Soviet psychotronics counter-intelligence viewings

Throughout the program's two-decade life, U.S. intelligence concerns about Soviet parapsychological research formed a steady undercurrent of justification. The CIA and DIA produced periodic assessments of Soviet and Eastern Bloc work on remote viewing, telepathy, and the broader category of "psychotronics," which Soviet researchers themselves used to refer to influence at a distance achieved by physical means. The U.S. concern was less about whether Soviet researchers were succeeding and more about whether they thought they were succeeding, and what the Soviet Union might therefore do.

The foundational assessment, prepared by DIA in 1972 and titled Soviet and Czechoslovakian Parapsychology Research, ran more than a hundred pages and surveyed open Soviet and Eastern Bloc literature on the subject. It identified named researchers, laboratories, and reported experimental results. It treated the question of whether the underlying phenomena were real as separate from the question of whether the Soviet investments were real. The investments, it concluded, were real and growing.

Updated assessments through the 1970s and 1980s continued in roughly the same shape. The CIA tasked the Stargate program itself with looking at Soviet psychotronic targets, both as a way of validating the program's methodology and as a way of providing collateral intelligence on Soviet research programs that traditional sources could not reach.

These counterintelligence sessions are scattered throughout the released archive. They are uneven. Some session reports describe Soviet laboratories in detail that later defectors confirmed in broad outline. Others describe facilities that do not appear to have existed. The 1995 American Institutes for Research review treated the Soviet-psychotronics tasking as one of the program's most defensible use cases, on the narrow ground that even if remote viewing did not work, the assessments it had produced were not worse than what was available through other open-source methods.