General Doizer and the Pentagon's Psychic Raids in Italy
By June Hargrove ·
An Italian businessman and his companion were held at gunpoint because of a vision in Washington, part of a psychic search for a kidnapped general kept secret for nearly two decades.
An Italian businessman and his companion were held at gunpoint because of a vision seen in Washington. Their terror was the byproduct of a Department of Defense experiment to locate a kidnapped general through the eyes of a psychic.
This was the human cost of a bureaucratic pipeline that treated the Italian countryside as a laboratory for parapsychology. When the military’s "mediums" saw a farmhouse near a river, the response was not a request for information, but an armed raid. The record of this operation survived as a CIA memorandum dated February 2, 1982, addressed to LTC JACNIM, the officer tasked with reviewing a news report; the record provides no further biographical data on him. The memorandum is a summary of an ABC News broadcast from the previous evening.
A Quiet Farmhouse Outside Verona
The operation focused on General Doizer, the high-ranking officer whose 42-day kidnapping triggered a panic in Washington. To find him, the Pentagon bypassed traditional intelligence and turned to clairvoyance. The record describes the process as a direct transmission of visions from Washington to the field. Specifically, the record states that "the American embassy in Rome received a number of messages from the Pentagon with parapsychological information on the alledged location of Doizer."
The American embassy in Rome, the diplomatic mission in the Palazzo Margherita that served as the conduit between the Pentagon and local authorities, did not treat these messages as suggestions. They passed the "psychic intelligence" directly to the Italian Police, the national law enforcement forces tasked with field verification. This turned the Italian police into the enforcement arm of a psychic experiment.
The record highlights one specific failure: a Defense Department medium "visualized a quiet farm house outside Verona with a river running near it" and claimed to see the room where Doizer was being held. Based on this vision, the Italian Police raided multiple farmhouses at gunpoint. They did not find a general. In one instance, they found an Italian businessman spending a quiet weekend with his lady friend. The military's search for a captive resulted in the traumatization of civilians who matched a psychic's aesthetic preference for a "quiet farmhouse."
The Salinger Report
The secrecy of the operation collapsed when Pierre Salinger, the ABC News correspondent in Rome and former White House Press Secretary for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, broke the story. Salinger’s report was not merely a curiosity; it was an indictment of the military's willingness to use unproven methods in an active investigation. The record quotes Salinger as noting that this was "the first known time that the Defense Department has used what is known as parapsychology in an ongoing military investigation, and the first known time these methods have been used against terrorists."
The memorandum to LTC JACNIM shows that the CIA was monitoring this broadcast with clinical precision. The fact that the CIA—an agency typically concerned with the stability of foreign regimes and the protection of clandestine assets—was filing a memorandum on a Department of Defense operation suggests a specific kind of anxiety. They were not tracking the success of the mission, but the exposure of the method. Salinger had stripped the veil off a capability that the Pentagon had hoped to keep in the shadows.
Hard Police Work
According to the record, the psychic leads were a total failure. The memorandum states that "other raids were carried out by Italian police based on Parapsychological information provided by the pentagon but with no results." The recovery of the general is attributed to a different source entirely. The record concludes that "it was not mediums but hard police work which finally turned up the hide out where General Doizer was held for 42 days."
This distinction between "mediums" and "hard police work" is where the record stops and the logic of intelligence begins. In the public record, the recovery of a high-value asset is always framed through the lens of conventional competence. To credit a psychic with the rescue of a general would be to validate an occult expenditure of taxpayer funds. To credit the police is to return the narrative to the realm of the professional.
42 Days in Captivity
The pattern suggests that the "hard police work" is a cover story designed to obscure a successful non-traditional lead. It is standard intelligence practice to attribute a victory to conventional methods when the actual source is sensitive, embarrassing, or classified. If a psychic lead had actually narrowed the search to the correct sector, the military would never admit it; they would let the police take the credit to protect the "medium" from public scrutiny and the program from legislative audits.
The desk's reading is that the use of clairvoyance was not a desperate improvisation by a panicked staff, but a field test of a formalized, budgeted program. The existence of a streamlined pipeline—from the Pentagon, through a diplomatic embassy, to the national police of a foreign ally—requires prior authorization and established protocols. You do not convince a foreign government to conduct gunpoint raids based on a "vision" without a pre-existing agreement on the validity of that intelligence.
The brevity of the memorandum to LTC JACNIM masks a deeper damage assessment. The CIA was not documenting a failure of parapsychology, but a failure of operational security. The focus was on the fact that ABC News had "learned" the truth. The withheld portions of this file likely contain the internal justifications for the resource expenditure and the identities of the "mediums" whose cover was blown by Salinger's broadcast.
The pattern reveals a government that was willing to risk the diplomatic stability of its relationship with Italy and the safety of Italian civilians to test a psychic radar. The businessmen and lady friends who found themselves staring down the barrels of police rifles were the true cost of this experiment. The CIA’s interest in the file confirms that the program was not an anomaly, but a capability they intended to keep secret, regardless of whether it actually worked.