Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit INTELLIGENCE N. 29 New Series, 22 January 1996 Publishing since 1980 Editor Olivier Schmidt (intelligence-adi@wanadoo.fr; tel/fax 33 1 40 51 85 19; ADI, 16 rue des Ecoles, 75005 Paris, France) ISSN 1245-2122 Copyright ADI 1996, reproduction in any form forbidden without explicit authorization from the ADI. INTELLIGENCE AROUND THE WORLD U.S.A. A "TREMENDOUS GROWTH IN TERRORISM" TO KEEP THE CIA AFLOAT CIA Director John M. Deutch's 16 January testimony to the House Select Intelligence Committee was a concentrated effort to justify Deutch's cabinet level status as DCI, "Director of Central Intelligence", to flash up "buzz words" to keep the CIA in the money and to reserve an intelligence field that the Pentagon won't take away from it in the near future. The CIA has already lost special operations and human intelligence (HUMINT) operations to the Department of Defense, and is in the process of losing imagery intelligence (IMINT). In Bosnia, the CIA has clearly stated it is concentrating on the "longer term" intelligence topics and analysis, leaving "counting the guns and troops" to the Pentagon's DIA and IMINT. But this orientation contradicts Deutch's speech which declares that: "the CIA will be paying its closest attention to developments in Russia and China because these nations have the greatest military power for the foreseeable future." Wrong Again! You don't have to be a DIA specialist to conclude, after the Russian army's assault of Pervomayskaya where a handful of Chechen rebels held one of the world's supposedly "greatest military powers" at bay for days on end, that the CIA has either missed the boat again or is talking though its hat. As for China, the DIA's recent analysis of China's "intimidating" November 1995 military maneuvers against Tiawan showed that China can only land one division of troops without calling on commercial ships and, in general, "poses little danger to potential foes". Moreover, U.S. intelligence experts, probably including CIA analysts, know quite well that China turned down the purchase of Ukraine's 80 percent completed "Varyag" aircraft carrier and is avoiding rapid military modernization because any war would devastate its economy and result in a strengthened U.S. and Japanese positions in the region. All this means that U.S. intelligence experts -- and hopefully members of the House Select Intelligence Committee -- know that the CIA will not be "paying its closest attention" to military developments in China and Russia and shouldn't justify its budget on that basis. That's where the "buzz words" terrorism, drug trafficking, weapons smuggling, organized crime and religious fanaticism come in, and the traditional "bogeymen": Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Libya. For Iran and Libya, the U.S. continues to have serious trouble getting the rest of the world, and Europe in particular, to back Washington's economic sanctions policy. Iraq is still under United Nation sanctions and North Korea is near famine. None of these would seem to justify a threat to American interests that requires a massive CIA budget. Indeed, in reply to a Committee question, Deutch did not discuss why he expected a surge in terrorism nor designate possible perpetrators. COMMENT - The answer to Deutch's testimony probably has to do with his call for a halt in criticism of the CIA's covert operations arms, on one hand, and the "empty shell" COCOM II, called the "New Forum" (INT, N. 25/14), that American allies forced on Washington at the 19 December meeting in The Hague. Indeed, the New Forum, to set up officially in Vienna on 2 April 1996, will not have a fixed list of military technology that cannot be exported from allied countries and will not have a "blacklist" of countries on which Washington wanted the four "bogeymen" above included. But U.S. officials have promised to "claw back" what they've lost in New Forum negotiations and impose their view which is disconcertingly similar to that put forward by Mr. Deutch before the intelligence committee. In short, Mr. Deutch's speech may be seen more as a declaration of future American foreign policy than a presentation of CIA goals and a justification for the CIA budget. * U.S.A.: SRI REMOTE VIEWING REPORT CIRCULATING Over the past two months, U.S. media has given extensive coverage to CIA "remote viewing" experiments (seeing people, places and events at a distance in space and time) following the CIA's September confirmation of the existence of a 20-year, $20 million research program on the topic. As Daniel Brandt states in his current "NameBase Newsline" on "Mind Control and the Secret State": "remote viewing was an old story, first reported by Jack Anderson himself on 23 April 1984. Other Anderson columns of U.S. and Soviet interest in psychic research date back to 1981." "Remote viewing" projects have Congressional backers, and former CIA director Robert Gates publicly implied that this pressure was responsible for the CIA's original involvement, plus stories that the Russians were doing it, too. The media has consistently cited Stanford Research Institute (SRI) experiments as "scientific support" for the reality of remote viewing. One such purported "declassified" report has been circulating around the Internet. "Intelligence" has obtained a copy. It is titled "Perceptual Augmentation Techniques - Final Report Covering the Period January 1974 through February 1975" supposedly written by Harold E. Puthoff and Russell Targ (Electronics and Bioengineering Laboratory), "approved by Earle Jones" and "approved for release July 1995". Although we have not yet been able to confirm the authenticity of this document, there are several indications that it is genuine. The goal of the program was to evaluate "remote viewing". The Executive Summary says: "The program was divided into two categories of approximately equal effort -- applied research and basic research. The applied research effort explored the operational utility of the above perceptual abilities [remote viewing]. The basic research effort was directed toward identification of the characteristics of individuals possessing such abilities and the determination of neurophysiological correlates and basic mechanisms involved in such functioning." The authors state that: "Our initial work in this area has been reported in the open literature". The program, in practical terms, tried to identify good "remote viewers" and train people to be good "remote viewers", noting that "visiting CIA personnel (...) performed well" and "subjects trained over a one-year period have performed well". The program's four categories of experiments were: A. Long-Distance Remote Viewing; B. Technology Series [resolution capability]; C. Remote Sensing of Internal States of Electronic Equipment; and D. Perturbation of Remote Equipment. The report is supposedly one of three reports declassified by the CIA of which there are seven more of the same period. COMMENT - Specialists contacted by "Intelligence" have all noted that the "scientific" SRI report has no figures anywhere, only descriptive adjectives such as "successful effort", "performed well", "exceptionally accurate description" and "well-developed". One specialist in experimental protocol noted that when experiments were described clearly enough, they were all constructed with leading questions. For example, a "remote viewer" was told to look at a target (geographical coordinates given) and describe it. But when the subject was also told it's a Russian military research and development site (in the isolated northern region east of the Urual Mountains), then anyone can "imagine" a triple barbed wire security fence with drab concrete buildings in an systematic pattern along straight concrete roads which are cracking and flaking from repeated freezes and thaws. But if the subject says (guesses?) there's a multistory building and a large crane and the experimenter asks for more detail, then the subject has been "led" towards development of something perceived to be of interest by the experimenter. At that point, the "experiment" has become a "conversation" or, scientifically speaking, an "open questionnaire protocol", and statistical tests of significance are inapplicable. The authors of the report never justified their "working assumption" that remote viewing "does not lie outside the purview of modern physics" but are inadvertently speaking the truth when they state that "with further work [remote viewing] will yield to analysis and specification". As one critical specialist said, "they have nothing to show scientifically, but they have a captive audience with money to spend on such projects." Earlier this month, the CIA officially recommended the cancellation and declassification of all such projects * For subscription info, write to: intelligence-adi@wanadoo.fr or point your browser to Intelligence online: http://www.blythe.org/Intelligence ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org =================================================================