Top Ten Reason To NOT Apply To the C.I.A.

When I was an undergraduate at UT in 1982 my physics Professor, Rory Coker, asserted that hypnosis did not exist. He claimed it was all a fraud, and that anyone claiming it existed was a crook.

That's how absurd a postion science had staked out in its continuing struggle to explain away common, potentially-documentable phenomena which they have no explaination for.

The disciplines of psychology and psychiatry therefore never arrived at a usable model of the mind that could explain ordinary experiences such as dreams, hypnosis or suggestability, much less other phenomena which might be experienced by some individuals but not others, such as precognition or clairvoyance.

But for the intelligence officers who lived in the real world, where they experienced or witnessed such things, they had to arrive at a more accurate understanding.

In the early 1950s, when it was realized that the battleground in the struggle against communism would be for beliefs and ideas, it was vital that a genuine understanding of human behavor be gained. The last thing anyone in government wanted was for our adversaries to gain some esosteric knowledge in influencing beliefs that we were ignorant of.

As such a lot of mistakes were made, as in many areas of intelligence work early on. However, by the early 1970s CIA had funded genuine work with real scientists which produced accurate knowledge of the mind. And all of this work was, and is, largely outside the disciplines of psychology and psychiatry. This contract work was performed largely by physicists.

Two resources I recommend for a window into this are:

www.espresearch.com

www.mindmotivations.com

This is one area where CIA got it right, because the people involved with it were on the analytic side of the agency, not the operational side.

My partner and I did so well on the test, we were promoted directly to level GL-G20. Great pay and benefits with lots of travel.

Here we are in Russia back during the cold war.

Actually if you had performed exceptionally on the tests you would have been asked to mentally "view" anything they asked you to in the U.S.S.R., but without you leaving the lab room in California LOL! Furthermore you would have not been offered anymore compensation, and your service record would have shown little or nothing for your efforts [that's science for you].

I know someone who used to be at Rand in Santa Monica who used hypnosis to remedy his accute myopia. It worked, and he's had near perfect vision ever since. He's a well-known person today in the field of internet protocal development, and he knows I run this service. So if anyone wants to find out who he is PM me and I will provide name for verification.

I have to caution though, hynotists and "psychics" and such used in government work had to go through genuine testing that your local "hypnotherapist" or "fortune-teller" may not have, so you may not get the same performance government did. It's sort of like what we sort through here - a lot of people making offers of real service out there and just a few who deliver, but when they do it's a phenomenon.

This thread sounds like the movie "Men who stare at Goats".

At a job fair during the college years I talked to a CIA recruiter and asked what qualifications they wanted, 4.0 GPA, and pay, shit, I laughed and walked off.

My point exactly.

Two of the major figures in CIA mental abilities research live in Austin. One is laser physicist Hal Putoff, who's a Professor in the Physics Department at UT....the same Physics Department which in 1982 housed Dr. Rory Coker, who told me even hypnosis was a fraud. I guess they've come a long way.

The second is Paul Smith, who recieved his Phd from the Department of Philosophy at UT a short time ago. Smith worked in the Military Intelligence version of the research, which is what relates to the "Men Who Star At Goats" farce. That film was based on the life of a particular officer [not Gen. Stubblebein but someone else] who had other officers chanting and meditating and so forth. He was always advocating for peaceful missions the military could do, such as his recent call for them to be deployed to the Gulf to clean up the oil spill.

I have to say that the military culture was not condusive to this kind of research, and they made a mess of it. The culture of the military is by nature authoritarian, absolutist, even aggressive. They are not geared for discovering information for information itself. They always will bend any resource to their fundamental mission, which is killing ordinary human beings at the order of their Commander-In-Chief [who is usually someone with a sick mind].

I think the point being made is to add a dose of reality about the mysterious CIA. I'm sure their KGB counterparts do the same thing.

As best as I can tell CIA's work in mental abilities was a response to reports that Soviet intel had been focusing on it and getting results.

The KGB was more successful in recruiting Americans to spy for them than American intelligence was in getting Soviets to spy for the U.S. There were several reasons for this.

1. After the Soviets took over the Russian empire no one in the west, either in media or acedemics, bothered to report on the mass genocides of tens of millions of ordinary people slaughtered by the Soviets during their rule. Their mass slaughters were more eggregous than what the Nazis did, even in the much-condemed "Holocost." Nor did they report on the massive poverty and total absence of civil protections in all communist societies.

2. Without knowing any better many well-meaning reformers everywhere in the world latched onto Marxism as a means to overcome the depradations of capitalism.

3. American counter-intelligence was in the hands of the F.B.I., hardly a spy agency. When CIA began reading Soviet codes in the 1950s revealing their spy networks in the US, CIA didn't trust the FBI enough to share much of the information.

4. In the 1960s and 1970s CIA's counter-intelligence Chief, James Angleton, became so inconfident of his own abilities to distinguish anyone spying for the US from double-agents, that he threw in the towel and influenced CIA to stop recruitment of any spies at all.

5. Influencing Angleton's thinking was the real situation in the USSR that the penalties for being caught spying, and the near total control of the society, were such that it was almost too hard of a target to work.

6. In contrast, the open societies of the west and their prohibitions against torture made the west a permissive environment for communist agents. In fact communist agents usually were not skilled enough to even recruit anyone. All they had to do was handle westerners who walked in off the streets and volunteered to be spies for them, either for ideological reasons or for money.

Back to the failings of the military psi efforts....

In CIA it was realized that very few people possessed demonsterable abilities, and they were recruited and used. But the military's reluctance to use anyone who was not military personnel caused them to only use servicemen that they could find. When they couldn't find such people they twisted their description of the phenomena to portray that "with the proper training anyone can be taught to use their innate psychic abilities."

They spent all their money and time trying to prove this meritless idea, and today there are officers from that program who have become millionaires [Major Ed Dames] conning people into believing that they can win the lottery by developing such "innate abilities."

The work done in RV and other such noetics was actually started by the us in a an effort to create disinformation, and cause a financial black hole by having the USSR chase after "bogus" research.

The problem wasn't that "few" people demonstrated abilities, it was the fact that "few" people got consistant, remarkably accurate results.

It wasn't until the russians started getting verifiable results, that in shock, the US decided, to pursue the same avenue of research. Schmidt and Jahn had over 25,000 clinical trials that showed very incredible results.

Puthoff with Russell Targ and a team of Pat Price, noted Ingo Swann. The most noted accurate description of Semipalatinsk. However, the best was Pat Price whose details of Palo Alto which transcended temporal information at the time.

There were a total of 2 Million trials, 309 distinct studies, and 50,000 participants. The odds against were 10^18 to 1. Very very telling.

The real "holocaust" was Stalin. He executed some 23Million people during the '30s. Compare that to Hitler's regime of 12Million. Its somewhat appalling to consider that these details are somewhat less politicized than the Holocaust victims. Not to say that wasn't tragic, but shouldn't we also be outraged by Stalin also ?

This entire thread reminds me of the time Candyman had to turn down the Pope job.

Thank you Winemaker for filling in these details.

My consideration of Hitler vs. Stalin is that Stalin was a criminal masquerading as a zealous revolutionary, while Hilter was a zealous revolutionary portrayed by the allies as a criminal. Both are malevolant, but there is a difference in their motives.

Let me just say one more thing about Angleton, because today he's so reviled. He was very close to several British MI-6 officers who he learned were actually spying for the Russians, and he also knew they had networks in the U.S. that he couldn't find. This situation drove him crazy. When you trust someone completely, and it turns out they've been lying to you the whole time, it makes it impossible to trust anyone else. That's when it's time to quit. In the 1990s it was revealed that all thirty-plus Cuban agents working for CIA were double-agents. And later it was learned that many East German and others were also. It's just the nature of the game that you can't trust your agents, but that doesn't mean that you stop recruiting them, or the game's over and you've lost.

Winemaker,

What I was told was that Pat Price was the star performer in the initial SRI team of Price, Hammit and Swann. I was also told that Price dropped dead of sudden heart failure in the cafeteria there, and that it may have been because someone dropped a tablet into his coffee. Do you know anything about this story?

Only anecdotally. He died in Las Vegas. I suspect Pearlman has more information than what was shared. His autopsy report seems to suggest cynanide or strychnine poisoning. Would love to have a 10 min re-up on SCI to review

I think a tox screen would have shown either of those two substances, and they are not among those used in CA. I asked someone who should know and he says that it was definitely sudden heart failure, and that it could have been one of several substances untraceable in a screen which were used at the time. I'm going to look into this further because he also says there were witnesses who claim they saw someone drop something in his coffee.