KGB

The Committee for State Security (KGB) was established in 1954 as a state committee attached to the Soviet Council of Ministers, with foreign intelligence, counterintelligence and internal security functions; Mikhail Gorbachev signed a decree abolishing it on October 24, 1991.¹ In the files of the United States Army, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and SRI International, it appears almost entirely in connection with Soviet parapsychology, which the Americans called psychoenergetics, borrowing, as one Army paper put it, "a Soviet term."²

The 1972 Army medical intelligence report

The report Controlled Offensive Behavior - USSR (document ST-CS-01-169-72, July 1972), prepared by the Medical Intelligence Office of the Army Surgeon General with Captain John LaMothe as author and issued as a Defense Intelligence Agency document, states that "the major impetus behind the Soviet drive to harness the possible capabilities of telepathic communication, telekinetics, and bionics are said to come from the Soviet military and the KGB." It adds that the USSR was reported to have twenty or more centers for the study of parapsychological phenomena, with an annual budget estimated in 1967 at over 12 million rubles (13 million dollars) and "reported to be as high as 21 million." In its survey of the literature the report cites the Czechoslovak parapsychologist Milan Ryzl as reporting that secret psi research associated with state security and defense was going on in the USSR, and that "Communist state authorities, the military and the KGB display an unusual, disproportionate interest in parapsychology." The same report discusses the use of psychiatric diagnosis against dissidents, naming the KGB as the agency that performs "the search, arrest, and initial investigation" before medical "experts" supply diagnoses.³

Naumov, Stern and Toth

A DIA study of September 1975 (DST-1810S-387-75) on Soviet and Czechoslovak parapsychology records the 1975 prosecution of Eduard Naumov. Convicted of taking fees for lectures without permission and sentenced to two years in a camp, he was tried while the club's director and an assistant were certified schizophrenic and sent to the Serbsky Institute, whose director, Andrei Snezhnevsky, testified at the trial that parapsychology was a pseudoscience. The study quotes the Moscow physicist Lev Regelson as saying that Naumov's offense was twofold: that despite "reiterated warnings from the KGB he had 'maintained free, personal, human contacts with foreign scholars.'"⁴ On March 30, 1976 KGB chairman Yuri Andropov reported to Leonid Brezhnev on the committee's work in 1975, listing about 20,000 persons given "prophylactic work," more than 25 "active participants of Zionist expressions" sent out of the country, and the prevention of the "creation of groups" by scholars and scientists from the Academy of Sciences institutes of history, philosophy, sociology and economics.⁵

On June 19, 1977 The New York Times reported from Paris that the emigre physicist August Stern, son of the imprisoned endocrinologist Mikhail Stern, said he had spent three years in the late 1960s in a secret Siberian laboratory seeking a physical basis for psychic energy, and that before leaving the Soviet Union two years earlier he was told that an even more secret laboratory had been set up in Moscow "under the direction of the K.G.B." The same article reported that Robert C. Toth, a Los Angeles Times correspondent, had been interrogated that week in Moscow by the KGB and accused of receiving "state secrets" about parapsychology; a 25-page document on parapsychology had been handed to him on the street just before he was seized, and he was allowed to leave after protests by the United States government. Some diplomats cited by the Times thought the incident had "the earmarks of an entrapment," and a Washington official was quoted as saying that the intelligence community knew of Soviet parapsychology research but did not believe the Russians had made any unusual discoveries.⁶

The DIA's 1983 account of Soviet organization

A January 1983 DIA report on Project Grill Flame, written with Hal Puthoff and Edwin May of SRI, states that in 1975 a high-level commission under the vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences was officially established to review psychoenergetics research, and that after a three-year review its recommendations produced "an integrated approach." The report says a centralized coordinating and review group included several Ministry of Defense representatives, a member of SKB Vympel (the antiballistic missile design bureau) and "at least one laboratory leader who is believed to be KGB affiliated," with backing from Communist Party officials "probably at the Council of Ministers level," and was closely associated with a new Bioelectronics Laboratory that screened people across the USSR "who can perform well on psi tasks." It concludes that applications-oriented research had elicited "the backing and support of the MOD, KGB, and certain high-level officials in the Communist Party," and that there was "evidence of a strong interest in applying ESP/remote viewing phenomena in accessing secure data, in information transmission (i.e., long distance communication), and in locating lost or hidden material or people."⁷

Army papers of the period repeat the same framing without a source: an Army briefing script says the Soviet effort was "believed to be controlled by the KGB and military," and a Grill Flame information paper states that Soviet research and development in the field "is primarily controlled and funded by the KGB and military."⁸⁹

A CIA Office of Scientific and Weapons Research memorandum of September 21, 1995, written after the Stargate program passed from the DIA to the CIA "at the direction of Congress," states that "a CIA assessment of 1977 showed that the Soviets at that time had a substantial parapsychology program whose existence was classified and whose funding and control resided largely with the Ministry of Defense and possibly the KGB," that the government of the USSR "apparently was unable to reap any benefits of consequence from its substantial investment," and that a Congressionally directed assessment of Russian parapsychology research completed that month "provides evidence of on-going research, as well as military sponsorship of at least some of the work."¹⁰

The KGB in the American tests

An analyst at the CIA reviewing an SRI remote viewing experiment on a Soviet site designated URDF-3 in 1974 found the viewer's sketch of a rail-mounted gantry crane "inconceivable" unless he had actually seen it through remote viewing "or he was informed of what to draw by someone knowledgeable of URDF-3," and wrote: "I only mention this second possibility because the experiment was not controlled to discount the possibility that [the viewer] could talk to other people, such as the Disinformation Section of the KGB. That may sound ridiculous to the reader, but I have to consider all possibilities."¹¹

The Army's INSCOM project list for the program records, among three projects used on March 31, 1983 to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush, Project 8034, described as a "KGB agent."¹² Jim Schnabel's Remote Viewers describes a case in which the CIA counterintelligence officer Jim Morris sought help from the Grill Flame viewers on a KGB "illegal" arrested in South Africa, and says that Ken Bell and Joe McMoneagle viewed the man's use of a hidden pocket calculator to decode messages and a fishing pole to retrieve dead-drop packages. Schnabel also wrote that Uri Geller claimed to have worked for the CIA's Mexico City station against local Soviet case officers and their dead drops, and attempted to persuade Mexican officials to reduce the KGB presence, and that the KGB was reported to have funded and directed the Moscow laboratory of I. M. Kogan.¹³