Free The Secret Life of Uri Geller by Jonathan Margolis Page A

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