DIA: the Soviets had a $21 million psychic weapons program
In July 1972 the Defense Intelligence Agency produced a classified assessment titled "Controlled Offensive Behavior USSR," prepared by Captain John D. LaMothe of the Army Medical Intelligence Office and approved by the DIA's Directorate for Scientific and Technical Intelligence. The document concludes that the Soviet Union was operating 20 or more research centers studying what it called biocommunications: telepathic communication, telekinetics, and behavior modification as offensive weapons capabilities. The annual budget for this program was estimated at over 12 million rubles in 1967, with reports placing it as high as $21 million. The primary driver, according to the assessment, was the Soviet military and the KGB. This is not a document about American psychic research. It is the U.S. military formally concluding that the Soviet Union was spending tens of millions of dollars annually on what amounts to a psychic weapons program, and treating that conclusion as a classified national security matter.
// Field Guide
Surviving the Simulation: $8
The government documents suggest the boundaries of physical reality are more negotiable than officially acknowledged. This guide covers what that means practically: how to think about a constructed reality, what the primary source record actually confirms, and what to do with that information.
Get the guide: $8 instant download →CIA-RDP96-00788R001300010001-7, a 177-page classified report, was produced by the Medical Intelligence Office, Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army, and formally approved by the Defense Intelligence Agency's Directorate for Scientific and Technical Intelligence. Its author is Captain John D. LaMothe of the Medical Service Corps. The document carries DIA Task Number T72-01-14, indicating it was a formal commissioned intelligence assessment, not a background paper or speculative memo.
The document was filed in the CIA's STARGATE collection, the same archive that contains the Agency's operational remote viewing program records, the Gateway Process assessment, and the CIA's experiments on Uri Geller. Its presence in the STARGATE archive indicates that the US government's own parallel research program was directly informed by this assessment of Soviet capabilities. The document was declassified in September 2003 and is available at the CIA FOIA reading room.
The assessment states that a 1963 Kremlin edict gave top priority to biological research, which in Soviet usage explicitly included parapsychology. By 1972 the document estimated the Soviets were operating 20 or more centers for the study of parapsychological phenomena. The annual budget for this effort was estimated at over 12 million rubles in 1967, with separate reporting placing it as high as $21 million.
The document identifies the primary institutional driver of this program explicitly: the Soviet military and the KGB. The assessment further notes that in 1965 the Department of Bioinformation of the Scientific and Technical Society of Radio Engineering and Telecommunications was established at the Popov Institute in Moscow, with stated objectives covering physical, biological, and philosophical aspects of bioinformation. The Soviets did not use the word parapsychology to describe their own work. They used the term biocommunications.
The capabilities the DIA assessed the Soviets were pursuing covered three primary areas: telepathic communication, the transmission of information between individuals without conventional sensory channels; telekinetics, the influence of physical systems through mental intention; and behavior modification, the remote influencing of human psychology and action. The document treats all three as legitimate Soviet research priorities pursued with substantial state resources under KGB oversight.
Most documents in the TCR STARGATE collection document American research: the CIA's own remote viewing program, the Uri Geller experiments at Stanford Research Institute, the photon detection experiment. This document is different. It documents what the US government believed the Soviet Union was doing, and what the US military determined that Soviet program meant for national security.
The distinction matters. When the CIA runs its own remote viewing experiments, one interpretation is that the agency was chasing something speculative out of institutional curiosity. When the DIA formally assesses that the Soviet Union is spending $21 million annually on the same type of research under KGB supervision, the framing changes. The US military's conclusion was not that the Soviets were wasting money on pseudoscience. The conclusion was that Soviet biocommunications research represented a potential offensive capability requiring a classified intelligence assessment and a formal response.
The American programs that followed, SCANATE, GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE, SUN STREAK, and ultimately STARGATE, were explicitly developed in response to awareness of the Soviet program. The DIA's 1972 assessment of Soviet capabilities is the document that most directly explains why the United States government spent the next 23 years funding its own classified psychic research program.
The DIA document's conclusion, that the Soviet Union was treating the mind's potential to interact with physical reality as a weapons-development priority, is significant not just as Cold War history but as a statement about what two of the world's most sophisticated intelligence services believed was worth investigating. The US government concluded in 1972 that the Soviets were serious about whether consciousness could affect physical systems at a distance. The US then spent the next two decades funding its own research into the same question. Neither superpower's intelligence service treated these phenomena as obviously impossible. Both treated them as sufficiently plausible to fund, classify, and operationalize.
Read alongside the CIA's MIAS Seminar document describing dimensions outside the time-space world, and the photon detection experiment testing whether psychic sessions emit light, the DIA's Soviet psychotronics assessment completes a picture: three separate US government agencies, across three decades, converged on the same question from different angles. Whether consciousness interacts with physical reality in ways conventional physics does not account for is not a question the primary source record treats as settled. It is a question the record shows both superpowers treated as an open and urgent national security problem.
Related: The CIA document describing dimensions both inside and outside the time-space world →
Related: CIA-funded experiment testing whether psychic sessions physically emit light →
Related: Project STARGATE, the full 23-year classified program this assessment helped create →
Related: CIA officer Kenneth Kress documents the American program from the inside →
Primary document: CIA-RDP96-00788R001300010001-7. "Controlled Offensive Behavior USSR." Captain John D. LaMothe, Army Medical Intelligence Office. Approved by DIA Directorate for Scientific and Technical Intelligence. July 1972. 177 pages. Declassified September 2003.
The Interference begins with a patent. US3951134, filed in 1974, describes a device for remotely monitoring and altering human brain waves without physical contact. The patent is real. The USPTO granted it. The documents on this site are what precedes it.
The fiction begins exactly where the public record stops answering questions.
The Interference Mars book series written by William Ray Brown begins here: williamraybrown.com →
This site costs real money to run. If it's useful to you, you can help keep it going →