The Secret Life of Uri Geller (12 page)

‘I was living James Bond. I was living the movies. It was a fantastic feeling that, wow, I was doing something for the CIA,’ says Uri today.

‘It wasn’t any more for the Mossad. It was for the Central Intelligence Agency, the one that I saw in movies when I was a child, the big symbol, the logo of the CIA.’ He says alongside other tasks, like the drone experiment, he was also working for the Mexican government as a kind of psychic bodyguard, warning Muncy and her husband of possible plots or about people who wished them harm, and steering them away from anyone suspect. His success rate at this is unclear, but his stock in Mexico rode ever higher. He was made a Federal Agent for the Mexican Treasury by the president and given a beautifully engraved .45 calibre automatic pistol that he would carry with him on flights back to the USA, which as a federal agent of another country, he was permitted to do.

That permission, though, did not prevent him soon afterwards from being stopped by Customs at Kennedy airport and having his gun confiscated. Uri called the Mexican authorities, who in turn called the US Embassy in Mexico City, who got straight on to the State Department. A US Customs Special Agent, Charlie Koczka, was told to sort it out. ‘That’s right,’ he says today. ‘Uri Geller was working for the President of Mexico and he [Uri] came in with a very nice 45 automatic, although I am not a great devotee of guns and never had to use one against anyone. My boss told me he was getting heat through the State Department and I was given the job of getting Geller’s gun back to him. Koczka met Uri on 57th Street in Manhattan, checked out his credentials and handed back his gun. ‘I suppose in the spirit of gratitude, he invited me and my wife to his apartment and we started a friendship, and through the years we became firm friends,’ Koczka says.

Even while in Mexico, Uri was able to continue making social inroads in the States, specifically into politics. At a dinner at Los Pinos for Henry Kissinger and Rosalynn Carter, the wife of the US President-elect, Geller wowed Mrs Carter by bending a silver spoon in her hand. He had been manoeuvred next to her by the CIA’s Mike with instructions to impress the First Lady-to-be, the hope being that she would then mention him favourably to the president.

While at Mrs Carter’s table, he offered to read Kissinger’s mind and recalls Kissinger recoiling, looking worried, folding his arms and looking uncomfortable, pleading, ‘No, no. I don’t want you to read my mind. I know too many secrets.’ Uri said he merely wanted to do his telepathy with his drawings party piece, which unfortunately, according to Uri, went so well that Kissinger asked sharply, ‘What else did you get from my mind?’ When Uri replied, ‘I’d better not talk about that here,’ as a joke, Kissinger became quite agitated, causing an awkward silence that lasted for a few seconds, until Uri explained he’d been kidding. Kissinger nevertheless ended the encounter looking thoughtful, Uri says.

Uri in Mexico City reading Henry Kissinger’s mind after bending a spoon for a bemused Rosalynn Carter, the wife of then President-elect, Jimmy Carter.

With Jimmy Carter destined for the White House, Mike decided, it seems, to try to get Uri right into the Oval Office, to establish a direct line of communication over his pet psychic-spies project with the president. Rosalynn was highly receptive; Kissinger had apparently been quite impressed. Mike promised to get Uri into the White House for Carter’s inauguration in January. He wanted Uri while he was there to beam a psychic message into the president’s brain to give funds to a paranormal programme.

It may all sound like an indeterminate mixture of a maverick, anonymous CIA field agent’s fantasy mixed with Uri Geller’s famous imaginative capacity, which had been both his making and breaking since he was a child. Yet when, on 20 January 1977, Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as the 39th President of the United States, Uri Geller was right there, at the White House. Rosalynn Carter apparently said, ‘Jimmy, this is Uri Geller, you remember, the young Israeli I told you so much about.’ Uri beamed his psychic message at the president, while shaking his hand, in his nervousness, harder than he had meant to. The president, Uri says, winced slightly and asked, ‘Are you going to solve the energy crisis for us?’ Uri says he cannot remember what he answered to this unexpected question.

Carter’s openness to the United States investigating the potential uses of psychic research was borne out seven years later, by a report in the
New York Times
, which claimed that in 1977, that he had ordered a high-level review of psychic research in the USSR, and called Uri Geller in for a half-hour meeting in the White House to discuss what the Americans could do in response. Uri, again, prefers not to confirm the
Times
report. But it was Carter, who, in what must have been an unguarded moment, became the highest-level personality ever to confirm that the psychic programme had been intensified.

When a Soviet aircraft wend down in Zaire, Hal Puthoff, one of the lead SRI scientists who had worked with Uri back in 1972, said, ‘We wanted to get it. And, of course, the Russians wanted to get it back. Since it went into the jungle canopy, they couldn’t find it by satellite. So, in fact, Stan Turner, who was Director of CIA, who, of course, knew about our programme, said, “Okay! When in doubt, who are you going to call? Remote viewers. Find this thing for me.”’ Puthoff and Targ activated a psychic called Joseph McMoneagle, who closed his eyes, said, ‘I see a river. I see a village. There are some mountains. The plane crashed just to the left of the river.’ He then marked the crash site on a map. The CIA successfully sent a team to the spot and found the Russian aeroplane before the Soviets could get near it.

‘We were told that that would never see the light of day,’ Puthoff says, ‘But as it turns out, after Carter got out of office, he happened to be giving a speech in Georgia and some aggressive student said, “Did anything happen that was really off-the-wall when you were president, or something that would really be interesting?” Carter said “Oh yes, there was a Soviet plane went down in Zaire and they got psychics to find it for us.” So that’s the only reason that ever came out.’

Meanwhile, Uri and Shipi’s sojourn in Mexico, where they were enjoying the presidential lifestyle, came to an abrupt halt. Uri’s social progress around the capital with Muncy set tongues wagging, not just among the Mexican elite, but as far away as in London’s Fleet Street, where in February 1978, the
Daily Express
gossip column ran a tiny piece headlined, ‘Bending the rules for Uri’. It suggested that observers in Mexico City were speculating that Uri’s ‘warm friendship’ with the president’s wife was thought to be on the point of precipitating a scandal, and talked of the pair ‘behaving intimately’ at a shared holiday in Cancun.

Uri swiftly received a call from the president’s son advising him to leave Mexico for good on the next flight – advice that he and Shipi took. They were late for the first flight out of the country, but had an ace up their sleeve. After they’d waved their special, free first-class Aeromexico passes at the official manning the check-in desk, the aircraft, which was about to depart, was held at the gate for them. Being able to board an aircraft that was still on the ground, even if it was on the point of departure, was one of the privileges granted to the lucky few who carried the card.

Back in New York for a spell in 1977, Uri had his talents called upon by his new friend, Charlie Koczka, for an unofficial law-enforcement mission. From the summer of 1976 onwards, New York had been terrorized by a serial killer who had murdered six victims and wounded seven more with a .44 calibre revolver. Jack the Ripper- style, he would leave letters promising further killings, signing himself in one as ‘The Son of Sam’.

‘The authorities were getting nowhere,’ Koczka says, ‘and although this was not a US customs matter, I felt that I should approach Uri and ask if he could, through me, assist the New York City Police Department. I knew this police detective and Uri has the ability he has. So I talked to Uri, and he said in order to help he wanted something that belonged to the killer. He actually said if he could at least be exposed to one of the famous letters written by the criminal, it would help him.

‘So the detective asked if this letter could be made available and the authorities said OK. Uri didn’t want to read the contents. He just wanted to get what I would call vibrations from a personal item belonging to the killer. But while we were at the police station, some lieutenant said, “No! We are not going to let this happen.” which was frustrating. The reason for this was that some other person who was ‘psychic’ had appeared in a photo, which later appeared in an exposé newspaper and the police department said they didn’t want to be openly associated with psychics because they were scared they would get a bad name.

‘So although they didn’t know anything about Geller, they turned him down outright. So as plan B, Uri asked if we could go to some of the crime scenes where the killings occurred. We went in my private car to Forest Hills, and then another area on the way to JFK, between Brooklyn and Queens. Uri walked through these parks where the bodies had been found and got what I would say was a reaction, a vibration and he said, “Charlie, do you have a map of New York City?”’

Koczka had a Mobil gas station map in the car, which he gave to Geller on Thursday, 3 August. ‘Uri called me on the Sunday morning,’ Koczka continues, and said, “I think the person who is responsible for these killings lives not in the five boroughs, but adjoining them in Yonkers.” So I called the detective and told him that for what it’s worth, this is what he has told me.’ On Wednesday, 10 August, David Berkowitz, now serving life for the Son of Sam murders, was arrested outside his apartment on Pine Street in Yonkers, NY.

Reflecting on the incident decades later, Charlie Koczka, acknowledged that it’s hardly conclusive proof of anything, yet impressive at the same time. ‘In law enforcement,’ he explained, ‘your exposure is mostly to people who basically don’t obey the law. So you have a tendency to be hypercritical, almost cynical, and you fight this because you don’t want to think ill of your fellow man because most people are honest. But law enforcement people just don’t run into them. So when you hear of a psychic or something like that, it’s almost normal not to believe the individual. You know … it’s like … the hand is quicker than the eye. But I can tell you I believe Uri Geller has these powers. I know he doesn’t use them always, because he invited me once to a racetrack and he wouldn’t give me the name of the horse that would win. He has said many times that he believes this is a gift and a gift you can lose if you don’t use it properly, so I have never seen him abuse his power. No! Uri Geller, I believe, is the real McCoy.’

Espionage-wise, things were to quieten down a little in the following years, but didn’t stop entirely. At one point, Uri was asked by two counter-espionage agents in the FBI to go to a party out on Long Island where some Soviet diplomats were expected to be. His mission in this case was to try to use telepathy to beam the thought of defection into the mind of one of them. He does not know if the mission worked.

So, when William Casey, newly installed as director of the CIA made his out-of-the-blue call to Uri in Connecticut in 1981, as detailed in
Chapter 1
, it was the first Geller had heard in many years from the US intelligence community, although he had done work for other Western intelligence services during this period. But Uri’s career has been characterized by constant comebacks, and in 1987, he was in action once more. Indeed, 1987 was the zenith of his years of what might be called political influence. In February of that year, Uri was to be found in Geneva at a reception hosted by the US Mission to the arms negotiations with the Soviets. A fortnight later, he was briefing a gathering of senior senators and congressmen, along with 40 Capitol staffers, Defense Department and Pentagon aides in a special room in the Capitol Building, which had been sealed to guard against possible Soviet eavesdropping.

Uri had not been at the Geneva reception as the cabaret (although he did ‘perform’ for the assembled company). He had been invited by Senator Claiborne Pell, then the powerful chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in the hope that he could use telepathy to influence the Soviet negotiating team, especially its head, Yuli Vorontsov, into making some serious concessions to the West, preferably, as a first step, reducing Russian missiles in Europe.

Pell had been introduced to Geller, who now lived in Britain, by Princess Michael of Kent, who is a good friend of Uri’s, as is her husband. So impressed was Pell, that he arranged a three-way meeting in London’s Cavendish Hotel with Geller, himself and Max Kampelman, the chief US negotiator. The day after the reception, according to a full-page report in
Newsweek
, the Russian leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, made an unexpected new offer – the removal within five years of all medium-range nuclear missiles based in Europe. Geller was quoted as saying he was convinced Vorontsov had called Gorbachev straight after the reception, having received his ESP message.