CIA Recruited 'Mind Readers' to Spy on the Soviets in the 1970s | Hacker News Reader

CIA Recruited 'Mind Readers' to Spy on the Soviets in the 1970s

history.com

41 pointsBluestein35 comments

There was a comedy of sorts loosely based on the idea. The Men Who Stare At Goats [1] I promise it's worth watching, if for no other reason than to be entirely taken aback as to how they got A-list actors to play the parts.

[1] - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1234548/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

When you understand the movie, or the book it was based on, you will no longer consider it a comedy. It is a terrifying dip into a government program devoted to psychological warfare.

There was never any program to use ESP for spying. There is, instead, a program that--in one of its projects--sought to convince Americans that ESP spying had been attempted. The project was a massive success: most people still believe that happened. There are still DoD people who continue to insist it was attempted, which means the project is still running.

The program is ongoing. It was involved in capturing Noriega in Panama. It was the source of the torture program in Afghanistan and Iran. It probably orchestrated the pundit-sphere's rabid insistence on invading Iraq despite all the evidence that there were no WMDs, and that the invasion would be a massive failure.

The same program probably is running the Tictacs/UFO hoax, today, for reasons unknown. Possibly it is just another exercise, like the ESP thing; military programs are obliged to demonstrate their readiness frequently if they want continued funding.

The Iraq invasion was not, for some people, a failure: it transferred, ultimately, $5T from the American people into many newly-minted billionaires' pockets, some of whom have become reliable campaign financers. Secret programs breed corruption.

I would not be surprised if that were a thing. One real world example I know of was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays. Edward received all of his uncle's writings, studied them and had some serious take-away's that led him to becoming a consultant for the U.S. Government and many private companies. He influenced the minds of millions of people and even after passing, his work is still influencing billions of people today. There is a great documentary that covers this called The Century of the Self. [1] Apologies, it is in black-and-white, but it is very much worth the watch in your spare time. This isn't about ESP or hoaxes, but rather controlling the masses during peace time through psychological means.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s

Bernays was very proud of his student, Josef Goebbels, the Nazis' propaganda minister.

Bernays's opinion was that government could not be trusted to voters, so voters must be managed like livestock. His methods have been very successful, persuading generations of voters to vote against their own interests. Fully half the population of the US recently voted for an out-and-out con man, twice! But his opponents mainly represent hedge funds.

I am so glad you brought up the Tic Tac thing-- It is terrifying to see people like Lex Friedman pretend that what David Fravor is saying is real. And the media reported it verbatim.

Do you have an opinion on David Targ? I feel like he's delusional or an operative. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBl0cwyn5GY)

That's the funny thing about psychic phenomena promoters -- you can't tell which.

I believe that Arthur Conan Doyle was sincerely duped by the photos of little girls with colored cutout drawings of fairies, as ridiculous as it seemed then and today. The lesson of that is that we (all of us!) will aggressively overlook truly massive inconsistencies in any story that we want (or have been led to want) to believe.

> It is a terrifying dip into a government program devoted to psychological warfare.

Yikes.-

For what purpose? Do you have any evidence of this?

His dad works for Nintendo, if you question him, he'll make your playstation 3 catch fire.

Jokes aside, I would be interested to see if there is any "sources" to his claim, but in all likelihood there isn't and there never will be.

there is no evidence that the alphabet-boys hijacked the term "Conspiracy theorist" and used the media to change people's perception that conspiracy theorists is batshit crazy people with tinfoil hats.

How many years were you not labelled a tinfoil-hatter if you tried to describe the echelon program pre-snowden, even though he wasn't the first to leak about FIVE EYES, especially the part how the western SIGINT community circumvented the laws prohibiting domestic dragnet spying in their own respective countries?

> there is no evidence that the alphabet-boys hijacked the term "Conspiracy theorist" and used the media to change people's perception that conspiracy theorists is batshit crazy people with tinfoil hats.

I don't know where do you got this particular claim from, seems like a straw man honestly, but here is the CIA's 1967 "Countering Conspiracy Theories" memo:

https://archive.org/details/img_53510_3_300

Memos like that (what the narrative and the talking points are) are leaking all the time.

Propaganda operatives, whether commercial or military, seek what are called "placements". These are packaged kernels of message content to be repeated by media gatekeepers, who may be reporters, editorialists, authors, movie directors, computer game studios, or social-media "influencers".

Zero Dark Thirty and Argo were important movie placements by the spooks. Diamond, cigarette, car, beverage, and now phone product placements are a familiar movie phenomenon. It appears that there is significant budget available for funding movies and games that present CIA programs in a positive light, which also generate direct revenue.

Good thing all my games are on PC ;)

I think people give too much credit to the government for being a rational and calculating actor. I don't find it difficult to believe that they attempted a "men who stare at goats"-style program. They are absolutely not above throwing a billion dollars worth of shit at the wall just to see what sticks. These are the same people who thought they could implant cats with listening equipment and train them to eavesdrop on Soviet officials, which went about as well as you'd expect.

This is a documentary . It’s told in a way that is funny, but it’s all a true account of real things that happened.

Ah yes, here are some references. [1] Either way, the movie is great. You will never see Georgy Clooney the same way again. cloud bursting

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_Who_Stare_at_Goats

It's also one of those odd films like Mean Girls screenplayized somehow out of a nonfiction book.

I immediately thought of the movie, when reading the article :)

I attended a remote viewing workshop a couple of years ago. We we are around 15 people sitting each having a piece of paper and a pen. The instructor then looked for like a minute at a picture only he could see and asked us to draw what he saw. I came nowhere close to draw anything that resembled what he saw, but I have to admit, that a lot of the other people did. I am unable to explain how they could but they did. So maybe some people do have these abilities. I dont think it was a scam and some people has received hints before the workshop as I knew most people in the room.

Mentalist tricks. You were all exposed to the picture in some form before walking into the room. Some people are less susceptible than others.

How the trick works is all about exploiting what people affiliate with something. So the picture is an elephant? Remind people that mice exists ("oh im a little late, we had an exterminator get rid of a bunch of mice today") Feed the occupants peanuts and have big fucking ears yourself. At some point people are gonna think elephant, a percentage of those people will draw an elephant.

You get the point.

Is there any evidence you can show me that those tricks work at all?

Sometimes the rumor of a weapon is better than the actual weapon, and can in fact be the actual weapon if you can use it to control your enemy's actions.

Eg. the prospect of imminent cheap laser weapons puts a lot of doubt in expensive hypersonic missile investment.

I can't decide if this was a completely absurd undertaking, or if because the other side is working the same thing, it makes sense to throw a few dollars at it just in case it turns into something.

There’s a fourth option: that we understood it was absurd and had no belief that the Russians were working on anything of the sort... but wanted the Russians to believe that we were trying to play “catch up” to their own non-existent program, resulting in the Russians diverting their own resources into a similar program.

As a bonus, presumably the Russians would put significantly more resources toward it since their US-based intelligence sources were reporting that we were having success with it.

How stupid did they think the Russians were? You have to wonder if they even did blindly copy this initiative, how many resources they'd invest.

These mind games would have been played both ways, cold war was a hysterical time. Maybe it was the Russians instead who played the double game and saw the opportunity to divert American resources to places they don't work against them.

The real lesson is this: Never trust an Austrian when death is on the line! AHAHAHAHAHAHA -The Princess Bride

The KGB were unfortunately extremely good at the real deal - they were probably just as mad but when the fabric of the country effectively is Chekism these things come easily.

The KGB were at one point convinced that NATO were planning a preemptive strike because the lights were on at 10PM in Whitehall - the more astute reader may correctly guess this was actually due to the cleaners.

ESP is a surprisingly cheap to research, I bet both thought "Why not? just in case".

I strongly suggest to read up on Allen Dulles — the guy who had sole responsibility in creating a number of US three letter services.

A bizarre freak he was.

I don't know if anybody similar would've ever been elevated to the apex of power of a nation by anybody in his sane mind.

Often referred to as Remote Viewing, two of the known 'names' in the field are Ingo Swann and Hal Puthoff.

If you're interested in the (supposed/alleged) techniques and manuals, many (including from them) are gathered in a single PDF here: https://remoteviewed.com/crv_docs_full.pdf

Far more important was ESP/PSI to use for submarine communication. There were official programs devoted to evaluate transmissions of words via so-called psychics. All that because the Russians claimed to use that.

It's of immense military importance to communicate undetected to submarines. Of course it didn't work. If it would have worked, it would have been a be decisive advantage.

It was trivial and cheap to test.

"In a highly classified project conducted first in a California research lab in the 1970s, and later at an Army base in Maryland, the CIA, Army and Defense Intelligence Agency recruited men and women claiming to have powers of extrasensory perception (ESP) to help uncover military and domestic intelligence secrets."

I knew that already because of a pretty good Columbo episode ;)

My bet, the program continue, meeting many skilled mind readers daily turns out assumptions makers.

How do you know - is powerful question.

Great article

If you find this interesting, check out the work of Joseph McMoneagle.

Thank you for this, looks good, books added to reading list

Reply on news.ycombinator.com