“This story is about what happened when a small group of men – highly placed within the United States military, the government and the intelligence services – began believing in very strange things.”

Such is the cover blurb for ‘The Men Who Stare At Goats,’ the companion book to Jon Ronson’s fascinating, amusing and often disturbing Channel 4 series ‘The Crazy Rulers Of The World,’ and also the follow up to 2001’s excellent ‘Them: Adventures With Extremists.’ Both books serve as detailed but easily digestible beginners’ guides to various forms of extreme paranoia in late 20th/early 21st century America (and by extension, in cultures that either affiliate with or define themselves in opposition to the US). Them: Adventures With Extremists “Obviously they’re both set in America,” Ronson remarks as he pours us both a cup of coffee in the bar of the Merrion Hotel near the end of an afternoon’s press duties, “but I’m wondering if it’s the dark underbelly of human nature.” Them: Adventures With Extremists The Cardiff born author and documentary-maker is a diminutive character swaddled in a green parka, an open face under a shock of red hair, much younger looking than his 37 years. More to the point, he’s disarming and quite warm. That he should’ve spent the best part of the last decade functioning as a professional freak magnet – spending extended periods of time with fundamentalists, white militia types and paranoiacs of every stripe – seems incongruous, but perhaps no more so than those mild mannered crime writers or horror novelists who in person seem studious and polite, but in private splatter all manner of atrocities on the page.

“Maybe it’s a series of books about neuroses and paranoia in all its forms,” he continues. “In the first book I’m a bit of a neurotic character in it, but I’ve been writing loads lately about my family life, everyday life, that sort of bubble of irrational thought that dictates the characters in these two books. Nobody’s immune to it in a way. Don’t you think like, you have one thought and it spirals into another thought and suddenly you’ve gotten to a completely irrational place, but the way you got there seemed totally rational?”

Many of Ronson’s pronouncements end in a question that draws the interviewer out of formal remove and into the position of participant in a college cafeteria bull session. Yet despite having the kind of mind that simultaneously shoots off on multiple tangents, Ronson the writer is very good at rendering complex case histories and wacko ideologies in clear, simple language, distilling his research into extremely readable narratives.

“People have accused me in the second book of it not being exhaustive enough,” he considers. “I did this reading the other night in Cambridge and there was a don there – well he looked like a don with his glasses and his gown and tweed – and he was saying, ‘You didn’t put in all the stuff about the British in Northern Ireland,’ and I sort of said I wanted the second book to be a sort of chamber piece, this one small story.”

This “one small story” is the kind that raises serious questions about the mental stability of people in the higher echelons of the military-industrial complex. ‘The Men Who Stare At Goats’ documents how a whole slew of esoteric notions – New Age doctrines, UFOlogy, quasi sci-fi ideas normally treated as the preserve of black helicopter-spotting nut jobs – found their way into military think-tanks investigating new methods of psychic warfare.

It might also be regarded as a secret history of American black ops, from the Cold War to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, from Waco to Abu Ghraib, featuring some remarkable dramatis personae: high-ranking army officers and tie-dyed lateral thinkers, hard-bitten war veterans and psychic freelance operatives courted by the military in the post-Vietnam hangover, many of whom were discharged in the 1980s, only to be recalled to service (or ‘reactivated’), in the wake of 9/11 and the War On Terror.

We’re talking about people like retired Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon, now resident on an eco-homestead in Hawaii, the author of the ‘First Earth Battalion Manual,’ which was, depending on how you look at it, a visionary template for a new kind of non-lethal warfare for the 21st century, or a load of codswallop cribbed from notions about mind control and can-you-feel-the-force-Luke Warrior Monk psychobabble. Or Major Ed Dames, a decorated army officer and ‘psychic spy’, who from 1995 onwards made a name for himself appearing on Art Bell’s Nevada based syndicated radio show predicting everything from pregnant Martians living underground in the desert to crop-destroying interstellar fungi to President Clinton being hit by lightning on the golf course. We’re talking about the existence of modules such as the wonderfully named Killology Research Group and top-secret military units (so secret they were denied access to the military’s coffee budget and forced to procure their own) sequestered in sheds “trying to be psychic” and attempting to kill goats by simply staring at them.

We’re talking about the US army trying to torture information from Iraqi prisoners by playing Metallica and Barney The Dinosaur records at high volume, ad nauseum. We’re talking about how a hoax photograph of a vessel tailing the Hale Bopp comet led to the mass suicides of the Heaven’s Gate cult. Even Uri Geller gets his ubiquitous mug in there somewhere.

And that’s just scratching the surface. Ronson sums up the thrust of ‘The Men Who Stare At Goats’ in its closing chapter:

“I suppose this has been a book about the changing relationship between Jim Channon’s ideas and the army at large… Perhaps the story is this: in the late 1970s Jim, traumatised from Vietnam, sought solace in the emerging human potential movement of California. He took his ideas back into the army and they struck a chord with the top brass who had never before seen themselves as New Age, but in their post Vietnam funk it all made sense to them. But then, over the decades that followed, the army, being what it is, recovered its strength and saw that some of the ideas contained within Jim’s manual could be used to shatter people rather than heal them. Those are the ideas that live on in the War On Terror.”

The military and the counter-culture have always corresponded in cryptic ways, be it army technology birthing the Internet, or impoverished students volunteering for acid experiments, or the MK-ULTRA CIA operations in which their own operatives were covertly dosed in order to see how they held up under interrogation.

One of the more intriguing sub-plots in ‘The Men Who Stare At Goats’ reads like something concocted by a caffeine-frazzled screenwriter working under the influence of ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ and ‘Jacob’s Ladder.’ It concerns a Maryland born man called Eric Olson. On a November morning in 1953, the nine year old Olson was woken and told that his father Frank, a civilian scientist working with chemicals at a nearby military base, had fallen or jumped out of a New York skyscraper window in a disorientated state and died.

Over the following years, Olson’s mother refused discuss her husband’s death in any detail, other than to speak of one night when he confided in her that he’d made a terrible mistake and was quitting his job to become a dentist. Then, in June 1975, the Washington Post ran a story about a civilian employee of the Department of the Army being given LSD as part of an MK-ULTRA experiment, and jumping ten floors to his death less than a week later following a meeting with CIA personnel.

It was, of course, Eric’s father. The revelations had come to light through the efforts of the Rockefeller Commission, set up to investigate CIA misdeeds in the aftermath of Watergate. The Olsons were invited to the Oval Office and personally given an apology by President Ford. But it didn’t end there. Eric Olson learned, through the assistant night manager at the hotel in which his father was staying, that shortly after Frank’s death the telephone switchboard operator put a call through to his room. The man who took the call said, ‘Well, he’s gone.’ The man who made the call said, ‘That’s too bad.’ Then they both hung up.

Continuing his investigations, Eric learned that his father had not reacted badly to the LSD at all, but had confided to friends that he found the incident rather funny. The plot thickened even further when he came to understand that his father was not in fact a civilian, but working for a CIA programme called Artichoke, which specialised in inventing brutal, violent and often fatal methods of interrogating people, including the administration and withholding of heroin. Frank Olson had been in Europe with the CIA, and was involved in experiments on ‘expendables’ (captured Russian agents and ex-Nazis). Eric believed his father witnessed and was possibly even directly involved in something so horrific it left him with no moral option but to leave his job. And soon after that, he was dead.

According to Ronson, what bothered Eric Olson most was that the press found the story of the CIA dosing his father with LSD more titillating than the notion that they might have killed him.

“In fact,” says Ronson, “he says that our cynicism is a thin veil beyond which we’re not cynical at all.”

The haunting part of the Frank Olson story is we never find out what exactly he witnessed in Europe that drove him to leave the CIA and put himself in danger.

“And Eric won’t really confront that,” Ronson nods. “The funny thing is, every word of Eric’s story might be absolutely true, but for Eric’s story to work, his father has to be a hero who was going to spill the beans so they pushed him out the window. And for the story to work for Eric, his father had to be slightly separate from whatever grotesque acts were going on, maybe he was brought in as an expert in chemical warfare, so he was almost like an advisor to the torture as opposed to an actual torturer. Eric could be absolutely right, certainly the story that he has created for himself is a lot more potent than the story the CIA put out. For the CIA story to work, I mean, when do you know of anybody who’s taken LSD and thought they could fly or had such a bad trip that they tried to kill themselves? Even at the depths of the madness you can still step back and say, ‘It’s the LSD that’s doing it.’ So Eric is onto something. What it was his father was involved in, it certainly seems to be some kind of grotesque version of the First Earth Battalion, some kind of think-tank.”

Still, even those of us who grew up on a diet of sci-fi comics, conspiracy thrillers and rock music would have difficulty imagining an institution like the US military plumbing such sources, psychic spies modelling themselves after Jedi Knights and so on. The idea that outré notions cooked up by acid-freaks and slackers could trickle up into the higher echelons…

“Yeah-yeah-yeah,” Ronson exclaims, “and then trickle back down to fuck us over. And that they, like us, were fans of 2000AD and Star Trek. They were getting ideas from sci-fi. They’re more likely to have gotten it from the TV than ancient history. I mean, one day I would love to see those two books out in one book ’cos I really think it’s like the journey’s continuing, ’cos when you think about it, this is one of the most whacked-out conspiracy theories, that there would be this occultist unit of mind control freaks at the highest places in intelligence who are kind of harnessing the dark powers of Satan in order to control us. And I think the second book shows that it’s basically true, but it’s true in this utterly human, buffoonish, rather weirdly innocuous way and manifests itself in people bonking their noses on walls.”

Ah yes, that would be a reference to the wonderfully named Major General Albert Stubblebine III, to whom Ronson dedicated the book. In the early 1980s Stubblebine was the US army’s chief of intelligence, a man driven with an evangelical zeal to introduce ideas about psychic healing, spoon bending, walking through walls, out of body experiences and goat-heart-stopping into the army’s research programmes. Here was a character straight out of Kubrick’s ‘Dr Strangelove.’

The resemblance was not lost on Ronson. By coincidence, Tony Frewen, Stanley Kubrick’s assistant since the mid ’60s, phoned Ronson to request a copy of his radio documentary ‘Hotel Auschwitz’ back in 1996. Last year, Frewen returned the favour and allowed Ronson to go through the Kubrick estate’s archives, an experience he wrote about for The Guardian.

“The reason why I went through the archive,” Ronson says, “was ’cos I’d just started this book, and I wondered were there clues in there. That’s why I phoned Tony Frewen really to begin with. I said, ‘I bet you would have collected some amazing stuff for ‘Dr Strangelove,’ and he said, ‘Well come and have a look.”

Given that the legendary director was such a meticulous researcher, one imagines he must have gathered all kinds of skewed intelligence on Cold War psy-ops techniques, and that the real life counterparts of George C Scott and Peter Sellers were in there somewhere among the sealed boxes and filing cards. So did Ronson find anything?

“No, because almost all of the stuff really begins with 2001. I don’t know what happened to the (other) stuff, they might have lost it. From about ’69 onwards everything was unbelievably meticulously stuck in boxes and filed away, but ‘Strangelove’ was just a bit too early.”

Did he meet Christiane Kubrick?

“Yeah, she was sweet. It’s a funny old place, the Kubrick house. There are all these totally disparate characters. She’s a kind of hippy, would never harm a fly, Tony’s reminds me a bit of me, slightly paranoid, tenacious, and then we had Jan (Harlan, Kubrick’s brother in law and executive producer), who’s incredibly stringent, and I sort of think if you stuck all these people in one person you’d get Kubrick, so I sort of feel as if I met him because different aspects of his character were embodied by all the people still living in the house.”

‘Strangelove’ is not the only Kubrick opus invoked in ‘The Men Who Stare At Goats.’ When Ronson interviewed a soldier who worked the night shift at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in the autumn of 2003, the man – who preferred to remain anonymous as he’d already been threatened with court martial for talking to the press – likened the place to The Overlook Hotel from ‘The Shining,’ believing that the building had its own malevolent presence dating back to the acid baths, the women being raped by dogs and various other atrocities perpetrated under Saddam Hussein. Speaking about the abuses committed by the US jarheads in the prison, the man said, “It was like the building wanted to be back in business.”

For his part, Ronson proposes that Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay were not just holding pens for suspected terrorists and enemies of the state, but that they also served as experimental interrogation laboratories, and that the detainees provided their captors with an opportunity to try out decades of untested psy-ops techniques stockpiled since the end of the Cold War, with Barney The Dinosaur and Metallica being just the tip of the iceberg.

“There’s a sort of question hanging over the book in the funny stories,” he remarks. “Like the Barney torture, are they deliberately…”

Leaked?

“Yeah, leaked. Because they’re funny stories.”

And thus deflect attention from the more sinister stuff. Ronson harbours serious doubts that the photographs of the sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners published by newspapers in April last year were the unauthorised sadistic acts of renegade individuals. Private Lynndie England, the 21-year-old US reservist who became the poster girl for the scandal, may have been portrayed by the media as a ‘Deliverance’ style cracker, but the author reckons the images were way too sophisticated to be the work of rogue rednecks.

“It seemed so complex,” he says, “ those photographs are so whacked out, they’re so complicated, they look like tableaux that have been deliberately designed to become these incredibly powerful photographs.”

Certainly, the pictures of human pyramids and the hooded figure standing on a box with electrodes attached to his limbs, these looked like stills from a surrealist horror movie, halfway between ‘Ringu’ and ‘Un Chien Andalou.’ One can only speculate as to the impact of such images on a prisoner deprived of sleep and blasted with loud music for days on end.

“It would drive you insane,” Ronson says. “It was a psy-op product, it must have been. And you wonder if it’s ever going to be officially recognised as such. None of the people charged have said ‘I’m pleading not guilty because I was ordered to do this.’ I think Lynndie England’s main trial is coming up, so it may still all come out, my theory on this may still be officially vindicated. And you walk the path backwards and that takes you to the New Age movement of the 80s, it’s kind of incredible.”

Ronson also detects earlier antecedents of these practices in the way the FBI approached the sieges at Ruby Ridge in Idaho and Waco, Texas. The Ruby Ridge incident was documented in the ‘Running Through Cornfields’ episode in ‘Them,’ which described how FBI agents accidentally murdered survivalist Randy Weaver’s wife Vicki and son Sammy in a bungled attempt to take him in on minor firearms violations. The Weaver case not only generated spectacularly bad press for the Feds, it also galvanised and united hitherto disparate back-to-the-landers, Aryan Nations types, anti-ZOG (Zionist Organised Government) militia men and all manner of folk gone off-the-grid.

“They were trying out all these psychological techniques at Ruby Ridge,” Ronson says.

“They were saying, ‘Vicki, Vicki, tell Randy to pick up the phone,’ when they knew Vicki was dead. The last time I saw Randy was drunk in a bar, and he started sort of telling me, ‘It’s my fault, let them take away all the shit, it’s my fault, I’m the one who armed the kids, I’m the one who didn’t give up when the Feds told me to go that court hearing.’”

But as some of the published transcripts of exchanges between FBI negotiators and David Koresh attest, the siege of the Branch Davidian Church at Waco was an even worse sham.

“I’m sure there’s no question that Waco was an experiment in interrogation,” says Ronson, “and a publicity stunt because of Ruby Ridge. They could’ve picked Koresh up in town whenever they wanted. So the first thing that happens is they think, ‘Okay we’re getting really bad publicity over Ruby Ridge; what’s a better publicity stunt than… nobody likes a child-molesting, gun-toting militant cult.’ So that was the first fuck-up. The second fuck-up is, you have these people in a siege situation and suddenly they start treating them as laboratory rats. And I’m not even sure how conscious they are of it, but that’s what they did.

“I’m sure the way to understand Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo is to look at Waco,” he concludes. “Ruby Ridge I reckon was on a smaller scale, and Guantanamo Bay, that’s all it is, I’m sure of that. This casserole of ideas. And I wanted to show how these sort of slapstick ideas made on high become concrete and result in human rights abuses.”

One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.