Parapsychology in Intelligence: a personal review and conclusions
In 1977, CIA Project Officer Kenneth A. Kress wrote this account for Studies in Intelligence: the Agency's classified internal journal, read only by cleared personnel. He wrote it in his own name. He describes years of firsthand involvement: testing subjects who apparently moved magnetometer readings with their minds, running remote viewing operations against Soviet facilities, and watching a psychic correctly identify a covert government installation by geographic coordinates alone. The document was declassified in 1996 and filed in the CIA STARGATE collection. It is the most direct primary source account of a CIA officer taking ESP seriously as a national security question. This is the first full searchable HTML transcription.
Kenneth A. Kress was a CIA Project Officer with a physics background, assigned to the Office of Technical Service. He became the project officer for the Agency's parapsychology research program in October 1972 and remained in that role through its operational phase. He was a firsthand participant in, not an observer of, the events he describes.
The document was originally written in 1977 for Studies in Intelligence, the CIA's classified internal publication distributed to senior Agency personnel. It was not written for public release or congressional oversight. It was written for the Agency's own institutional record, which is what makes it unusual. Kress is writing to colleagues, not defending a program to skeptics. The tone is candid throughout.
The document was declassified in 1996 as part of the STARGATE collection release ordered by Congress. It was later published with a new postscript in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 1999. The version in the CIA FOIA reading room is the NSA-filed copy, document number NSA-RDP96X00790R000100010031-3, released December 1, 2011.
Kress traces CIA involvement in parapsychology from 1961, when the chief of the Technical Services Division became interested in ESP claims and commissioned a review from Oxford's Parapsychological Laboratory under Project ULTRA, through the early 1970s SRI program and into the first operational intelligence collection attempts using psychic subjects.
The centerpiece is the account of subject Pat Price, a former California police commissioner recruited by SRI physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff. Kress describes giving Price only the geographic coordinates of the Semipalatinsk URDF-3 Soviet research facility and receiving back a drawing of a large crane that two independent analysts, including a nuclear analyst at Los Alamos, assessed as accurate. Price also, without prompting, correctly identified the code name of a separate government installation that Kress had not disclosed.
Kress then describes the embassy coderoom experiments: Price was given exterior photographs and geographic coordinates of two foreign embassies and asked to locate their coderooms by remote viewing. In both cases he correctly identified the locations. The operations officer who evaluated the results wrote that the technique "offers definite operational possibilities." Price died of a heart attack shortly after, and the program stopped.
The 1999 postscript adds a detail not in the original: the FBI later informed Kress that Price had been debriefing a private organization after every CIA session, disclosing intelligence objectives, meeting locations, and the names of everyone present, in violation of the secrecy agreement he had signed.
Kress is direct about this. It was not a single decision, it was institutional erosion. The program was caught between the rigor demands of ORD scientists who wanted controlled experiments before drawing conclusions and the operational demands of OTS management who wanted results that could be used. Neither side got what they needed. New directors with no background in the subject repeatedly cycled through. The Watergate investigation created institutional sensitivity around any unusual activities. The program that Kress describes as producing "tantalizing but incomplete data" was never given the long-term basic research mandate he believed it required.
His conclusion in 1977: "As it relates to intelligence, sufficient understanding and assessment of parapsychology has not been achieved." Not debunked. Not confirmed. Unfinished.
Complete word-for-word transcription of Kress's original 1977 report and his 1999 postscript. Includes the magnetometer experiment, the URDF-3 remote viewing operation, the embassy coderoom tests, the Vietnam point men account, and the postscript on Price's unauthorized debriefings. First full searchable HTML transcription.
Document: "Parapsychology in Intelligence: A Personal Review and Conclusions": Kenneth A. Kress, CIA
Original publication: Studies in Intelligence, Winter 1977 (classified). Declassified 1996.
Document number: NSA-RDP96X00790R000100010031-3. Released 2011/12/01.
Collection: CIA STARGATE / NSA FOIA
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.
What precedes that patent is a documented institutional record. In 1960, the CIA funded MKUltra Subproject 119 at Texas Christian University. The stated objective included techniques of activation of the human organism by remote electronic means. The contractor was unwitting. The budget was $6,370. Sidney Gottlieb signed off. In 1952, an ARTICHOKE field team produced total amnesia in two overseas subjects held in a guarded safehouse with eyes taped shut in transit. Their dispositions after the operation were outside the team's responsibility. In 1963, the CIA Inspector General recommended termination of unwitting testing on American citizens. The program ran for another decade. In 1983, a U.S. Army Intelligence report filed in the CIA's STARGATE collection treated the brain as an electromagnetic organ that could be entrained to external frequencies. Not as theory. As established fact.
The Colonial Authority in The Interference is what that timeline produces if you follow it forward rather than stop at the declassified record. The mesh program James Harlan carries inside his skull is built on the physics in these documents. The fiction begins exactly where the public record stops answering questions.