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

archaeological dig. Dayan would ask him to do the same again on other occasions, an offence under Israeli law, but not one he would be prosecuted for by anybody.
    A variety of sources agree that the Israelis were intellectually open to the military and intelligence potential of Geller years before the USA, and the value Israel continues to place on Uri today cannot be underestimated. His work for the land of his birth is the area that he is the most reticent to discuss, perhaps because it is ongoing. The one thing he will say is that if he does anything for Israel, and he’s not necessarily saying he does, ‘it is only for totally positive causes’.
    One slightly younger soldier whom Uri met when still in uniform and doing a performance is the current Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The two remain close and see each other regularly. ‘His abilities made a tremendous impression on me as a young soldier,’ Netanyahu says today. ‘I’m still amazed, I haven’t a clue how he does these things.’ And it is Netanyahu, listed 23rd on the 2012 Forbes magazine list of ‘The World’s Most Powerful People’, who tells one of the more remarkable stories of Uri’s metal-bending prowess. Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, were with Uri in a restaurant in Caesarea when Uri simultaneously bent the spoons of a whole group of people, all of whom were sitting at different tables – a rare example of a batch bending that caused astonishment in the restaurant.

    Uri with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
    As we know from Kit Green’s account in the previous chapter, back in the early 1970s, the Mossad was keen to swap intelligence with the USA, to the extent that it alerted the Americans to the unusual young man and told them that it was willing to allow the US intelligence and scientific communities to take a look at him. The Mossad’s overture was followed by Andrija Puharich’s mission to Israel to do semi-formal testing on Uri, and his eventual arrival in the USA in 1972.
    During the two intense years that followed, the espionage world only touched Uri insofar as the circus that was going on around him. Mossad people were watching the SRI: CIA people were watching the SRI: and, according to a book on the Mossad written in 1978 by the well-informed writer Richard Deacon, various Soviet-bloc spooks were watching them all. Uri had only a hazy knowledge of what was going on. He was not privy to the increasing interest being taken in him as a possible intelligence asset. As he says himself, he was becoming more and more interested in being a celebrity and making a lot of money.
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    The period when Uri Geller begins being used by the CIA – an unprecedented development since he was still an Israeli citizen – as well as by Mossad and the Mexican government – begins around 1974.
    There was reluctance and caution at the CIA even then to exploit Geller. ‘As we finished our work with Uri at SRI,’ says the former astronaut Edgar Mitchell, ‘I was called by the head of the CIA and asked to come to Washington and brief him on what we had learned. That head happened to be Ambassador George HW Bush’ [who later, of course, became president]. Mitchell explained to Bush that the Russians were studying parapsychology, so it was essential that the CIA should be studying it, too. Geller was not immediately recruited as an agent, but Kit Green began regularly talking with Eldon Byrd about the Geller question.
    Eldon Byrd, the naval strategic weapons systems specialist who had been one of many experts investigating Uri on behalf of the military, also briefed a CIA director, whom he didn’t identify as Bush. ‘In later years during the Brezhnev period,’ he said before his death in 2002, ‘I met with several Russian scientists who not only had documented results similar to ours, but also were actively using psychic techniques against the USA and its allies. I eventually ended up briefing a director of the CIA. I