Secret Service Agents and the Army's Shadow Roster
By Miriam Adler ·
Secret Service agents and CIA officers sat on a restricted Army access list for years, while the project's actual name is still blacked out in the records.
The men on this list were the only ones allowed to know what the Army was trying to unlock in the human mind. Their silence was the only thing standing between a classified experiment and a public scandal.
This story is built from a single, stark piece of evidence: an access roster for a group called the "Intelligence Continuity Staff SG1I." This is a translation of a document that is effectively a ledger of secrets, a list of who was "indoctrinated"—the record's term for being read into a program—and when.
The SG1I Indoctrination
The roster reads like a directory of the Army's most guarded secrets. It centers on the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), the unit that conducts intelligence and information operations for Army commanders and national decision-makers. At the top of the chain is Major General Albert N. Stubblebine, who served as the Commanding General of INSCOM; the record shows no further details on his career, only that he was indoctrinated on June 25, 1980.
Under Stubblebine were the operational architects: Colonel James W. Shufelt, the Chief of Staff for INSCOM, and Colonel Charles F. Scanlon, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations. Both were read into the program on October 9, 1980. The record places them as the primary administrative handlers of a project so sensitive that it required its own dedicated staff and a specific classification tier.
The document provides a list of others who shared this circle. There is Lieutenant Colonel Richard E. Hartzel, the INSCOM Command Psychologist, and Edwin A. Speakman, a GS-18 Scientific Advisor for the command. These are not typical roles for a tactical intelligence roster. The presence of a psychologist and a high-level scientific advisor indicates that the "continuity" being managed here was not about logistics or troop movements, but about something happening inside the head.
An Unusual Guard
If the presence of a psychologist is a clue, the presence of the United States Secret Service (USSS) is a flashing alarm. The USSS is the federal agency tasked with protecting political leaders and visiting heads of state. They have no operational mandate to sit on an Army intelligence access roster.
Yet, the record is explicit. A translation of the "Active" roster lists "USSS/ID" and "USSS" multiple times. One entry shows a member of the USSS was indoctrinated on December 11, 1981. Another lists a "LTC USSS" indoctrinated on May 1, 1980.
The pattern suggests a breach of standard military protocol. The USSS does not provide security for Army intelligence programs. They provide security for high-value persons or sites of extreme national sensitivity. The desk's reading is that the SG1I project involved a physical site or a high-value asset that required "off-book" security beyond what INSCOM's own guards could provide. When the Secret Service is moved onto a military intelligence roster, it is because the asset in question is either a person of immense importance or a technology that the Pentagon dared not leave to the Army's internal security.
The Psychologist and the Advisor
To understand what was being guarded, one must look at the overlap between INSCOM and the CIA. The public record establishes the CIA as the civilian foreign intelligence service tasked with covert operations. On this roster, the two organizations are not just partners; they are fused.
Edwin A. Speakman is the linchpin. While he is listed as a Scientific Advisor for INSCOM, he also appears in the record as being associated with the CIA's DD/S&T—the Directorate of Science and Technology. The Directorate of Science and Technology is the arm of the CIA that develops the tools for espionage, from satellites to specialized sensors.
Connecting Speakman to the CIA's scientific wing and Hartzel's role as Command Psychologist creates a clear trajectory. The desk's reading is that INSCOM served as the operational "laboratory" for a capability owned and directed by the CIA. The Army provided the facilities and the personnel; the CIA provided the scientific direction. If the program's objective were traditional signals intelligence or human spying, a "Command Psychologist" would be a luxury, not a requirement for the access roster. The inclusion of Hartzel suggests the program's objective was cognitive or parapsychological in nature.
A Strategic Migration
The most telling line in the record is not a name, but a move. Colonel Charles F. Scanlon began as the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations at INSCOM. He was one of the first senior officers read into the SG1I program. Later, the record shows Scanlon moved from his leadership role at INSCOM to a position with the US Secret Service.
This is not a standard career path. A senior Army intelligence officer does not simply slide into the Secret Service unless there is a specific operational requirement to do so. The connection here is the USSS's existing presence on the SG1I roster. Scanlon did not just leave the program; he followed the security detail.
If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the movement of senior INSCOM leadership into the USSS was a strategic placement. The goal was to ensure the program's secrecy survived the transition of command. By planting a key indoctrinated officer within the agency providing the security, the project's architects closed the loop. They ensured that the people guarding the door were the same people who knew exactly what was behind it.
The Shape of the Gap
The record contains a glaring void. Immediately preceding the personnel roster, the document states: "Next 1 Page(s) In Document Exempt." This is a redaction, a purposeful removal of text by the agency before release.
In a file that lists every aide-de-camp and budget officer, the only thing the government felt the need to hide was the page that defines the mission. The desk's reading is that the "Exempt" page contains the project's codename and its mission statement. It is the only place in the document where the "what" is hidden, while the "who" is left exposed.
This is a roster of a shadow program that operated at the intersection of Army intelligence, CIA science, and Secret Service security. The pattern—the psychologists, the scientific advisors, the cross-agency migrations—points to a project focused on the exploitation of human consciousness or non-traditional perception. A full release would show a program that treated the human mind as a piece of hardware to be hacked, and the "Exempt" page is protecting the name of the tool they used to do it.
The people on this roster paid for that secret with their professional trajectories, moving in strange circles between Fort Meade and Langley to keep the loop closed. The public paid for it with a void in the record, a single exempt page that hides the nature of the experiment while leaving the list of accomplices in plain sight.