Norm Everheart

Norm Everheart was a CIA technical operations specialist with nearly a quarter-century of service by the mid-1970s. In 1950, at the age of twenty, he was recruited by the fledgling intelligence agency as a television engineer and sent to Greece as a clandestine radio operator. He subsequently worked in the Agency's Office of Communications and the Technical Services Division (TSD), which later became the Office of Technical Service (OTS). His last posting before becoming a coordinator for Grill Flame was chief of OTS's regional tech base in Athens.¹

In late 1974 or early 1975, Everheart was appointed liaison to "Staff D" (later the Office of SIGINT Operations), an office specializing in small-scale signals intelligence collection. It was in this role that he was introduced to the remote viewing program by Ken Kress, who had initiated Stanford Research Institute (SRI)'s first psi research contract. Everheart, initially unfamiliar with remote viewing, was urged to consider how it might benefit Staff D operations, particularly through the abilities of Pat Price.¹

Everheart became the chief coordinator for Grill Flame taskings from the CIA's Operations Directorate, working alongside his superior John McMahon, the CIA's deputy director for operations. He was a pragmatic and relatively open-minded individual in the often "cold and conniving" world of intelligence. He employed an "oblique targeting method," where the remote viewer was given minimal information about the target, which helped build confidence in the accuracy of psychic data when it matched unknown facts.¹

He was involved in several notable remote viewing operations. In one, he tasked Ken Bell and Mel Riley to remote-view a KGB "illegal" in South Africa, leading to the discovery of a hidden pocket calculator used for coding messages. In another, he tasked Joe McMoneagle to remote-view a Soviet Embassy official carrying a fishing pole, which led to the identification of a dead-drop site. Despite the "giggle factor" from skeptical colleagues like Staff D chief Ed Rogers, Everheart remained a strong proponent of remote viewing within the Agency.¹