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Chapter 12 / I Spy

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'These are the names of the men which Moses sent to spy out the land.' (Numbers, xiii, 16)

One day, Geller was having lunch in the SRI canteen with Russell Targ and Edgar Mitchell. They had been talking about Mitchell's epic walk across the Fra Mauro region of the Moon the previous year, when Mitchell mentioned the expensive Hasselblad camera he had left up there. Geller, as ever with an eye on the main publicity chance, hatched the idea of trying to bring the Hasselblad back to Earth by some method of teleportation. Whereas the camera has not yet returned, the idea, incidentally, has - to haunt Geller for having dreamed it up. Saying he was going to beam a large and unique camera down from the Fra Mauro region of the Moon is one of the claims which sceptics have joyously seized on. However, within minutes right there in the canteen, some very strange teleportation effects did appear to manifest in the presence of Targ and Mitchell.

Geller, who at the time was still a big, omnivorous eater (today he is a whippet-thin vegan) had ordered two desserts, the second of which was vanilla ice cream. In the first spoonful, he bit hard on something metallic. He spat it out to find a tiny arrowhead, which Mitchell looked at and said, 'My God, that looks familiar.' Annoyed, Geller had meanwhile called over the waitress and suggested the canteen warn its supplier about foreign bodies in their product. She asked him if she could take the offending item away; he refused, thinking he would need it for claiming compensation if his tooth turned out to be broken. Back in the laboratory, the three were talking when they saw another small piece of metal fall to the carpet. They picked it up, to see that together, the two pieces which had appeared made up a tie pin. Mitchell, according to Geller and Targ, looked shocked; he now realised why the first part had been familiar. It was a tie pin he had lost several years before.

Russell Targ still lives close to the SRI, and has recently retired as a senior staff scientist at Lockheed Martin, the aerospace corporation, where he was a leading light for 12 years in developing a new laser-based air safety system, only announced in 1998 and called Lidar. Lidar is a form of radar which detects clear air turbulence up to 10 km ahead of an aircraft. The system may well be fitted to commercial aircraft in the near future. Targ, a rather magisterial, imposingly intellectual fellow who today resembles an older Art Garfunkel, but with a deep, bass voice, is so proud of his anti-turbulence device that he has the license plate LIDAR 1 on his motorcycle.

Although the more mystically-inclined of the SRI Two, Targ is the more reluctant to attribute too much to Uri Geller. We met in Beverly Hills, where he was on a tour promoting a fine new book he has co-authored called Miracles of Mind, which explores 'nonlocal consciousness and spiritual healing'. Available chiefly in alternative, spiritual-type bookshops, Miracles of Mind contains just two brief references to Geller - and none at all to Puharich.

'I don't regret having given him a platform, I think he is a fine fellow, an admirable character and a nice man, and I have no problem with the work I did with Uri,' Targ said. 'In the laboratory, he demonstrated various kinds of perceptual ESP comparable to what we saw from a number of other people. I would say that Uri was certainly better than average, but by no means the best we have seen. The fact that some of our remote viewers were able to provide precise, descriptions of what was going on in the Soviet Union and China and other places which were later verified by satellite photography, makes it quite ordinary that Uri Geller can look in a closet in another room and describe what's on the wall. Geller's miracles are of very small note compared with the architectural accuracy provided by a number of other people from thousands of miles away.'

'Spoon bending, however,' Targ continued, 'Is something which did not occur at SRI. We worked for five weeks intensively in an effort to elicit spoon bending from him, but that did not happen for us, for whatever reason. It happened numerous times during informal sessions, but for a scientist, what doesn't happen in the laboratory doesn't happen.'

'I don't rule out the possibility of Uri being able to bend a spoon paranormally. I have seen evidence, under somewhat better controlled conditions of spoons being bent in the hands of other people who were caught by surprise by the bowl of the spoon suddenly getting soft and rolling up. So it is not that I am categorically saying there is no paranormal spoon bending - I think there probably is - but I couldn't say that I have seen Uri do it. Most people have paranormal psychic abilities, so it would be silly to say that the world is filled with psychics except for Uri Geller.'

Hal Puthoff, meanwhile, runs a private science research institute in Austin, Texas, working in a field so audacious and advanced - it is known as Zero Point Energy and concerns, ultimately, harnessing hidden energy in the vacuum of space to power spaceships - that he is expected by many to win a Nobel Prize before he retires. I was told that, while Targ had already retired, but was still involved in parapsychological research, and would hence be happy to discuss Uri Geller with me, Hal Puthoff was a different matter. Puthoff works in a rarefied area of science, yet one which is conventional, he writes for respectable scientific journals and magazines such as New Scientist, and would most likely want to avoid discussing anything to do with Geller.

Hal was indeed hesitant for a moment, but I got the sense he had plenty of new insights to shed on the events of a quarter of a century earlier. We were soon having lunch together at a restaurant close to his laboratory. We talked first about his work in the exciting area of extracting energy from 'nothing' Ironically, perhaps, a major part of Hal Puthoff's job today is debunking crazy inventors who think they have discovered free energy - although he makes it clear from the start that he sees no difference between that function and what he was doing at SRI with Geller and other psychics in 1972. 'This is the hardest thing to get across to people,' Puthoff explained. 'My position is that I am a total sceptic, and that's a sword that cuts both ways. I am sceptical about psi phenomena existing, and similarly, I am totally sceptical of the sceptics who, without evidence and without investigation, dismiss it out of hand as being an impossibility. I have had some fairly acrimonious interaction with sceptics on the basis that they should have supported the SRI effort. In the laboratory we found these phenomena sketchy, unreliable, high noise but nonetheless, there was something there. I imagine there are some honest sceptics but for a lot of them it's an emotional issue.

Puthoff took on the job of investigating psychic claims 'on a lark', and would have been just as happy if the result had been the debunking of Geller and the others as he was validating their powers. Fun as he saw it, there was, however, a deadly serious side to what SRI was doing. It is only very recently, since part of his work at SRI became declassified (a declassification he had campaigned for) that Puthoff has been able to reveal that the whole Geller programme was requested and paid for by the CIA, and later passed on to the military version of the CIA, the DIA. It turns out that the intelligence community was beginning to get seriously rattled by the Soviets' use of psychics for military purposes. It was believed that the information leaking out of the Communist bloc was largely disinformation, and that the psychic spying they were rumoured to be engaged in was probably mere propaganda. However, it was seen as a good idea to launch a low profile, academic study of psychics, but in an out-of-the-way, non-obvious centre, where it would be under the control of CIA operatives and secrets-oriented scientists (like Puthoff), rather than glory seeking university professors. The operation to discover whether there was potential in 'remote viewing' of distant targets would carry on in fits and starts until as late as 1990, under a variety of names, Operation Stargate and Grillflame among them.

Where Uri Geller, who was by this time one of the best known (as well as egomaniacal) celebrities in America, fitted into this hush-hush approach takes some explaining. For one thing, the Mossad, with whom US intelligence had friendly, although mutually wary, links had informed the Americans that Geller was very interesting indeed. Leaving aside some of Puharich's dubious-sounding stories about he and Geller meeting Israeli military chiefs to warn them about their information from Hoova on forthcoming Egyptian war plans, there is no doubt that Geller and Puharich were a matter of intense interest to the Mossad while they were together back in Israel. There is evidence, for example, that some unfortunate Israeli spook was assigned the job of sifting Geller's toilet waste for shreds of anything it might reveal about his nefarious purposes. (They once confronted he and Puharich about a photocopier brochure which Puharich had had mailed from the States; Geller had feared the security people would discover it and assume Puharich was an American spy. He tore it up and flushed it, only to find in painstakingly reconstructed back at Mossad HQ when he was summoned there to explain it.) The Mossad's conclusion, however, seems to have been that Puharich might be nutty but was bright and no danger, whereas Geller was a potentially powerful military weapon who had proved himself useful in secret military tests, but at the same time, was a flamboyant showbusiness personality, who, in terms of keeping a secret, was likely to be about as much use as a giant megaphone. Their recommendation to the Americans, therefore, was to test him and use him, with their complements, as it were, but to be careful.

Of course, as Hal Puthoff knew, once you were into the intelligence world, absolutely nothing was straightforward, and a veritable circus ensued. Geller was not to be told that he was just one of many psychics to be tested; for publicity purposes, however, it was to look as if Geller was the only psychic being examined. That way if, as suspected, he was found to be a conjurer, the Russians might believe the Americans had given up no sooner than they started. It would also give an opportunity for an easy answer to be given when the rumour y say they were checking out Geller. Additionally, the Israelis had to be watched in case they were planting Geller as a known fake; there was said to be an understanding that Israel was letting the US look at Geller in exchange for use of American spy satellites as they passed over the Arab countries. Another complication Puthoff and Targ needed to be aware of was that rival parts of the American intelligence world might want to sabotage the CIA/DIA's work at SRI. Another still was that Uri Geller might after all be a magician who had fooled the Mossad and was now out to fool them too.
'Before Geller came, someone showed up from Israeli intelligence,' recounted Puthoff, a pixie-like Californian with a dry sense of humour. 'They were interested in what we were going to do. They had used Geller in field operations and were impressed by what he had done, but they had never done anything scientific with him, so if we were going to generate scientific results, they were very interested in them.'
Once it was clear that the Israelis were monitoring the SRI tests, the security around Geller increased. 'We were doing our own security as SRI, but we were reporting to the CIA, and they wanted to be sure that we were taking every possible precaution. We were stationing people on the top of SRI buildings looking for people on the top of other SRI buildings. We did all kinds of things,' Puthoff continued. 'Another concern was that he was working for Israeli intelligence, and that they were just out to prove that he was a superman in order to scare the Arabs, and that therefore he might be something like the Six Million Dollar Man. He might have implanted receivers, he might have a whole shadow team with eavesdropping equipment. So we tore apart the ceiling tiles every evening looking for bugs. Our concern that this was an intelligence plot resulted in our paranoia being much deeper than the typical sceptic would say. We were sure there was a scam.'
Inside the lab, the 'enemy' in a sense, was Geller. 'What was not appreciated at the time, when everybody thought we had been fooled by a magician,' continued Puthoff, 'was that we were looking for magicians' tricks beyond anything Randi ever thought of. Of course, we looked at everything Randi had said, like Shipi probably had a signalling system to signal into the sealed room. Well the thing wrong with that Shipi was in the sealed room with him on our insistence, because we were more worried about it than Randi was. We covered everything Randi later said was wrong with the experiments, but in ways he doesn't know. We were salting magicians in as physicists and lab people while he was doing the experiments. We had an expert in psychic magicianship come in and carefully view video tapes of experiments, and he couldn't work out how they were done.'
Of course, trying to fool Uri Geller is not easy, as Puthoff noticed. 'He is one of the brightest people I have met. He is very quick on the uptake, he doesn't miss a thing, and for those who would say that he is a magician pure and simple, he certainly sees things that the ordinary person doesn't. We might walk by a laboratory where I had a couple of agents hidden in the back with 30 other people, and Uri would walk by and point to them and say, "Who are those two guys?" As far as I could tell, they looked just like everybody else.'
Then there were the suspected destabilisation attempts by other parts of the US government machine to deal with. On one occasion, Puthoff tells of a visit from George Lawrence, the director of ARPA, the Pentagon's Advance Research Projects Agency. Lawrence brought with him Professor Robert Van de Castle of the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Van de Castle was a psychologist with a particular interest in sleep and dream research, parapsychology and psychic research. The three-man ARPA team, which also included Ray Hyman, the sceptical psychologist from Oregon, wanted to see the Geller experiments, but Puthoff and Targ objected. 'We were still paranoid that there was a big operation against us, and maybe ARPA and Geller were in cahoots, so we wouldn't let them be in our experiments,' Puthoff said. 'What we offered instead was they did their own. So they did some experiments with Uri, but not under control. Uri did very well reproducing pictures from sealed envelopes, but someone from New Scientist ended up interviewing George Lawrence, and he said, "Oh, yes we went there and all we saw was tricks." The implication was that they had seen our experiments, but they only saw their own.'
According to Prof. Van de Castle, even those experiments had satisfied him that Geller 'was an interesting subject for further research'. What he says happened was that Geller had sensed that Lawrence and Hyman were hostile to him from the start, and that Geller asked if he could do something alone with Van de Castle, 'because he liked me and I was different from the other two.' Lawrence, Van de Castle says, was convinced before he even went to SRI that the trip was a waste of time. In addition, late the night before, Lawrence had eaten a large Chinese meal, and in the morning was complaining of diarrhoea and fatigue, and was highly irritable. Lawrence continued running to the bathroom during his discussion with Geller, and later wrote a scathing report on the visit for ARPA, which formed a large part of Leon Jaroff's Time article. Van de Castle complains that he told Time of his conclusions from the visit, but that they were given a scant few lines compared to Lawrence's heavily critical comments.
Hal Puthoff explains that several experiments he and Targ did at SRI were never published. 'Once we said, "Uri we have a physics colleague on the East Coast who we'd like you to show what you can do." Now in fact, this was the CIA contract monitor. We called him at the agency and said, "Just put something on your desk and we'll see if Uri can get it." Uri is sitting there in our lab struggling to try and get whatever it is, and he keeps drawing something, crumpling it up and throwing it away. We were there for an hour, and then finally he said, "I give up. This is all I am getting, but it doesn't make any sense," and he had written the word "architecture" across the back of this paper and made a drawing that looked like a plateful of scrambled eggs. So we asked the guy what he had on his desk. He said it was a medical textbook which he'd opened at random to a section called Architecture of the Brain, next to a picture of a brain. There was no possibility that there was collusion between them.'
As for psychokinesis (PK) effects, Puthoff confirms that the formal SRI tests were a disappointment. 'Under camera conditions, the spoons just didn't bend. Informally, my father's keepsake ring distorted into a heart shape but Uri stopped it because didn't want it to break it. One of the things I found the most striking in an informal setting was early on, before we had started the experimentation. Russ is used to seeing how magicians handle cards, and decided to bring along a fresh pack he had bought on the airplane, a pack he knew hadn't been tampered with. Russ said by handing them to Uri and watching, he would be able to tell if he was a practised magician. So we were sitting round the table chatting, and Russ takes the cards and rips open the cellophane and says, "Uri, do you ever do anything with cards?" and hands him the deck. Uri says, "No, I'm not into cards," and he reaches out to take the deck and clumsily drops part of it. Now our observation was that the cards appeared to fall and land and go partially into the table and fall over, so what we ended up with was several cards whose corners were cut off where they appeared to go into the table. A whole piece of the card was missing. In the deck, of course, the cards were in order, and we had a certain place where they began to be slightly chopped, and the next one was a little more chopped and so on, from 10 per cent of a card up to 30 or 40 per cent. There were about six or seven cards with part missing, and they were the ones that gave the impression of having dug 'into' the table. We all saw it was very startling.'
'Russ scooped up the cards immediately. The question was, how did that happen? Without a doubt, there was no chance for Geller to substitute cards or to distract us while he cut pieces off. This was a one second event. The only thing we could figure, since we weren't yet ready to believe that something so magical had happened, was that when the cards went through the machine in the factory, a certain set went through at an angle and got cut. So Russ checked with the card company, and asked if they ever had runs in which some of the cards get chopped. They said never, they had all sorts of procedures to prevent it, and it would be detected if it had occurred. Even on that basis, you have to say that the synchronicity that one of the few decks that ever got chopped should ever end up in Uri Geller's hand is unbelievable. But that's the kind of thing that happened around him.'
'Another thing that happened was when everybody was over at our house for dinner, and my wife had made some mayonnaise, and set the spoon in the sink. We ate, and later when she went back, that spoon was all curled up but the mayonnaise on it had not been touched. It's hard to believe, not that it couldn't have been done. Uri would have had to go in there, bend the spoon, then go the refrigerator, find more mayonnaise, swill it around, make sure it had untouched mayonnaise on it, and put it back in the sink. And we always watched him like a hawk. We always traded off that if one if us went to the bathroom, the other would watch him. Even in informal situations, myself, Russell, my wife, other friends we had over, I gave them all tasks; you concentrate on spoons, don't let them out of your sight, you concentrate on when he does drawings.'
'Back at SRI, we were going to have Uri attempt to deflect a laser beam. This was a complex experiment, and he said, "How will I know if I am successful?" We said, "You see this chart recorder over here. That line is a recording of the position of the laser beam that is picked up and if you deflect the laser beam it will show as a signal on the chart." He said, "So what you want to see is a signal on this chart recorder. OK, one, two, three, go!" And the chart recorder went off scale, came back and was burned out. We took it to the repair shop and some of the electronics had been blown out. OK, so it could have been a coincidence, or our paranoid theory could have been correct, that he had some EMP pulse generator buried in his body somewhere and he stepped on a heel switch and made it blow. Or maybe he had just demonstrated a genuine PK event. But it is not a real event from our standpoint as scientists. It is one of those unrecorded events, so I don't know what to say about the PK claims. But I have no doubt that he has genuine powers in the psi area.'
To place Hal Puhoff's position on Uri Geller into perspective, it is important to note, as he pointed out at our lunch, that Geller was only a part, arguably a publicity front, of a larger, more secret, remote viewing programme, and that both he and Targ are generally happier discussing remote viewing as a whole than Geller alone. Both men tend to take an 'oh, yes, and then there was Uri Geller' attitude to their work in the early 1970s. 'Remote viewing involved millions of dollars and training dozens of intelligence agents even as late as 1985,' Puhoff explained. 'And it worked. One of the Russian hypotheses was that it was transmission from brain waves, so we even did some remote viewing from a shielded area on a submerged submarine several hundred metres down, suspended mid way between the surface and the bottom of the ocean off Catalina Island, southern California, 500 miles from where we were.' The results, which Puthoff presented at a symposium of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1981, were almost as good as remote viewing results on land.

Did Puthoff, then, ever regret becoming involved with Geller? 'I don't have any regret,' he shot back, 'because it was fascinating, and I know there is enough genuine stuff to say something about physics. It opened my mind. We are going to look back and see that 20th century science was pretty primitive, just as we look back and think that 18th and 19th century science was primitive I feel it has been a privilege to have been exposed to 21st century physics ahead of time.'

Targ came away with a rather different perspective. He was fascinated above all not by details, not even by any explanatory mathematical equations that the Geller experiments might have yielded up, but by the bigger picture still. 'Modern physics talks about nonlocality, which pertains to the idea that there is an element of conductivity in the world beyond what is obvious,' Targ explained. 'There are experiments that show, for example, that photons which set off in opposite directions at the speed of light still appear to have an interaction or an effect upon one another. It is said that there is a nonlocal connection between them. Photons at the speed of light should not still be interacting according to classical theory. Quantum theory, however, predicts that that there will continue to be an interaction, and indeed that interaction is seen.'

'This is in perfect agreement with what the Buddhists said 2,500 years ago. The central idea of the Buddhist tenet was that if you only knew one thing, it is that that separation is an illusion, that we misapprehend the world we live in, and there is significantly more connection between the consciousness and the physical universe than it seems. The Indian guru Patanjali, who was a Hindu, wrote a book which he called The Secrets of Patanjali, and is available today as How To Know God, translated by Christopher Isherwood, in which Patanjali writes that a person seeking transcendence will encounter the abilities to see into the distance, see into the future and see into bodies - and this is available to the quiet mind. This was all 500 years before the time of Christ that Patanjali provided the tool kit for psychic functioning. So you could say we spent $20m of the CIA's money and 20 years of our time demonstrating that Patanjali got it right. That's our accomplishment - that we replicated his teachings. He totally understood our psychic abilities.'

Although Puthoff and Targ are still happy to support Geller, there is a sense in which they continue, just a little, to damn him with faint praise. Specifically, both are agreed that, looking at the remote viewing programme as a whole, the star of that programme was a former Burbank, California police commissioner, Pat Price. Price was one of the elite psychics actually put on some unofficial payroll of the CIA and employed through a distant outpost of the agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, as a remote viewer. He had a string of successes, but died under what are claimed to be suspicious circumstances in Las Vegas. (The suspicion is that he was so good that his heart attack death was faked to fool the Russians, and he continued to work for many more years. Price is said to have been buried in a closed casket; Hal Puthoff was at the funeral and says it was open, with a very good likeness of Pat Price inside.)

Although Puthoff and Targ are unanimous that Price was the best remote viewer in the US psychic programme, that conclusion is disputed. The man doing most of the disputing is Dr. David Morehouse, a 43 year-old career army man, who believes he developed psychic powers as a result of being hit on the helmet by a bullet during a training exercise in Jordan. That Morehouse was recruited into the remote viewing programme at Fort Meade is beyond question, but he is controversial, as he has written a book - Psychic Warrior - on the programme, and had dealings with Hollywood over it, which has rendered him to some extent a pariah for breaking ranks so publicly. Nevertheless, what Morehouse has to say about Uri Geller is interesting to note. He works part of the time as a writer, and part teaching American police departments on the use of psychics, and is highly regarded in his field.

'I came to know of Uri when I was in the remote viewing unit because one of the first things you were required to do was go through the historical files and in these files were constant references to Uri and Uri's early involvement at Stanford Research Institute,' Morehouse says. 'It was very clear in all of the historical documentation, the briefs that were passed on to the intelligence community, that Uri Geller was without equal. None of the others came even close to Uri's abilities in all of the tests. What interested me was that this was not a phenomenon that was born in some back room behind a beaded curtain by a starry eyed guy; this was something that was born in a bed of science at Stanford Research Institute, being paid for heavily by the CIA. And also, these were two laser physicists, not psychologists, but hard scientists- brought in to establish the validity and credibility, to see if it works as an intelligence collection asset, and if it works, to develop training templates that allow us to select certain individuals that meet a certain psychological profile, and establish units that can gather and collect data using certain phenomenon. And their answer to all those things was, Yes. If Targ and Puhoff had said, "Well, yes, there is a little something to it, but we can't explain it, it's not consistent and isn't of any value,", well fine, but obviously it met all the criteria and twenty odd years later, they were still using it.'

Like Morehouse, Geller too feels, a little peevishly, perhaps, that there is an attempt in retrospect to play down his achievements at SRI, and suggests that, grateful as he is to Puthoff and Targ for their continuing support, they might still be under obligation to the CIA to keep some material on him secret.

'There was a lot of stuff at SRI that was very strange, like the stopwatch materialising out from Hal's briefcase and appearing over the experiment table and then falling on the table,' Geller says. 'I have seen the videotape of that because they played it back over and over. Then I bent metal under running water for them; I have never seen that film either, and you can actually see coins and spoons bending. Then there was the bending of the rings. Those were heavy, thick rings. There was no way that anyone with force could bend those; you'd have to really hammer it, but if you hammer a copper ring, you will see the indentations. I know for certain they never found impact on those rings. They will probably deny all this, and some of these things happened off camera and not under controlled conditions, but I always wonder, where is the stuff that was under laboratory controlled conditions, that was filmed? Why did they take it away? It probably exists somewhere in the dungeons of the Pentagon . Maybe they were afraid of the public knowing for a fact that Uri Geller is genuine. Maybe there was a plan to debunk me purposely, so I would come to depend on them.'

One of Geller's most disturbing stories from this time was of being spirited off to a government installation and given an unusual request. 'I can't tell you where it happened,' he says. 'All I can tell you is that I was asked to stop the heart of a pig, and I knew that the final target was really Uri Andropov the head of the KGB. They were ultimately asking me to see if the power of the human mind could stop the human heart. I went into the room and talked to one of the scientists and said I wasn't interested in this at all, because it isn't in my nature to do such a thing. That was the time when I becoming a vegetarian, and I was very quiet and very shocked. I asked to leave and they drove us - because this was base outside a certain city - back to the hotel, and then I just flew back to New York. That was when I decided not to do any more scientific work, because I feel that the whole thing at SRI was really leading to that. perhaps it was only one man's obsession. I don't know. They wanted to see what the power of the mind could do which was impossible physically or electronically. If they could find someone who could concentrate on a picture like some voodoo thing and stop someone's heart bingo they'd have a tool in their hands.'
Further backing for Geller being known to the CIA, and being a matter of interest and concern to the Agency, if not for doing work on its behalf, as Geller claims he did, comes from Edgar Mitchell and from Eldon Byrd. 'After the Geller work,' says Mitchell, 'I was asked to brief the director of the CIA, Ambassador George Bush, on our activities and the results. In later years during the Brezhnev period, I met with several Russian scientists who not only had documented results similar to ours, but were actively using psychic techniques against the US and its allies' Byrd says, 'I eventually ended up briefing a director of the CIA, I briefed people on the National Security Council and I briefed Congressional committees because of some of the results we got.

Eldon Byrd also recounts two occasions that he knows about of Geller apparently working with Israeli intelligence - both of which Geller today refuses point blank to discuss. 'One time, Uri called me when he was in New York and said he had a very strange encounter that evening with someone who said they were from Israel and would he 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 if whatever there broke, 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. He called me all excited later on 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.' [In 1976 an Air France Airbus hijacked by Palestinian terrorists was given shelter in Idi Amin's Uganda and 100 Israeli passengers held hostage. A daring Israeli rescue mission swooped in by air to save them.]

'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 is not suggesting, obviously, that this proved Uri's psychic ability, but it did suggest strongly that the Mossad really were in contact with him.

'Another time,' Byrd says, 'Uri had been secreted out of the country by the Mossad and they'd dressed him up as an airplane mechanic for an ElAl flight. In the 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 the nuclear 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.'

As far as Geller working for the CIA is concerned, rather than him being observed by it, Byrd is less sure, and yet his account continues to be highly illuminating. (Uri tells of being recruited for certain tasks later by the CIA's station in Mexico City later in his career, as we shall see later in Chapter 15, but as in accounts of all espionage exploits, second hand reports are bound to have more validity than first hand.) 'I got a call a couple of years after I met Uri, from someone in the CIA,' Byrd says. 'They wanted me to come over. I went down to Virginia, and they said we understand you had an interaction with Uri a couple of years ago, and what did you do with him? So I told him about the telepathy. And they said, "So you say it was a green R that came in your head?" I said yes, and they looked at each other. I asked if there was something significant about the colour and they said yes.'

'Another time,' Byrd continues. 'Uri asked me to check with my CIA guy, because he was living in the States and had the benefit of being here, and wanted to do something like work for the CIA on a project or something. So I passed that along to them and they said, no, we won't do that. I said he's offering for free, why not? They said we have had bad experiences working with double agents, so we don't do it. They said they knew he was working with the Mossad. They verified what Uri had been telling me. I said he'd never told me he was working with the Mossad. There were a couple of instances of requests, but that doesn't mean working with or working for. They said, "No, we know he works with the Mossad."'

'Later on, my contact person, who was head at the time of a division called Life Sciences, was regularly asking me if I knew where Uri was and what he was doing. Finally, I said why are you so curious? They said they were assigned to keep track of him. I said this implies that you know he's for real. They said of course we know he's for real. I asked how they could determine that. They said they'd tested him without his knowing who they were. He had been told to call a certain telephone number when he was on the west coast doing experiments, and there was a scientist in Washington DC who wanted to do a very quick experiment with him. My guy said he was the scientist. Now this guy had a medical doctorate, and he also had a PhD in neurophsyiology, and his expertise was forensic medicine. He was the Scully of the X-files. He said he had seen a tape of Uri cheating, but it didn't make much difference, because they'd seen him make spoons and forks bend on their own, so they were convinced that he was for real, but this time, they were taping it under a certain set of protocols, and they said the proof to them that Uri was not a magician was that when they caught him cheating, the way he did it was so naive that a magician wouldn't have thought he could get away with it.'

When he describes the surreptitious test on Uri by 'Rick' of the CIA, Byrd is referring, of course, to the same incident as Hal Puthoff; the book Rick had on his desk was Gray's Anatomy, and that telephone test was the one which convinced the CIA that Geller was for real. The CIA contract manager tried another test across the States with Geller on another day. The man, whom Geller knew as Rick, was at home with some sealed numbers in envelopes. Out in California, Geller suddenly told him something had happened in his house in the Virginia suburbs involving shards of glass over some smooth green surface and a dog with a square face. 'Rick' went into his den to find his white bulldog had knocked over a lamp with a glass dome, and the splinters of glass were lying across a bright green carpet.

Rick, whose similarity (in function if not form) to the fictional Agent Dana Scully of the X-Files has already been noted by Eldon Byrd, was soon to be dragged into something infinitely stranger involving Geller, as documented by the science writer Jim Schnabel in his excellent, though sadly under-publicised, 1997 book Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies (Dell Publishing). One of the most secret nuclear weapons facilities in the USA, the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, happened to be an hour or so from SRI. By 1974, according to Schnabel, who writes for such journals as Science, New Scientist, the Washington Post, and The Economist, a few staff at Livermore had become concerned that if Uri Geller was genuine, he was a danger to national security. It didn't take more than the movement of a few grams of nuclear material a few centimetres, after all, to set off (or sabotage) a nuclear weapon.

Although the whole world now knew by 1974 that Geller was being tested at SRI, and a select few knew the work was government-funded, it would still have been considered unseemly for the Livermore Laboratory to do any official work on Geller. In between scientific engagements, Geller was still a showbiz animal, hopping from talk show to celebrity party to talk show. Consequently, a small, volunteer group of physicists and engineers at Livermore, with Rick's knowledge, embarked on a series of experiments with Geller at evenings and weekends, in an old, wooden barracks on a low security part of the former naval air base.

The tests were designed to succeed in the PK area where SRI had failed, Schnabel relates. As experiments, they largely failed. Geller could do everything in the way of metal bending and computer disc wiping that he was asked - so long as he was allowed to touch the items he was working on. But a psychological backdrop developed among the researchers which would unquestionably have had Scully and Mulder arguing and speculating through an entire episode. What was to become a mounting hysteria, practically a mass-possession, began when one of the group, a security officer, was speaking on the phone to Geller, and Geller proceeded in mid-conversation to give him a detailed description of three minor family dramas he predicted. All three happened to the officer the following Saturday. Then, in the makeshift lab, an infrared camera started recording unexplained patches of radiation for a few seconds at a time, high up on a wall. Shortly afterwards, an audiotape picked up a peculiar, unintelligible metallic voice which no one had heard when the tape recorder was on.

In the following days, some members of the team and their families began to see a fuzzy, grey 3-D hallucination or vision, or something, of a miniature flying saucer hovering in the centre of various rooms. Other visions the scientists reported, in mounting terror, took the form of giant birds, which would walk across their gardens, or, in the case of one physicist, Mike Russo, and his wife, at the foot of their bed. After a few weeks, according to Schnabel, another physicist, Peter Crane, called Rick at the CIA, almost in desperation. Rick came down and met Crane in a coffee shop in the town closest to the lab. He later met the other team members, and was astonished to find them sweating and weeping openly as they described what had been happening. Knowing from his medical training that group hallucinations were extremely rare, and additionally, that all the affected Livermore personnel, as a part of their high security clearance, were known to be unusually stable psychologically, Rick reportedly doubted the hallucination theory even more. When he examined the metallic voice tape, he became even more puzzled. One of the few recognisable words on it was the codename for an unconnected top secret project, which he happened to know about, but nobody at Livermore could have any inkling of.

Shortly afterwards, Russo received a phone call from the metallic voice, which was insisting that the Livermore group cease its work on Geller; something the scientists, who were only volunteers after all, did with some alacrity, whereupon the phenomena gradually stopped. One of the last, according to Schnabel, appeared to a physicist called Don Curtis and his wife in the centre of their living room, and consisted of a holographic false arm in grey suiting material, with a hook for a hand. This vision prompted Rick to ask Puthoff and Targ for a meeting when they were next in Washington. He seemed to think privately that the SRI men, both laser physicists of course, were playing some kind of holography prank on their scientific colleagues at a rival lab, and he wanted them to know the joke had gone too far. Late at night, as Hal Puthoff confirms today, Rick was telling him and Targ the whole bizarre story of what had been happening down at Livermore, ending on the piece de resistance, the arm, and looking, presumably, for a confession. As he was talking about the arm, apparently, a sharp, very aggressive knocking was heard on the hotel room door. By now, Puthoff and Targ suspected Rick might be playing a practical joke on them. Rick answered the door to a middle-aged man in a grey suit, who wandered stiffly into the room, stood between the beds and said in an odd, slow voice, 'I guess I must be in the wrong room,' before walking slowly out again. All three men noticed as he left that one sleeve of his suit was empty.

The strange Livermore events are unique in the Uri Geller story, in that they are the only instance to be found of anything which might be described as evil happening around Uri Geller. As Jim Schnabel points out, accounts of apparitions of giant, raven-like birds glowering from the end of the bed at terrified young couples have a definite aura of shamanism about them. They are the stuff of witchdoctors, black magic and nightmares, yet nowhere else is there a report, however fanciful, of such things happening, let alone to a group of nuclear scientists. Could it just be possible that something - from Uri's subconscious, from the Livermore people's subconscious, from Andrija Puharich's bag of electronics tricks, from somewhere - objected to Uri working with men whose job was producing nuclear warheads? He has been a soldier and killed a man, he has helped Israel defend itself, but he is essentially a peaceable man. My question is not of the kind to which there is really any answer, but it seems odd that something so frightening to others would happen just this once, when he happened to be working within a few hundred metres of weapons capable of wiping out most of the world. 'I have no explanation for what happened at Livermore,' Uri says today. 'I wasn't even aware of it at the time. I can only think it happened because I misused my powers in this place where weapons of mass destruction were being made. For me what was so weird was the birds. The senior physicist was called Ron Hawke, I'd been dealing with Eldon Byrd over at the Naval Surface weapons Centre in Maryland. But I'm just guessing. I don't know what was going on.'

It is illuminating to think again what it must have been like to be Uri Geller at this time. In a couple of years, he had gone from being a night-club turn in Israel to being on the periphery of the American nuclear machine, to being a matter of fascination to the CIA, to having senior military figures briefing senior politicians about him. He was still living in Puharich's cultish compound up in Ossining, and believed, rightly or wrongly, that he was under the control of extraterrestrials. And on top of all this, he was a major showbusiness personality, who rarely passed a week - especially after he had been on the cover of Time - without appearing on a TV talk show. I have already discussed the question that if everything he did was a fake, the strain of keeping up appearances would surely have killed him or driven him into a mental institution; but what about the opposite, if he knew in his deepest self that what he did was real, that all those people trying to prove he was a fake were doomed to failure? Could being genuine be as great a personal cross for Uri to bear as being a fraud? Could it be that he found some comfort in people believing he was just a conjuror? After all, there's a lot of conjurors about, there's safety in numbers, and so long as he was keeping himself and his mother back in Israel in some style, and he was satisfying his lust for fame and recognition, why should he care if people thought he was a fake?

An unlikely position for Uri Geller to take? Perhaps; but Eldon Byrd has an interesting reflection on how badly Geller really wanted to be regarded as genuine. 'I always remember that Uri had this box,' Byrd told me. 'He may have got rid of it now. When he showed it to me, he said, "You know, if the world really knew I was for real my life wouldn't be worth a nickel. There would be people trying to kill me if they thought I could really do what I can say I do." He opened the box, and in it, he had a fork, and in the handle of the fork there was this fingerprint. I said, "How did you do that?" and he said, "I was thinking, 'Melt, melt, melt', and it got soft." I said, "Just give me that, no magician can put their fingerprints in stainless steel. There's no way of doing this. It's mind boggling. Give it to me, and we can analyse it. But Uri said, "No. That's going to prove for good that I am for real, and I don't want people knowing that." He was very, very paranoid about that.'

Paranoia that the Russians, or even the Arabs, would kill him was one reason Geller may have shied away from any further laboratory testing after 1974, and his final experiments at SRI. Another was boredom. The amount of time he spent wired up in laboratories in the early 1970s is
astonishing, as Charles Panati of Newsweek discovered in researching his 1976 book, The Geller Papers. On top of SRI's and Eldon Byrd's work, Panati published papers from academics including Wilbur Franklin at Kent State ('Fracture surface physics indicating teleneural interaction'), from Dr. Thelma Moss of the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA's Center for the Health Sciences, from Dr. Coohill at Western Kentucky University, and from William E. Cox at The Institute of Parapsychology at Durham, North Carolina. In Europe, Geller underwent testing at Birkbeck College and King's College, both part of London University, and at the INSERM Telemetry Laboratories of the Foch Hospital, Suresnes, France. In South Africa, he was examined by Dr. E. Alan Price, a medical doctor and Research Project Director for the South African Institute for Parapsychology, who painstakingly documented over 100 cases - which took up 60 pages of Panati's book - of Geller's effect on members of the public and university staffs as he travelled across the country on a lecture tour.

Uri Geller was a handsome, wealthy young man in his twenties on the loose in America, with little real interest, according to his best friend Byron Janis, in being anything other than an unusual kind of rock star. While he was on the rock star's Holiday Inn trail around the States, he was able to attract as many women as he wanted, although he denies being on the rampage. 'I had very stable relationships with girls. And then once a while, yes, I would sleep with groupies because it was comfortable and offered passion and sex. I could have had anyone if I wanted to. The girls just appeared automatically, it was easy. There were even stories about girls having orgasms when they were watching me in shows.'

'The government saw that they couldn't really control me,' Uri Geller continues, 'Because I was really on an ego trip and into making money and showbusiness. I didn't want to sit in a bloody laboratory without getting paid and doing this constant work, and I also noticed that wherever I went to do scientific work, they always wanted me to do the same thing over and over again. They didn't know how to handle Andrija, and they didn't know how to handle me.'