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created updated title aliases tags category summary start location relations
2025-03-05 2026-10-05 NSA
NSA
National Security Agency
National Security Agency/Central Security Service
US National Security Agency
Organization
Intelligence
SignalsIntelligence
FortMeade
GrillFlame
RemoteViewing
PROMIS
Shamrock
Israel
U.S. Government The signals intelligence agency at Fort Meade, established 1952; it appears here in SHAMROCK, the 1973 Scanate West Virginia target, the Army remote viewing program, the INSLAW/PROMIS inquiries and the KH-11 dispute. 1952 Fort Meade, Maryland
type with reverse role start end fn
employed_by Hal Puthoff true Navy officer assigned to a research billet; Project LIGHTNING (ultra-high-speed computers) 1960 1963 2
type with reverse role fn
employed_by Bill Hamilton true worked for NSA in the 1960s according to NSA's statement to the Bua inquiry; personnel records purged 10
type with reverse role start end fn
investigated Church Committee true hearings on SHAMROCK and the watch list activity, October 29 and November 6, 1975 1975 1975 1

The National Security Agency (NSA) was established by a presidential memorandum of October 1952, which directed the creation of the agency, designated the Secretary of Defense as the President's executive agent for communications intelligence, and set out the agency's missions. The agency's director, Lieutenant General Lew Allen, described it in that form to the Church Committee on October 29, 1975.1 Its headquarters are at Fort Meade, Maryland, where the Army's United States Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) also kept its remote viewing unit.

SHAMROCK and the watch list activity

The Church Committee's statement of November 6, 1975 described SHAMROCK as a message collection program in which the government persuaded three international telegraph companies, RCA Global, ITT World Communications and Western Union International, to make their international telegraph traffic available, so that "for almost 30 years, copies of most international telegrams originating in or forwarded through the United States were turned over to the National Security Agency and its predecessor agencies." The committee found that the Army Security Agency, later folded into INSCOM, was the first agency with operational responsibility for SHAMROCK; the Armed Forces Security Agency inherited it in 1949 and NSA assumed operational control when it was created in 1952. The committee added that no documents at NSA or the Department of Defense reflected the operational arrangements between the government and the companies.1 In his own testimony Allen separately described a "watch list activity" conducted by NSA between 1967 and 1973 in response to requirements levied by other government agencies, and the committee chairman's opening statement noted that NSA, like the Central Intelligence Agency and the Internal Revenue Service, had maintained a watch list containing the names of United States citizens.1

Hal Puthoff at the NSA

Hal Puthoff, later the principal investigator of the Stanford Research Institute remote viewing work, reported to active duty as a U.S. Navy officer in 1960 after taking a master's degree at the University of Florida and was assigned to a research billet at the NSA at Fort Meade. According to the biography SRI filed with its 1979 Grill Flame protocol, he pursued research and monitored contracts on the development of ultra-high-speed computers under Project LIGHTNING, started a program on the potential of lasers, fiber optics and related devices for optical computers, received a Department of Defense Certificate of Commendation, and won second prize for outstanding paper of the year in the NSA Technical Journal in 1963. He left active duty in February 1963 and remained a civilian (GS-13) until September 1963, when he entered Stanford University.2

The 1973 West Virginia target

SRI's final report for the period January 1974 through February 1975 describes experiments "under the control of the sponsor," in which an SRI experimenter requested geographical coordinates of a site unknown to the experimenters and subjects from "the sponsor's group responsible for threat analysis." The coordinates received were 38 degrees 23 minutes 45 seconds to 48 seconds north, 79 degrees 25 minutes west, described only as being in West Virginia. On May 29, 1973 Puthoff relayed them by telephone to a first subject, designated S3 in the final report and named as Ingo Swann in SRI's October 1, 1973 proposal, whose sessions of May 29 and 30 described rolling hills, lawns like those around a military base, and "either some old bunkers around, or maybe this is a covered reservoir." On June 1, 1973 Puthoff gave the coordinates to a second subject, designated S1 and named as Pat Price in the proposal, whose written response of June 2 reported a peak in a mountain chain, a concealed road, a "former missile site" where underground rooms held records, microfilm and file cabinets under "Army 5th Corps Engineers," and, beyond them, bays "with computers, communication equipment, large maps" staffed by the Army Signal Corps. The report states that both West Virginia reports and the report on a Urals site that Price volunteered were "verified by personnel in the sponsor organization as being substantially correct."3

On a later date, the report says, S1 was asked to return to the site "with the goal of obtaining information on code words," and supplied the following: top of desk with papers labeled "Flytrap" and "Minerva"; a file cabinet labeled "Operation Pool"; folders labeled "Cueball," "14 Ball," "4 Ball," "8 Ball" and "Rackup"; a site name that "vaguely seems like Hayfork or Haystack"; and the personnel "Col. R. J. Hamilton, Maj. Gen. George R. Nash, Major John C. Calhoun (??)."3 The name Sugar Grove does not appear in the SRI report. An article by the former Time science correspondent John L. Wilhelm in The Washington Post (c. 1977) wrote that the coordinates were encoded and passed through an NSA monitor in the Washington area to a Central Intelligence Agency scientist at Menlo Park, that the site was a satellite interrogation station which "eavesdrops on Soviet space vehicles," that an officer exclaimed "Hell, there's no security left," and that a security investigation was launched to determine whether the information had leaked to Price. Wilhelm, who also names Sugar Grove in listing the explanations later offered, quoted a source as saying the security men "wouldn't buy the idea of remote viewing."4 An Army briefing script on the Grill Flame program, describing the same episode without naming the site, states that the viewer "actually entered the place, calling out names of people who were working there," that he "read" classified codewords on folders, some locked inside security containers, and that "the CIA later confirmed with NSA the validity of much of the subject's information."5

NSA and the Army remote viewing program

An INSCOM staff paper of 1982, written when Congress was ending National Foreign Intelligence Program funding for the Army's Grill Flame project, listed among the options for its future a determination "if the Director, NSA would integrate the current INSCOM GRILL FLAME project into any NSA program."6 A September 22, 1982 memorandum from the 902d Military Intelligence Group set out the mechanics of NSA sponsorship: the psi personnel could be carried on the rolls of the CONUS MI Group, the housekeeping organization for Army personnel working at NSA, under a "Strategic Systems Planning Detachment" with funding provided by the NSA sponsor and tasking exercised by the INSCOM commander through an INSCOM liaison officer at the NSA.7 INSCOM's chronology records that Lieutenant General Lincoln D. Faurer, director of the NSA, was briefed on the program on August 2, 1982.6

On August 27, 1982 the Grill Flame project manager, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Jachim, recorded a conversation with NSA personnel. The NSA people said the agency had "no active remote viewers," asked INSCOM how remote viewers were selected, what psychological battery was used, whether a screening questionnaire could be provided and what training SRI had offered, and were given copies of articles from Signal, Omni and an IEEE article by Robert Jahn of Princeton. Jachim wrote that Puthoff had telephoned an NSA contact to say that some of SRI's funding had not materialized and to invite NSA into the program, and that the NSA contact "was noncommittal." The memorandum gives an internal NSA designation for the agency's own parapsychology activity, which is redacted in the released copy.8 A 1984 INSCOM commanding general's memorandum lists the NSA among the agencies that had tasked remote viewing and says an evaluation from the NSA, with one from the CIA, was attached to it.9

PROMIS

An NSA database named PROMIS appears in the Department of Justice inquiry into the INSLAW matter. The 1993 report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua records that Ari Ben-Menashe told Bua's team that the "PROMIS" software Earl Brian distributed to the Israelis was an NSA program and not INSLAW's, that the NSA had developed it to translate Vietnamese into English, and that Bill Hamilton had worked on it while employed at the NSA before INSLAW existed. Ben-Menashe had earlier sworn affidavits for INSLAW stating that Brian told a 1987 Israeli meeting that the CIA, the NSA, the Department of Justice and Israeli intelligence had been allowed to use PROMIS since 1982; he told Bua that he had let the Hamiltons "assume" he meant INSLAW's product. The Bua report states that the NSA told the investigators Hamilton had worked for the NSA in the 1960s but that, because his personnel records had been purged, it could not say whether he had worked on such a program. The NSA also told them it used a commercial software package from Computer Corporation of America and that in 1974 and 1975, six years before INSLAW was incorporated, it had developed a database in the M204 language called PROMIS, an acronym for Product Related On-line Management Information System ("product" being the agency's term for its intelligence reports), which it said had no relationship to INSLAW's product and shared the name coincidentally. The NSA general counsel's office told the investigators that many NSA personnel knew of its PROMIS and that many had since moved to other agencies and private employers. The Bua report declined to credit the rest of Ben-Menashe's account.10

The House Judiciary Committee's 1992 report on the INSLAW affair had recorded a different claim: Juval Aviv, a former Israeli intelligence officer and head of the investigative firm Interfor, told committee investigators in January 1991 that Brian had sold INSLAW's Enhanced PROMIS to United States agencies outside the Department of Justice, including the CIA, the NSA, NASA and the National Security Council, and to Interpol, the Mossad, the Israeli Air Force and the Egyptian government.11

UFO records and Citizens Against UFO Secrecy v. NSA

In Ground Saucer Watch v. CIA (D.D.C., Civil Action 78-859) the Central Intelligence Agency located documents that originated with the NSA and referred them to that agency in four separate referrals, the last on July 27, 1979. The attorney for the plaintiff, Peter A. Gersten, then requested the documents from the NSA; by letters of January 9, 1979 and December 19, 1979 the NSA's policy staff chief, Roy R. Banner, told him the records were classified in their entirety and exempt under 5 U.S.C. 552(b)(1) and (b)(3), the latter on the strength of 18 U.S.C. 798, 50 U.S.C. 403(d)(3) and Public Law 86-36. The NSA appeals authority affirmed on March 24, 1980, and in Citizens Against Unidentified Flying Objects Secrecy v. National Security Agency (D.D.C., Civil Action 80-1562) the agency's Chief of the Office of Policy, Eugene F. Yeates, swore an affidavit that the withheld material consisted of communications intelligence reports that were "all based on intercepted foreign communications," whose disclosure would identify communications "successfully intercepted and processed," together with four non-COMINT records, and that he would supply a second affidavit classified Top Secret for the court's in camera consideration. A portion of one responsive document was declassified and released to plaintiff's counsel on September 15, 1980.12

The KH-11 and the Israeli access dispute

Seymour Hersh wrote in The Samson Option that a former NSA official told him the KH-11 satellite, launched in December 1976, was considered the most important advance of its time in reconnaissance photography, that every military and civilian intelligence agency had an urgent requirement for its imagery, and that the NSA, responsible for all communications intelligence, had a role in scheduling the satellite to maximize collection. Hersh wrote that Jimmy Carter's decision in March 1979 to give Israel direct access to KH-11 photographs disrupted that scheduling and was unpopular within the NSA and other agencies, and that during the Ronald Reagan administration it was learned that Israeli military officers were permitted to attend Pentagon meetings where future KH-11 missions and orbital paths were discussed, which dismayed some NSA officials.13

Footnotes

  1. U.S. Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Intelligence Activities, Senate Resolution 21, Hearings, vol. 5, "The National Security Agency and Fourth Amendment Rights," 94th Cong., 1st sess., October 29 and November 6, 1975 (testimony of Lt. Gen. Lew Allen, Jr.; committee statement on SHAMROCK read November 6), https://archive.org/details/Church-Committee-Hearings-Volume5-National-Security-Agency (text at https://archive.org/download/Church-Committee-Hearings-Volume5-National-Security-Agency/Vol5-NSA_djvu.txt). ↩︎

  2. "Proposed Grill Flame Protocol: Proposed SRI International Applied Remote Viewing Protocol," SRI 9-4107, March 23, 1979, CIA-RDP96-00788R001300070001-1, biography of Harold E. Puthoff, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001300070001-1. ↩︎

  3. Harold E. Puthoff and Russell Targ, "Perceptual Augmentation Techniques, Part Two: Research Report," final report covering January 1974 through February 1975, SRI International, December 1, 1975, section on "West Virginia Site (S3)," "West Virginia Site (S1)" and "Urals Site," CIA-RDP96-00788R001300030001-5, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001300030001-5; and SRI Proposal for Research ISH 73-146, "Perceptual Augmentation Techniques, Part One," October 1, 1973, CIA-RDP96-00787R000700100001-5, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00787r000700100001-5, which names Price in the same passage. ↩︎

  4. John L. Wilhelm, "The CIA, the Pentagon and the Russians: The Military Potential of Parapsychology," The Washington Post (c. 1977), as reproduced in CIA-RDP96-00788R001700360003-3, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001700360003-3. Wilhelm is the sole source for the NSA monitor, the "satellite interrogation station," the exclamation and the security investigation. ↩︎

  5. "Army's Role in a Sensitive, Close-Hold DoD Project," Army briefing script on psychoenergetics (undated), CIA-RDP96-00787R000200020023-5, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00787r000200020023-5. ↩︎

  6. Staff paper on termination of the Army Grill Flame program, 1982, and "Center Lane Historical Overview," CIA-RDP96-00788R001500180001-7, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001500180001-7 and CIA-RDP96-00788R000400060001-2. ↩︎

  7. Memorandum, "Detachment G Reorganization," 902d Military Intelligence Group Security Support Detachment, September 22, 1982, CIA-RDP96-00788R001700350013-3, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001700350013-3. ↩︎

  8. Memorandum for the record, "NSA Involvement in GRILL FLAME," Lt. Col. Robert J. Jachim, August 1982, CIA-RDP96-00788R001700230009-1, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001700230009-1. ↩︎

  9. INSCOM commanding general's memorandum and talking paper, May 4, 1984, CIA-RDP96-00788R001500180001-7. ↩︎

  10. Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua to the Attorney General of the United States Regarding the Allegations of Inslaw, Inc. (1993), pp. 73 to 80, released by the Department of Justice Office of Information Policy on September 30, 2013 (AG/13-00675 (F)), https://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/nsa/DOJ-OIP-INSLAW_1993.pdf. ↩︎

  11. U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, The INSLAW Affair, H. Rept. 102-857, September 10, 1992, pp. 67 to 68, https://archive.org/details/InslawAffairInvestigativeReport. Aviv is the sole source for these statements, which the report records as his account to committee investigators. ↩︎

  12. Affidavit of Eugene F. Yeates, Chief, Office of Policy, National Security Agency, Citizens Against Unidentified Flying Objects Secrecy v. National Security Agency, Civil Action No. 80-1562 (D.D.C. 1980), https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/ufo/assets/files/affadavit_yeates.pdf (archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/ufo/assets/files/affadavit_yeates.pdf). ↩︎

  13. Seymour M. Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy (Random House, 1991). Hersh attributes the account of the KH-11 scheduling to an unnamed former NSA official. ↩︎