The Real Life X-files

“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 John 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.
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.
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 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.
“They were getting ideas from sci-fi,”?Ronson reflects. “ They’re more likely to have gotten it from the TV than ancient history. 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 Men Who Stare At Goats 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.
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.”

The Men Who Stare At Goats is published by Picador.