The Secret Life of Uri Geller

Jonathan Margolis is a technology journalist for the
Financial Times
and writes on more general subjects, especially China, for publications including the
Observer
, the
Guardian
, the
New Statesman
and the
Daily Mail
. He is a former London contributor to
TIME
magazine and is also the author of two popular science books –
The Intimate History of the Orgasm
and
A Brief History of Tomorrow,
an investigation into triumphs and disasters of futurologists through the ages.

For Burro

The author would like to thank the following for their invaluable help with this book.

Uri, Shipi and the Geller family, Vikram Jayanti, Bruce Burges, Kit Green, Russell Targ, Hal Puthoff, John Alexander, Captain Edgar Mitchell, Scott Jones, Paul Smith, Nick Pope, Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu, Jon Ronson, Charles Koczka, Richard Winelander, Paul Tweed, Jonathan Caplan, David Sherborne, Tim Drukker, Byron and Maria Janis, Jack Sarfatti, Andre Singer, Richard Melman, Ian Johnson, Walter Soriano, Ulrich Kohli, Michael Mann, John Tintera, David, Peter, Marvin Berglas, Prof Zvi Bentwich, Dr Friedbert Karger, Prof Brian Josephson, Prof Yitzhak Kelson, Guy Lyon Playfair. Christopher Stevens and family, Doug Stephan, Kevin John Lewis and family, Dr George Weissmann, Dr David Morehouse, David Dimbleby, Ardash Melemendjian, Miki Peled, Meir Gitlis, Prof Amnon Rubinstein, Eytan Shomron, Capt Gideon Peleg, Capt Dov Yarom, Joy Philippou, Dr Graham Wagstaff, Daniel Morgenstern, Bruce Merrin.

I
never planned to become an expert on Uri Geller. A smaller boy made me do it – my son, David, aged 15 in 1996, when we first had the Internet, became fascinated online by the controversy over Geller.

I sighed and tried to discourage him. ‘He’s just a washed-up fake,’ I explained. David was not convinced, and through a wonderful British inventor, John Knopp, whom I had interviewed, he made contact with Geller.

Uri was soon inviting my whole family to come to his house. There was a slight setback when we turned up, all five of us, and Uri was out. His excuse was more than reasonable. He had been asked to go to the old Wembley Stadium to give some psychic support to the England football team.

We returned another week. We saw a spoon bend on its own, and a series of quite extraordinary micro events, enough to fill a long article in themselves, unfolded. This weird little pattern starts up again every time I have contact with Uri, even if I’m thousands of kilometres from him.

Now, intrigued, I began researching Uri, and found that everything I had told David – such as my absolute insistence that he had never been validated by science – was wrong.

Even so, Uri’s life has been so packed with extraordinary, bizarre and fascinating incidents, and so rammed with stories, that 17 years after first meeting him, I’m still learning.

This book concerns a side of Uri that even many who know him well will not have been aware of until now. I think even the most sceptical reader will find it intriguing, and just possibly compelling.

Jonathan Margolis,
August 2013

I
t’s a perfect spring day in 1981 in Stamford, Connecticut, just an hour or so north of New York City, yet more rural than suburban. A little way from the pretty town centre, you find yourself on Westover Road, passing the secluded, gated homes, mostly of wealthy New Yorkers who with their families have left the excitement of Manhattan (along with the less-missed muggers and garbage that typified the city in the ’80s) for quiet, secluded, safe, green backyards and elite schools. Along on the right, there’s a dirt track, rather grandly announced by the standard American white-on-green street sign as Long Close Road. Picking up a bit of dust as you go (the road today is paved and smooth, which almost detracts from its bucolic charm) this trail leads into a delightful forest, complete with lake. Along the way, so hidden as to be almost invisible, are even more desirable homes than on Westover.

In one of these, a large, imposing house built on a slope that gently dips down to a creek, lives a family, who, but for a few unusual details, of which we will hear more as this story unfolds, typify the American dream of immigration gone extraordinarily right. The house, even back then, 35 years ago in the early days of Ronald Reagan’s America, is worth close to a million dollars.

The Geller family, from Israel. There’s 35-year-old Uri, who has made enough money to retire working as … well, we will get to that. There’s his wife, Hanna, their two tiny children, Daniel and Natalie. There’s Hanna’s younger brother, Shipi, who has been Uri’s best friend and, latterly, business partner since they were practically kids. And there’s Uri’s German-born widowed mother, Margaret, whom he has brought over from Tel Aviv to live in the States and be there for her grandchildren. It’s an idealized, close, happy family set-up, which will remain unchanged for decades. Even today, with Margaret having died, Uri of retirement age, Daniel a successful attorney in Manhattan and Natalie an aspiring actress in Los Angeles, the Gellers are a stable, happy unit.

Back in 1981, the focus this particular sparkling morning switches over 640 kilometres to the south and to, of all places, the office of the newly appointed Director of the CIA, William Joseph Casey. Casey is 68, a New York Republican politician and devout Roman Catholic, with a wartime background in intelligence, for which he was awarded a Bronze Star. He has post-war experience as a lawyer, and a profound loathing and distrust of the Soviet Union. He was Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager in his recent successful election and was one of the new president’s key appointees.

We don’t know what Casey has on his desk this morning a few weeks after he started as CIA director, when he phones Uri Geller in Connecticut. We don’t know why he calls. We don’t know why he doesn’t get a subordinate at least to dial the number and announce that the Director of the CIA is on the line. But we do know the kind of material that had accumulated in Geller’s bulging file over the ten years he has been a subject of interest to the Agency, so we can hazard an unusually informed guess.

Uri Geller had been brought to the CIA’s attention in the early 1970s by the Israeli secret service, Mossad, and by a particular eccentric Serbian-American scientist, Dr Andrija Puharich, who had spent months in Tel Aviv if not at the explicit request of the CIA, then with its blessing, testing the young Israeli’s apparently paranormal abilities with a view to both seeking to quantify and understand them – and to seeing if the young man had it in him to work covertly against the Soviet bloc.

The scientist had also been encouraged to investigate Uri Geller by the former Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the lunar module pilot on the Apollo 14 Moon landing. Mitchell had become the sixth man to walk on the Moon just a few months earlier, and had always had a scientific fascination with the paranormal. We will look back over the strange story of how Uri came to be in America at all later in this book. It is every bit as odd and intriguing – and disturbing – as the truly astonishing events that happened to and around the American intelligence community during the decade in the USA leading up to William Casey’s out-of-the-blue phone call. These events seriously unhinged a considerable number of the hard-headed scientific researchers who investigated Uri. Some of them were never the same again – and not in a good way.

Yet the early indications seen by Andrija Puharich, the man the US government – or at least elements within it – nominated to investigate Uri, didn’t suggest such an outcome. Far from it. Puharich, a polymath who had qualified as both a medical doctor and a physicist, had first seen Uri when the Israeli was working in a seedy nightclub. He struck the scientist as nothing more than an ordinary, not-very-good conjuror with an act consisting of a small number of effects – spoon bending, mind reading and stopping and starting clocks and watches – all of which could be replicated by any half-decent magician.

After months of work with Uri Geller in semi-laboratory conditions on his field trip to Israel, the scientist had changed his opinion radically. During the early 1970s, Uri (along with some other apparent psychics) went on to be the subject of formal experimentation in research in the USA funded by the CIA to the tune, we now know, of $20m. The most significant of these exhaustive tests had been done in 1972, by Stanford Research International (SRI), a big laboratory complex in Menlo Park, outside San Francisco. Their extraordinary success was widely reported after the CIA agreed to allow the lead scientists to write a largely positive report on Uri’s mind-reading abilities for the prestigious British science journal
Nature
as a reward for their endeavours. It would do no harm if the Soviets got to read it, either.

All this, William Casey would have known from the file when he called Uri in 1981. The headline facts were not even secret; it is no exaggeration to say that Uri Geller was one of the most famous people in the world, a guest – bizarrely for someone being assessed for use as an espionage asset – on entertainment shows around the (non-communist) globe, a buddy of celebrities from John Lennon to Salvador Dali.

The Geller files – and we will see later a recently revealed extract from one of the documents that Casey will have had to hand – were also very clear on another thing about Uri Geller. That he was, and remains even today at the age of 66, an incorrigible, extrovert showman with a penchant for self-publicity – none of which, it goes without saying, suggests a man marked out by the CIA and other secret government agencies in the US, Israel, Mexico and possibly the UK for a life as psychic spy.

Psychic spy he most certainly was, as we will discover, but ‘cool’, in either the 1950s’ and 60s’ James Bond-ish mode that Casey would have understood, or in the more modern, dark espionage-fiction sense, Uri Geller most definitely was not. With examples of show business luminaries from Errol Flynn to Noël Coward known to have done their bit of intelligence work on the side, Geller saw no reason why he couldn’t ride two horses and be both a celebrity and a spy. In his own field, almost, the great Harry Houdini had done just that in his day. Houdini’s stunts made headlines, but also caught the eye of influential figures in US and British intelligence agencies.

A 2006 biography of the great Austrian-American stunt performer revealed that both the Secret Service and Scotland Yard hired him to infiltrate police stations in mainland Europe and Russia, keeping an eye out and an ear open for informative titbits. In return, Houdini demanded that the intelligence agencies help further his career. Before he would agree to spying assignments, Houdini insisted that William Melville, the head of the British Special Branch and later of the British Secret Service, who died in 1918, arranged for him to audition with London theatre managers.

Another important aspect of the Uri Geller story that would have featured high in his CIA case notes needs to be flagged up for the millions of those under the age of 35 or so and others who may be unacquainted with the known story of Uri Geller. That is that he was despised and derided, actively, vocally and with a vengeance, by many stage magicians and a substantial number of scientists, initially at home but later around the world.