds and remotely alter moods was on a par with the idea that they were concealing UFOs in military hangars and transforming themselves into twelve-foot lizards. This conspiracy theory has persisted because it contains all the crucial ingredients—the hidden hand of big government teaming up with Machiavellian scientists to take over our minds like body snatchers.
The thing is, in this context, Jamal’s Fleetwood Mac all-girl-covers-band-ghetto-blaster experience inside the Brown Block at Guantanamo Bay suddenly made sense.
Jamal seemed fine when I met him in Manchester. I asked him if he felt at all unusual after listening to Matchbox Twenty and he said no. But one shouldn’t read too much into this. There is a very strong chance, given the history of the goat staring and the wall walking and so on, that they blasted Jamal with silent sounds and it just didn’t work.
There was one thing I could chase up. Dr. Oliver Lowery (or whoever he was) had mentioned to me a Dr. Igor Smirnov. He said Igor Smirnov had undertaken similar U.S. government work in the field of silent sounds. I looked Dr. Smirnov up. I found him in Moscow. I corresponded with his office, and his assistant (Dr. Smirnov speaks little English) told me the following curious story.
It is a story the FBI has never denied.
Igor Smirnov was not prospering in the post-Cold War Moscow of 1993. His finances were so bleak that when the Russian mafia turned up at his laboratory one evening, pressed the bell marked, somewhat ominously, “Institute for Psycho-Correction,” and told Igor they’d pay him handsomely if he could subliminally influence certain unwilling businessmen to sign certain contracts, he almost accepted their offer. But in the end it seemed just too frightening and unethical and he turned the gangsters down. His regular clients—the schizophrenics and the drug addicts—may have been poor payers but at least they weren’t the mafia.
Igor’s day-to-day work in the early 1990s was something like this: A heroin addict would turn up at his lab very upset because he was a father-to-be but try as he might he cared more about the heroin than his unborn child. So he’d lie on a bed, and Igor would blast him with subliminal messages. He’d flash them onto a screen in front of the addict’s eyes and blast them through earphones, disguised by white noise, and the messages would say “Be a good father. Fatherhood is more important than heroin.” And so on.
This was a man once fêted by the Soviet government, which—ten years earlier—had instructed him to blast his silent messages at Red Army troops on their way to Afghanistan. Those messages said, “Do not get drunk before battle.”
But the glory days were long gone by March 1993—the month Igor Smirnov received a telephone call, out of the blue, from the FBI. Could he fly to Arlington, Virginia, right away? Igor Smirnov was intrigued, and quite amazed, and he got on a plane.
The U.S. intelligence community had been spying on Igor Smirnov for years. It seemed he’d succeeded in creating a system of influencing people from afar—putting voices into their heads, remotely altering their outlook on life—perhaps without the subjects even knowing it was being done to them. This was a tangible, real-life, mechanistic version of General Wickham’s prayer groups, or Guy Savelli’s goat staring, the kind of system the ambient composer Steven Halpern had suggested to Jim Channon back in the late 1970s. The question was: Could Igor do it to David Koresh?
Could he put the voice of God into David Koresh’s head?
The Branch Davidians, an offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventists, had been living around Waco, Texas, predicting an imminent Judgment Day, since 1935. When Vernon Howell took over the church’s leadership in the late 1980s, and declared himself a Christ-figure, the anointed one, the seventh and final messenger as outlined in the Book of Revelation, and changed his name to David Koresh and started selling weapons illegally to fund his congregation’s separatist lifestyle, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms began to take an interest. They imagined that a high-profile raid on the church would be good for agency morale and PR. So they tipped off the local media, told them the Branch David-ians were theologically incomprehensible, nuts, and heavily armed (they were, but basically in the way that gun shops are heavily armed), and they were going in.
What the BATF failed to predict was that Koresh had been waiting for a confrontation like this, and relished the prospect. It was his destiny to be attacked by a hostile army representing an out-of-control, sinister, heavy-handed, new-world-order-type Babylon government.
On February 28, 1993, a hundred or so BATF agents stormed the church, but the raid turned into a gun battle, during which four agents were killed, and the gun battle turned into a siege.
There is something far too familiar, in retrospect, about the whole thing. At Waco, just as at Abu Ghraib, the U.S. government behaved like a grotesque caricature of itself. The anti-big-government American right wing had harbored paranoid fantasies about the Clinton administration heavy-handedly destroying the lives of simple people who wanted to live free, and Waco was the place where those conspiracy theories came true. Much of the Iraqi population had been fed similarly wild conspiracy theories about American imperialistic hedonism—that the United States was violently out of control and determined to force its corruption and decadence on the devout—and Abu Ghraib was the place where those conspiracy theories came true.
But there is a more disturbing parallel. David Koresh’s Branch Davidians also seem to have been considered guinea pigs in the middle of a long-awaited golden opportunity, an opportunity to try stuff out.
Back in 1993, the problem for advocates of out-of-the-box thinking within the U.S. government and military establishments was that there was nobody suitably wicked out there on whom to test their ideas. The outlook was so hopeful, in fact, that a State Department social scientist named Francis Fukuyama declared in 1989, to widespread international acclaim, that it was the end of history. Western democratic capitalism had proved so superior to all its historical rivals, wrote Fukuyama, that it was finding acceptance everywhere in the world. There was simply nothing nefarious out there on the horizon. Although this eventually turned out to be just about the worst prediction ever, in 1993 it seemed too real. These were the fallow years for those who wanted to experiment with new ideas on suitable adversaries.
And then the Waco siege came along.
First there were the noises. Midway through the siege—in the middle of March 1993—the sounds of Tibetan Buddhist chants, screeching bagpipes, crying seagulls, helicopter rotor blades, dentist drills, sirens, dying rabbits, a train, and Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walking” began to blast into the church. It was the FBI, in this instance, who did the blasting. There were seventy-nine members of David Koresh’s congrega
tion in there, including twenty-five children (twenty-seven if you count the unborn ones). Some of the parishioners put cotton wool in their ears, a luxury that was later unavailable to Jamal at Guantanamo and the prisoners inside the shipping containers in al-Qā’im. Others apparently tried to enjoy it by ironically pretending it was a disco. This wasn’t easy, as one of them, Clive Doyle, told me when I telephoned him.
Clive Doyle is one of the very few survivors of the fire that ended the siege.
“Very rarely did they play a song straight through,” he said. “They distorted it by slowing it down or speeding it up. And the Tibetan monks were pretty ominous.” Then, apropos of nothing, he said, “Do you think they blasted us with those subliminal sounds?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Do you?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “We figured they were experimenting in a lot of different areas. They had a robot that came down the drive one day, with a big antenna sticking out the top. What was that about?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Sometimes,” said Clive Doyle, “I think that the FBI were just like idiots, and it was just chaos out there.”
It did seem somewhat chaotic. Some of the noises blasted at the Branch Davidians, like the Buddhist chants, I have learned, came from the wife of an agent present at the scene. She worked in a local museum. She just scooped up the tapes and gave them to her husband. The dying rabbit noises were an exception. They came from an FBI agent who used the tape, under normal circumstances, to ferret out coyotes during his regular hunting trips. Furthermore, the FBI carried on blasting the Buddhist chants even after the Dalai Lama had written a letter of complaint because the agent in charge of the speaker system “didn’t have anything else to do at night.”
My guess is that, just like at Abu Ghraib, there was a “casserole of intelligence” present, each with their own idea about how to direct the siege. Some of the ideas were inspired by Jim Channon, or inspired by people who were inspired by him. Others were more random. The FBI negotiators taped their telephone conversations with David Koresh and his deputies. Excerpts from these tapes illustrate two things: the people within the church were, somewhat alarmingly, of one mind—David Koresh’s mind; the people on the outside of the church were, even more alarmingly, of no cohesive mind-set whatsoever.
STEVE SCHNEIDER (Branch Davidian): Who’s controlling these guys? You’ve got guys out there right now pulling their pants down, men that are mature, sticking their butts in the air and flipping the finger.
FBI NEGOTIATOR: Uh. Give me a moment. The guys that gravitate towards riding in tanks, jumping out of airplanes, have a little different mind-set from you and I, would you agree?
STEVE SCHNEIDER: I agree with you. But somebody’s gotta be above these guys.
FBI NEGOTIATOR: Sure.
JIM CAVANAUGH (FBI negotiator): I think we need to set the record straight. There were no guns on those helicopters.
DAVID KORESH: That’s a lie. That is a lie. Now, Jim, you’re a damn liar. Let’s get real.
JIM CAVANAUGH: David, I—
DAVID KORESH: No, you listen to me. You’re sitting there telling me that there were no guns on that helicopter?
JIM CAVANAUGH: I said they didn’t shoot.
DAVID KORESH: You are a damn liar.
JIM CAVANAUGH: Well, you’re wrong, David.
DAVID KORESH: You are a liar.
JIM CAVANAUGH: Okay. Well, just calm down… .
DAVID KORESH: No! Let me tell you something. That may be what you might want the media to believe, but there’s other people that saw too. Now tell me, Jim, you’re honestly going to say those helicopters didn’t fire on any of us?
JIM CAVANAUGH (after a long silence): David?
DAVID KORESH: I’m here.
JIM CAVANAUGH: Uh, yeah, uh, what I’m saying is those helicopters did not have mounted guns. Okay? I’m not disputing the fact that there might have been fire from the helicopters. Do you understand what I’m saying?
DAVID KORESH: Uh, no.
UNIDENTIFIED LITTLE GIRL: Are they going to come in and kill me?
UNIDENTIFIED NEGOTIATOR: No. Nobody’s coming. Nobody’s coming.
And this, from a press conference that occurred midway through the siege:
JOURNALIST: Mr. Ricks, is there a consideration to use psychological warfare? Have you discussed it at all?
BOB RICKS (FBI spokesman): I don’t know what psychological warfare is.
JOURNALIST: It was reported in the paper that you would play loud music, put bright lights on the compound all night, to try to agitate the entire group. Is that possible?
BOB RICKS: We will not discuss tactics of that sort, but I would say the chances of doing that sort of activity are minimal.
I have met Bob Ricks. He has been one of the FBI’s most outspoken critics of the Waco siege, and he all but single-handedly prevented a similar raid from occurring on a group of white supremacists in northern Oklahoma, at a place called Elohim City. I don’t think that Bob Ricks was lying during the press conference. I think the FBI’s left hand didn’t know what its right hand was up to.
At Waco, just like at Abu Ghraib, the Jim Channon–like thinkers seem to have had to bide their time, wait for the finger flippers and the helicopter snipers to have their turn.
My guess is that the musical bombardment was inspired by a similar event that occurred four years earlier in Panama City. The battle between General Stubblebine and General Manuel Noriega had long been fought like two wizards standing atop mountains throwing thunderbolts at each other. General Stubblebine had set his psychic spies onto Noriega, who had countered by inserting little slips of paper into his shoes, and so on.
In the end, Noriega turned up at the Vatican embassy in Panama City, and PsyOps arrived on the scene with loudspeakers attached to their trucks, which were used to repeatedly blast the building with Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle.” If this event was inspired (directly or indirectly) by Jim Channon’s manual, it is appropriate that Noriega—who had given General Stubblebine so much hassle that he couldn’t concentrate on walking through his wall—was finally felled by another First Earth Battalion idea.
I telephoned a dozen witnesses to the siege at Waco—journalists and intelligence agents—and I asked them if they knew of any strange goings-on beyond the music and the robot with the antenna. Three of them told me the same story. I can’t prove it, so it remains a rumor—one that sounds plausible but, then again, entirely implausible.
The rumor I heard involves a man I’ll call Mr. B. He enlisted in the U.S. military in 1972, and between 1973 and 1989 he was in the Special Forces unit at Fort Bragg, where he took part in the various General Stubblebine inspired supersoldier programs. As a result he became—in the words of one man I spoke to—“not only the greatest surreptitious break-in guy in the armed forces, but in the whole government.”
Mr. B. could break in anywhere, unseen and unheard. He had, to all intents and purposes, wholly and extraordinarily mastered level three of Glenn Wheaton’s Jedi Warrior code: invisibility. But Mr. B. used his powers for bad. He was convicted, in 1989, of breaking into women’s apartments and raping them. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
A soldier I cannot name swears that, on April 18, 1993, he spotted Mr. B. surreptitiously entering David Koresh’s church. Perhaps his four years in prison had diminished his powers, for the soldier recognized him immediately. He said nothing at the time, because he knew he had witnessed a Black Op. An intelligence agency must have sprung Mr. B. from jail.
The rumor ends like this: Mr. B. entered the Koresh compound, checked that the bugging devices were in good working order, fixed those that weren’t, crept out again, was transported back to his jail cell in Colorado, and found God. He refused to grant me an interview because he said he no longer wanted to dwell on his past.
He remains to this day in a maximum-security prison.
That story remains a rumor, whereas Dr. Igor Smirn
ov’s involvement in the Waco siege can safely be considered true.
The FBI flew Dr. Smirnov from Moscow to Arlington, Virginia, where he found himself in a conference room with representatives of the FBI, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Advance Research Projects Research Agency.
The idea, the agents explained, was to use the telephone lines. The FBI negotiators would bargain with Koresh as usual but, underneath, the silent voice of God would tell Koresh whatever the FBI wanted God to say.
Dr. Smirnov said this was possible.
But then bureaucracy crept into the negotiations. An FBI agent said he was concerned that the endeavor might somehow lead to the Branch Davidians’ committing mass suicide. Would Dr. Smirnov sign something to the effect that if they did kill themselves as a result of the voice of God being subliminally implanted in their heads, he would take responsibility?
Dr. Smirnov said he wouldn’t sign something like that.
And so the meeting broke up.
An agent told Dr. Smirnov it was a shame it didn’t work out. He said they had already co-opted someone to play the voice of God.
Had Dr. Smirnov’s technology been put into practice at Waco, the agent said, God would have been played by Charlton Heston.
I was passing through Georgia, and thinking a lot about my telephone conversation with Dr. Oliver Lowery, and so I decided to drive past the address I had for him. It was somewhere in the suburbs of Atlanta. I wondered if I’d find a normal house or something like a fourteen-story building behind three layers of barbed-wire defenses. A gale was blowing so strongly I thought it would tip over my car.
