So if assassinating pigs (or goats, as in the partly fictionalized George Clooney film) by the power of thought was off limits for him, what specifically, do we know Uri Geller did do as a spy in the years after his nonspecified intelligence work back in Israel?
Eldon Byrd believed that in the run-up to his arrival in the USA at the end of 1972, Uri was asked by the Israelis to go to Munich, where the Olympic Games were to be held. ‘I didn’t know him then,’ Byrd said, ‘but he once mentioned to me that he was in Munich at the request of a particular person in the Mossad and had told them after sensing out the site before the Games not to send the Olympic team over and they did anyway.’ On 5 September, ten days into the Games, a group of Palestinian terrorists, reportedly with the connivance of a few sympathetic German neo-Nazis, broke into the Olympic Village and went on to murder 11 Israeli athletes and a West German policeman. According to Byrd, Uri was ‘really pissed off about that and he was saying he didn’t want to work with them any more.’
In late 1975, two New York friends of Uri’s, the concert pianist Byron Janis and his wife Maria, recall Ariel Sharon, then a retired major general working as a special aide to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, meeting with Uri at their Park Avenue apartment and having lengthy discussions about Israeli matters. ‘They were obviously prepping him for something,’ Janis says.
Byrd recounted two other occasions he knew about of Geller apparently working with Israeli intelligence after his arrival in the States. ‘One time, in 1976, Uri called me when he was in New York and said he had had an encounter that evening with someone who said they were from Israel who asked if he would like to do something beneficial for his country. They wanted him at a certain time the next day to concentrate on some latitudes and longitudes, and to think, “Break! Break! Break!” He asked what was there, and this person said that if whatever there was there was to break, or if Uri could interfere with it, it would be good for Israel. He asked me if I thought he should do it, and I said, “I don’t know. Why not? It would be interesting to try and see what happens.”’
What had already happened was that an Air France Airbus had been hijacked by terrorists and given shelter in Idi Amin’s Uganda: 101 passengers and the captain were being held hostage. What was about to happen was that the Israelis went on to mount a daring rescue mission by commandos who flew in on four Hercules aircraft. Benjamin Netanyahu’s older brother, Yonatan, was commander of the elite Israeli army unit on the operation, and was the only Israeli killed on it.
‘Uri called me all excited later on,’ said Byrd, ‘and asked if I’d heard what happened. The successful Israeli rescue raid on Entebbe had taken place, and he was sure the co-ordinates he had been given connected with it in some way.
‘Uri kept saying, “The radar in Entebbe, there must have been radars there. Can you find out if there were radars at these points?”’ I said I’d try. I had contacts with people at the CIA. I called them and asked them could they find out if there were radars at these latitudes and longitudes, as they were roughly on the way from Israel to Uganda, and if they could find out if the radar was really knocked out or not. They called me back and said they didn’t have any information about that. They said the raid as far as we know was conducted underneath the radars anyway and we have no indication that there were radars at those points and whether they were working. But Uri had called me beforehand to tell me about this, and then the raid happened, so I thought that was pretty good.’
Byrd was not suggesting that this conclusively proved that Uri’s psychic ability had knocked out all radar on the 3,520 kilometres between Israel to Uganda, and Geller is – eloquently, perhaps – silent on the matter. But Byrd argued that it did suggest at least that a Mossad agent was in contact with him – and believed he could mind-hack electronics.
A balanced reading of the Entebbe raid and Geller’s part in it is that he was almost certainly drafted in as a slightly peripheral – but easily activated – backup to simply evading the radar stations en route, or avoiding them by some other more conventional method. The most threatening of these radar stations were in Egypt and in Eritrea, where a state-of-the-art Soviet installation was in operation. Andrija Puharich said Uri was asked to block 11 radar stations in total. ‘I can only describe his role as being a shield for Israel like the shield of David in the Bible,’ the physicist said. ‘Whenever there was a problem, he was consulted and would give his ideas and opinion. He would see things that might happen, could possibly happen and so on.’
The mad Idi Amin, Uganda’s despotic ruler, admittedly not the most reliable source, did tell reporters that the Israelis had ‘jammed our radar’, and there was another curious hint about possibly unconventional methods being used on the mission, this one from an Israeli officer briefing the press in Jerusalem after the raiders returned safely from Entebbe.
‘The main problem was to get to the terrorists with the biggest surprise possible,’ the officer told the world’s media. ‘We used several tricks to do that, and once it worked, all the rest was quite simple.’ Uri for his part does not discuss the raid, but has said, ‘Use your imagination. Wouldn’t I have been asked to do things of this nature? Of course I would.’ (Interestingly, Israelis, even those who accept Geller’s abilities are real, usually use the word ‘tricks’ to refer to them. The officer’s press statement could perhaps be seen as a coded tease in this light.)
An unnamed expert on the Entebbe raid told The Independent newspaper in 2013 that the Mossad, with British help, had gained details of the specifications of the radar system at Entebbe and therefore knew the precise approach direction that would be blind to Ugandan radar. He hinted interestingly, however, that a Mossad disinformation tactic might have been to let it be thought Uri Geller had been somehow involved in blocking the radar to deflect any suggestion of the British involvement.
Byrd also told the author of another instance of Geller being used by the Mossad. ‘Uri had been secreted out of the USA by the Mossad dressed as an El Al airplane mechanic. In a 747, there is a way from the cargo hold up into the cabin. That way, they got him in and out without going through customs. He told me they took him back to Israel and flew him over some place in Syria two days in a row and said they wanted to know where a particular power plant was from his psychic impressions, and he told them. By gosh, just a day or so after he told me that, they bombed it.’ Russell Targ has said that it is ‘totally believable’ that Uri had been used to help Israel’s June 1981 air strike on the Osirak nuclear reactor site in Iraq, then under construction. (When asked about this alleged mission, Uri was taken aback. ‘I really don’t recall ever telling anything about this to Eldon,’ he said. ‘I wonder if he got it from some other source?’)
It is late 1976 before corroborated evidence emerges of Uri being used operationally by the CIA rather than him being observed by it. For over a year between 1976 and early 1978 he found himself living in Mexico City as a sort of psychic aide to Carmen Romano de Lopez Portillo, known as Muncy, and the glamorous wife of the country’s president, Jose Lopez Portillo.
Uri had been brought to Mexico originally for a TV show. After the show, Muncy, then the first lady-elect, summoned him to her home with a police escort, to meet him. Lopez Portillo’s predecessor, Luis Echeverria, later welcomed Uri at a reception at Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, and Uri immediately felt an affinity with the country. Echeverria’s oil minster, Jorge Diaz Serrano, had a hunch that Uri Geller could help the state oil company, Pemex, locate oil reserves it knew it had, and was anxious to exploit. Lopez Portillo put Serrano’s hunch to the test after he became president in January 1977. And it worked unbelievably well. Although Uri fretted that he had more or less guessed the site from a helicopter, he was spot on.
Geller’s dowsing abilities, his financial mainstay from his mid-30s onwards, had been discovered in England by the chairman of the British mining company Rio Tinto Zinc, Sir Val Duncan, who had seen Uri on TV and invited him to his home in London. Duncan suggested that bending spoons might not always be the best way for him to make use of his talents. He later took Uri to his villa on Majorca aboard the RTZ company jet. There he passed onto Geller his surprising knowledge of dowsing – surprising for a man who had been an ADC to Montgomery during the war, and was now a director of the Bank of England.
Uri with Muncy, the wife of the Mexican President Jose Lopez Portillo.
Geller subsequently did well mineral hunting for RTZ in Africa, and was so successful with his dowsing work for Pemex, that he was granted Mexican citizenship. He and Shipi were also flown around with Muncy on private jets and given luxury penthouses complete with pools in the exclusive Zona Rosa to use, along with the plentiful supply of señoritas who were fascinated to meet the handsome young Israelis-about-town. Their main preoccupation was keeping it from Muncy that Uri was seeing many other – and younger – women at the same time as her.
Mexico City’s Soviet embassy, not far from where Uri and Shipi were cavorting, was known to be the nerve centre of the KGB’s spying operations in the USA, a major headache for the Americans. So somebody at the Mexico City CIA station seems to have had the idea of deploying Geller for intelligence work. His seemingly interesting connections with the Mexican establishment, which was a tad too friendly to the Soviets for Washington’s liking, could be worth exploring, too. Uri had meanwhile befriended Roger Sawyer, a former US Army officer and now a consular officer at the US embassy in Mexico, who he and Shipi had met when they were renewing their US visas.
‘He invited me to lunch one day and he said we were going to the President’s house,’ Sawyer says. ‘I was a little bit sceptical, but I thought, “All right, we’ll see where this leads.” So we actually went to the President’s house and we had lunch with the wife of the President of Mexico. And while we were there, the President made an appearance, said “Hello!’ then excused himself because he didn’t have time to stay for lunch.’ Sawyer was fascinated at the level of Mexican society the young Israeli had penetrated, but as he puts it, ‘It was a little bit above my pay grade, so I didn’t try to get involved in those activities because I knew that that wouldn’t end well for me.’
Uri and Shipi with Roger Sawyer, consular officer at the US Embassy in Mexico City.
Soon afterwards, Uri says he got a call from an American identifying himself as Mike. Uri was surprised the man had the phone number of his penthouse but agreed to meet him at a Denny’s chain restaurant in Mexico City. ‘He said, “We know what you did at Stanford Research Institute. I’ve seen the reports. We know you can do certain things with the power of the mind. Can you help us?”’ Uri confirmed that he could indeed do this. So Mike gave him two specific missions, offering, as he had been authorized to, the carrot of helping him and Shipi out with their still slightly tricky visa applications – not that Uri needed much of a carrot.
The first task was to report to Mike the names of the Soviet embassy officials Lopez Portillo and his ministers were seeing, Washington continuing to be concerned about Mexico’s friendliness with the Soviets. The second was more exciting to Uri. ‘Mike explained to me that every ten or 15 days, there was a diplomatic pouch that goes out of the Russian embassy handcuffed to the wrist of one of the KGB agents and with secret floppy disks inside. Mike was also aware that I was able to erase floppy disks.’ (He had previously done just that at Western Kentucky University under the gaze of the physicist Dr Thomas Coohill and word had clearly found its way to the CIA.) Mike then asked Uri Geller to hang around outside the embassy. He even gave him a pair of reflective, rear-viewing sunglasses to wear so he could keep an eye on the front entrance – while apparently looking in the opposite direction – and try to get a feeling for who was coming in and out that might be of interest to the CIA.
It was proposed that Uri, with his Mexican passport in the name of his mother’s distant family, the Freuds, begin to accompany known KGB couriers carrying floppy disks back to Moscow on board Aeromexico flights. His job would be to sit close to the courier for the Mexico City to Paris leg, mentally erasing the disks for the duration of the transatlantic flights and hopping off in Paris, leaving the unsuspecting courier to board the Aeroflot flight to Moscow with the now-useless disks. The problem arose, however, that the KGB agents travelled in first class, and Uri, never shy to discuss finance, asked Mike who was going to pay for his – and the ever-present Shipi’s – fares? Mike came up with the idea that he should drop a hint to the Mexican president that a couple of the rare and special Aeromexico gold cards, only given to Mexico’s elite and allowing limitless free first-class travel to anywhere the airline flew, would be quite handy. In return, Uri would be more than happy to promote Aeromexico by wearing specially made Aeromexico-branded T-shirts around town.
Uri was never told if he had been successful on the first disk-erasing mission, but says it was telling that he was asked to do the same again twice more. If he had been successful, the consternation and recriminations within the KGB when their floppy disks from Mexico City kept turning up in Moscow blank or corrupted can only be imagined. Wiping floppy disks was not the only thing Uri did. ‘I told them about drop-outs and drop-ins in at the Russian Embassy, and Mike also took me out to the desert to test if I could move a drone, a spy model aeroplane, with the power of my mind. I managed to do that too,’ he says.
‘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.
Photograph taken secretly of Uri’s meeting in London with Ambassador Max Kampelman, who led arms talks with the Soviet Union.
Even with the Newsweek article to back it up, it sounded like the kind of story that would fall apart under serious investigation. Indeed, they got a few things wrong, according to Uri. He says the key meeting with Kampelman took place not at the hotel, but at an office in London, and that Kampelman requested – as Pell had done previously – that Uri beam thoughts about signing the treaty into Vorontsov’s mind. Uri says he was so convinced that people would disbelieve this whole story that he stationed a photographer across the road from the office to snap him arriving and shaking hands with Kampelman as he left.
To check out this story further, before Pell died in 2009, the author visited the retired six-term senator at his simple, elegant home, overlooking the ocean in Newport, Rhode Island. In the room was a black-and-white picture of Pell with his friend, JFK, another with Lyndon B. Johnson, and another with the Queen. In a corner was a chair from the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969. On the coffee table was a letter from Bill Clinton, wishing his senior Democrat colleague well, and adding Hillary’s best wishes, too, to Nuala, Pell’s wife. Had JFK ever been in this house? ‘Oh, no … I mean not often. He might stop his boat out there and drop by, but not formally. No! Only at our home in Washington.’ So was this Uri Geller story really true?
‘Well, yes, actually,’ the senator replied. ‘I was interested in parapsychology, telepathy and life after death. I had no ability or experience in this area, but I believed in it, and I would love to have had the experience. So I thought it would be fun for Uri to bring his dog and pony show to some of the American and Russian delegates at a cocktail party. I was interested in seeing what impression Uri might be able to make on the Russians, and I think they were mystified. I’ll never forget the Russian ambassador, Vorontsov, later the Russian ambassador to Washington. Uri bent his spoon. Then he put the spoon into the ambassador’s hand, and it continued to move. Everybody saw that. It was a key moment for me.’ Whether Uri really influenced Vorontsov, Pell reasonably says he can’t know, and that it would be highly unlikely for Vorontsov to know, either.
Uri was in his element. ‘Al Gore was there next to me, Anthony Lake the National Security Advisor, who later became the director of UNICEF was there. The Russians didn’t know who I was. I did a little chitchat, and then I got very close to Yuli Vorontsov. I actually stood behind him, and I did exactly what Senator Claiborne Pell and Max Kampelman asked me to do, to bombard him with the idea of signing the treaty. All I did is I looked at the back of his head and I constantly repeated in my mind, “Sign! Sign! Sign! Sign!” And they signed. Of course, I can’t take full credit that I did it. I don’t know why. But it worked.’
Nuala Pell also recalled Vorontsov refusing to give Uri his watch. ‘What I remember was Uri putting the grass seeds in the palm of his hand and they grew. He did it in front of us all. We just couldn’t believe it. Everybody was floored. I truly believe in Uri, and I think everyone did. The Russians just looked stunned. They didn’t know whether to believe or not to believe. I know Claiborne’s colleagues in the Senate who were on that trip never got over that. They couldn’t believe that Claiborne got him there, and then he performed, and they were so impressed. It was the talk of the summit for some time. But Claiborne was very determined; he believed in Uri and was determined that other people should have the chance to see him too.’
Left to right: Head of the US Foreign Relations Committee Senator Claiborne Pell, First Deputy Foreign Minister of the former Soviet Union Yuli M. Vorontsov, Ambassador Max Kampelman and Uri at the Nuclear Arms Reduction Treaty, Geneva.
‘I’d seen that kind of thing before,’ the senator explained, ‘and thought it might be a conjuror’s trick. I talked with that guy Randi once, and he said it was a trick, and he could do it too. [Randi was the Canadian magician who spent much of his career trying to debunk Geller.] There’s a great depth of feeling there against Uri, you know. It’s almost vicious. But Uri was far more impressive as a person. I think Uri is a very likeable, decent sort. I never felt he was at all dubious. I respect him. I think he has good ideas, and is genuine. I also remember how unless he was in full vigour, he couldn’t make things happen, which I found most interesting.’ Senator Pell remained friendly with Uri into very old age, and visited him in England. Uri remembers that he declined to accept a watch he wanted to give the senator on the grounds that the gift would fall foul of US corruption rules.
It was Pell who also arranged the meeting at the Capitol, for which the official agenda, for the benefit of any Soviet spies or their American contacts, was to talk about the plight of Soviet Jews. The meeting was held in the Capitol’s only SCIF – a Superior Compartmentalized Intelligence Facility – up in the rotunda of the building. Pell’s senior aide, Scott Jones, a decorated Navy pilot, had arranged the bug-proof setting at Pell’s suggestion. Colonel John Alexander, who had been invited by the Commanding General of Intelligence in the Security Command, was sitting in the front row listening and watching.
‘He [Geller] talked about the stuff the Soviets were doing psychically,’ Alexander recalls, ‘but everyone wanted him to bend something. There wasn’t a spoon around, so someone went outside and found one in the guard’s coffee cup. I was watching very closely. I had been trained by magicians by now, and I had watched Randi do it frame by frame and I could catch him at it. Uri took the spoon, stroked it lightly, and the thing bent up quite noticeably. He put it down on the top of this chair and he continued talking, and I watched this spoon continue to bend until it fell off the chair. There was never a time when Uri could have applied force. And even if the touch were strong, it would have bent down not bent upwards.’ Although Pell says he did not think the meeting was a huge success, at least one important politician there did. Dante Fascell, Member of the House of Representatives and Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, rushed directly to the library to read up on Geller. Col Alexander managed successfully to leave the Capitol with the bent spoon in his pocket. He still has it.
‘I saw Uri do that several more times after that,’ John Alexander added. I introduced him to Steven Seagal, and we did it there in Seagal’s house, the inner sanctum of his bedroom, with all these old ancient Tibetan tapestries on the wall. [Seagal is the macho actor who has been described by the Dalai Lama as ‘a sacred vessel’.] I don’t think Steven has any doubt. His belief system is that these things can happen, although it goes without saying that this is not totally unique to Uri Geller.’
So, under Jimmy Carter, and with perhaps a record number of influential government figures receptive to the paranormal in no small part thanks to Uri’s pervasive influence, serious discussion of unorthodox science had its heyday.
Uri amazes Senator Claiborne Pell (right).
The Maine-based paranormalist researcher and document-ferret Gary S. Bekkum, through his organization STARstream Research, has brought to light numerous now-declassified US government documents referring to PK and reflecting a continuing feeling among a variety of exotically named official bodies that enemy psychokinetic action could be a very real threat. One US Army Missile Command report unearthed by Bekkum opens with these words: ‘The term “remote perturbation” (RP) is used herein to signify an intellectual-mental process by which a person perturbs remote sensitive apparatus or equipment. RP does not involve any electronic sensing devices at, or focused on, the RP agent.’
The Missile Command programme, Bekkum discovered, was, quoting SRI again, ‘to determine the degree to which selected personnel are able to interact with and influence, by mental means only, sensitive electronic equipment and to ascertain how this phenomena might be exploited for Army-designed applications … In Phase I, a computer-based binary random number generator (RNG) was constructed … in Phase II, subjects were selected and trials begun [to determine if individuals could affect the random sequence produced using their minds alone]. When all were completed, the SRI investigators concluded that there was an anomalous, unexplained effect on the electronic system which could not be accounted for by engineering considerations only.’
Bekkum writes: ‘After reviewing the SRI-produced data, the report concluded, “… when considered in the framework of the existing database, it is difficult to disregard claims for the existence of remote perturbation.” As for the threat implied by the initially positive results, the report recommended, “If the random-event generators appear to be vulnerable to remote perturbation, an effort should be made to determine if sensitive equipment such as internal guidance systems can be affected. There is also interest in the use of some RP [remote-perturbation] sensitive device placed in covert secure areas to serve as an intrusion alarm against these areas being compromised by enemy remote viewers.” Other files describe a “remote-perturbation switch” and “remote-perturbation techniques.”’
Another report, this one dated 1980 and found by Bekkum in CIA files is called Remote-Perturbation Techniques: Managerial Study and discusses the PK mind-over-matter problem in greater detail. It opens: ‘In view of the obvious military value of being able to disturb sensitive enemy equipment, it is to the advantage of the Army to assess the validity of RP [remote perturbation, or psychokinesis] claims.’
It later reveals, ‘Two separate but technically identical RP experiments on random-number generators were undertaken at SRI International and at the US Army Missile Command (MICOM). The director of this program is under the oversight of a committee of three senior scientist-managers at MICOM.’ This trial, the report says, cost $400,000.
Yet another review, written in 1989 by a redacted official of the Defense Intelligence Agency, classified SECRET and entitled Government-sponsored Research in Psychoenergetics, explains why American intelligence officials tasked their scientists on the problem of psychokinesis.
Happy – and productive – days for paranormal researchers, then, but not everyone in US government circles was content with such things being funded by tax dollars. Colonel John Alexander had become aware of theological objections, too, from those with various religious perspectives.
‘These people believed the events were real,’ he says. ‘However, they were, “The work of the Devil.” Therefore, the military had no business participating in psychic research. This position was made crystal clear to me at a briefing I conducted in the fall of 1987. I was addressing a science panel headed by Walt LeBerg, a former Department of Defense Director for Research and Development. At the conclusion of my presentation on certain anomalous phenomenology, LeBerg exploded. He literally screamed at me, “You’re not supposed to know that. That’s what you learn when you die!” I made a quiet, but snide, remark indicating I’d made a mistake and thought this was a science panel. As quickly as possible, I picked up my briefing slides and got the hell out of there.’
The issue raised its head again, two years into the Clinton presidency, in 1995. Senator Pell’s aide, Scott Jones, traced living in rural Texas by the BBC TV director Vikram Jayanti, says a very senior science official at DIA who was also an evangelical, born-again Christian, had let it be known that psychic phenomena were incompatible with his belief structure. Not long afterwards, Congress officially terminated the US Government’s work on the paranormal.
‘It became an emotional, theocratic issue with a very important religious segment of the country,’ Jones told Jayanti. ‘Programmes can’t survive like that. It’s okay for them to kill a lot of people, but they can’t kill them by psychic phenomena – you’re going to have to burn them or blow them up. It’s a bizarre situation, I think. It had to go away and what I hope, without knowing, is that it went away but it still exists.’ Indeed, Jones hints heavily that he knows the paranormal work continues, only now, as he puts it, it will be ‘deep, deep black.’ ‘I can’t imagine that the military, or the intelligence community, would ever fully shut down something that might enable them to gather intelligence better.’
Whether Uri went deep, deep black too is not easy to say. He was certainly involved during the early 1990s in delivering to some US intelligence operatives in Washington a European billionaire who, for whatever reason, wanted to discuss a specific matter with the US Government – and was aware that Uri Geller had the contacts to be a go-between. It is known that Uri flew in the billionaire’s private jet from the UK to Washington, refuelling in Iceland. In the dangerous, post -9/11 world, however, he is much more guarded than he was about even hinting at involvement in espionage. To have helped fight the Soviet Union is no longer a problem – he has become a big TV star in post-Communist Russia.
But the kind of bad guys a psychic spy needs to investigate in these troubled times make the old KGB look like gentlemen. So there have been rumours – some not even tacitly acknowledged by Geller – that he helped locate Saddam Hussein’s mobile Scud missile launchers in the Iraq War. He is also said to have helped the US military find hidden tunnels in North Korea. In this respect, Uri does have a photo of himself in South Korea with US Army personnel, which suggests there could be something in the claim.
Post-9/11, however, it seems Uri was contacted again by his old spook friends. He singles out a call he says he received. ‘The only thing that I can tell you is that I was reactivated by a person called Ron. I can’t tell you what nationality, and what country,’ Uri says. He rather likes the idea of having been a ‘sleeper’ asset for so many years, and says that ‘probably another 150 people’ in a few countries will have got the same call. ‘But I must tell you, you know, if some people out there, especially the sceptics, think that there is no paranormal or psychical research or there’s no remote-viewer programmes going on, they’re dead wrong.’
Both Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ concur with this. Targ says he has heard that remote viewers from the Fort Meade programme were called back into action to help in the search for Osama bin Laden. Puthoff agrees. ‘There was a lot of re-contact of remote viewers. Some of them were talking about this at remote-viewing conferences. In fact I was a voice, actually, to try to talk people out of doing that. Because after all, if there are terrorist cells in the USA, you don’t want them hunting down remote viewers as targets.’
As for who Uri’s mysterious Ron was, there is an assumption among informed observers that this was a CIA official named Ronald Pandolfi, who was characterized by the notorious Wikileaks organization early in 2013 as, ‘the CIA’s “Real-life X-files” Fox Mulder. Pandolfi, according to the New York Times was a senior CIA scientific analyst in the mid-1990s. Elsewhere, he is said as late as 2008 to have been working with the DIA under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Kit Green, however, who has known and worked with Pandolfi for many years, says that Pandolfi was not the Ron who ‘reactivated’ Geller after 9/11.
Further corroboration of a reactivation of psychic remote viewers, meanwhile, comes from Nick Pope, a former long-standing Ministry of Defence official in London, best known for having run its UFO project. ‘Post-9/11, we were in a different ball game,’ Pope says. ‘Clearly people did start looking at some more exotic possibilities, remote viewing being one.
‘One way or the other, the establishment in the UK has looked at all sorts of exotic phenomena. UFOs, ghosts, psychic abilities, antigravity, perpetual motion, everything that you think is science fiction, somewhere in the UK, someone is doing it for the government, for the military, for the intelligence community, saying, “Is this real? If it is, can we get this to work?”
Just weeks after 9/11, according to Pope, the Ministry of Defence commissioned a study into remote viewing, outsourcing it to a civilian contractor to insulate it from the MoD. The work was a trial of people claiming psychic powers to see if they could be usefully deployed in efforts to track down bin Laden and other al Qa’ida targets. The report, Pope says, ran to over 150 pages and was classified ‘Secret, UK Eyes Only’. ‘That is one of the highest classifications in the UK government, information the compromise of which could cause serious damage to the national interest. So I was quickly aware when I saw this study that the Ministry of Defence had taken remote viewing very seriously. And had made some fairly diligent efforts to research it, investigate it, recruit remote viewers and see if we could get this to work.’ The results, Pope concedes, were ‘a mixed bag.’
The Independent newspaper in London quoted ‘a source with knowledge of the trial’ as saying, ‘I am sure Uri Geller was approached for this trial.’ ‘The use of psychics in intelligence matters,’ Nick Pope told the newspaper, ‘is what we call a low-probability/high-impact scenario. Even if it is a very long shot, then the ramifications of success are such that it is worth trying. It doesn’t cost much to put a psychic in a room with a piece of paper.’