Not according to the Army. Brigadier General James Dozier was kidnapped by the Red Brigades in Verona on December 17, 1981, and freed by Italian police in Padua on January 28, 1982. The Army's Grill Flame remote viewing unit spent the whole period on the case. A one-page Army memo in the CIA files reports that a preliminary analysis found the data "did not play a direct and immediate role" in his release. One session transcript does contain the word Padua.
What happened to General Dozier
The Army memo
The session that said Padua
Why the story persists
Where to read it
What the documents say, and what people claim
What happened to General Dozier
Dozier, a US Army brigadier general posted in Verona, was taken from his apartment there at about 6 pm on December 17, 1981, by the Red Brigades. After 42 days, on January 28, 1982, Italy's NOCS police unit rescued him from an apartment in Padua without firing a shot. The US Intelligence Support Activity assisted the Italian effort. The remote viewing files add a footnote to those facts.
The Army memo
The record is a one-page memorandum from the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Department of the Army, sent through the Director of the Army Staff for the Secretary of the Army, titled "SA Query re GRILL FLAME Support to BG Dozier Search and Rescue." The CIA Reading Room lists it as CIA-RDP96-00788R000700130006-6, released December 7, 1998. The date line is illegible in the scan.
It has three numbered paragraphs. The first defines the program: "GRILL FLAME is a DIA/Army program that applies remote viewing phenomena to priority intelligence targets." The second says that during the kidnapping "100% of the Army GRILL FLAME effort was devoted to developing information that could lead to his location and release," that the usefulness of that information was being assessed, and that "a preliminary analysis reveals that Army GRILL FLAME data did not play a direct and immediate role in BG Dozier's release." The third promises a separate memo on the specific role once the final analysis was done. That final memo is not among the records we have read.
The session that said Padua
The collection also holds a 17-page transcript, "Remote Viewing Session #849," dated January 20, 1982, eight days before the rescue. The cover pages state the unit's standing rule: the viewer's impressions "are provided as raw intelligence data, and as such, have not been subjected to any intermediate analysis, evaluation or collation." The monitor opens by showing a photograph and asking where Brigadier General Dozier is located.
The viewer, identified only as #06, describes a house with floor-to-ceiling windows on a hillside by a lake in real mountains with a lot of snow, owned by a professor, with five people inside. Asked the name of the area, he says: "I get a....get an old name. Padua. Very old. 300 years. I don't know why I got that." He then speaks of a cardinal, a radio station to the west and a code hidden in song dedications.
Dozier was rescued from an apartment in Padua, a flat city on the Venetian plain, not a lakeside house in snowy mountains. The transcript holds one word that matched and a scene that did not, in a report the unit itself labeled raw and unanalyzed. Whether anyone acted on the word is what the Army memo answers: not directly.
Why the story persists
The FAS program history lists "locating a kidnapped general in Italy" among the successes claimed for the program, noting that such claims are largely unverified. The files show what the claim rests on: a session with a city name in it, and an Army assessment that the data did not directly help. The 1995 review of the whole program reached the same general finding, that no remote viewing report had ever guided an operation; see Is remote viewing real?.
The documents say: the Army unit worked the case full time; one January 20, 1982 session named Padua inside a description of a mountain lake house; the Army's preliminary analysis found the data did not play a direct and immediate role in the release; a promised final analysis is not in the records read.
People claim: that remote viewers found General Dozier, or located the apartment. The Italian police found him. The files contain a word that matched and an official memo saying the data did not directly help.
Last updated November 4, 2026.
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