part0031

T he same opportunities for international cooperation emerged for citizens of the countries of the former Soviet Union as for those from the US. This is apparent the relationship of Russian psychic Tofik Dadashev with the Turkish security services in the 1990s. This would have been totally impossible during the Soviet heyday, when citizens of the USSR were rarely allowed to maintain acquaintances with foreigners, much less work for foreign security services. This story also reflects changes in the mutual relations of psychics and the security services in the post-Soviet period as a whole.

At the end of the 1980s, Dadashev decided to stop working with the Special Security Services completely because he was doing more and more private consulting and did not want the two activities to intersect. But as reality often contradicts one’s wishes, there were exceptions. On one occasion during the 1990s, he was staying by invitation at an out of town government housing complex not far from Baku. “Suddenly one of the security guards weapons went missing,” said Dadashev. “The Special Security Services became alarmed because members of the President of Azerbaijan’s inner circle lived nearby. They contacted me to help and, given the hospitality that was being extended to me, I could not refuse.” Before looking at the suspects, he asked to see the security guard whose weapon was missing.

“‘No,’ I assured them,” said Dadashev. “ ‘It’s an ordinary reason, like an argument with his wife. He just did a foolish thing. Give me your word that you won’t charge him.’ They gave me their word, and the very next day the psychic’s accusation was confirmed. The security guard confessed to everything, and was later simply fired.”

In the mid-90s the Special Security Service of Turkey invited Dadashev to work with them on one case. He happened to be in Istanbul in transit, and they called to request that he help a young man who had been in a serious accident. The man was the son of Nedzhmeddin Arbakan, the head of the Islamic party, which led to the Security Services handling the situation. Dadashev changed his plans, arrived at the requested location. He conducted a psychic diagnosis. They asked him, “Will he live?”

“He will live, but he needs a complex operation. It’s better to have it done in America or in Germany. And he will remain confined to a wheelchair. This will be difficult both for him and for his family, but it’s not the end of the world. He has enough energy to lead an active life in the future. I see that he will become a Member of Parliament, and incidentally, his father will become the prime minister within the year.”

It seems the psychic was correct. An unexpected shakeup did occur within the Turkish government soon after, and Nedzhmeddin Arbakan became prime minister in June of 1998. Dadashev immediately received an invitation to move to Turkey and take up residence there. “I was offered a private house and special working conditions there, but I refused, mainly for patriotic reasons,” his loyalties remaining mainly in Russia.

In another situation involving terrorism in the mid-90s, he was working in Baku again providing private consultations. “One time my assistant told me that a journalist passing through town from Belarus had stopped to see me for a consultation,” recalled Dadashev. “I asked her to show him in. However, as soon as the journalist appeared at the door, I felt an inner impulse and said to him right away, ‘Stop! Leave your bag in the hallway behind the door. Do you have a bomb in it, by any chance? ’

“We chatted for a bit, and he left. A few days later, I found out that the Azerbaijan Special Security Services had arrested this ‘journalist’ on a charge of terrorism. It turned out that he had already blown up a train in Belarus earlier and was planning to do it again in Azerbaijan or Russia. At the trial, this man said, ‘Tofik Dadashev blew the lid on me.’

“I must admit that I had not informed the Special Security Services about him myself because I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure this time that I had a terrorist in front of me. But it became clear that the apartment I was working in was bugged by the Special Security Service, and for good reason. They had taken note of my words about the bomb and had checked this person out, just in case. Many human lives were saved as a result.”

As for incidents in recent years, Dadashev cites the case of the kidnapping of the wife of Dzhakhangir Gadzhiev, the president of the International Bank of Azerbaijan that occurred in February 2005. The kidnappers nabbed her as she was walking out of a beauty salon, drove to parts unknown, and demanded a ransom of 20 million Euros. The next morning a close friend of Dadashev’s from Baku called the psychic in Moscow about this incident. The banker had contacted Dadashev’s friend, asking him to persuade the psychic to help search for the kidnap victim. “An oppressive pause ensued because I felt that there was more than just foul play involved, and my principle is not to get involved in such matters,” said the psychic. “On the other hand, I couldn’t refuse my close friend, and I expressed my reasons to him.”

The friend was so stunned by what he heard that he asked whether the banker could call Dadashev directly so that this could be repeated personally. Two minutes later, the banker Gadzhiev called. “I immediately asked, ‘Have you notified the Special Security Services?’”

“She wasn’t kidnapped by mobsters,” said the psychic, “but by people in the intelligence services of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, very high-level ones. That is why they have so many opportunities to track the situation. I’m sure that this isn’t the first time they’ve done this. But I’m also experienced here. Several years ago, I helped some high-level people whose son was kidnapped, and in their case, the kidnappers were also people from intelligence. You have to stay strong and not panic, and to maintain control of yourself. If you show any sign of weakness, you’ll only play into their hands.”

“The danger is that if I come on the scene, the kidnappers will find out, and they’ll get rid of her—they’ll kill her and hide the body. I’m sure that their man is close to you, they know all your plans and are monitoring you.”

In responding to the question of what might happen to the man’s wife, Dadashev told him that her relatives need not worry, that she would be safe and sound, there would be no violence or abuse, that these were not ordinary bandits who would cut off her nose or ear or bully her. The psychic also asked for her photograph, “so that I might positively influence the outcome, that this was my method. And I repeated that if I came on the scene, it would ruin everything. I could only come after the hostage was freed. I said all this to the banker over the phone.”

Two hours later the woman’s photograph was delivered to Dadashev in Moscow. He conducted a session to “psychically harmonize the situation and influence its success.” Shortly thereafter, a special operations team from the Azerbaijan Ministry of National Security conducted an operation to neutralize the criminals and freed the hostage. The kidnappers were all taken by surprise. The head of the criminal gang was Gadzhi Mamedov, a police colonel on the staff of the Main Directorate of Criminal Investigation in the Azerbaijan Ministry of Internal Affairs. The banker El’chin Aliev, a family friend of the Gadzhievs and Mamedov’s nephew, turned out to be directly involved in organizing the kidnapping, confirming Dadashev’s perception that “their man” was close to Gadzhiev.

Naturally, it’s next to impossible to draw a conclusion that Dadashev’s session with the kidnapped woman’s photo had any real effect. But events turned out well for all but the kidnappers. “Those who took part in the operation received high ranks and decorations. Although my role in this story was kept confidential, it was natural to expect an expression of gratitude of some kind. Therefore, I was surprised that none of the participants even called me after it was over.”1

T ofik Dadashev’s stories, as well those of Joseph McMoneagle, provide us with a context for the position of a psychic working for special services and the military. The narrations of Ed May, Alexei Savin, and Boris Ratnikov represent both the researcher and the organizer of these investigations, while others involved in the Russian work provide additional layers of the history of the ESP Wars in that part of the world.

The following, from Colonel Vyacheslav Zvonikov, M.D., provides some of the rest of the story. Zvonikov, a psychic and a research physician, began working at the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the early 1990s and established a large center there to study and develop the practical utilization of ESP, post-USSR. In his narrative, we can also see the radical changes in the state institutions’ attitudes toward ESP, such attitudes particularly characteristic of the final Soviet period. At that time, the abrupt breakdown of the old ideology forced officials to open their eyes to new, unconventional ideas and approaches to decision-making with regard to social problems, even though many (perhaps most) in the West might consider such ideas and approaches too “New Age” or “mystical.” This period of openness to new ideas in Russia’s governmental bodies ended for the most part in the middle of the 1990s.

Vyacheslav Zvonikov’s interest in human potential and extraordinary capabilities stretches back to his childhood, as it does with so many parapsychologists in the West. In his case, the interest led to entering the world of medicine. But he noted that he also possessed psychic abilities himself and, “when I conduct ESP experiments, often it is to participate in them personally. But it is worth saying that I always look at the problem of miracles through the ‘lenses of science,’ with an objective approach.”

His affiliation with ESP research began in 1989. He was working at the Institute of Aviation and Space Medicine and had written a report for the government about the existence of extrasensory perception, explaining that the subject needed to be taken seriously. The report focused on the potential for ESP as applied to military purposes. The paper was well received and interest was shown in his ideas. As a result, he became acquainted with Colonel Michael Bazhanov, who was in charge of similar subjects at the Ministry of Defense. Bazhanov also offered Zvonikov a job at his department in the General Staff. “I was tempted,” said Zvonikov, “as this would have allowed me to remain within the Ministry of Defense but, in contrast to my job at the time, to have major opportunities for research in the field of parapsychology. For some time I oscillated between the General Staff and the other interesting offer from the Ministry of Internal Affairs.”

In the end, Zvonikov chose the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Within a year, 150 persons were working for him in the center. The first department there, consisting of 12-15 people, was engaged exclusively in ESP research. They created a huge program, with more than a hundred institutes and laboratories under Zvonikov’s direction. At that time the Prime Minister of the USSR, Valentin Pavlov, and the Chief of the Department of Defense of the CPSU Central Committee, Oleg Baklanov, were greatly interested in extrasensory questions, and they helped support the work.

Zvonikov worked in close cooperation with the KGB and the Ministry of Defense. “Thus, I met with Colonel—later General—Alexei Savin who replaced Bazhanov in the General Staff, to discuss and debate ESP research, especially with regard to the ways extrasensory influences affect people. At first, Savin proposed experiments using technical devices, such as using a psychotronic generator to measure extrasensory effects. I held the contrasting view that the usefulness of such machines had not been proven. In my opinion, it was important first to study carefully the phenomenon of extrasensory influences on humans, and only then to use technical modeling methods.”

For nearly three years, they worked together and achieved a great deal. Using policemen as their subjects, many were found to have extraordinary abilities. They selected 20 to 30 from about 400 officers and prepared them for work as operatives. These were engaged in the search for criminals using ESP, and the results were quite impressive.

One important case that Zvonikov reports working on involved the first murder of a foreign businessman in Moscow. “During Soviet times all foreign business was connected to the state, and such things simply did not happen,” said Zvonikov. “But after perestroika the dividing-up of the Soviet state’s wealth had begun, and the clash between private interests brought the potential for violence.” In 1991, a Polish businessman was killed in a hotel. Through access to his hotel room and items found there, his psychics put together accurate descriptions of the perpetrators, their base of operations, and their motivation—namely that the murder was connected to the oil business. Through this information, the location where the criminals were hiding was found, and they were later arrested at the very location specified by the psychics.

Concurrently, there was a large-scale analysis of ESP abilities of Russians as a whole, using a sample of several thousand people. According to the data, about 1.5 percent of Russians possessed extrasensory abilities. “There are regions of Russia with populations more advanced in ESP, for example, in the Kuban.2 We also found that, among those claiming extrasensory abilities, not more than 5-7% truly possess them.”

As with all human experiences and endeavors, humor pops up even in the psychic world. “While I worked in the Ministry of Internal Affairs,” said Zvonikov, “I was constantly persecuted by the inventors of psychotronic generators. In spite of tight security in our Ministry building, inventors somehow managed to get through and knock on my office door. As a result, by the end of the third year of my work, half of our conference room was jammed with all sorts of psychotronic generators that were stacked up to the ceiling, some of them with designs that were quite exotic. Most of these inventions were pure rubbish. This is not to say that all such machines are worthless. I simply had no time to test them.” One wonders if word of the number of diverse psychotronic devices Zvonikov received somehow made its way to the West, given often outlandish rumors of Russian psychotronic weaponry reported.

When the Extreme Situations Agency (which later became the Ministry of Emergency Measures) was created within the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Zvonikov’s center offered its cooperation. Using ESP in emergency situations seemed, and still seems, like a natural fit. Unfortunately, for a long time the Ministry of Emergency Measures had too many organizational problems and its longtime head, Sergey Shoigu, simply could not pay sufficient attention to the matter. Zvonikov added, “The ministry’s psychological division was headed by his daughter Yulia. I discussed the idea of developing ESP services in the Ministry of Emergency Measures with Yulia Shoigu, but before the concept had time to be realized, I had left the Ministry of Internal Affairs.”

In the late 1990s, the Ministry of Emergency Measures used the psychics trained in General Savin`s programs, but the scale of work was much less than Zvonikov had originally envisioned. “The potential for ESP in that field is huge, such as the possibility of predicting and preventing accidents, of finding people under avalanches, of revealing the most effective strategies for firefighting, and so on.

“There should almost always be a professional intermediary between the psychic and the clients, for example, for someone on a rescue mission,” said Zvonikov. “It is necessary to train professionals who can act in a role of ‘translator.’ The government agencies for emergency measures in all countries undoubtedly have a need for ESP support; it could save many lives and resources. I believe that, eventually, such a center could be created at the international level.” Zvonikov emphasized that the work should be given serious scientific consideration, with a strong medical, psychological, and physiological research framework.

They continued their work until 1993. During the period that followed, Zvonikov organized a private center where they worked with subjects supervised by the Federal Security Service and also personally by General Boris Ratnikov, with additional help from General Nikolai Sham. The Service gave the orders, and Zvonikov’s operatives, trained in ESP techniques, carried out these orders. They investigated criminal cases and shipwrecks, and predicted earthquakes. They drew up composite sketches (identikits) of suspects and locations from representational extrasensory perception .

By this time, terrorism loomed as a huge, global challenge. The Security Services briefed Zvonikov and his people on several explosions on Moscow trolley buses. The police could not locate the terrorists, as they had left no hard evidence. “Our psychics worked together with a conventional operative group in our investigation. The psychics, with their unique access to past events, made identikits of the terrorists, and they were shown on TV.” Using extrasensory means, they also located places where the criminals were hiding out. “Our psychics surveyed the license numbers of cars,” said Zvonikov, “with the conventional operative group following up on that information. From that, the corpse of a terrorist was indeed discovered in a car. But when we traced the mastermind of these terrorist acts, our operations were curtailed abruptly.” Zvonikov speculated that “there were obviously high governmental connections. We surmised that either power lines were being redrawn, or some political intrigue was being played out.”

As to the current state of Russian psi research and application, Zvonikov said, “Our experiments continue to this day. We prefer not to work with stray people from the street, and those who claim to be great psychics are also not welcome here. Instead, we test people, then we work with them, using the techniques developed in our center to develop their ESP abilities. Thus, I know that I can reliably produce amazing results in any, even the most strictly controlled conditions, with a high likelihood of success. And if it doesn’t happen, I almost always know precisely why it has not worked. We have a success rate of about 75-80%. This satisfies the strictest scientific criteria of reliability and repeatability.”

Ed May added a comment to the preceding statement from Zvonikov. “This is very much like our side with one exception,” said May. “Throughout the Russian material they use the word train or training as if it is a given. Maybe they can do it, but our side failed at this and not for lack of trying. Our psychic hit rate (i.e., % of selected populations) was of the same order as theirs.”

In addition to his research, Zvonikov teaches at the Moscow Humanitarian University. At this state university, they offer special courses of study in the department of psychology, in particular on the psyche’s unknown reserve potential. “Research into ESP has never been more important than it is today, as mass media interest soars while little real scientific research is done. From my point of view the potential for the development of ESP abilities in ordinary people is simply enormous,” said Zvonikov .

F rom Colonel Zvonikov’s account, we can see that ESP research in Russia was being conducted at the governmental level during the early 1990s at institutions that had never shown interest previously, such as the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In addition, the KGB now supported the development of these new and unusual methods for practical use. This was a major ideological breakthrough for Russia.

However, the forces of reaction soon struck back. By the mid-1990s, ESP research within the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Security Services had slowed to a trickle. Among government institutions, real work was only being done under a wing of the Ministry of Defense. A backlash was to be expected, but it is curious to note that debate on the issue of ESP already mirrored, not the ideological divide between communism and capitalism, but opposing views on the question of a progressive attitude towards science and society.

W e move now to General Sham, whom we’ve heard from previously, about how a united program of ESP research and related areas was created, and regarding the further prospects for ESP in Russia. As mentioned, he was the last Deputy Director of the KGB, and at that time headed all KGB development of ESP and new technologies.

When he was appointed to the position of Deputy Director of the KGB in September 1991, Sham set himself to the task of identifying everything that was being done in the sphere of non-ordinary technologies, ESP, and parapsychology in his nation. He wanted to evaluate their levels and prospects, to rigorously establish priorities, and to designate a special division in the KGB that would work on special unconventional subjects on a daily basis. This division was designated as a department in the Second Main Directorate (subsequently Directorate P), headed by Colonel Nikolai Dmitrievich Sharin.

“We began developing contacts with the Americans and came up with the idea of collaborating on new technologies and joint efforts to organize a system to monitor all the research that was being conducted in this area. It was too dangerous to allow it to go unregulated by the government,” said the General. Sham’s idea was to single out this special issue, and to create administrative departments to track the situation in the Soviet Union as well as in other nations and analyze the research in order to come to specific conclusions and decisions at the government level. There was historical precedent for this kind of an approach .

As Sham previously mentioned in this book, no focused, consolidated work was conducted in this field during the 1980s in the USSR. There was nothing comparable to the US Star Gate program, “but graduate-level courses were taught at the KGB on subjects such as investigative psychology,” said Sham, “the substance of which was learning how to read an individual’s mind and his motivation and learning methods of covert questioning to get needed information and of coercion.” Interdisciplinary research in psychology, parapsychology, and technology on classified topics was also conducted there, and a multitude of military and civilian experts, scientists, engineers, psychologists, and psychoanalysts stewed in this pot.

Sham continued, “To the uninitiated, some of these project designs could seem totally unbelievable—like something from a science fiction novel. But these designs were real, and were being worked on by the most highly qualified scientists and engineers. Many of them produced concrete, effective results for practical use.”

However, there was no integrated government program. Some plans in certain areas did exist, but the main problem was that all the institutes were government-financed and had to fit into the budget. They had to officially disclose their subject and get their own funding. Conducting the work in a systematic way would have required a single analytical brain to formulate the objectives and tasks, organize how specific problems were resolved and issues were addressed, obtain feedback, and analyze the data gathered. But in reality, there were masses of indirect, subjective processes and sources: contacts, friends, and the command’s priorities, all of which produced a tower of Babel, more than a little chaos.

“Each institute stewed in its own juices and there was no unified center. Nevertheless the activity continued, strengths accumulated, the R&D projects from various institutes came together, and people concluded that they needed to combine their efforts into a single serious, comprehensive joint program.”

From the late 80s to the early 90s, Sham said that they “were confronted with the fact that these special abilities were beginning to be used for criminal purposes. For example, the same con men who used methods to manipulate the minds of individuals also used bona fide ESP coercion, turning people into bio-robots that fulfilled all their demands. When the victims regained consciousness, they often could not recall what had happened to them. It’s entirely possible that in some of these cases the generators, created in the laboratories of the military-industrial complex, could have been stolen and used by criminal gangs for mercenary motives.” This fits in with some rumors and fears running through media and other discussion of Soviet psychotronics in the West at that time, though even coming from someone like General Sham this begs to be questioned with more than a little skepticism .

General Sham provided a story dealing with such criminal activity in the early 1990s, which happened to the daughter of an associate of his. “Criminals put her into a kind of trance right on the street, using a kind of ESP-hypnotic influence. She gave them all her cash, then used her bank passbook to withdraw all her savings and gave that to them as well. She was in a confused mental state all day. It wasn’t until midnight that she emerged from this state, and at that point she nearly hung herself. This particular story turned out to a good outcome, because her husband was a colonel of internal service, and he spotted this criminal group. However, this was a single success in defeating such people while we really needed a comprehensive system.”

At the end of 1991, after analyzing everything, a program was created under a single conceptual system, which included the dozens of topics that were being developed in the field of parapsychology and non-ordinary technologies, and began to establish a unified code for them. “I personally supervised this program, which systematized all the R&D into ESP functioning and unique unconventional technologies. In the end, this work was expected to move up to the highest level of government and to acquire the status of a national program.”

But Sham did not manage to see this work to its conclusion. He became the Deputy Chairman of the KGB under Vadim Bakatin just before the dissolution of the USSR. After the August 1991 coup, the leapfrogging—a rapid succession of changes in governmental appointments—began with the reorganization of the Special Services. The KGB was split up, and became the MGB at first, but then the names and structure began changing. About a year later, Victor Barannikov became head of the security agencies. All of Sham’s attempts to interest the new leadership in these subjects went nowhere—everyone proceeded to divide up the money. “I turned in my resignation and left the system,” he said. Once again, the parallel with what went on in the US is noteworthy.

He did not stop working with ESP and non-traditional technologies after he left the Special Security agencies. “In the mid-1990s we created our own center as a commercial enterprise, and it grew rapidly. We received contracts to investigate acts of terrorism and to search for missing ships and planes. This began after we had a brilliant success in investigating the blowing-up of a trolley bus in Moscow, previously described by Colonel Zvonikov, with our psychics identifying perpetrators and clients in this affair, who were quickly found and arrested by Special Services.”

They also began developing an idea that they’d come up with in 1991, to create a set of equipment that would make any site on the planet accessible, and allow information pertaining to people, plants, animals or habitats to be transferred to that site. They started to implement this idea and to construct a generator that was on a larger scale than an earlier prototype. “However,” he said, “with a generator like this we were confronted with a moral dilemma: it would be possible to transfer any type of information, good or evil, including how to wage climate wars. According to our data, military research organizations in several countries had already been working on contracts to fulfill climate orders for a long time. This can be useful in many cases, but the unregulated use of such generators and climate wars could destroy the Earth’s ecological balance and cause environmental accidents. We shelved our designs, so as not to facilitate these destructive tendencies.” Whether it could have actually worked in practice is unknown, of course.

“F rom the Russian perspective,” says Sham, “Humanity has the capability of creating a system that might make it possible to perform detailed medical diagnoses, and to formulate procedures and regimens of rejuvenation based on these diagnoses.

“Modern technologies, based on the information and field transfer, make it possible to revolutionize everything related to agriculture—plant cultivation, animal husbandry and poultry farming. From the same foundation, we can create technologies that do not impact or pollute the environment, ensure any amount of gain in growth, that provide organic food, and that solve energy-related problems (that is, secure energy without pumping oil and gas). Clearly, it’s impossible to stop our oil consumption instantaneously, but it is possible to extract oil in unconventional ways using resonant technologies, to make extraction less ecologically destructive, and to do this while reducing, not increasing expenditures.”

He finished with the sentiment that “Money is what drives humanity now, but mankind must aspire to a completely different path, on which the thirst for personal gain is not paramount. We need to reconsider our objectives and concerns to change the patterns of our activity, both between people and toward the world around us.