“How Much Do I Remember? How Much Do I Still Use?”

Sometimes a simple admin action brings an unexpected result.

I recently updated my profile on my personal Facebook page to show my 1993 graduation from what is now the National Intelligence University (NIU). (“Defense Intelligence College” at the time.)

I had intended just to quietly add it to my page. Much to my annoyance, Facebook instead auto-generated a post announcing to the world the small addition. My irritation at this un-asked-for intrusion soon changed, however, when a number of friends and associates made comments that showed their interest. One comment in particular caught my attention. Long time RVIS student and course assistant Dr. Ellen Zechman asked me a thought-provoking question about my NIU experience: “How much do you remember, and how much do you use now?” That kind of question would be challenging for anyone. After all, is it even possible to reach that far back in time to inventory what you remember, and what you actually still use? Yet such forced reflection is almost always valuable. And so it was for me.

As I mulled it over, insights came fast, and brought me full circle to a watershed remote viewing event that happened at Star Gate in which NIU played a key role.

The NIU

At the time, the National Intelligence University operated under the umbrella of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Chartered by Congress, its mission is to increase professionalism and improve the capabilities of the people working in military intelligence. The NIU confers bachelors and masters degrees in Strategic Intelligence. With a few exceptions, only active duty military and civilian career intelligence personnel are admitted. Depending on a student’s circumstances, that might be for either full- or part-time enrollment. And to attend, you have to have an active Top Secret security clearance.

In 1987, an opportunity opened for a few in-person, part-time slots. I was still assigned to the Star Gate military remote viewing program on Fort Meade, Maryland. My coworker and close friend, the late Gabrielle “Gabi” Pettingell, encouraged me to join her in signing up. So, with approval of our chain of command, we drove south together on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway to Bolling Air Force Base on the east side of the District of Columbia to apply. There on Bolling sprawled our headquarters, the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center (DIAC). The NIU occupied most of one full floor of the massive building. By December we were officially enrolled.

For much of the next three years Gabi and I, sometimes together, sometimes separately, drove the office sedan the 45 minutes south to the DIAC, to participate in university-level classes with titles like “The

National Foreign Intelligence Community,” “Indications & Warning Intelligence,” “Financial Management of Intelligence,” “Appraisal of the Soviet Union,” “Intelligence Analysis,” “The Military in Third World Politics,” “MidEast: Theories & Concepts,” “Transnational Terrorism,” and so on. For a couple of hours two or three times a week, we listened to lectures from experts, took notes, wrote papers and took exams just like in any other post-grad program. When Gabi and I weren’t in our part-time academic setting, we still did our work at Star Gate: projecting our consciousness to the other side of the planet and elsewhere to accomplish our main duty, real-world operational remote viewing sessions. We also trained others in CRV, managed operational projects, and so on. As you can imagine, the two activities—academic versus operational—made an interesting contrast.

Off to War

Then came a life-changing Monday toward the end of August, 1990. The day before, my family and I had returned from a week-long vacation get-away at an Army recreation camp at a beach on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. As I sat at my desk in the Star Gate offices that Monday, the phone rang. On the other end of the line was Army Assignments Branch. “Captain Smith,” said the voice over the phone. “The Army finds itself in need of your Arabic and Middle East background. You have four days to report to Fort Campbell, Kentucky for emergency reassignment to the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault).” I realized I had not been paying close enough attention. Iraq had invaded Kuwait. Suddenly, President Bush had decided that I, along with thousands of my closest Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine buddies, should be on our way to take part in what became known as Desert Storm.

The NIU folks graciously allowed me an indefinite leave of absence from my studies. After all, what else could they do? It would not be a good look for them if they refused. “Sorry, you can’t take time off from schooling to go fight a war.” That ended my seven years in both the Star Gate Program and working on Fort Meade.

Fast forward through a month of prep time at Fort Campbell, including being issued my personal weapon—a fifty-year-old Colt’s .38 revolver; followed by an 18-hour flight crammed together in a chartered 747 with a rowdy infantry battalion (it would have been a TSA nightmare: guns and knives crammed in the overhead compartments, under the seats, poking into the aisles); then bivouacking in the nastiest desert I’ve ever had to pitch a tent in; twice helicoptering (the Army calls it “air-assaulting”) deep behind enemy lines; and always, always dust everywhere. Then at last returning for a final five months

in Kentucky. (Kentucky had never looked so inviting!)

Finally, in early September 1991 I was back home, living in Maryland but working in Arlington, Virginia for DIA again. Just not as a remote viewer. Then NIU came calling. With the war over, they were telling me I had to either complete my studies or resign from the program. I made the choice to finish. But completing the program had now become more complicated—commuting to the DIAC from the wrong side of the Potomac River was not nearly so easy as it had been from Ft. Meade. And I wouldn’t have Gabi to encourage me (and make sure I arrived places on time), since she in the meantime had moved on to a new assignment.

Answering the Question

I managed to get through the rest of the program (including writing an over-achieving 250-page masters thesis assessing the viability of a possible Palestinian state), and on July 29, 1993 I went to the DIAC for my final time as a student. The NIU hosted the graduation ceremony in the DIAC’s voluminous theater-style conference room. Along with me came my oldest three kids, ages from 12 to 15. Although with permission I’d brought them into the Star Gate offices in the past, this was their first and so far only visit to a major secure facility. Fortunately, there are few national secrets to be found in a conference room. My fourth child had been born just five days before, so he and his mom stayed home.

With the preceding context, I’ll get back to Ellen’s question: If you recall, she asked “How much do you remember?” Actually, I remember a lot! But I have forgotten a lot of it, too. Mostly the tedious stuff—intelligence financial management, the minutia of how the national foreign intelligence community fits together, things like that (and so much of both has changed, anyway). Of course, what I learned was immediately useful for the remainder of my intelligence career. But even now, I retain enough so that, whenever the news reports a national or international kerfuffle, I still almost always understand more about it than do many of the talking heads the network drags in to argue it over.

I answer Ellen’s more interesting question, “How much do I use now?” mostly the same way. I ignore (or have forgotten) much of what has proved not particularly useful. But a surprising amount still relates to my world today, and even to remote viewing. One would think, for example, that what I learned from a course about the Soviet Union would be obsolete by now. Not so!

Russian president Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy today mirrors (in a warped way) so much of how Soviet Russia behaved. Central features range from the lies, propaganda, intrigue, and cynical undermining of foreign governments and cultures, to the brutal means used to stifle dissent and subjugate countries and ethnic groups that Russia has invaded and exploited. I am helped two ways: first, by having a context within which to judge new developments. And second, by having an informed opinion on what is really going on, at least in principle, rather than being easily duped by the propaganda and manipulations from both sides—though mostly from Russia and it’s much more clever ally, China.

The same holds true for developments in the Middle East. Every government, but (regrettably these days) worst of all our own, wants to spin things to their own advantage. It helps to know something about the political, social and military history of the Middle East to distinguish the facts from the “facts” one is presented.

Don’t get me wrong. What I learned at NIU didn’t make me perfect—I can still be mistaken often enough. But it has helped me be wrong less often than many of my fellow Americans. (And, as an added bonus, my 20 years in the espionage world has helped me judge much better the quality of Hollywood spy movies!)

But, you want to know, how has it helped me in terms of remote viewing? Here’s where my intelligence analysis training at the NIU paid dividends. First, I could immediately apply what I learned to managing real-world remote viewing projects for Star Gate. Other intelligence training during my career had also helped me learn analysis and critical thinking. But the broad-based exposure from NIU course work made me more valuable to the Program.

Perhaps more important to my civilian students today, NIU training built the core of my “Operational Remote Viewing” Course. With the addition of the remote viewing process itself, tasking, analysis and reporting form the legs on which the practical value of applied remote viewing rests. Successful operational RV requires that the data viewers produce be handled and analyzed carefully and with an open mind. One of the first steps I took when I put the my Operational RV course together more than a decade ago was to dust off my NIU notes and textbooks. I even still use some of those course materials in my classes.

Most people find it challenging to deal with the wild and wooly online and media culture that is today’s modern remote viewing community. My training focused on recognizing my own innate biases and those of others. This has proved essential to objectively evaluate wild-sounding claims that crop up, seemingly out of nowhere. The training I received in cognitive biases and logical fallacies was not just great help in creating my Operational Remote Viewing Course, but in evaluating and, when necessary, pushing back the myriad of unsupported claims and fantasies that emerge at any given time in the modern remote viewing communinty.

The Stark

One more thing before I close. It was thanks to a course at the NIU that I got my best feedback ever on an operational remote viewing session.

“Okay, Paul. It’s time to work. Head over to the operations building and get ready to do a session. I’ll be over in a few minutes.” It was May 15, 1987—a Friday. Ed Dames, one of our project officers (the ones in the office who tasked us with and monitored us on the remote viewing sessions we did every day) was telling me it was time once again to project my consciousness to some other potential trouble spot around the globe to tell our bosses what they needed to know. Or so I thought.

A few minutes later, as he and I sat opposite each other inside a completely grey-painted room in the ramshackle building where we did our most important work, I picked up my pen, indicating I was ready. Dames gave me a tasking number:
“369147″ followed by “312200.” I wrote it on my paper, and launched into the session.

Many of you have heard me tell this story before in radio and TV interviews. For those who haven’t, I tell the tale in detail in my book Reading the Enemy’s Mind, so I’ll only briefly summarize it here. I perceived an

aircraft flying in the night, firing missiles at an unsuspecting warship sailing in a body of water enclosed between desert shores. The missiles struck the ship, igniting fires and sparking pandemonium among the crew. The ship lurched to one side, spewing smoke. A Third-World military in a city of flat-roofed buildings far inland controlled the aircraft, but it was unclear whether they themselves knew what was happening. I added numerous details that I will skip here. After about an hour, resulting in 17 pages of transcript, Dames ended the session. “Let’s quit there, Paul. Unfortunately, you’re off.” [“off” was the term we used when we failed a remote viewing session.] “But no worries. Everyone is off every now and again.” Dames had expected me to report on a completely different event—a UFO he believed was going to land on the White House lawn in the near future. That never happened. But what I actually described in my session did.

I put my session paperwork, including extensive descriptions and numerous sketches, in the top drawer of my safe, and forgot about it. In a few hours, we all went home for the weekend.

Then, the Monday after the weekend came. A newly-single parent at the time, I was getting my three young kids ready to meet the school bus. Unexpectedly, I got a phone call from Captain Fred “Skip”Atwater, Star Gate’s operations officer. He wanted to know where my session from Friday was. I told him it was in my safe, and expressed surprise that he was interested, since I had been “off.”

“You haven’t seen the papers yet today, have you!” I opened up the front page of my daily copy of the Washington Post and there it was: side-by-side photos of an Iraqi jet fighter-bomber and an American warship, the USS Stark. As I rushed through the story, I saw in newsprint what had unfolded three days before in the theater of my

mind: An Iraqi jet had fired Exocet missiles at a US Navy warship, nearly sinking it. As we say in the remote viewing business, I had “nailed it.” Even more surprisingly, I had accurately described the event 50 hours before it actually happened. Only, all along I had thought I was “off.”

I was ordered to hurry into the office and type up a coherent summary of the session, which was then sent up the chain of command to the highest authorities.

Surprise Ending

Skip forward almost two years, to the spring semester of 1989. I had signed up for NIU’s Indications & Warning class, where we studied what happens when intelligence officers miss telltale information that something crucial is about to happen to threaten the security of us or our friends. I was startled to find that one of the course texts was the official report of the investigation into the attack on the USS Stark. Around mid-semester I was able to directly compare the results of my May, 1987 session with a detailed post mortem of the actual event. What a revelation! It became obvious that I had not just approximately, but exactly described the attack from beginning to end. I came away convinced that this was the best remote viewing session I had ever done, and even the best I’ve done since.

So think about this time-line: I worked the Stark session literally 50 hours before the event itself occurred, and seven months before I enrolled at NIU. I had no expectation of getting further closure on the event and my session describing it. Another fourteen months passed (the Stark was now almost two years in the past). Then, in the middle of the Spring 1989 semester, the whole thing unexpectedly came full circle and I was given a copy of the Stark after-action report. Consider that there was almost no possibility that I would have gotten access to that report had I not been in that course at that time in that university setting. Sometimes the universe conspires in our favor. This seems to have been one of those times.