Iraqi weapons sessions before the Gulf War (1990)

After Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, the Defense Intelligence Agency tasked the Fort Meade remote-viewing unit against a series of Iraqi targets. The unit was then operating under the name SUN STREAK. Some of the tasking was preparatory, intended to feed into U.S. military planning for what would become Operation Desert Storm in January 1991. Other tasking was reactive, focused on locating specific individuals or installations as the situation on the ground changed.

The released session reports from this period concentrate on a few categories of target. Viewers were asked to describe sites suspected to house Iraqi chemical or biological weapons production. They were asked to indicate where Iraqi mobile Scud launchers were being concealed. They were asked, repeatedly, to locate Saddam Hussein himself. They were given site photographs, target coordinates, and names on slips of paper.

The results, by the program's own internal assessment, were mixed. Some viewer descriptions of suspected facility interiors were judged plausibly accurate against later overhead imagery. Specific location data for mobile launchers was less successful, and the agency's later writeup treated that effort as a clear failure. The viewers did not produce a usable fix on Saddam at any point in 1990.

The Iraqi pre-war tasking was the first sustained operational use of the program against an active war-buildup situation. It is also one of the cases the 1995 American Institutes for Research review cited when it concluded that the program had not produced intelligence of operational value. The volume of session reports from late 1990 is substantial. Their fate inside DIA analytical channels, where they were routinely circulated to weapons analysts and target planners, is partly visible in the routing slips preserved with the released files.