The Secret Life of Uri Geller Read online

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  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

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  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.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Chapter One A Phone Call

  Chapter Two Lab Rat

  Chapter Three A Subject of Interest

  Chapter Four I Spy

  Chapter Five Early Daze

  Chapter Six Fame

  Chapter Seven I Wanna Be In America

  Chapter Eight London Calling

  Chapter Nine Into the 21st Century

  Chapter Ten So?

  INTRODUCTION

  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

  Chapter One

  A PHONE CALL

  It’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.

  To understand why Uri was the focus of such hatred, we must realize that conjurors specialize in performing feats for entertainment purposes that look like ‘paranormal’ or magical effects, but are actually produced by physical and mental trickery. They spend years honing and perfecting these tricks and were infuriated beyond imagining when Uri Geller cropped up in the 1960s saying the abilities he possessed were natural, that he had had them since early childhood and had no idea how he did what he did; it just ‘kind of worked’.

  The appearance of Uri Geller on the scene at the height of the hippy era, when rationalists were getting increasingly irritated by the boom in mysticism, was to prompt the growth of what might be termed ‘professional scepticism’. All over the world, societies were founded and magazines published that cast an ever-cynical eye on all things mystic. What will be referred to in this story occasionally as ‘the sceptics’ tend to be dominated by an odd coalition of disgruntled stage magicians and scientists, atheists and devout ultra-rationalists, all with their own agendas. And ‘the sceptics’ have, in the minds of many educated people in different parts of the world, come to dominate the discussion that rages around Uri Geller and the paranormal. It is not the intention of this book to go too deeply into the 40-year argument between those who take Uri Geller and ‘Gellerism’ seriously and those who believe him to be a charlatan, but to let the evidence speak for itself and allow the reader to make a judgment call.

  To make such a judgment, however, it is necessary to know – as one can be sure William Casey did – that the intellectual honesty of some of ‘the sceptics’ is far from a given. Most educated younger people tend to believe it is the sceptics who are the cowboys in white hats, when in reality a noisy minority are more like traditional Wild-West-movie, black-hat wearers.

  To be fair, there are many honest, rigorous-minded people among the sceptics, who do not just sneer as an ill-considered kneejerk reaction. But more than a few journalists, lawyers and others – even former professional sceptics – have been surprised to discover a significant scattering of rogues amongst them. And the ranks of the organized, militant sceptics are, to this day, thick with rather over-emotional, excitable characters. Those on the fringes of this group are often, weirdly, superstitious. They are careless with accusations of fraud, engaging in multiple, documented cases in vicious personal attacks based on invented evidence. And they are notoriously reluctant even to read the research that challenges their prejudices. They are quick with fanciful conspiracy theories on how Uri and others do what they do – and, as with so many fundamentalists in various fields, fatally prone to falling out with one another.

  One of the most prominent and public among the militantly anti-Uri Geller crusaders in the USA had been lobbying against Geller since the 1970s. Beyond question, his and other names will have been highlighted in Geller’s case notes, now lying in front of William Casey: among them was a somewhat maverick character who had been exposed in a Baltimore court case as unreliable.

  Decades later, indeed, when one reviews the strange, intense period most of this book covers, it is hard not to wonder, not only if Uri’s loud, showy persona was a front, to make it impossible for anyone to believe he was engaged in serious espionage work, but also that the sceptics’ ranks were riddled with CIA men, planted there to spread propaganda against Geller in an effort to convince the Soviets that the Americans’ ‘psychic secret weapon’ was a fake, while in fact, significant elements among US intelligence were convinced that their mouthy Israeli superstar was absolutely the real thing. Andrija Puharich, indeed, believed the Defense Department decided that short of killing Uri, the best thing was to ridicule him, at least for public consumption, and that they effectively set up the sceptics’ campaign. It’s a theory, at least …

  The language of some the CIA’s recently declassified (although heavily redacted) internal communications of the time – which again, not to labour the point, would have been available to Casey when he called Geller – strongly suggests, however, that the CIA considered Geller an extremely interesting potential asset.

  One memo argues for taking Geller out of the hands of the semi-private SRI and getting him firmly under CIA control. Thus it proposes: ‘Telling SRI (sincerely by the way) that we have no intention of easing them o
ut and that they will have full access to the data and first option re publication, we persuade them to use their good offices with Geller in the following manner. They tell him that, in order to get the kind of money necessary for prolonged research, they showed the data and film on a highly selective basis to officials in the USG. [US government] While all expressed interest (and many incredulity) only one group had both the vision and the courage and the means to pursue the matter and they urge Geller to at least listen to the proposition they wish to make.

  ‘If he asks who they represent,’ the document continues, ‘SRI finesses the matter by telling him that the representatives themselves would rather explain their status. (NOTE: alternatively, with appropriate backstopping, we could pass ourselves off as NIH [National Institutes of Health] officials). SRI then provides the introduction to Geller and we try to convince him to accept a contract as a consultant for a two- or three-month period renewable if both parties concur. If we don’t pose as NIH officials and if he insists on knowing who we are, we tell him but only after enough low-key and sympathetic exposure to permit him at least to judge us subjectively.

  ‘If we pose as NIH, the rationale for our interest is simple – straight basic research. If we drop cover, the rationale is simply that in addition to our scientific interest in understanding the phenomena we are concerned about the potentialities for its use in the wrong hands and against the interests of humanity as a whole. We have a defensive responsibility in that regard and solicit his help in meeting it. In other words, we virtually level with him.

  ‘As matters now stand we have little to lose and, handled adeptly, we might get a reasonably cooperative response. If so, we arrange for him to be ensconced in an NIH clinic (under alias if he prefers) and ensure that the conditions (privacy, security, yet freedom of movement for G, who will live and sleep there, but be free to leave outside “office” hours are optimum from his and our point of view.