Operation GONDOLA WISH: the original DIA charter (1977)

By 1977 the CIA had been funding Stanford Research Institute's remote-viewing work for five years. The agency's appetite for direct sponsorship of the research was wearing thin. The phenomenon, whatever it was, had not produced the kind of replicable result that would justify a permanent research line inside the CIA. But the Pentagon was watching, and the Soviet Union's reported investments in similar work were continuing to be reported through other intelligence channels.

In late 1977 the Defense Intelligence Agency took over the operational side of the program. The new umbrella charter was called Operation GONDOLA WISH. Under it, DIA would build an in-house unit of trained viewers rather than continuing to contract the work out to SRI. The unit would be housed at Fort Meade, Maryland, under the administrative cover of the Army's Intelligence and Security Command. SRI would continue receiving research funding to refine the underlying methodology.

The GONDOLA WISH charter, drafted in 1977 and bundled with an assessment report dated August 25, 1978, set the structure that the program would keep for the next decade. There would be a small fixed roster of viewers trained at SRI in the technique that Puthoff and the SRI staff had standardized. There would be a tasking process that pushed intelligence questions to the unit through DIA. There would be a session-report format that captured each viewer's drawings and verbal output without summary or interpretation.

GONDOLA WISH was renamed GRILL FLAME in 1978 and CENTER LANE in 1983. The bureaucratic skeleton it set up survived each rename. When the program returned to CIA control under the STAR GATE umbrella in 1991, the session protocols and reporting structures it ran on were still recognizably the ones the GONDOLA WISH charter had laid down.