Hazard by Gerald A Browne Page A

separate agencies sharing an annual six-billion-dollar budget. Among them were the FBI , the AEC , the Treasury Department, and the State Department’s Intelligence and Research Bureau. None of these got a very big slice. At least not compared to the National Security Agency, the CIA , and the DIA . The last had the intelligence divisions of the Army, Navy, and Air Force under its authority making it the biggest spender.
    Since the Bay of Pigs fiasco the CIA had recouped its losses and apparently was the intelligence agency most favored by the present administration. That left the DIA a poor second. Not poor in money but starving for prestige.
    The CIA had come to be synonymous with U.S. intelligence. Few persons even knew the DIA existed. The Defense Intelligence Agency had been formed in 1961 by Secretary of Defense McNamara. The idea was to consolidate the intelligence units of the various military services. The move gave the DIA a big edge in personnel under command. The DIA was big, so big in fact that it got caught up in its own bureaucracy. It operated like a giant vacuum cleaner, sweeping up raw data gleaned by DIA agents over the world, but DIA suffered a glut of facts and a poverty of analysis.
    Meanwhile, it was the CIA that predicted the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and Israel’s blitz victory in the Six-Day War. It was the CIA that engineered the putschs and coups like the one in Iran that put the Shah back in power and kept the Russians from getting control of the Iranian oil fields. It was the CIA that did the things behind the things that made the headlines. The smaller, trimmer CIA used clever footwork, beat its rival agencies to the punch, and had made itself the lightweight champion of the smart-ass, know-it-all division.
    That being the case, Kersh believed that not the CIA but the DIA was his best prospect. He figured the DIA had more money to get rid of and would also be more receptive because of its secondary position.
    However, after twenty minutes with this DIA man, Mumford, Kersh doubted his own strategy. Mumford showed no sign one way or the other; merely sat there riding his swivel chair, noncommittal.
    Kersh went to his reserve ammunition.
    He let Mumford know he’d only accidentally chosen to come first to the DIA with this proposition. Implying that his next stop would be CIA headquarters across the river at Langley.
    That got nothing from Mumford, not even a blink.
    Kersh brought in the Russians. He’d boned up on what they were reportedly doing in the field of ESP . A surprising amount of information was available in such ethical publications as the Foreign Science Bulletin. And Kersh had access to papers written by Russian scientists, extracts of symposiums held at the geophysics department of Moscow University, the Leningrad Academy of Science, and the Kazah State University. Among those involved was Dr. Leonid Vasilev, whom Kersh knew to be a top Soviet scientist. He was holder of the Lenin Prize, a member of the Soviet Academy of Medicine, and chairman of physiology at the University of Leningrad. Excellent credentials. Also participating was Dr. Ya Terletsky, the noted physicist, a chairman at Moscow University, and Dr. M. Bongard of the Biophysics Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
    From what was reported, Kersh gathered that, unlike the United States, the Soviet Union had been seriously experimenting with ESP for the past twenty years. In 1966 the Russians conducted the first long-distance-telepathy exercise. A receiver-subject in Moscow successfully received several simple-image messages telepathically transmitted by a sender-subject in another city more than a thousand miles away. The exercise was performed under fairly controlled conditions. Since then, more complicated, highly controlled experiments had been conducted in Moscow, Leningrad, Prague, at various state universities, and most recently in Academgorodok, where the elite of