Professor George Pake, a member of the president’s Science Advisory Committee and creator of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre (Parc) said, ‘During our conversation, he demonstrated his mind-reading techniques and plucked out of my mind an image I was thinking of. It was very impressive.’
Over in the UK, the prominent Oxford neuropsychiatrist, Dr Peter Fenwick, spoke at length about Uri. ‘I was able to watch him bend a spoon on a colleague’s outstretched hand. I took a spoon from the table. Uri did not touch it. I put it on my colleague’s hand and asked Uri to bend it. Uri ran his finger above the spoon and stood back. Nothing happened. We expressed some disappointment, still watching the spoon. He said, “Wait and watch.” Slowly, as we watched, with Uri standing well away, the spoon started to curl in front of us, and within four minutes the tail of the spoon had risen up like a scorpion’s sting. I then took the spoon, the first time I had handled it since I put it there, and sure enough, it remained a normal spoon with a marked bend.’
Uri being tested at an INSERM laboratory in France.
Dr Wernher von Braun, the NASA scientist and father of the US space programme, met Uri and announced: ‘Geller has bent my ring in the palm of my hand without ever touching it. Personally, I have no scientific explanation for the phenomena.’ The MIT physics professor Gerald Schroeder, latterly of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, had a different slant on the Geller enigma. ‘What makes me accept Geller at face value,’ he said, ‘is that unlike a magician, he does not have a bag of tricks. He bends spoons. The one he bent with me peering over his shoulder continued to bend even after he placed it on the ground and stepped away. The Talmud claims there are two types of “magic”. One is the “catching of the eye”, an optical illusion. The other is the real thing, a mustering of the forces of nature. With Uri, I opt for the latter, though he claims he has no idea how these are mustered.’
But after all, perhaps it is possible, even for someone desperately anxious to be taken seriously by science, to become worn out by being a lab rat. ‘The government saw that they couldn’t really control me,’ Uri Geller says, ‘because I was really on an ego trip and into making money and into show business. I didn’t want to sit in a laboratory any more, doing the same thing again and again, without getting paid, and then getting constantly abused in the background by the sceptics with their silly, far-fetched explanations of what I did. Some of these people were really low – ignorant and lying, like medieval witch finders.’
Uri with Edgar Mitchell (far right) and Wernher von Braun at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, after bending von Braun’s wedding ring in the palm of the scientist’s hand. Picture taken with German Minox spy camera by Shipi.
All in all, he felt – and indeed knew – that his abilities were accepted beyond serious question by the US government, right to the top. Yet although Uri’s period as an experimental subject was drawing to an end, his life as an American spy was just about to begin.
Chapter Three
A SUBJECT OF INTEREST
The path which led Uri Geller from playground prodigy in the back streets of Tel Aviv – a story we will recount later – to young man groomed as the public face of a US government programme designed, essentially, to create a team of psychic spies working against the ‘evil empire’ of the Soviet bloc, starts in earnest in Cyprus in the late 1950s. Uri and his mother had moved to the island to live with his new stepfather, Ladislas Gero, who ran a modest motel in Nicosia. Gero died a year after the move, leaving Uri’s mother alone again – but in Cyprus, with Uri newly settled in as a boarder at the prestigious Terra Santa Catholic School in the hills outside the city.
Uri, a notably imaginative little boy, had, with the unusual powers he seemed to have acquired, long dreamed of putting his abilities to use as a spy or special agent of some kind. The primacy of intelligence in the espionage sense is close to a founding virtue of the state of Israel and has been key to the country’s survival against the odds in modern times. One of the most common symbols seen in Israel, used on everything from food labels to official literature, shows two men carrying a huge bunch of grapes. It is known to every Israeli schoolchild that these men were two of a group of 12 spies, sent by Moses to check out whether the land of milk and honey promised by God really was as fertile as He had told Moses it would be. The grapes were the evidence they brought back to show it very much was the Promised Land that had been yearned for since Abraham’s day.
In 1959, Uri was a 13-year-old, tearing around Nicosia on his bicycle like many other youngsters. As we will see, he was known to some boys and teachers at Terra Santa to have some very odd abilities, but it seems like any child striving to appear normal and unexceptional, he kept his paranormal powers mostly under wraps. He told no one about what he called a green television screen he could envisage.
His stepfather’s unprepossessing little motel happened to be close to the Israeli consulate, and attracted a few business visitors from Israel. One of them was Yoav Shacham, a tall, well-built man in the grain-buying business. Uri was a sociable lad who missed his father, a career soldier back in Israel, and became friendly with the tough-looking Shacham. He reminded Uri of his father: certainly not his stepfather, who had been a gentle, mild, older man. Uri, who went by the more Greek name of George, now mostly spoke English but enjoyed speaking Hebrew with this interesting man, who knew judo and offered to teach him some moves. But while they were practising, Uri says he got the feeling that Shacham was somehow more than a grain buyer. He saw that Shacham got mail from Arab countries, and moreover, Uri believed he could see on his mental TV screen that his friend was both adept with firearms and working with secret documents in some way. It occurred to the young teenager that Shacham was a spy, something that appealed intensely to his increasingly cinema-fired imagination.
One afternoon, Uri says, that when he had to go into the motel’s loft, he found himself above Shacham’s room, from where he could hear a conversation, one which seem to have clear espionage overtones. Peering through a crack around the ceiling light, Uri saw his friend with someone who looked to be a middle-aged Egyptian, who he gathered from what was being said, appeared to live in Israel. The two were poring over documents, which they were photographing and which Uri could see were in Arabic. The men were speaking quietly about the Egyptian Army, something happening in the Sudan and some business concerning agricultural machinery among other matters.
Uri was thrilled and excited. Yoav must be a real Mossad agent! It was the stuff his dreams were made of come true. ‘I wanted to share the secret of the powers with someone I didn’t know too well,’ he explained years later. When Uri told Shacham what he suspected, the agent, as might be expected, was horrified, and probably more than a little ashamed that he had failed so amateurishly to cover his tracks. He confirmed that Uri was correct, and appealed to his young countryman’s patriotism to keep it to himself. Heaven knows what Shacham thought when the boy to whom he had just been obliged to entrust his deadly important secret told him he was the possessor of inexplicable, magical powers.
Uri asked him to think of numbers, which he guessed correctly each time. He made Shacham’s watch hands move. When Shacham invited him out for a walk, Uri told him as they strolled through the streets that he would do anything to spy for Israel, too. Shacham said that he was far too young, but then truly put his life in Uri’s hands when he went on, ‘But you can help me.’ This was the start of a routine whereby, whenever Shacham was away from Cyprus, Uri would collect his mail at the motel and deliver it on his bike directly to the Israeli consul, a one-armed, red-haired man in his 40s. His loyalty was such that he told none of his friends, not even his mother, what he was doing. But he did make one possible mistake for a spy when he wore on first mission to the consulate an Israeli insignia that his father had won.
The consul zoomed in on it, asking gently whose it was. Uri proudly told him about his father being a sergeant major in the Tank Corps. The consul smoothly extracted every
detail from Uri. Later, back in Israel, his father came home to find his apartment had been almost taken apart by intruders, although nothing had been stolen. Yoav and Uri, his unpaid courier, meanwhile became close friends. Uri met Yoav’s fiancée, Tammi, and he promised Uri that when he had finished his military duty at 21, he would gladly help the young man get into the secret service. He was quite specific about what the boy should do when he was eventually conscripted, instructing him to join the Paras, get himself into officer school – ‘And then find me.’
Uri, aged 11, with his father, Tibor.
When the time came, Uri knew he had to shine in his army career before the Mossad would even consider him. He served well and loyally for the most part and became a paratrooper as Yoav had directed. He even saw his friend once in the front of a Jeep – the Mossad man seemed to have returned to his own paratroop unit – and, delighted, said hello to him. Uri, who was later wounded while serving in the Six Day War, eventually got into officer school. But as it turned out, the Israeli Defense Forces and Uri Geller were not quite made for one another. While Uri was on his officer-training course, he read in a newspaper that Yoav Shacham had been killed in action. His desire for a military career took an instant nosedive. That very night while on an exercise he fell asleep on duty and had to kicked awake by an officer. His days on the training course came to an end shortly afterwards.
‘Yoav was the key to the door for my future,’ Uri says. ‘His death sank me into despair, firstly because I loved and cared for him, and then because I knew my career was down the drain. Only he really knew of my powers. Suddenly, officer school didn’t seem so important and I was quickly thrown out. My father, who was devastated, advised me to try again. He had been a sergeant major and was desperate for me to do better than he had and make it to officer rank. But for me, leaving and going back to my unit was a great relief. A big responsibility was lifted, and I felt fine about it.’
Yoav Shacham, the Mossad agent who recruited 16-year-old Uri as an unpaid, bicycle-riding courier in Cyprus. Yoav is with his fiancée Tammi and Uri’s mother.
Yet while he kept his paranormal abilities largely quiet in the military, rumours about his remarkable abilities still got around, especially towards the end of his three-year mandatory service period, at the end of 1968. After being wounded in the Six Day War, he had been given the rather pleasant and easy army job of running around Israel on a Vespa scooter he had brought back from Cyprus, tracking down deserters – something he was, unsurprisingly perhaps, very good at. It was about this time, while still in uniform, that he began showing more colleagues what he could do, and was invited by pals to perform at youth clubs and parties.
After returning to civilian life, broke but happy, with his scooter and with a beautiful young model girlfriend in tow, he became a male model, gracing magazine advertisements in some natty swimwear or smart Terylene jackets. While he was on shoots, he would do impromptu demonstrations of his powers for the photographers and technicians, and he began to be invited – for payment – to perform at ‘arty’ parties. Uri, loving fame more and more, was beginning a determined clamber up Israel’s social ladder. Soon, as word got out about a Six Day War veteran, now a male model, who could perform incomprehensible psychic feats, his audiences began to include lawyers, politicians – and senior military officers. Before long, he was being approached by someone he believed to be a Mossad agent, who invited him to do a show at a military base of some kind.
Uri had a brief career as a male model. He is seen here in a stylish tailored Terylene mod jacket.
He found himself being taken to a place called Midrasha. ‘It’s just out of Tel Aviv, near Herzliya,’ he says, ‘on a hill and it’s top secret. You know … it’s all cameras everywhere and barbed wire. They were all Mossad and Secret Service agents, and generals, and spies, and you name it. And I was taken there to give a big lecture, and I think I blew their minds. I moved the hands of a watch. I did mind reading. I instilled pictures in other people’s minds. I did things that they could grab and twist for their own missions.’
He began, in tandem with his show business work in Israel – which was making him one of the most famous men in the country – to undertake operational missions for the secret service. Aharon Yariv, head of military intelligence, met him in a coffee shop to discuss how he might help. Meir Amit, the head of the Mossad, was a powerful supporter of Geller and believer in his powers. Although he resigned in 1968, he remained close to the organization and continued to advocate deploying Uri on a range of tasks. Uri still refuses to reveal specific jobs he was assigned, but he became known by all the major establishment figures of the time, especially the defence minister and military hero, Moshe Dayan, who specifically asked him if he could ‘do certain things’.
‘I answered to some yes, to some no. And then to the ones that I said yes to, he arranged for me to execute those requests, and those I cannot talk about. Not to be too specific, I think one of the interesting questions was whether my mind could knock out a pilot’s mind in flight. Whether I could beam my powers and somehow mix up or jumble up a fighter pilot’s mind.’ The only actual task Uri speaks about from this time was successfully locating a piece of antique pottery for Dayan at an archaeological dig. Dayan would ask him to do the same again on other occasions, an offence under Israeli law, but not one he would be prosecuted for by anybody.
A variety of sources agree that the Israelis were intellectually open to the military and intelligence potential of Geller years before the USA, and the value Israel continues to place on Uri today cannot be underestimated. His work for the land of his birth is the area that he is the most reticent to discuss, perhaps because it is ongoing. The one thing he will say is that if he does anything for Israel, and he’s not necessarily saying he does, ‘it is only for totally positive causes’.
One slightly younger soldier whom Uri met when still in uniform and doing a performance is the current Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The two remain close and see each other regularly. ‘His abilities made a tremendous impression on me as a young soldier,’ Netanyahu says today. ‘I’m still amazed, I haven’t a clue how he does these things.’ And it is Netanyahu, listed 23rd on the 2012 Forbes magazine list of ‘The World’s Most Powerful People’, who tells one of the more remarkable stories of Uri’s metal-bending prowess. Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, were with Uri in a restaurant in Caesarea when Uri simultaneously bent the spoons of a whole group of people, all of whom were sitting at different tables – a rare example of a batch bending that caused astonishment in the restaurant.
Uri with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
As we know from Kit Green’s account in the previous chapter, back in the early 1970s, the Mossad was keen to swap intelligence with the USA, to the extent that it alerted the Americans to the unusual young man and told them that it was willing to allow the US intelligence and scientific communities to take a look at him. The Mossad’s overture was followed by Andrija Puharich’s mission to Israel to do semi-formal testing on Uri, and his eventual arrival in the USA in 1972.
During the two intense years that followed, the espionage world only touched Uri insofar as the circus that was going on around him. Mossad people were watching the SRI: CIA people were watching the SRI: and, according to a book on the Mossad written in 1978 by the well-informed writer Richard Deacon, various Soviet-bloc spooks were watching them all. Uri had only a hazy knowledge of what was going on. He was not privy to the increasing interest being taken in him as a possible intelligence asset. As he says himself, he was becoming more and more interested in being a celebrity and making a lot of money.
* * *
The period when Uri Geller begins being used by the CIA – an unprecedented development since he was still an Israeli citizen – as well as by Mossad and the Mexican government – begins around 1974.
There was reluctance and caution at the CIA even then to exploit Geller. ‘As we finished our work with Uri at SRI,�
�� says the former astronaut Edgar Mitchell, ‘I was called by the head of the CIA and asked to come to Washington and brief him on what we had learned. That head happened to be Ambassador George HW Bush’ [who later, of course, became president]. Mitchell explained to Bush that the Russians were studying parapsychology, so it was essential that the CIA should be studying it, too. Geller was not immediately recruited as an agent, but Kit Green began regularly talking with Eldon Byrd about the Geller question.
Eldon Byrd, the naval strategic weapons systems specialist who had been one of many experts investigating Uri on behalf of the military, also briefed a CIA director, whom he didn’t identify as Bush. ‘In later years during the Brezhnev period,’ he said before his death in 2002, ‘I met with several Russian scientists who not only had documented results similar to ours, but also were actively using psychic techniques against the USA and its allies. I eventually ended up briefing a director of the CIA. I also briefed people on the National Security Council and I briefed Congressional committees because of some of the results we got.’
Byrd recalled getting a request from Green to come and see them. He again did not reveal Green’s identity when interviewed. ‘I went down to Virginia, and they said we understand you had an interaction with Uri a couple of years ago, and what did you do with him?’ Byrd briefed Green and others at a meeting about some work he had done with Uri and a new, then secret, alloy of nickel and titanium called nitinol. Nitinol had a unique property of having a mechanical memory; it sprang back to the shape at which it was forged, whatever twisting and distortion it was subjected to. Byrd had given Uri a 12.5-centimetre-long piece of nitinol wire. Uri stroked it whereupon, according to Byrd, an odd little lump formed in it, which failed to disappear as it should have done. Bent nitinol, in Uri’s hands, also refused to spring back into its original shape. In this and further tests with the alloy, Uri produced a molecular-level effect in it which, the lab reported, would have required Geller to have raised the temperature of the metal to almost 500°C.
The Secret Life of Uri Geller Page 6