Hezbollah hostage tracking sessions (Beirut, late 1980s)

Between 1982 and 1992, more than thirty Westerners were taken hostage in Beirut, Lebanon, by groups affiliated with Hezbollah and other militias. The hostages included the CIA's Beirut station chief William Buckley, the Associated Press correspondent Terry Anderson, the journalist Charles Glass, and Catholic and Anglican clerics who had traveled to Lebanon as part of relief work. Some of the hostages died in captivity. Most were eventually released, in slow stages, as part of intermittent negotiations.

The Defense Intelligence Agency tasked the Fort Meade remote-viewing unit against the Beirut hostage situation periodically during this period. The sessions are scattered across the released archive rather than concentrated in a single bundle. Most use a specific named hostage as the target and ask viewers to describe the location, the captors, and the conditions of confinement.

The session reports are detailed. They are also, on the whole, unrelated to where the hostages actually were. Different viewers gave different cities. Building descriptions did not match the locations identified later through other intelligence sources. The unit's internal post-mortem treated the Beirut tasking as a sustained failure case, comparable in style to the Iran hostage work a decade earlier but with even less ability to verify session output in real time.

William Buckley, whose 1984 kidnapping was the catalyst for much of the U.S. interest in the Beirut situation, died in captivity in June 1985. Terry Anderson was held for almost seven years before being released in December 1991. By the time most of the hostages were free, the Fort Meade unit had moved on to other tasking under the STAR GATE name.

The Beirut session files are a useful reference for what the program looked like when it was not working: extensive, detailed, internally coherent reports that pointed in the wrong direction.