Morris Childs and the Psychic Surveillance of Solo
By Miriam Adler ·
Kept secret for 31 years, the record shows the agency attempting to use "Viewer 032" to track a double agent they already owned.
Morris Childs spent thirty years living a lie that could have ended in a Soviet basement, while his handlers in Washington wondered if a psychic could see the truth better than a man on the ground. The cost of this overlap was a total collapse of trust in human intelligence, replaced by a desperate reliance on the occult to verify the movements of a man the government already paid to betray Moscow.
This story comes from a single, mangled page of a reading-room file. The text provided is a translation of OCR-extracted records released by the CIA, the civilian foreign intelligence service tasked with covert operations and global intelligence collection. Because this is a translation of a degraded scan, the record is often a slurry of characters and gaps, but the labels remain clear.
Viewer 032 and the Noise
The record is a fragment titled "8929 SESSION 03, SOLO, VIEWER # 032" (CIA-RDP96-00789R000700720003-3). It does not read like a report; it reads like a transmission from a broken radio. Much of the body is noise—strings of colons, dots, and fragments—but the structural markers are intact. The record identifies a specific "SESSION 03" and a specific operative designated as "VIEWER # 032," a psychic practitioner whose identity is withheld from the file.
Among the ruins of the OCR text, a few translated words survive. The record mentions a date in "NOV" and the word "institutional." Most tellingly, the fragmented text contains the phrase "and saw," the primary verb of a remote viewing session. The rest of the document is a graveyard of characters: "h'r?i t'::1,.1' (::;.}.. ,a l..l la 3 I Fa::".
If the record is read as a raw output, it is useless. But the record is not the output; it is the file of the output. The existence of a "Session 03" means there were at least two previous attempts to use Viewer 032 to look at the target. The designation "SOLO" is the anchor.
Twenty-Eight Million Dollars
According to the public record, SOLO was the codename for Morris Childs. Childs was an American political activist and a functionary of the American Communist Party who became a Soviet espionage agent in 1929. In 1952, he flipped, becoming a double agent for the FBI. For the next three decades, Childs operated as a high-level courier, traveling between Moscow and New York City, briefing Soviet officials on American political affairs while reporting every detail back to his handlers.
Childs was not a low-level mole; he was a financial artery. The public record establishes that he played a central role in transferring more than $28 million in Soviet subsidies to the American Communist movement. He was so successful in his deception that the Soviet government awarded him the Order of the Red Banner in 1975. The American government eventually recognized his utility with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by Ronald Reagan in 1987.
Childs lived in the narrow gap between two empires, carrying millions of dollars in cash and the secrets of the American party's leadership. He was the ultimate human asset: a man who had spent decades perfecting the art of the lie.
Tracking a Double Agent
This is where the connection becomes an absurdity. The CIA was not using Viewer 032 to find a hidden Soviet base or a missing missile; they were using a psychic to watch Morris Childs.
The public record shows that the FBI and the CIA knew exactly where Childs was, who he was meeting, and how much money he was carrying. He was their asset. Yet, the record of Session 03 proves that the agency felt the human intelligence—the reports from Childs himself and the surveillance of his handlers—was insufficient.
There is a profound irony in the trajectory of this operation. The government had a man who had successfully fooled the KGB for decades, yet they did not trust that man's reports enough to forgo a "viewing" session. They were attempting to create a psychic redundancy. By assigning Viewer 032 to "SOLO," the agency was effectively auditing their own double agent using a method that had no basis in physical evidence. They were looking for the "ground truth" of a man's loyalty not through polygraphs or counter-intelligence, but through a psychic's impressions of an "institutional" setting.
The Shape of the Void
The most striking part of the record is what is missing. A standard remote viewing session requires three things: the viewer's raw impressions, the known facts of the target's location, and an evaluator's grade on the accuracy of the session. In this file, the target's coordinates are gone, and the evaluator's verdict is absent.
The pattern suggests that the degradation of the text is a byproduct of selective redaction rather than simple OCR failure. The "Approved For Release" headers are pristine, while the core content of the session is obliterated. This is not a scan of a faded page; it is a scan of a page that has been surgically scrubbed.
If this file is shaped the way it looks, the desk's reading is that Session 03 was a failure, or worse, a contradiction. If Viewer 032 "saw" something that disagreed with the reports provided by Morris Childs, the agency would have faced a crisis: either their most valuable Soviet asset was lying to them, or their psychic program was a fraud. The redactions are protecting the agency from admitting which one was true.
The operational necessity that triggered Session 03 is withheld, but the timing in "NOV" suggests a specific window of anxiety. The desk's reading is that the CIA was tracking a specific shipment of funds or a specific meeting in Moscow and found that Childs' report didn't align with the psychic's vision. Instead of confronting the agent or discarding the psychic, they buried the result in a file that was eventually released as a digital smudge.
What a full release would show is a record of institutional paranoia. The agency had a man who could move $28 million under the nose of the KGB, yet they were terrified that he might be playing a triple game. They turned to the occult to solve a problem of trust, and when the results were likely inconclusive or embarrassing, they blacked out the evidence.
This is the legacy of the psychic programs: they provided a shadow-track for intelligence that didn't fit the narrative. The still-withheld pages of the SOLO files are protecting the memory of an agency that preferred the fantasies of Viewer 032 to the recorded facts of its own operatives. Morris Childs paid for this with a lifetime of deception, and the American taxpayer paid for it by funding a psychic search for a man who was already standing right in front of them.