Rasputin's Shadow

58

Kirby’s JPEGs were soon pouring into my phone. Lots of them.

I was at my desk, e-mailing them on to myself at my personal Gmail account, and going through them on my laptop as they arrived.

The first file, though heavily redacted, was interesting. It concerned an assignment code named Operation Bouncer and was marked SCI-Sensitive Compartmented Information. It involved the interrogation and subsequent assassination of a Bulgarian psychiatrist who had been torturing prisoners in El Salvador. From what I could make out between the words and lines that had been crossed out with a thick black marker, Corrigan was a field agent working for the CIA’s Office of Research Development. In El Salvador, the cover he’d used was a Boston-based CIA front called the Scientific Engineering Institute. All of this didn’t come as a surprise to me, given the reason Corliss had reached out to him.

Apart from these two institutions that I would need to look at more closely, the file didn’t offer me anything else. Too much of it was redacted to give me any more insights into who “Reed Corrigan” really was. Not that I expected it to. Code names were there for a reason.

Which was why I wasn’t feeling hugely hopeful when I turned my attention to the second file.

It concerned an assignment code named, of all names, Operation Sleeping Beauty. It was also marked SCI and its pages were also heavily redacted, more so than the first file. From what I could gather, it was about a Russian scientist, code named Jericho, who had managed to make contact with our people in Helsinki while attending a KGB-sponsored conference there. He claimed to be working on a highly classified program of psychotronic weapons.

I paused there. I’d never heard the word. I opened a browser window and looked it up and discovered it was a term the Russians had coined for a new generation of weapons.

Mind-control weapons.

I straightened up.

The report mentioned Jericho as a neurophysiologist and described how he had substantiated his claims by revealing details about the organizational structure of the KGB’s S Directorate and its Department of Information-Psychological Actions. Frustratingly, the information about what technology he was actually working on was heavily blacked out. From the information that was still readable, it had to do with something called entrainment and was of “paramount importance to the national security of the United States.”

Again, I paused and called up the browser window and typed in “entrainment.” The word was used in several contexts, but one of them darted off the screen and sent a charge through me.

Brainwave Entrainment.

I skimmed a couple of articles that explained it. They described it as using an external stimulus to alter the brain state of the person being “entrained.” Broadly, the concept was that you could make people feel or behave in a certain way by using auditory pulses, flashing lights, electromagnetic waves, or other stimuli to “entrain” their brains into particular states.

My nerves crackled as I sped-read through the history-about how the scientific concept of brainwave entrainment or synchronization dated back to 200 AD, when Ptolemy first noted the effects of flickering sunlight generated by a spinning wheel, and how humans have been using sensory entrainment throughout their history. Then in the 1930s and 1940s, technology made it possible to measure brainwave entrainment after the invention of the EEG in 1924. This created a flurry of research in the area, including looking at the effects of introducing frequencies into the brain directly through electrical stimulus.

I dug deeper.

I read about how entrainment influences brain function beyond visual and auditory stimuli because of a phenomenon called the frequency following response. If the human brain receives a stimulus with a frequency in the range of brain waves, the predominant brain wave frequency will move toward the frequency of the stimulus. The most familiar side effect of entrainment was the way in which strobe lights at an “alpha” frequency could trigger photosensitive epilepsy.

Then in the early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, a neuroscientist called Allan H. Frey discovered the Microwave Auditory Effect, which is caused by audible clicks induced by pulsed/modulated microwave frequencies. There’d been a huge increase in radar coverage in the 1950s, and pilots had started to complain about a clicking in their ears when they flew directly into the path of the microwave radiation on which the radar systems were built. Frey discovered that these clicks were generated directly inside the human head and were not audible to people nearby. Research showed that this effect occurred as a result of thermal expansion of parts of the human ear around the cochlea, even at low power density. At specific frequencies, it was thought that these clicks could cause entrainment.

The U.S. embassy in Moscow was famously believed to have been bombarded with microwaves for several decades starting in the 1950s in an effort to confuse, disorient, and even harm its staff. Anecdotal evidence exists of many embassy employees dying in the ensuing years because of the damage that was done to them, although as was usual in these cases, I imagined the real truth was buried in some long-shredded documents or in the graves of those insiders who really knew what had happened-or of those who had been its victims.

I found references to a scientist from Yale called Delgado in several articles. He had implanted electrodes into the brains of animals and humans in order to send highly specific electromagnetic currents into targeted areas. In his most infamous experiment, he wired up a bull, then, in front of several colleagues, Delgado stepped into the bull ring armed with no more than a remote control. He hit a switch that made the bull furious, then as the bull charged at him, he hit another switch that stopped the big animal in its tracks and turned it into a docile pussycat. Delgado was quoted as saying that if he could do these things by implanting electrodes in the brain, he believed it was only a matter of time before he’d be able to do it from outside the brain, using a very precise electromagnetic field.

And if all that wasn’t enough to trip all kinds of circuits inside me, another article revealed that the same Microwave Auditory Effect was found to be inducible with shorter-wavelength portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The shorter the wave, it seemed, the more energy and information it could carry. The article then described how microwave pulses from modern cell-phone network towers could theoretically cause this effect. These behavioral changes had to do with chemical responses in the brain. The external stimuli triggered the release of neurochemicals that caused various reactions in the brain, resulting in remotely heightened emotional and intellectual responses such as calmness, trust, lust, or aggression. The difficulty, and the key to achieving this, was believed to be in pinpointing the right combination of frequency, wave form, and power level to bring about a specific reaction.

Microwaves. Cell-phone technology. Altering human behavior remotely. Aggression.

The bloodbath at Brighton Beach. The gear we found in Sokolov’s garage.

I couldn’t read this last section fast enough, and I could already feel my heart kicking in my neck before I saw this:

Russian and American psychological warfare programs are believed to be actively researching the sonic, electromagnetic, and microwave spectrums for wavelengths and frequencies that can affect human behavior and exploring the viability of using entrainment, both to control their own population as well as to use it as an advanced weapon. The Russians are widely acknowledged to be well ahead of their American counterparts in this field. A handful of independent scientists are also actively researching brainwave entrainment, with the more outspoken stating that it could theoretically be used to cause subjects to commit acts of extreme violence and even kill on a massive scale by activating extreme paranoia and predatory survival impulses inside them.

My insides twisted.

I went back and checked the first date in the report.

November 29, 1981.

My eyes went into tunnel vision, and everything outside those words and numbers went all blurry as a fury of connections and implications lit up my mind.

I had zero doubt about it.

This file was about Sokolov.

Leo Sokolov was “Jericho.”

And he was connected to Corrigan.