Puthoff's own account attributes his 1972 CIA recruitment to a pre-existing Naval Intelligence/NSA pedigree, not psi aptitude

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Hal Puthoff's own 1996 account of how the CIA first approached him at SRI International — after an internal report on Ingo Swann's apparent psychokinetic effects had circulated among his scientific colleagues — names the deciding factor as a trust relationship that predated the psi research entirely: "They knew of my previous background as a Naval Intelligence Officer and then civilian employee at the National Security Agency (NSA) several years earlier, and felt they could discuss their concerns with me openly." He does not attribute the approach to anything distinctive about the psi results themselves, or to his standing as a physicist.

In the same piece, addressing why he continued working with intelligence agencies across the following decades, Puthoff gives a personally held rationale rather than a programmatic one: "My answer is simply that as a result of my own previous exposure to this community I became persuaded that war can almost always be traced to a failure in intelligence, and that therefore the strongest weapon for peace is good intelligence." Read together, his own account locates the cause of the 1972 recruitment in who he already was to the intelligence community — Naval Intelligence Officer, then NSA civilian employee — rather than in the subject matter that became the Stargate program.