Psychic Spies | DoD
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Welcome to True Spies. Week by week, mission by mission, you'll hear the true stories behind the world's greatest espionage operations. You'll meet the people who navigate this secret world. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?

This is True Spies. Our data show very clearly that if you can see the future, you are not condemned to experience that future. For example, you have a psychic dream. On the way to work, you're going to get hit by a truck and die. Stay home, have breakfast, take the day off. You'll survive just fine. Thank you very much. This is True Spies. Episode 69, Psychic Spies.

It was December 1981 in the winsome medieval city of Verona, Italy. Nearly a week before Christmas, Brigadier General James L. Dozier was enjoying a peaceful evening at home with his wife, Judy, when — that's odd — the Doziers weren't expecting anyone. On the other side of the door, a male voice said there was a leak in the building that would need to be fixed. He was a plumber. The General opened the door.

And that's how two members of the Red Brigades, a Marxist terrorist organization, entered the home of General Dozier, pointed a pistol at his head and threatened his life. The men taped over Dozier's mouth, bound his ankles, put him in a trunk and loaded him into a van. They left his wife behind, bound and gagged, her eyes covered with tape. The general was held captive for over a month.

Thousands of miles away, in Fort Meade, Maryland, a man named Joe McMoneagle was conducting something called "remote viewing sessions." He was able to see the General locked up in the Italian town of Padua, all the way from the other side of the world. Not with computers or hidden cameras or any other technology. No.

According to McMoneagle and his colleagues, the only tools he had in use were his own psychic abilities. And what he did was described, at least phonetically, what his circumstances was. He was chained to a steam radiator with handcuffs. Could McMoneagle's remote viewing be trusted? And could the information he gathered save the General before it was too late?

These are the sorts of questions that the US government's psychic spying program endeavored to answer. If you're going to ask the genie a question, you better be damn sure you know what the question actually is. My name is Edwin Charles May, and everybody calls me Ed.

In 1968, I was awarded a PhD in experimental nuclear physics, shooting particles at targets and what have you and measuring what bubbles off. And in '68, when I graduated with my degree, I joined the University of California at Davis, California, in their nuclear physics lab as a postdoctoral fellow. No, this week's true spy isn't in fact a spy. He's a scientist, a physicist to be precise.

But his curiosity and a series of chance encounters led him down a path that would intersect with the highest echelons of American intelligence in a field of research that was and remains highly controversial. Enter into the world of Dr. Edward May and you're likely to hear something about "Eight Martini Results". You see, Ed is a researcher and his subject is psychic phenomena.

You know what the three most important words of all of science are? I don't know. Over nearly half a century in the field, a lot of his research has been, well, rather unremarkable. That's par for the course for any scientist. But some of Ed's research has produced astounding results. Eight-martini results. The kind of results that call for not just one strong drink, but several.

As the former director of the Stargate project and a practicing researcher to this day, Ed says he has no doubt that psychic functioning, or Psy, exists, and he suspects we can mine traditional scientific disciplines to learn how it works.

I'm exploring, along with my colleagues, that we yet do not have to give up physics and physiology and neuropsychology to explain our phenomena. And that's one. We're working in that direction just now. Have we finished it? Nowhere close. But until the materialist perspective begins to fail in the laboratory, I'm sticking with it.

For 23 years, beginning in 1972, highly classified research projects like Ed's helped put psychic spies to work for the United States government. If you're a skeptic, that alone might have you reaching for a stiff drink. For the moment, put your skepticism aside. Let's hear Ed's side of the story. How did a nuclear physicist find himself working in the realm of the paranormal, in the shadowy world of secrets and spies?

For Ed May, it all began as a postdoctoral fellow in Davis, California. While I was still at Davis, what happened to me is I was bored. I was like 31 years old.

And I saw a flyer advertising a weekend conference on something called out-of-the-body experiences. I had never heard of out-of-the-body experiences. I had never heard of anything about extrasensory perception or psychics. It was all brand new. So why not? I got nothing else to do. And I'm sitting there listening to this sort of businessman looking like a character talking about some of the most amazing things that I had ever heard. And I was completely convinced it couldn't possibly be true.

To understand one of the biggest challenges faced by psychic researchers, you have to know a key concept in parapsychology, that is, the study of unexplained mental phenomena. You see, the field of psychic research, with all of its critics, is divided into two camps: the sheep and the goats. Sheep are people who believe in it, or at least who believe in the possibility that it could exist.

And goats? They're the naysayers. They think it's all a waste of time and resources. Ed is a physicist. He identifies as a hardline materialist. But he isn't a goat.

I'm a physics guy. I'm a terrible theorist. Definitely not a theorist. And I'm certainly, if you make a list of eminent philosophers, I'm at the bottom of the list always. But I have a very strong interest in how the world works. Not the way I'd like it to work, but how it actually works. So here's some anomalies that, you know, gosh, if this is real, we're overlooking some aspect about how the world looks. And that's what got me into parapsychology. And that's what's keeping me in it right now.

So when Ed stumbled on the concept of out-of-body experiences, he bought a book on the subject. He was not convinced. But he was still open to learning more. Some time passed, I was at the University of California, Berkeley, still doing physics, and I ran into another flyer, this time by a guy named Charles Onerton, and I had nothing to do again. I went and listened to him, and my golly, he was talking really hard-nosed science.

And I asked Chuck out for dinner, and he had all the good scientific questions answered for me. And I was amazed. And for most of his life, until he passed away unexpectedly, he was my mentor. Honiton was a pioneer researcher in the field of psychic phenomena, also known as ESP, or simply PSI. Ed went to work in Honiton's lab.

Then, through a chance encounter with a psychic research subject, he was invited to take a job as a physicist at SRI. Formerly known as Stanford Research Institute, but now no longer affiliated with Stanford University, SRI received funding from the US Department of Defense. Ed would go to work with a quantum physicist, Hal Puthoff. What Ed didn't know was that the results of Puthoff's work had attracted the attention of the CIA.

Under extreme secrecy, the CIA was now sponsoring SRI's psychic research. But let's back up. Why would the United States government be interested in Psy in the first place? To understand that, you have to think back to the 1960s and early 70s and get into a Cold War mindset. Everyone knows about the space race between the United States and Russia, to be the first nation to put a man on the moon.

But when the US caught wind of Russian efforts to improve intelligence gathering with the help of SAI, it kicked off what's been called the "psychic arms race." The basic research back in those days was done mainly from the point of view, "Well, we heard the Russians are doing this. Let's do some research to see whether that's real or not." Ed makes this sound rather casual. In fact, declassified documents show that government officials were frightened about all sorts of possible applications of SAI.

What if the Russians could not just read their minds, but influence their thoughts? What if they could stop their hearts beating just by concentrating hard enough? Clearly, targeted research was in order. Beginning in 1972, various Psy programs had three chief goals, according to Ed. First of all, if this could work, can we gather intelligence by spying, if you will? So, goal one: scope out the possibilities for psychic intelligence gathering.

How could it be done? How reliable was it? Was there any way to guarantee reliability? Or at least to give it a boost? The second aim was, well, if we can spy on them, meaning the Soviets, they can spy on us. So a second part of the three-pronged technique was to say, okay, can we protect ourselves against being spied upon by remote viewing? Goal two, threat assessment.

If the Soviets are using psychic powers to spy on their adversaries, how could the US take psychic countermeasures to spy on them in return? And thirdly was to figure out how it works. Although for probably the first almost 10 years of the program, we have very little money to do that. Goal three, get to the bottom of all this unexplained phenomena. Crack a mystery that has puzzled people for millennia. A worthy goal, if a far-off one.

The highly classified effort took many forms over the two decades it was in operation. Today, these are most often referred to with a catch-all name: Stargate. Now, Stargate is just an unclassified nickname so that you could call up somebody on an open line and say, "I'm coming to Washington next week. I want to discuss Stargate," as opposed to, "I want to discuss psychic functioning." When Ed joined the SRI team in 1975,

He had no idea that the CIA was behind their work. I didn't know who was funding it. I know the US Navy funded the magnetometer experiment because that wasn't classified. But when I got my clearance, I knew that the CIA was funding it. Now keep in mind, we had something close to $20 million. The CIA gave us funding about 1% of that. So they were not a major funder. That might sound like a footnote in this story, but funding, or a lack thereof, is a big deal.

is key to the history of the American government's interest in psychic research. After all, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Intelligence and Security Command, these are huge bureaucracies. And as in any bureaucracy, politics played a major role.

When I became the director of the research project, I spent about 40% of my time doing admin work in Washington. If it weren't for a handful of people who protected us, kind of a shield between the sharks coming after us, so to speak,

One of those was the former Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen when he was on the Intel Committee. John Glenn, who I met in Cohen's office once, and he said, Ed, this is really fascinating work. If you ever have any troubles, please give me a call. So I tried to get hold of him, and his chief of staff wouldn't let me anywhere near the guy because of his giggle factor. But we prevailed. The giggle factor, as Ed calls it.

also factors into the researchers' relationship with the rest of the scientific community. Scientific atheists don't like what we do because they believe, incorrectly so, that what we're pushing is transcendence, that we need God in our equation to make all this stuff work. Another issue is we've written papers now claiming that all the information gathering is with one phenomenon only: precognition. Precognition, meaning

knowing something in advance. And that gets the scientific community's undies in a bunch because it appears to them that this must violate causality. If you're going to ask the question, if you can see the future by precognition, are you condemned to experience that future?

And if you are, that plays heavily into the philosophical notion of free will and those kinds of important issues. Our data show very clearly that if you can see the future, you are not condemned to experience that future. For example, you have a psychic dream. On the way to work, you're going to get hit by a truck and die. Stay home, have breakfast, take the day off. You'll survive just fine. Thank you very much.

When Ed was brought onto the project, he became privy to years' worth of classified information about past Psy research. And what he learned, he says, was nothing short of extraordinary. I was blown away. I said, "Look, why are we having so much trouble getting this stuff approved when these are small miracles that need to be closely examined?"

One of these small miracles was an instance of remote viewing, a technical, more military-friendly term for clairvoyance: psychic spying. The spy in question was a former police officer named Pat Price. In the early 1970s, Price was given a set of geographic coordinates and asked to describe what was there. Unbeknownst to him, the coordinates belonged to the summer home of a colleague of one of the researchers,

A cabin hidden away in a West Virginia forest. But it wasn't a cabin that Price saw. It was something else. A few kilometers away, what Pat found was a very, very top secret listening post that was not to be known by anybody and described exactly what was there.

Not only that, Price was able to identify file names, code words, minute details that he would only have known if he had actually been inside the building. And that's how Pat described his information gathering. He went there, in the mind, from a distance. To quote Pat in his transcript, "I mushed my head inside the safe and he read off what are called special code word names on very sensitive projects."

While Price's head was mushed inside a safe, he had stumbled upon Sugar Grove, a top-secret facility run by the National Security Agency. It was a breakthrough for the researchers, but it rattled the CIA.

That spawned one of the largest, probably ever, CIA internal investigation of a leak of sensitive information. And it wasn't a leak, it was real data. And when I saw that report, and it's now published in full, it was astounding to me, truly astounding. That's probably the most remarkable thing I had ever seen. Put yourself in Ed's shoes. You hold a PhD in physics, yet you've given over your career to a field that simply cannot be explained.

Wouldn't you want to know what was at the root of all of those miracles you witnessed, both in classified records and with your own two eyes? Ed came on as a researcher in the classified program at SRI in 1975. Then, after 10 years, he inherited the program and became its director. Ed and his research team wanted to find out not only if Psy was real, but if it was ever reliable.

And if it wasn't reliable, were there ways of improving its accuracy for the purposes of intelligence gathering? Could researchers create conditions in which psychic spies would collect superior data? The main research we are doing is what would we require to do for a participant or a psychic to enhance the likelihood he's being right, he or she is being correct or not. Then there's the question of Psy's practical applications for the US government.

If Psy really works, and May and his colleagues are convinced that it does, is it a job for only a few gifted individuals? Or could anyone tap into their psychic abilities? Could someone be trained to gather intelligence for their country? Three big questions in parapsychology research today, none of which do we know the answers to, and they are critical. Number one is, who is psychic? Is it the experimenter or the subject? That's a big problem.

Number two is the psychics do not have control over when they're psychic. For example, if psychics have access to information across all space and all time, bloody forever, and you were conscious of that,

To use a technical term, you'd go bullgoose loony in a heartbeat. You would not be able to function. I mean, for example, if you and I are having a conversation over dinner at a crowded restaurant, we can understand each other because we are attending to each other. And the fact that somebody drops a whole tray full of dishes catches our attention and then we get back to our conversation.

Well, all right, if the question then becomes, what opens the door to this vast amount of information from the future and what closes it? We do not know the answer to either of those. We suspect that the tasking opens that door. So I say, day after tomorrow, come to my lab, we're going to do an experiment. Already, that's opening the door for you, even though you're not aware of it. What closes the door is more complicated. We don't know the answer to that.

In other words, Ed suspects it's easier to tap into one's own psychic ability than to tap out of it or snap out of it. Suppose I have a magic pill here and I say, if you take this pill, you will be a perfect psychic. Would you take it? And the answer, when we informally do surveys with this, most people would not take it because there's no off switch. Think about it. Would you really want to know the unknowable?

Sure, it might make for a fun party trick, but imagine not being able to switch the knowing off. Fortunately, Ed says, that's not a problem that any non-psychics have to grapple with. Let's look at other forms of human behavior that are really excellent. For example, high jumping in the Olympics. And so the question is, could you train me to be an Olympic star high jumper?

And boy, you can train me forever and I will clear six easily inches, not feet. And there's no way that I don't have the innate native skill set to be able to learn to play tennis well enough to compete at Wimbledon or to be on the PGA golf tour and so on. So it turns out that same with psychic ability. There is some people that have innate ability. It becomes challenging.

challenging to find out who those people are but you can train them up to their point of what their innate ability is because you know there's some tips you can give but I can't turn everybody into a superstar by training them but how do you find those superstars they're hardly a dime a dozen one of Ed's major challenges was to recruit potential psychic spies that was no easy feat

I wish we could say that we had some mechanism to select out of the population at large. What we found over time, about 1% of selected populations meet the qualities of being a good psychic spy or experiment participant. I wish I had some way of mechanically doing that other than just testing them to be psychic. Ed says that modern research suggests that there might be a neuroscientific signature in the brain.

setting Psykix apart from the rest of the population. But for now, that's just speculation. There was no easy way for him to tell who had Psy and who didn't. There were no predictive personality factors, no clear commonalities. Yet, as Ed's team turned out attractive results, he says the need to recruit only became more dire.

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High-stakes operations have taken our spies into the shadows and across the globe, putting them in serious peril. And then there's psychic espionage. Interesting, to be sure, but in truth it's kind of a desk job. Psy-spies in remote viewing sessions make notes, they draw sketches, sometimes they meditate or lie down in the dark. From the outside, he doesn't look like much.

Inside Stargate, however, these spies were tangling with dangerous criminals, traveling to distant locales and fighting battles that even the army couldn't take on. Which is why, according to Ed, the need for psychic spies was growing.

The Army really got interested in it. So they said, "We want to get a unit stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland, that we can find people who would be good spies." And so the question becomes, how the hell do you find good spies? And the answer is, we had no idea at that time. So the Army psychologist and other people got together and went to Fort Huachuca, which was the Army training center for spies, if you will.

And they ended up with a large number of people that got whittled down to six individuals. And those six individuals came out one at a time to SRI to be tested to see whether they were good psychics or not. Based on their, not previous experiences per se, but based on their interest in the field. Right. Turns out not every psychic actually wants to spy for the federal government.

And out of the six, four were remarkable, one of whom was Joe McMonagle, who performed extremely well. Joe McMonagle. We'll come back to him in a moment. Another person is Angela Ford, Angela DellaFerrari Ford.

She had a 37-year career in the intelligence community as an analyst, and some of her work has been handed to the President of the United States, her analysis, not as a psychic. And of that 37 years, nine of which she was part of the Fort Meade Remote Viewing Group, and we are still working together right now. She is marvelous at this job. Angela Della Fiora Ford's skills weren't discovered by Ed or anyone else. She says she knew she was psychic from the time she was a child.

With a process called automatic writing, in which she could shut down her conscious mind and channel words onto the page, she cracked enough cases for the army that she became something of a celebrity in the program. In 1989, she used her extraordinary skill to spot a target on the run.

There was a customs agent who turned bad. He started dealing drugs with the bad guys in Florida. The customs agent in question learned that authorities were after him and became a fugitive for over three years. Law enforcement officials had a few theories about where he might have disappeared to, but they hadn't been able to track him down, which is why they turned to the Army's remote viewing team.

Smart people at the time believed that because this guy who fled loved the sea, that he must be somewhere along the coast. And Angela didn't quite work this way, but close, stuck a pin in a map, said, "No, no, no, he's near the South Gate at Wyoming's Yellowstone National Park." Lowell, Wyoming, were Angela's exact words. Hardly a seaside paradise. But there was a problem. There was no Lowell, Wyoming.

But there was a Lovell, Wyoming. Long story short, they went there and caught him just there. One letter off. Ford also channeled key details in high-risk situations far away from American soil. She was very, very good at describing what was happening upon boats. And there was a boat heading into Libya.

And she gave a very accurate description of what was on board that boat. Specifically, a major stockpile of chemical weapons shipped by Muammar Gaddafi. A few days later, Ford learned that her remote viewing had had real-world consequences. And our boss at the time, a guy named Jack Verona, told Angela, "Oh, I've initiated a submarine." She said, "No, no, you're not going to sink the boat on my data." I said, "No, no, we're just going to follow it into the harbor."

As it turns out, Ed says, Angela had accurately described the boat's contents. Very, very useful circumstance. Not every psychic spy mission was a rousing success. Another one of the program's prized spies was a man named Gary Langford. Langford, as you'll soon learn, got a lot of things right. But on one particular occasion, he nearly led Ed terribly astray. Reagan was giving a State of the Union address that year.

And Gary handed me about 18 pages unsolicited. I didn't ask him to do anything. And the 18 pages showed basically a 9-11 attack way long before that ever happened. A plane was going to fly down the Potomac River and veer off at the last minute and dive into the capital and kill everybody. And it went on and detailed information about that particular event.

So I went to Jim Salyer, who is a very smart fellow, had been with our project as a representative from the Defense Intelligence Agency for years. I knew Jim very well. So I said, "Hey, Jim, what do you want me to do with this?" And he handed and he read the whole thing and he said, "You know, are you handing this to me officially?" And I said, "Hey, Jim, what does that mean, officially?"

So if you hand this to me officially, I will take action and God help you if you're wrong. Oh dear. Oh dear indeed. And I'm not exaggerating, it was the worst 24 hours I ever had in my life. I sat there agonizing saying, "Okay, gee, what am I going to do if I don't hand this in and it happens? I'm going to feel really terrible. And if I hand it in and it doesn't happen, I'm going to probably get sacked from the program."

What would you do in Ed's position? You're not a sidekick. You have no way of verifying the stack of information that's just been handed to you. Do you take the risk and make it official? Or do you run the even bigger risk of letting a 9/11 type event happen? And you could have been the one to stop it. Ed was torn. Lives hung in the balance. But something about Gary's report didn't pass the smell test. He didn't hand it over. And it's a good thing he didn't.

of the entire 18-page document, Langford had only gotten one thing right. The only part of that 18 pages that was correct, which was unknown at the time, that Reagan had a foreign head of state who was female, Maggie Thatcher, on the podium with him during the State of the Union address. And the color picture in the paper the next day showed her wearing a pink hat. And Gary had that in his transcript a day or two before the event. We don't know right now

If someone hands me a large number of stuff from a single remote viewing, what part of it is right and what part of it is wrong? We clearly don't know how to do that. It certainly wasn't all misfires for Gary Langford. He was a star psychic in the Stargate project for a reason. A few years earlier, Langford foresaw an event that would become a key victory in the remote viewing program. It was the end of 1981.

The physicist and researcher Hal Puthoff gave Langford an uncharacteristically open-ended task to determine if an event of major importance would happen in the near future. Reagan was president at the time, and there was some hint there may have been a terrorist attack against Reagan at the Christmas tree lighting ceremony that Reagan would throw the switch and the lights would come on and all that. Langford didn't produce an answer straight away.

But a few days later, on December the 15th, he came back with a detailed prediction. An American official would be kidnapped two days later, on the evening of December the 17th. Terrorists would bind and gag him, put him in a trunk, and load him into a van. It had nothing to do with the Christmas tree lighting ceremony, except it was right. Remember General Dozier, his mouth taped over, trapped in a trunk somewhere around Verona, Italy.

Gary Langford had seen it all with astounding accuracy. It was a matter of hours before news of General Dozier's kidnapping reached the United States. Over the course of the next several weeks, the remote viewing team tried to zero in on where the general had been taken. The team produced a great deal of vague information that didn't help to narrow down his whereabouts. But in one particular session,

One of the Stargate spies, Joe McMoneagle, was able to pinpoint that he was in Padua, bound in chains. Meanwhile, another remote viewer had flown to Italy and was producing similar details that Dozier was in Padua, chained somewhere above a grocery. And that's where Italian special forces found him shortly thereafter, when he was finally freed 42 days after the attack.

It wasn't until later that Dozier heard how much had been known about his whereabouts well before his capture. Dozier said, my God, how did you know all that information? The only reason you could get that information, you must have had an agent on site knowing all that. And if that's the case, why was I held in captivity for that long?

Turns out he was told it was done by remote viewing. He said, you know what, we need to train generals and senior staff and congresspeople and the president what to think about when you're being held captive so the Sake's can find you more easily. That was Dozier's opinion. Of course, according to Ed, this stuff can't be taught. There's no way you can force your brain to emit some kind of signal that makes it easy to find you, like a red blip on a radar screen.

And that's part of the reason the Stargate project was discontinued after 23 years. Officially, the program was deemed to be ineffective. And more important reason, Ed says, was a lack of funding. The CIA was in trouble with Congress because they were spread too thin.

And so an order came out from Congress, "You must slim down your programs because we're running out of money and the Cold War is over and you need to do that." So one of the programs that suffered from that closing was us. There were others as well. It wasn't because the data weren't any good. It was because administratively there just wasn't enough money to do the job properly. Psy is messy business. There's no way to verify a psychic download.

No way to know when the door opens and when it closes. No way to separate the signal from the noise. That leaves a lot of room for doubt in an area that's already riddled with skepticism. But for all the unknowns, Ed says there is no doubt, either in his mind or in the data, that Psy really works. There are 504 remote viewing spying missions given between SRI and the Fort Meade group over the 20 years or so.

Of those 504 missions, they were all spread across the usual ABC alphabet soup agencies like the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, the FBI, and so on. Over those 19 agencies, 17 of them came back with additional new missions.

That's all you need to know. It worked. It worked well enough to keep them coming back and spending money. Suppose someone wanted to open up a new restaurant here in San Francisco. That's something they're short of restaurants, are you kidding?

But nonetheless, you've got some funding and you hire the best chef in Northern California and you have a fabulous wine cellar. And it's a small place because that's all you can afford. And it seats 19 people. All right. And on opening night, big fanfare, 19 people come and they fill up your restaurant. No more room for anybody else. And over the next two weeks, 17 of those original 19 people come back to your restaurant.

So what would you say about the quality of that restaurant? The answer is, very clearly, it was a mighty damn good restaurant. Why would they keep coming back? The food was excellent, the wine was better, price was right, and so on. If you've ever eaten in a newly open restaurant, you know that things often don't run smoothly straight out of the gate. Only with time and experience does the hustle and bustle fall into a flow. Stargate officially ended in 1995, and Ed says there's still more work to be done

But even with all its flaws, the program proved that there are plenty of gains to be made in the field of psychic espionage. Did it work 100% of the time? No. Regular spying by human spies on the ground, like in World War II, was particularly unreliable. The good news and the bad news about psychic spies. The good news is we're as good as humans on the ground, and the bad news is we're just as bad as they were.

So it's not a very good way of collecting data. The good news about it is, unlike spies of the old variety, the people on the ground are not put in harm's way in any way whatsoever, and it's cheap. Ed is still at work today, trying to solve the mysteries that have been at the core of his work for nearly half a century. And what about all those naysayers? The goats who don't believe in what he's doing and don't think it's a good use of time or money or energy.

Surely he's exhausted after all these years of defending himself. Is he ever tempted to just let those perplexing mysteries remain unsolved? I'm having too much fun. Are you kidding? This is great fun. We're doing experiments now which have a potential of making rather large sums of money. We're doing work with neuroscience to answer some of these pressing questions. And I'll drop dead on the job one day.

You can learn more about Ed May in the book ESP Wars, East and West, and about General Dozier's kidnapping in Annie Jacobson's book, Phenomena. I'm Vanessa Kirby. Here's a taste of next week's encounter with true spies.