Free The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson Page A

painted shut dozens of times over the years. Nobody knew where the key was. During one particularly hot day they began almost to faint in there, and so the talk got around to whether they should kick the door open and get a breeze going through.
    “We can’t,” said Lyn Buchanan. “We don’t
exist.
If we kick it open, nobody will come and fix it.”
    (It was Lyn Buchanan who recounted this story to me, when I met him in the summer of 2003 at a hotel in Las Vegas.)
    “Leave it to me,” said psychic spy Joe McMoneagle. He disappeared and returned twenty minutes later with a detailed and psychically divined sketch of the missing key. Joe McMoneagle then drove into town to a local locksmith, got the key made from the sketch, returned to the unit, unlocked the back door, and pried through the paint.
    “Oh, Joe’s good,” said Lyn Buchanan. “Joe is very good.”
    I visited Joe McMoneagle a few months later. He lives in Virginia now. I mentioned Lyn Buchanan’s story about the key. After I told him what Lyn had said, Joe smiled somewhat guiltily.
    “I, uh, actually picked the lock,” he admitted.
    He explained that Lyn had seemed so bedazzled, and it had given the flagging morale of the psychic spies such aboost, that he hadn’t had the heart to inform them of the fact that the door was opened using nonpsychic means.
    Working conditions at Fort Meade were so grim that a conspiracy theory began to flourish within its condemned walls. There they were, hitherto ordinary soldiers who had been handpicked and initiated into a fabulously secret military psychic elite, which turned out to be utterly humdrum. Lyn Buchanan and some of his colleagues had consequently come to believe that there must be
another
secret psychic unit, even more deeply embedded, and presumably with more glamorous offices than theirs.
    “I got to think that we were there in order to be caught,” Lyn said when I met him in Las Vegas.
    Lyn is a soft-eyed, folksy-looking man who—for all the dismal working conditions—sees his time in the old unit as the happiest days of his life.
    “What do you mean, ‘there to be caught’?” I asked him.
    “You know,” said Lyn. “If the
National Enquirer
ever got wind of it, the army could have said to them, ‘Yes, we
do
have a secret psychic unit. Here they are.’”
    Hang the psychics out to dry—postulated Lyn with some bitterness—so that the other psychics, whoever they were, would be left in peace to continue their even more secret work.
    So in the summer of 1983, when General Stubblebine asked the team to divine in which room of a particular villa in Panama City Noriega was staying, and what Noriega was thinking about while he was there, they sprang into action, delighted for some distraction.
    General Stubblebine simultaneously ordered a team ofnonpsychic spies to rent an apartment down the road from Noriega’s villa. The timing was critical. The moment the Fort Meade psychics delivered their divinations, General Stub-blebine phoned the nonpsychics in Panama and ordered them to climb over the wall, get inside the villa, and plant bugs in Noriega’s rooms. Unfortunately, two of Noriega’s guard dogs were alerted during the covert raid, and the nonpsychics were chased back over the wall.
    General Noriega responded to this assault by placing a huge amulet around his neck and driving to a nearby beach where his personal sorcerer, a Brazilian named Ivan Trilha, erected an illuminated cross to ward off American intelligence operatives.
    General Stubblebine had his adversaries at home too. His superior officer, General John Adams Wickham, the army’s chief of staff, was not a fan of the paranormal. General Stub-blebine had attempted to captivate him at a high-level black-tie party in a Washington hotel by producing from his tuxedo pocket a piece of bent cutlery, but General Wickham recoiled, horrified.
    The reason General Wickham felt the way he did about bent cutlery can be found in Deuteronomy,