[spy v spy] russia’s kgb and the clairvoyants – grasping at straws?

Would you fear an international intelligence service which employed clairvoyants?

Correspondents of the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily said that not long before he passed away, Professor Alexander Spirkin, well-known scholar and co-author of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, admitted in an interview that the Soviet KGB employed clairvoyants to spy on their enemies.

Alexander Spirkin used to head a secret lab under the Soviet government and worked closely with clairvoyants hired to carry out special missions for the Kremlin.

“I used to work closely with hundreds of all sorts of extrasensory individuals,” Mr. Spirkin recalled in a conversation with Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondents.

“In the 1960s, when the [Khrushchev] Thaw began (the period between the end of 1950s and the beginning of 1960s, when repressions and censorship reached a low point) and people began to speak out, groups of people interested in telepathy met at the Moscow Polytechnic Museum.

”Wolf Messing who possessed a true gift of clairvoyance and telepathy was a key figure at those gatherings. I had known him since university. His posters reading: “Experienced in reading thoughts at a distance!” were all over the country.

“In those days I had campaigned for studying those phenomena, claimed they were incomprehensible, and, in terms of Marxist and Leninist ideology inexplicable, but we had no right to deny the fact they exist.

Eventually, I was summoned to the scientific department of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] Central Committee and offered a post of the chairman of the laboratory for biological information. Provided, of course, its operation would be closely watched by the KGB and the Central Committee.”

Spirkin’s task was to hire at least 200 “agents”. Each contender was to fill out a questionnaire containing such questions as: “Which extraordinary properties do you possess?”, “What kind of dreams do you have?”, “Are they of erotic nature?”, “Do you fly in your sleep?”, “Are you able to influence people?” and “Have you ever tried to heal?”

Candidates were examined by a commission made up of clairvoyants who had already proved their ability, and Spirkin himself.

One of the female agents possessed great healing power, as her body produced extraordinary heat. Ivan Fomin used his extrasensory energy to investigate all sorts of disasters and technical malfunctions.

His services are still in demand in Russia, Prof. Spirkin said. He used to work as an advisor to Boris Yeltsin and investigated aircraft accidents. Spirkin also mentioned Boris Shapiro, who possessed a very strong sense of diagnostics. These days, Shapiro consults wealthy entrepreneurs.

All employees of the secret laboratory were closely watched by the Soviet omnipotent security agency — the KGB. Some of the lab staffers, too, were KGB agents. One of such “students” once entered Alexander Spirkin’s office and introduced himself as KGB General Makarevich.

The official said that he was ordered to control the professor’s activities because they were of great interest for foreign intelligence and defense agencies, especially for the CIA and the Pentagon.

Spirkin responded that the laboratory had not developed a scientific base that could deserve such immense interests in other countries. The general replied that foreign intelligence officers wanted to know everything, even if there was nothing to know about. “Even the fact we have made no progress whatsoever also amounts to important intelligence data,” he said.

“In the end I had to leave the lab. New know-how and technical devices started to appear but I could hardly make them out. A special committee came to check our equipment, and they were shocked to see how obsolete it was. The laboratory was not closed. A younger scholar took over my post.”

Prof. Spirkin admitted he still did not know what the outcome of the research was. He knew that the military took great interest in the lab’s work, seeking to use clairvoyants for purposes of spying. The Soviets hired clairvoyants to report on the state of health of U.S. leaders or travel to the United States under the guise of tourists, so that they could report on local developments, using their extrasensory abilities.

From MosNews