In other words, why the intelligence community risked becoming a contemporary laughing stock is a matter entirely germane to the real story of remote viewing.
There is only one feasible answer for this WHY.
Circumstances, or a particular set of them, had come into play and which fueled that interest. Circumstances so compelling that the intelligence community became WORRIED about an issue the rest of the mainstream modern world not only laughed at but spit on.
More pointedly, the intelligence community got sucked into "surprising" circumstances it clearly wished did not exist, and if they did exist would remain so minimal or marginal that nothing need be done about them.
And, in provable fact, this marginalization has been the on-going local position of the mainstream modernist world regarding psi.
But behind those marginalizing circumstances looms a quite large and on-going circumstance. The existence at the species level of the superpowers of the human bio-mind -- with the faculties for the superpowers potentially present in all born specimens.
The existence of the superpowers was quite easily marginalized during the twentieth century by claiming them to be irrational and unscientific -- at least in the modernist West.
And so very little was known about the superpowers, their real existence even in serious doubt.