The CIA's Ghost Murmur hearbeat-detection system: fact or fiction?

The colonel, one of a two-man crew of an F-15E Strike Eagle shot down by an Iranian shoulder-launched missile, had spent two days trying to conceal his location from enemy search parties, while letting his would-be rescuers know where he was. Apart from intermittent radio contact, all he had was his personal “come-and-get-me” beacon signal. And he dared switch that on only occasionally, for the Iranians would surely be monitoring the conventional means of rescuing him. What ultimately led to salvation, however, was far from conventional. One of the most intriguing secrets of Operation Epic Fury is how, using an “exquisite” piece of classified technology, the CIA succeeded in finding the injured airman in Iran by detecting his heartbeat, the tiniest evidence of human life concealed in a narrow crevice up a 7,000ft mountain ridge. The technology that led to the airman’s rescue by Seal Team Six commandos has now been outed as a CIA “tool” called Ghost Murmur. But is it fact or cleverly-woven fantasy? It was reportedly developed as a highly classified “blue skies” invention by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, the famous laboratory where young, brilliant scientists and engineers devote their time to finding solutions to impossible concepts. Hunting for a heartbeat to confirm the airman’s location, CIA “human assets” inside Iran are said to have relied on Ghost Murmur to select out all other environmental noises across the barren landscape to pinpoint the position of the weapons systems officer, the colonel, call-signed DUDE44 Bravo. John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, hinted at the new technology in a press conference this week. “We deployed both human assets and exquisite technologies that no other intelligence service in the world possess to a daunting challenge, comparable to hunting for a single grain of sand in the middle of a desert,” Ratcliffe said. The US intelligence community is keeping quiet about the revelations. One American intelligence source said: “If we’ve done something in secret, it’s for a good reason.” On the face of it, a futuristic magnetic sensing device — Ghost Murmur in simplistic terms — pinpointed the missing colonel’s heartbeat across a 40-mile stretch of land. Such a system defies the laws of known physics. However, when Trump was contacted about the CIA’s exotic heartbeat detection system by the New York Post, which first broke the story on Ghost Murmur, he appeared to confirm the accuracy of the extraordinary achievement. “It was very important, the CIA was fantastic. Nobody even knows what it is. Nobody ever heard about it before. We have equipment, the likes of which nobody has ever even thought about,” he told the newspaper. The CIA is now more than ever linked up to private industry to benefit from technological breakthroughs. But Ghost Murmur, as described, would appear to push the boundaries of physics beyond even the most exceptional human brain or computer. Intelligence sources would not confirm or deny the existence of Ghost Murmur. But reportedly the “CIA tool” relies on what is called quantum magnetometry, which can find signals of human hearts, aided by artificial intelligence to separate out all the other noises getting in the way. On the night of the rescue operation, there would have been multiple heartbeats because the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was out in force in the same region searching for the downed airman. “Ghost Murmur finds no support in decades of peer-reviewed physics, even with the help of AI,” says Scientific American, a magazine that specialises in advances in science and technology. “Quantum magnetometers are real, they are ultra-precise in detecting heart arrhythmias by measuring magnetic fields produced by the cardiac muscle. But the heart’s magnetic field is weak,” it reports. “At the surface of the chest, where you’re about ten centimetres away from the source, the magnetic field is just barely detectable,” John Wikswo, a professor of biomedical engineering and physics at Vanderbilt University, said. In other words, the further away, the heartbeat signal becomes progressively weaker, so detection of the missing colonel’s heartbeat from 40 miles away would seem to be a scientific stretch too far. Yet the CIA director’s “single grain of sand in a desert” image would appear to back it up. When the missing colonel finally stood up on the mountainside, which was covered in bushes and trees, as the rescuers got closer, his heartbeat was revealed in technicolour. The hint of movement 40 miles away was enough for Seal Team Six to board AH-6 Little Bird special forces helicopters and head for the spot. The commandos were strapped to outer benches attached to the helicopters for quick disembarkation. It was not the CIA’s only breakthrough achievement. The agency launched an elaborate deception plot to fool the IRGC into thinking the missing colonel had already been rescued and was being taken to safety in a road convoy for exfiltration by sea. No details of the deception mission have been released. But it is believed the CIA used Pegasus spyware developed by an Israeli company to hack into multiple Tehran leadership and IRGC command mobile phones to spread reports that the airman had been found. Pegasus, widely used by US intelligence services and special forces, was developed for eavesdropping on mobile phones and harvesting data without detection. But it can also be used for spreading false information, sending out apparently genuine messages via WhatsApp and Signal under the name of the phone account holder. In the end, the operation to save the missing colonel involved more than 150 fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters and hundreds of special operations troops. 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