FT260

It should probably come as no surprise that the conflict in Iraq should throw up a story about a British businessman making a fortune out of selling a ‘magic wand’ to the Iraqi security forces. After all, a sort of magical thinking seemed to set in from the moment Tony Blair took us to war, giving rise to all manner of irrational beliefs: that nonexistent WMDs would be found; that removing existing power structures wouldn’t lead to a violent factional struggle; that it was perfectly OK to go to war without any kind of post-invasion plann­ing in place… And now, after the ‘dodgy dossier’, we have the dodgy dowsing rod.

53-year-old Jim McCorm­ick, a one-time Merseyside police officer and now the managing director of ATSC (UK) Ltd, has been arrested and questioned on suspic­ion of fraud after complaints that his company’s ‘Advanced Detection Equipment 651’ (ADE651), sold in large numbers to Iraq for detecting explosives, does not work.

It’s hard to imagine how it could. A BBC Newsnight report described the ADE651 as a “glorified dowsing rod” consisting of a swivelling metal aerial mounted by a hinge to a handgrip and connected to a black box containing a “programmed detection card”. The device, which has no power supply, is apparently “charged” by the user’s body and the cards are “electrostatically matched” to whatever it is you want to detect: bombs, weapons, humans, truffles – even, should the need arise, elephants.

A device that can be programmed to find, well, anything – it sounds little short of miraculous. But when tested by Dr Markus Kuhn of Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory, the “programmed” cards at the heart of the ADE651 were found to contain nothing more than the sort of anti-theft tag used to prevent shoplifting, and Dr Kuhn stated that it was impossible that the ADE651 could detect anything at all: “There is nothing to program in these cards. There is no memory. There is no micro-controller. There is no way any form of information can be stored.”

Even McCormick had earlier expressed some concern about the defiantly low-tech appearance of his miraculous dowsing device: “One of the problems we have is that the machine does look a little primitive. We are working on a new model that has flashing lights.”

Nonetheless, even without the flashing lights, he’d sold at least 1,500 ADE651s to the Iraqis for a total of £85 million (much of the cost covering ‘training’ in how to use the things). Some in Iraq expressed themselves quite satisfied with the product, with Major General Jehad al-Jabiri of the Iraqi interior ministry insisting that he was right behind it. “Whether it’s magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs,” he told the New York Times last year, blaming alleged poor results on lack of training. Meanwhile, professional sceptic James Randi, who picked up on the ADE651 back in 2008, says the offer he made back then – that he’ll pay McCormick his usual million dollars if the MD can demonstrate that his doohickey actually works – still stands.

If the potential consequences weren’t so tragic, this would be as funny as the US military’s involvement with Remote Viewing – a subject FT will be returning to in the near future.

New York Times, 3 Dec 2009; BBC News; The Register, 22 Jan 2010.