106 lines
11 KiB
Markdown
106 lines
11 KiB
Markdown
---
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aliases:
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- United States Army
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- U.S. Army
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- US Army
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- Army
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created: 2025-07-22
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updated: 2026-10-05
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title: U.S. Army
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tags:
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- Organization
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- Government
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- USA
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- Military
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- StargateProject
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- INSCOM
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- GrillFlame
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- FortMeade
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- FortDetrick
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- DarkAllianceInvestigation
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- ContrasNicaragua
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description: The U.S. Army, parent service of the INSCOM remote viewing unit at Fort Meade and of the medical research command that funded SRI's psychoenergetics program from 1985, and the service whose schools and attaches appear in the Nicaraguan Contra and Dimona records.
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category: "U.S. Government"
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summary: "Parent service of the INSCOM remote viewing unit at Fort Meade and of the Surgeon General's research command that paid for SRI's psychoenergetics work from 1985, named in the Contra and Dimona records."
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relations:
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- type: funded
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with: "[[Stanford Research Institute]]"
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start: 1985
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end: 1990
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role: "Surgeon General's research office funded a five-year psychoenergetics program through the Army Medical Research and Development Command, contract DAMD17-85-C-5130"
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fn: 8
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- type: funded
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with: "[[Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity]]"
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start: 1978
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end: 1980
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role: "AMSAA contracted SRI to remote view field tests at Hunter-Liggett Military Reservation ($230,000 by the Defense Intelligence Agency's account)"
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fn: 4
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- type: participant_in
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with: "[[Stargate Project]]"
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start: 1977
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end: 1995
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role: "host service of the Gondola Wish, Grill Flame and Center Lane unit at Fort Meade, and party to a 1995 memorandum of understanding with the Central Intelligence Agency on the transfer"
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fn: 10
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---
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The [[U.S. Army]] is the [[Department of Defense]]'s ground service. The pages of this vault touch it at four points: the remote viewing unit it housed at [[Fort Meade]] and the Surgeon General's research command that paid for the [[Stanford Research Institute]] program; the [[Nicaraguan National Guard]] officers that [[Anastasio Somoza]] said its schools had trained; the military attache who photographed [[Dimona]] in the 1960s; and the contracts it gave [[Science Applications International Corporation]].
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### Gondola Wish, Grill Flame and Center Lane
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[[Jim Schnabel]] wrote that the Army's [[United States Army Intelligence and Security Command]] (INSCOM), formed in 1977 from the Army Intelligence Agency and the [[Army Security Agency]], took in a small Systems Exploitation Detachment at Fort Meade in which Lieutenant [[Frederick Atwater]] began the project later called Gondola Wish.[^1] An Army legal chronology records that on September 26, 1978 the Army staff office DAMI-ISH cancelled Gondola Wish on a memorandum from the 902d Military Intelligence Group, and that in February 1979 the Army General Counsel advised that [[Grill Flame]] could involve "testing on human subjects"; the Surgeon General's human use subcommittee ruled in March 1979 that the protocol sponsored by the [[Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity]] was "NO RISK, NO HUMAN USE," and in 1980 the Surgeon General said the existing protocols of the Army Missile Command and SRI "constitute research involving human subjects."[^2] Army records name Colonel [[Garrison Rapmund]], Director of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, as the Surgeon General's "permanent point of contact" for Grill Flame and "an impartial member" of both the Defense Department working group and its human testing subcommittee.[^3]
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The Defense Intelligence Agency's 1989 history of government psychoenergetics research lists Army money for 1975 to 1980 as $230,000 through AMSAA, which contracted SRI "to remote view daily field tests being conducted at Hunter-Liggett Military Reservation" and, in the Defense Intelligence Agency's words, produced no final reports, and $75,000 through INSCOM in 1979 to 1980, adding that "it was also INSCOM that compartmentalized the area of psychoenergetics under the code name Grill Flame." INSCOM was tasked in 1978 to determine whether remote viewing could serve as a collection method, assembled a unit in 1979, held its first operational sessions in September 1979 and declared the unit operational in December 1979.[^4] On March 7, 1985 an INSCOM information paper for the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency described the successor project Center Lane, with training at Fort Meade and at the Monroe Institute in Virginia.[^5] Operational control passed to the Defense Intelligence Agency under [[Sun Streak]] in 1986.[^6]
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### The Surgeon General's money, 1985 to 1995
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A sole-source justification written for the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1992 states that "the bulk of this prior R&D effort was provided by the Department of the Army's Surgeon General Office (SGRD) in 1985" with [[Edwin May]] as principal researcher at SRI.[^7] The contract was DAMD17-85-C-5130, "Research and Application of Psychoenergetics," for October 7, 1985 to September 30, 1990, and a military interdepartmental purchase request carried Defense Intelligence Agency funds to Jean V. Smith at the Army Medical Research and Development Command at Fort Detrick, Maryland.[^8] The Defense Intelligence Agency's statement of work recites that in 1987 "it became apparent that SGRD funding might not be available to carry through to the end of the five year period," so that "additional funding was sought by DIA and acquired through funding transfer action by the House Appropriations Committee."[^9] The 1989 history adds that for fiscal 1988 "the Army funding was reduced from the expected $2.3 million to $1.15 million, and the Army Medical R&D Command expressed its intent of providing no additional funds."[^4]
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The Army reappears in the 1995 transfer. The Central Intelligence Agency's chronology for that year lists informal discussions with the Army Research Institute, a site visit to Fort Meade, and a memorandum of understanding "executed between US Army and CIA" with funds "officially transferred to Pentagon."[^10] A December 1992 study had also examined moving Star Gate to the Armed Forces Medical Intelligence Center at Fort Detrick, whose staff expressed concern about a repeat of the "Yellow Rain" controversy; the Defense Intelligence Agency kept the project at Fort Meade.[^11]
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### Nicaraguan National Guard officers
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[[Gary Webb]] quoted Somoza telling Ambassador [[Lawrence Pezzullo]] in 1979, as the dictator urged him not to abandon the National Guard: "They have been fighting Communism just like you taught them at Fort Gulick and Fort Benning and Leavenworth, out of nine hundred officers we have, eight hundred or so belong to your schools."[^12] The figure is Somoza's. Webb wrote separately that Colonel [[Enrique Bermudez]], later military commander of the [[FDN]], had been in the United States from 1975, "first as a student attending courses on subversion and counterinsurgency at the Inter-American Defense College in Washington and later as the Nicaraguan government's liaison to the American military," and that Edmundo Meneses, brother of [[Norwin Meneses]], "had been trained in irregular warfare and anticommunism at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas in Panama"; Webb's glossary calls Edmundo Meneses a "graduate of U.S. Army School of the Americas."[^13] Webb also wrote that Colonel Pino, "another Bay of Pigs veteran," became the Army's "action officer" on the civil war in El Salvador in 1982 and was a close friend of [[Felix Rodriguez]], and that Lieutenant Colonel James "Bo" Gritz said he worked after his 1979 retirement with the Army's Intelligence Support Activity.[^14]
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### Dimona
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Colonel [[Carmelo Alba]], the Army's military attache in Israel in the mid-1960s, told [[Seymour Hersh]] that he spent many weekends in the Negev with a long-range camera, shipping the film to Washington "with no reaction" until a photograph showed "smoke coming out of the dome"; CIA station chief [[John L. Hadden]] later sent him to Beersheba to count French names on mailboxes.[^15]
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### Contracts
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[[Science Applications International Corporation]] reported that the Army accounted for 15 percent of its consolidated revenue in fiscal 1993, 17 percent in 1994, 19 percent in 1995 and 22 percent in 1996, and that its services included engineering support to the Army's chemical demilitarization activity and a contract to support the National Cancer Institute's Frederick Cancer Research and Development Center at Fort Detrick.[^16]
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### Related pages
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- [[ACSI]]
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- [[Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program]]
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- [[Advanced Tactics Projects]]
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- [[Army Chemical Corps]]
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- [[Defense Intelligence Agency]]
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- [[Great Skill Program]]
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- [[Green Berets]]
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- [[Joint Special Operations Command]]
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- [[Special Operations Group]]
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- [[Systems Exploitation Detachment]]
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- [[United States Army Intelligence Support Activity]]
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- [[Fort Bragg]]
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- [[Fort Carson]]
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- [[Fort Huachuca]]
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- [[Fort Meade]]
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### Footnotes
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[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies.* Dell, 1997, chapters on Atwater and Gondola Wish.
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[^2]: "Human Use Chronology," Army staff, CIA-RDP96-00788R001100430001-3. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection (the scan's columns are misaligned).
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[^3]: Message on Grill Flame human use, CIA-RDP96-00788R001100440009-4, paragraph 2d.
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[^4]: Defense Intelligence Agency, *Government-Sponsored Research in Psychoenergetics,* February 1989, section 2 and section on fiscal 1988, CIA-RDP96-00789R002200440001-9.
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[^5]: *Center Lane Information Papers for Director, Defense Intelligence Agency,* March 7, 1985, CIA-RDP96-00788R000400060001-2.
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[^6]: Defense Intelligence Agency, "Senate Appropriations Committee Congressionally Directed Action: Star Gate," CIA-RDP96-00789R002900010001-9, and Staff Study of December 1992, CIA-RDP96-00789R002500130001-0 (Congressional direction of fiscal 1986 and twelve billets).
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[^7]: Defense Intelligence Agency, "Justification and Approval for Other Than Full and Open Competition," Virginia Contracting Activity, CIA-RDP96-00789R003000460008-1, section 5.
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[^8]: Contract DAMD17-85-C-5130, sections B and C, CIA-RDP96-00789R003000400005-0, and military interdepartmental purchase request, CIA-RDP96-00789R003000400001-4, as cited on the page for Edwin May.
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[^9]: Statement of work, paragraphs 2.6 and 2.7, CIA-RDP96-00789R003000460008-1.
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[^10]: Central Intelligence Agency, "Star Gate Transfer Chronology: 1995," CIA-RDP96-00791R000200190017-9.
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[^11]: Staff Study of December 1992 (note 6), discussion section.
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[^12]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998, chapter 1, "A Pretty secret kind of thing." https://archive.org/details/dark-alliance-the-cia-the-contras-and-the-crack-cocaine-explosion-gary-webb-1998
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[^13]: Webb, *Dark Alliance,* chapter 2, "We were the first" (Bermudez); chapter 3, "The brotherhood of military minds" (Edmundo Meneses); and the glossary of principal figures.
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[^14]: Webb, *Dark Alliance,* chapters on the Contra supply network (Pino; Gritz and the Intelligence Support Activity).
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[^15]: Hersh, Seymour M. *The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy.* Random House, 1991, chapter 12, "The Ambassador," pp. 163-164. https://archive.org/details/Sampson_Option
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[^16]: Science Applications International Corporation, Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 31, 1995, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/353394/0000912057-95-002498.txt ; Form 10-K for fiscal 1996, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/353394/0000936392-96-000116.txt ; Form 10-K for fiscal 1997, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/353394/0000936392-97-000561.txt
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