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Authors: David Morehouse

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In the next few weeks, Levy announced that he too was retiring, which came as a shock. Who would be his replacement? What would our unit be like without his supervision? It was during this time that a colonel from DIA showed up at the office. I was called in to the office that afternoon.
“David, this is Colonel Welch from DIA. He has something he'd like to talk to you about.”
I started sweating bullets.
Welch adjusted himself in Levy's broken-down guest chair. “Something's come up and we need to talk to you about your future at DIA.”
I was sure he was going to tell me that because of my nightmares I'd have to leave the program. I couldn't believe Levy would abandon me like this and let me go after I'd been through so much for the unit.
“You've been selected for promotion to major, and for attendance at the army's Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.” He offered me his hand. “Congratulations!”
I was shocked. What did this mean? “Thank you, sir,
but I'm not sure I want this. I mean, the Leavenworth thing. Can't I just get promoted and stay on here?”
Welch was obviously taken aback by this. “What the hell do you mean?”
Levy tried to jump to my rescue. “I'm sure what Captain Morehouse means is that he just needs some time for this to settle in. That's all.”
“No, that's not it at all,” I objected. “I don't want to leave here and go to Fort Leavenworth for CGSC. You can give the slot to somebody else, and I'll take the nonresident course.”
“Are you dumb or just plain stupid? The army's trying to tell you something by giving you this. There are young men and women out there who would die to be offered a resident position at CGSC, and you want to throw it away for a bunch of fucking freaks?”
Levy's eyebrows went up. “Excuse me, Colonel—”
Welch cut him off. “You hold your water, Bill. I'm talking to this boy—who, for starters, obviously doesn't know what he's gotten himself into. What's worse is he doesn't understand what's being handed to him on a silver platter. Listen up, Morehouse! You are not going to throw this chance away, especially not for an assignment to this unit. Piss and moan all you want, but if you think you aren't going to CGSC, just try to stay here and I'll see to it that your ass is moved. This is a fucked-up operation and it isn't being refunded or restaffed. You are an infantry officer in an intelligence officer's billet. You stand out like a pimple on a baby's ass. People know you're here—people you used to work for. They think you're being held against your will, and they want you back in the infantry. Because I know and like them, I'll spare them the misery of being told their boy wants to stay. You get the fuck out of here. You are going where the army needs you most. Now get!”
“Yes, sir!” I was out the door before he got off another salvo, but Levy had to endure another ten minutes of the guy. I'd never seen Welch before that day and I never saw him again, but the wheels were in motion for me to leave
the unit. It would take some time—maybe as long as a year—but I was going to leave Sun Streak.
 
One of my most interesting operational targets involved the search for Marine Lieutenant Colonel Higgins, the United Nations observer taken hostage in Lebanon. Our attempt to determine his location and condition for DIA's customers was one of the most complex missions we'd ever worked. Each of us did eight to ten search sessions; Higgins was being moved often, but we found him over and over and passed the information along. Nothing ever came of it-that is to say, nobody ever launched a rescue operation. It was difficult for members of the unit to tap into Higgins and feel his suffering and his worsening physical and emotional condition day after day without any relief in sight. Several people had real trouble living Higgins's pain so as to turn in intelligence that was never acted on. I understood their distress, and I tried to explain the army's reasoning. Nobody was going to launch a rescue operation and risk lives on no basis except information from remote viewers. It would be insane to risk lives in reliance on our intelligence product alone; things just weren't done that way. The information we produced was intended to augment and balance more solid, reliable, conventionally acquired data. If two or more “collection assets” could have confirmed our findings, I'm certain the rescue would have taken place.
If it's any comfort, our unit determined that Higgins had been dead for many hours before his body was displayed on video: He died of a broken spirit and a broken heart, not from the hanging. His brutal captors, frustrated by his sudden death, hanged his body in a show of defiance, doing their best to capitalize on their error. Higgins was of no use to them dead; he was a bargaining chip they'd failed to keep. If it's any further consolation, he is in a far better place than this world. He is happy, busy, and eternal. Seven remote viewers confirmed that.
Another operational mission took place over the nine days immediately following the destruction of Pan Am
Flight 103, which detonated over Lockerbie, Scotland. It was a frosty morning when we received the mission tasking. Only we could provide immediate feedback while the search crews and investigators slowly pieced the events together.
I watched an old acquaintance, a man we all called Tiny, die as I relived the event for Sun Streak. We worked the mission twice a day, each day presenting detailed sketches of the two explosive devices and two methods of detonation. Judy and Lyn and I sketched the primary explosive device months before the investigators announced their findings. We diagrammed the electronic device, the tape player and radio that contained the explosives. We identified the site of the explosion as the aircraft's left front cargo hold days before that was announced. We tracked the builders of the device to the point of transfer and even farther, to the place of assembly. We provided descriptions, phonetic spellings of names, and sketches of houses and meeting places for the terrorists. -
The secondary device was hand carried aboard the aircraft by an Iranian woman on a suicide mission. She had lost loved ones on the airliner the United States shot down in the Gulf, and she was willing to die to avenge them. Her high explosives were camouflaged as commercially wrapped chocolate bars, which she was to have detonated if the automatic device failed. She sat very near the point of detonation, on the left side of the aircraft.
In the most painful of all the sessions, Lyn described being in the airliner just before detonation. In his phantom form he was, of course, not seen. However, the instant the bomb detonated, he stood in the presence of dozens of quickened souls wondering what had happened to them. Lyn wept as one small child approached him in the ether and asked him where her mommy was and what had happened to them all. Lyn had the tools to return; they did not.
 
During the War on Drugs, Sun Streak was called upon to determine whether certain ships were carrying illegal narcotics.
In the ether, viewers boarded ships to pinpoint the illegal cargo, piercing bulkheads to find packages of marijuana and cocaine. We found the sites of planned open-water drops, and located buried base and paste on islands throughout the Caribbean. From the ether, we hunted Pablo Escobar and other drug kingpins, accessing their minds to reveal elements of their plans that could not have been obtained by any other means. Eventually, some members of Sun Streak were moved into the Counter Narcotics Joint Task Force headquarters in Florida, where they worked for nearly a year. The commander of the CNJTF sent DIA a memo saying that the remote viewers had saved the task force millions of dollars on search and seizure operations. The viewers were a tremendous success and a new power tool in law enforcement. However, this glory was short-lived. Things were heating up in the Gulf region. Central Command, a multi-service command whose specified theaters of operation include the Persian Gulf, spent considerable time on planning and in briefing Washington and the Pentagon on the escalating tensions, there. Several weeks later Saddam Hussein's army invaded Kuwait and held its ground despite international demands that they leave immediately. In a relatively short period of time, funding, weapons, and observation platforms such as helicopters and observation aircraft all began to be diverted to the rapidly escalating situation in Kuwait. Emphasis on the drug wars by the Department of Defense and the White House understandably began to drift eastward into the Central Command region.
I'd been an operational viewer for nearly a year when I left Sun Streak, on the day of the Iraqi invasion. I was on my way to Command and General Staff College, with a one-year stop in a strategic deception unit. Levy departed several weeks after me.
I never went back to Sun Streak, but I heard that the successes of the drug wars breathed new life into the program. Two new remote-viewing trainees were brought in, as was a new program manager to replace Levy. It looked
as if everything was going to be fine. I hoped I'd be able to come back someday. Perhaps DIA would unlock the potential of the program and let it help all of mankind.
 
I'd been gone from Sun Streak for about three months when I began having trouble with the nightmares again. I thought it was because I wasn't spending time in the ether. I couldn't focus on anything; I felt disconnected and empty. My head spun with images I'd seen in the unit; swamped by waves of emotion, I wept openly and often. I was slowly disintegrating emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Bitter and lost in a world that neither understood nor cared what I'd been through, I talked to myself and sketched the images that poured from my mind. I needed “hands-on” help, an intervention by someone who knew the ether. But Kathleen was gone, Mel was gone, Levy was gone—all the people who spoke the language of the ether were gone. I turned into a hermit, never venturing out of my office building during the day. On weekends, I seldom left the house or shaved. Afraid of sleeping, I stayed awake for long periods, and every night I played the television and radio together, trying to drown out the noise and the images that swamped my mind. I needed to be under the control of the unit again; I needed the ether; I needed friends who understood what was happening to me.
One night I curled up on the couch in a sleepless stupor, my hands covering my ears to keep out the noise of the darkness. I coughed and snorted my way into a disturbed sleep, full of images of Lockerbie and Dachau, all the haunting horrors of the world I'd come to know so well. I drifted in and out of consciousness, the faces of the past around me. I saw a young lieutenant who'd served with me in the Ranger battalion die in a plane crash with someone he loved. I felt him die as I had Mike Foley many years ago. I awoke long enough to see the shadows of the living room come alive. Every object in the room projected a living shadow that stood to threaten me. Screaming and wailing, I ran, bouncing off walls and stumbling. I ran out into
the brisk October air and fell into the safety of the grass and leaves. Embracing the living things beneath me, I lay there until sunrise.
“You okay, Dave?” A voice came from above me. It was a friend, David Gould, the coach of my son's hockey team. He'd come by to pick up Michael and see if I wanted to ride with him to the game. “Dave? It's me, David Gould. Do you need some help getting up?”
I strained to stand, cold and stiff from a night on the lawn. I looked and felt like hell, and my son watched as his coach helped his father into the house. A tear fell from his eye as I passed him. Debbie came down the stairs in her nightgown.
“What happened? Is he all right?” She spoke about me as though I weren't there, as though I were an object and no longer her husband.
“I don't know,” Gould said. “I think he spent the night on the front lawn.”
“Oh, my God, David, what's happening to you? Can't you see you're destroying yourself?”
I stared at her with bloodshot, sunken eyes. “That's just the trouble, my dear. I can't see anything anymore.”
 
I arrived at work around nine A.M., punched in my key code, and made my way to the office. For the first time in my career I could honestly say I had a jerk for a boss; his boss was a jerk, as well. But it was a small unit with a very flexible schedule; people pretty much came and went as they pleased, being trusted to do what they needed in order to keep their deception projects running. They were independent operators, some very capable and others hiding from the real army, the army outside their classified programs.
It cost $40,000 a month to house a small team of about eighteen deceivers. As at Sacred Cape, everyone was on a first-name basis. Rank, uniforms, and any semblance of military discipline disappeared the day you reported for duty. That seemed to be one of the big boasting points of
this place, along with the free coffee supplied by the owner of the building.
By this point in my career I'd grown sick of intelligence prima donnas. They got promotions by the handful, winding up as lieutenant colonels and full colonels even when they'd joined the unit as nothing more than junior captains. And some of their private lives! A few staff members hardly bothered to conceal extramarital affairs. On one trip to Europe, my traveling companion hadn't been off the phone with his wife more than twenty minutes before he was slipping off into the hotel room of a fifty-two-year-old he'd been scoping out in the lobby. It was a real Peyton Place, and I hated it. And just in case I haven't made it clear that this place was a waste of money and time, let me top my description off with the colonel who sold Afghani rugs out of the trunk of his car in the parking lot. Oh, and we had a small fleet of leased cars available, so we could fool people and maintain our cover.

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