Free The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson

in the notch, way over where the pine trees are,” said Rima. “Do
that
one.”
    “Let me see,” said the general.
    He stood very still and began to stare up at the sky.
    “Are you trying to burst that one over
there?”
I asked. “Isn’t it too far away?”
    General Stubblebine looked at me as if I were nuts.
    “They’re
all
far away,” he said.
    “Over there!” said Rima.
    I darted my eyes back and forth across the sky, trying to work out which cloud the general was trying to burst.
    “It’s
gone
!” said Rima.
    “The cloud,” confirmed the general, “appears to have gone.”
    We sat back down. Then the general said he wasn’t sure. The clouds had been moving so fast, he said, it wasn’t possible to conclude 100 percent that he had caused the disappearance. It might have been just meteorology.
    “Hard to tell,” he said, “who was doing what to whom.”
    Sometimes on long car journeys, he said, Rima would drive and he would make the clouds go away, and if it was a puffy cloud alone in a blue sky, it was unequivocal. He would stare: the cloud would burst. But this wasn’t one of those moments.
    In 1983, two years into his tenure as the commander of military intelligence, General Stubblebine’s pursuit of an indisputable miracle became an urgent one. He needed something to satisfy his commanding officers in the Pentagon, and he needed it fast, because his job was in jeopardy.
    General Stubblebine was confounded by his continual failure to walk through his wall. What was wrong with him that he couldn’t do it? Perhaps there was simply too much in his in-box to give it the required level of concentration. General Manuel Noriega, principally, was causing him significant trouble in Panama. Noriega had been on the U.S. intelligence payroll since the 1970s—since CIA director George H. W. Bush had authorized his recruitment—but now he was out of control.
    General Stubblebine’s CIA counterparts had been usingPanama’s network of hidden airstrips to transport guns to the Contras in Nicaragua. Once the weapons had been delivered, the planes returned to Panama to refuel for their journey back to the United States. Noriega seized the opportunity to fill them with cocaine. And so it was that the CIA became implicated in Noriega’s cocaine racket. This awkward alliance was making both sides paranoid, and when General Stub-blebine visited Panama, he discovered to his fury that Noriega had his hotel room bugged.
    It was at this point that the battle between the two generals—Noriega and Stubblebine—shifted into the supernatural. Noriega took to tying black ribbons around his ankles and placing little scraps of paper in his shoes with names written on them to protect him against spells cast by his enemies. He was possibly walking around Panama City with the word
Stubblebine
secreted inside his shoe at the very moment that the general was trying to walk through his wall. How could General Stubblebine concentrate on passing through objects with that sort of craziness going on around him?
    General Stubblebine countered by setting his psychic spies on Noriega. This was the Fort Meade team, who worked out of a condemned clapboard building down a wooded track in Maryland and who, as a result of not officially existing, had no coffee budget, a fact that they had come to resent. They were also going stir-crazy. Their offices were claustrophobic, and many of them didn’t much like one another to begin with. One, a major named Ed Dames, had taken to psychic spying on the Loch Ness monster during the fallow months, when there wasn’t much official military psychic work. Hedetermined that it was a dinosaur’s ghost. This finding irritated some of the others, who considered it unscientific and frankly implausible. Another psychic spy, David Morehouse, was soon to check himself into a psychiatric hospital as a result of an excess of psychic spying.
    They couldn’t get their back door open. It had been locked and