During his marathon annual press conference in December, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who sees Western perfidy wherever he looks, mentioned further evidence of the West’s ill intentions toward Russia: “We have heard it even from high-level officials, that it is unfair that the whole of Siberia with its immense resources belongs to Russia in its entirety.” He was referring to an alleged statement made by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
Putin’s claim says a lot about the state of Russian politics. The belief that Albright has cast a greedy Yankee eye on Siberia is a widely-held urban legend in Russia. Albright, of course, never made any such statement. In fact, it turns out that the story traces back to a claim made in 2006 by a retired general from the Federal Protection Service which was Russia’s rough equivalent of the U.S. Secret Service. According to Boris Ratnikov, a retired one-star general of that service, psychics read Albright’s mind in 1999 and found that she held this belief about Siberia. Ratnikov further claimed that he had been among the analysts who worked with the data pilfered from Albright’s brain.
This is not merely a quirk of the Yeltsin and Putin-era Russia. Rather it is an inheritance from the Soviet Union. Ratnikov has claimed that during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union fought entire “astral battles.” While that is presumably not true, declassified documents from the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Freedom of Information Act website show that junk science was an important line of research in the USSR and communist Eastern Europe. In 1975, the Defense Intelligence Agency published a 68-page research paper written by Army medical intelligence specialists on Soviet and Czechoslovak research into parapsychology. It concluded that after a period of being denounced by Communists theorists for its lack of a materialist basis, parapsychological phenomena were no longer on the wrong side of Communist ideology. An even lengthier 1975 analysis prepared by the U.S. Air Force and published by the Defense Intelligence Agency portrayed flourishing Soviet research in the field.
Little has been published in the West about the use of parapsychology by the Soviet military or intelligence services. However, intriguing snippets of information indicate that the USSR tried to operationalize this junk science in pursuit of national security. For instance, The New York Times reported in the 1980s that President Carter had “ordered the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct a high-level review of psychic research behind the Iron Curtain in an attempt to assess a possible Soviet threat.” In 1977 the Soviets arrested a Los Angeles Times reporter and accused him of having stolen state secrets relating to parapsychology. Then in 1981 when Soviet grandmaster Anatoly Karpov and Soviet defector Viktor Korchnoy met in Milan to battle for the world chess championship, the KGB sent its parapsychologists to support Karpov and psychically attack Korchnoy.
The well-informed reader may note that the United States has engaged in similar research. This is true. However, there are two differences between the United States and Russia when it comes to national security uses of this sort of junk science. First, the United States finally got out of the psychic warfare business in 1995 (as far as we know) and only kept the work going that long because Congress insisted on it. Secondly, while the psychically-based claim about America’s designs on Siberia are part and parcel of Putin’s tenuous relationship with objective truth, President Obama would be embarrassed to cite the work of a psychic.
Mark Stout is a Senior Editor at War on the Rocks. He is the Director of the MA Program in Global Security Studies and the Graduate Certificate Program in Intelligence at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Arts and Sciences in Washington, D.C.
Photo credit: www.kremlin.ru
Padma Drago 
Kim Iannone 
Mark Rudningen 
It’s a good thing that they did not know about ayahuasca, or all their attempts at psychic warfare and remote viewing would have been much more successful.
See book “Ayahuasca in my Blood” to get an idea of psychic phenomena possible with ayahuasca.
Also worthy of viewing is the CIA researcher Dr. Persinger’s “No More Secrets” on youtube.
Junk science? Yeah, as junky as “junk DNA”; called junk until we began to understand its quantum resonance functions.
The author is correct, that there is a a long-standing idea in Russia that the oligarchs of the United States might want to take resources from Russia, and in particular from Siberia.
Let’s remember, that American troops were sent to the Soviet Union in 1919 and 1920 with the express purpose of destroying it.
To my knowledge, neither Russia nor the Soviet Union ever landed troops on sovereign American soil for the purpose of overthrowing the American government.
Check out the Starpod website for the real facts. Some facts: 1997: In a now declassified article from “CIA Studies in Intelligence” journal, government historian Gerald K. Haines writes, “There is a DIA Psychic Center [presumably a reference to the now-defunct STARGATE project], and the NSA studies parapsychology, that branch of psychology that deals with the investigation of such psychic phenomena as clairvoyance, extrasensory perception, and telepathy.” Former President Jimmy Carter said the CIA, without his knowledge, once consulted a psychic to help locate a missing government plane in Africa. Carter told students at Emory University that the ‘special US plane crashed somewhere in Zaire’ while he was president.According to Carter, US spy satellites could find no trace of the aircraft, so the CIA consulted a psychic from California. Carter said the woman ‘went into a trance and gave some latitude and longitude figures. We focused our satellite cameras on that point and the plane was there.’
Milton Friedman, a speech writer for President Ford with inside information, writing in Venture Inward
magazine, Jan-Feb 1996, in an article called, Intuition is Alive in Washington, has said that:‘Remote-viewing accuracy was actually sixty per cent to eighty-five per cent (not fifteen per cent as claimed). The programs have not closed down but been moved under a deeper cloak of secrecy.
The term ‘eight-martini effect’ was coined by Norman Jackson, a CIA spokesman and former Technical Adviser to John McMahon, Deputy Director of the CIA. On the US TV show ‘Night Line’ (28 November 1995) which was about the use of remote-viewing programmes in the mid 1980s, he said, ‘Well, if it’s the eight-martini results you want to talk about, I won’t talk about them. “Eight-martini results” is an in-house term for remote-viewing data so good it cracks everyone’s sense of reality.’ After one particularly spectacular demonstration apparently, the CIA handlers had to have eight martinis to calm their nerves.
Joe McMoneagle was now the finest remote viewer in the team. In fact, he was one of the US government’s premier psi-spies. When this army intelligence officer left Stargate in 1984, he was awarded a Legion of
Merit for providing information on 150 targets that was unavailable from other sources. Joe McMoneagle
was asked by the NSA to remotely view a US consulate in the Mediterranean theatre from which the Russians were extracting information. McMoneagle correctly described a Russian listening post opposite the consulate, and the location of the electronic bug inside the consulate – he even psychically spied upon an NSA counterespionage team in a room beneath the Russians.**
Joseph McMoneagle What was your weirdest RV experience? Getting lost in the mind of someone who was
mentally deranged, a psychopath, and no longer being able to tell which thoughts were my own and which were theirs
In 1980, the CIA asked Ken Bell to help them with a suspected KGB agent who had been detained by BOSS
(the South African intelligence organization) in South Africa. The KGB agent was proving difficult to
break. Bell remotely viewed the KGB suspect and telepathically interrogated the man. During this psychic
interrogation, Bell asked the man questions which were telepathically transmitted to the Russian and
appeared in the man’s thoughts as if he was asking them of himself. Bell discovered that the suspect was
using a pocket calculator specially modified to decode messages from the KGB. One of the BOSS agents had
taken the calculator home. When it was recovered and examined, it enabled them to prove the man was a KGB
agent.