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Chapter 15 / Independence Day

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'Melanie wanted my child because she believed that a child from me would be a space child. And I believed it, too.' (Uri Geller on his lover in the mid 1970s, Melanie Toyofuku.)

Geller's 12 years in America fell into two uneven parts - his time with Andrija Puharich in Ossining, which lasted until the end of 1973, and his much longer period based in his own Upper East-side Manhattan apartment, with his mother invited over from Israel and installed in a house Uri bought for her up in Connecticut.

The break with Puharich had to come, releasing Uri as it did into his first real semblance of an independent adult life. But it was as emotional a separation as any between parent and child, and practically ended in legal fisticuffs between the two men. 'I had a row with Andrija,' says Uri. 'He signed me on a contract, he owned me for seven years and all my income. I don't think it was that Andrija locked me into this contract for monetary reasons. He wanted to own me because of what I represented to this alien intelligence I was their tool, and he wanted to own the tool. Andrija was convinced that through me, he was dealing directly with God. I never accepted that, because I am a believer in God, so when Andrija concluded from the messages that this was God speaking directly to him, that, I guess was the first step of me realising that it went too far.'

'Nevertheless,' Uri continues, 'Everyone around me was telling me how foolish I was. We were very gullible and naive. I had no lawyers, but I threatened the publishers of the book Andrija had just finished on me, Uri, and the whole fight was in London in a hotel room. I wanted him to tear up the contract otherwise I would have refused to endorse Uri. It was a damaging business until we made up again, but after I left him, he started gathering other people around him and he was OK. We saw him a couple of times in America, and when he came to London about eight years later for me to film him - that was just something I wanted to do for posterity - we embraced and hugged each other.'

According to Hal Puthoff, Uri's concern about breaking up with Puharich, a process which was coming to a head during the SRI tests in California, was worrying Uri at a deeper level than the merely financial. Puthoff's memory of his private discussions with Uri at the time on the Puharich question suggest as powerfully as almost any other account just how sincerely Uri believed in his own abilities, even if opponents believed he was enjoying a huge joke at the expense of science. 'Puharich told Uri that if they broke up as a team, Uri would lose his powers,' Puthoff explains. 'Uri spent a lot of quiet time with us asking if we believed that, because he didn't want to lose his powers. He felt obligated to demonstrate his abilities, and he was concerned that if at any time he did the wrong thing ethically, he might lose them. What did we think he should do, did we think Puharich was right, was it possible that somehow Puharich's involvement with him helped strengthen his powers, and so on. It wasn't a con thing. He was genuinely concerned and he kept coming back to it.'

A letter Uri wrote to Andrija while on a flight just before Christmas 1973, and came to light after it was sent from Holland to Uri in 1998 by Puharich's first wife, similarly reveals a great deal about what was in Uri's mind at this troubled time. Some of the meaning is a little obscure, but it would be difficult for the harshest critic reading it to deny its sincerity. On United Airlines stationary, the letter is addressed in capitals, 'TO ANDREA'. (In two years of knowing Puharich, Uri had not picked up the correct Serbian spelling of his name.) 'Words mean nothing if feelings don't cry,' he wrote. 'A lot we struggled for GoD in heaven but on the road we stopped. Never, never have I in my mind body or soul thought but about you. For me inside, I am still proud to know you Andrea. Whatever your decision is, to stop or keep going, I will understand your human feelings. I truly care about the mission. I also care about my people, so I asked you to trust my feelings towards you and Spectra. and if you still don't want to hear me or feel my wanting you, then maybe this is how it has to come to an end, although I don't feel so. Still loyal to you. Uri.'

Uri's obvious regret that the relationship was breaking up is understandable. As part of the separation, Puharich had clearly been threatening to abandon Uri as much as Uri had threatened to abandon him. They both feared they needed one another, and both knew it had not been at all a bad life for Uri, Shipi and Yasha Katz in Ossining. 'I didn't have to go down to the local store to buy food,' Uri says, 'Andrija did it. It a more down-to-earth, rustic kind of plush living than I was used to for that few months in Germany when I was truly living on someone, but Andrija organised everything, and it was very comfortable. So when I left Andrija, it was quite a shock for me, knowing that I had to rent my own apartment, and that to have breakfast, I had to buy it. After splitting with Andrija, suddenly I had no money at all, I was broke. I couldn't sell the apartment that my mother was living in. And that's when Byron Janis loaned me $40,000, which was a huge amount at that time - and he wasn't a rich man at all. But with the money, I could afford the apartment, the furniture, and Yasha's salary, and I never had to worry again, because almost immediately, I had TV shows all the time, I was lecturing in universities for as much as £5,000 a time, and was getting book advances. I did a commercial for Japan. I remember getting $40,000 from on show in Tokyo. So I could quickly pay Byron back with interest, and before long, I actually had two apartments on the 12th and 17th floor of the same block.'

'I lived in one alone, and Shipi and the girls lived in the other downstairs. I had two girls working for me, Melanie and another young American girl called Trina who was, I can't say a groupie, but she was a fan and she used to write me letters, and one day I called her and asked her whether she would like to work for me, just answering letters and things of that nature and then she just joined us. Melanie was also deeply in love with me, and she wanted my child because she believed that a child from me would be a space child. She really went on that. I believed it too.'

Shipi's still slightly ill-defined role in the Geller entourage had become clearer by now. 'Shipi was my personal manager, but also my confidante' Uri says. 'There were certain things that I couldn't tell Yasha, but I could tell Shipi. I told Shipi everything. We used to discuss how the group at Andrija's really wanted to turn me into a guru, a messiah. And Shipi always knew me better than even Hannah when it came to my powers, and to the business side. My problem with Shipi was that he obviously knew I was involved with his sister, but she was in Israel most of the time, and we weren't properly going out yet. She used to come and see me. I was too busy to go and see her in Israel, so I would just send her tickets all the time, and then there were times when she would stay for months with me, and then go back. So as regards women I was seeing, I had to tell Shipi, look, you'd better be on my side because this is me, this is what I am. There are certain times when I felt he wanted to protect Hannah, but of course, by the end of the 1970s, it happened automatically anyway, Hannah finally came over and we were together for good. What was great with Hannah was that she understood that I was out to make it myself and I had no time for other people really, and that it was all a totally egocentric fame and fortune type of thing at that time. It was important because I learned so much from it, and I had to go through that phase in order to develop further. But I was always aware that it was quite difficult at times for Shipi.'

Uri's new life in New York, on the corner of East 57th Street and First Avenue, was every inch the celebrity whirl. At a party given by Elton John, he met John Lennon, and the two immediately clicked. They arranged to meet again in the coffee shop of the Sherry Netherland Hotel on Fifth Avenue, and made this a regular date. They talked about paranormal, spiritual matters, Sai Baba, a popular Indian guru Lennon was interested in (and who performs a number of Geller-like effects for pilgrims who come to see him from around the world) and UFOs. A few weeks before Lennon was killed, and the last time Uri and he met, he told Uri an amazing story.
He explained how he had been lying in bed in the Dakota Building where he lived, when he saw an exceptionally bright light seeping under the bedroom door. He told Uri he thought someone had aimed up at his apartment an outdoor floodlight of the kind used at film premieres. He got out of bed, he told Uri, opened the door and saw the source of the light was actually in the next room. Lennon then felt something touching the back of his knees and his elbows and urging him into the light. 'I asked him obviously whether he was drunk or on drugs,' Uri relates, 'but he insisted he was perfectly awake and aware and had not taken any drugs. In the middle of the light, he said, he saw a hand stretched out. He described it as, "a typical alien hand," like the ones you see on science fiction books, and it held something. He knew intuitively that the hand wanted to put something into his, and he held his hand out. Then everything turned off, the light went off, the room was clear. And he found himself standing there with this egg-shaped, brass-type lump of metal in his hand. And then John put his hand in his pocket and said, "Uri, I want you to have this.". It was as if he felt he was going to be killed and wanted someone to have this thing who would know where it came from and would believe him and look after it.'
Uri keeps the smooth metal object today in the hands of a 16th Century Tibetan brass statue in his house. The little piece of metal is certainly quite unusual, rather heavier than its size suggests, but for those anxious to know what it is, Uri is unhelpful. 'I purposely don't want to have it analysed because I don't want to be disappointed. I don't want someone to come up with a story that it's made in Korea. I'd rather leave it mystical,' he says.
Another seventies icon who became friendly with Uri was Muhammed Ali. He was brought to see Ali at his training camp in New Jersey by a journalist. 'Ali was fascinated by what I did. I learned that he loved magic and does all kinds of sleight of hand tricks. He realised that what he was seeing was real. Then we became friendlier when he was interested in me teaching him how to concentrate and look in the eyes of opponents in the ring to help overcome them.'
Another still of Uri's exotic menagerie of friends at the time was the surrealist painter, Salvador Dali - an amusing choice of companion, some will feel, as Dali too has become regarded by many as a charlatan in the art world. 'I was introduced to Dali by this incredibly beautiful woman called Amanda, who it was rumoured used to be a man, and who was hanging out with Dali at the time. She wrote a book in which she mentioned me. I used to meet Dali at the hotel where he used to stay in New York. I showed him my doodles and paintings, and I think he was quite impressed. He wanted to know why I drew the doodles the way I did. He actually inspired me to try some surrealist painting myself, which I still sometimes do Then I stayed with him in Barcelona for a couple of days. It was while I was there that I bent a fork in his hand and he was so shocked that he took himself off to a room in his house and locked himself in there for hours. He finally emerged holding this beautiful rock crystal sphere - I don't know whether he made it or found it somewhere. Dali gave me several sculptures, which I have all over the house now.' The sphere the painter gave him now takes pride of place as the hood mascot of Geller's old Cadillac, his car back in his Manhattan days. The car, which he now keeps in his garage outside Reading, is covered in welded-on bent cutlery (not paranormally bent, but made specially for the car). Uri once planned to drive the car to Baghdad on somewhat surrealist peace mission to Saddam Hussein, but was discouraged from doing so by wiser heads who suggested that the dictator might know a little about his connections with the Mossad and fail to take the gesture in the spirit in which it was intended.

At the very beginning of all this social mountaineering, which being in Manhattan naturally dwarfed his previous assault on the Eurotrash of Munich, came the single most dramatic and, if we are to believe him, traumatic psychic event of Uri's life. Whether it really happened - and there are certainly good witnesses to something extremely peculiar having occurred - or whether Uri felt the need to contrive the whole thing, or even if he invented it groundlessly, the following is revealing, some will feel, of the tension between himself and Puharich.

On a freezing November early Friday evening in 1973, on a trip back from SRI, Uri went round to Byron and Maria Janis's apartment. There, he had made a couple of phone calls, one to Puharich in Ossining, which is 36 miles north of New York City. Then Byron Janis recalls that he said he had to go down to Bloomingdales to buy something, and had some things to do. 'He was very excited,' Byron says. 'I assumed it was to do with a woman. He liked women very much.' At 5.30, Maria Janis says, referring to notes she made later that night, Uri left. Bloomingdales was eight minutes' walk away, Uri's apartment, two minutes in the opposite direction. The round trip to the store, into the camera department (where he bought a pair of binoculars, as it happened) and home would have taken 20 minutes. Maria knows this because she has paced the journey out repeatedly in an effort to explain what then happened, because Uri never reached home. Twenty five minutes after he left, the phone went. Maria took it, and Byron happened to pick up the extension. It was Andrija Puharich, calling from Ossining. 'There's someone here who wants to talk to you,' Puharich said gravely.

'Then,' Byron says, 'Uri came on the line. He said, "Maria, I'm here." He was obviously in shock. She said, "Uri, what are you doing there." I thought it was a joke. But it was obvious that somehow, Uri had got to Ossining, and it was clear that he was a complete wreck. He went through the story on the phone. he said as he got to the canopy in front of his building, "I felt this sudden pull backwards and up." Those were his exact words. "And the next thing I knew, I was falling through the screen door in Ossining." It seemed unlikely to the Janises that this could have been a stunt, even if they thought Uri capable of pulling one, or had the remotest need to impress them, of all people, who were devoted converts. Yet they considered everything; a train or car getaway to Ossining was impossible in 25 minutes, especially on a busy winter Friday rush hour. Even a split second-timed helicopter operation would have taken longer, because of the time it would have taken to get to a helipad in central Manhattan..

Puharich, in an unpublished account found by his children after his death, confirmed the Janises' chronology. With his meticulous detail-noting style, he recounted having been watching the six o'clock TV news while lying on his bed - the main story was of Henry Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy between Israel and Egypt - and felt a shudder with a simultaneous crash from, as it turned out, a conservatory he used in the summer as a dining room. He also heard the faint voice of Uri calling his name. when he found Uri, he appeared to have crashed through the roof of the conservatory, rather than the screen door. He had landed on a round wooden coffee table, whose glass top had shattered. He was unhurt, but clearly confused and dazed. And he was carrying a Bloomingdales' bag.

Uri's own account has necessarily to come last on the 'he would say that, wouldn't he' principle, yet is compelling in itself. The sidewalk wasn't crowded at the time,' he says. 'The first recollection I have is of me looking at the pavement and seeing myself a few inches above it. The next thing I can remember is like someone had cut out a split second piece of my life, like a piece of film taken out with scissors. I remember the lifting off, then I recollect there being a screen in front of me, and putting my arms up to protect my face, as my instinct told me that I was about to crush something. Then my palms were crashing through the screen, but ever so gently, then there was falling on the round table, and a glass on the table slipping from under my hands, and breaking on the floor, and me falling on the table, and onto the floor. I didn't know where I was. I didn't recognise it as Andrija's porch at first, until I got my bearings. I had had many breakfasts there on that porch in summer.'

Geller, like the Janises and Puharich, spent many months trying to puzzle out what happened that evening. 'It's beyond my understanding and comprehension to believe that my body was disintegrated molecule by molecule and reconstructed itself 36 miles out of New York. My explanation is that people, animals and objects can fall into a time-warp, like a whirlpool of time, space and matter. You are sucked into some kind of void, a vacuum, an emptiness that could move you in space and time and replant you elsewhere. I could have gone back into the past or the future, I have no doubt. Hundreds of people go missing each year without a trace, and no-one knows where they disappear to. Probably what is happening is that there are velocities and speeds in the universe and in our bodies and in our minds, and most likely, everything is happening right now. The past is now, the present is now and the future is now, and somehow we are just stuck in it. It is like a mixture of speeds we don't understand, so what happened to me is that because my mind, my subconscious, or even deeper than that, was so concerned about my relationship with Andrija and how I wanted to tear away from him at that time, that it just pushed me into this thing and I teleported there. Perhaps it was him wanting me to be back there. There were times, you know, when I began to doubt whether Andrija was human.'

If Uri was a hoaxer and practical joker, much of what had been happening at SRI, at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and at the same time in New York suggested he was also a workaholic practical joker. Yasha Katz, another man who needed no convincing of Uri's powers by now, was also experiencing a string of strange incidents at this turbulent time. Katz is an interesting case, because he, like Arthur Ellison in England but on a far greater scale, became disaffected with Geller - over money in Katz's case - went back to Israel, and proceeded to give James Randi, who later come over to make an Italian TV film about Geller, a damning interview, in which he claimed he had colluded in his former employer's cheating.

He could have stayed with the story, but instead, Katz now says he was paid by the TV team to lie, and went along with Randi to make mischief - although after being convinced by Randi that Geller had duped him. 'I was a little bit disappointed with Uri because he asked me to leave him, and after so many years of devotion I felt that I deserved a little bit more,' he explains at his Johannesburg office, where, aged 65, he now sells life assurance. 'Randi came and he talked me into believing that all of it was a hoax, but I regretted it at the same time as doing it. I lowered myself to the minimum and made myself very, very small. Because when I've thought about it, and I still do think about it, it is very easy to show all the things that Uri does by sleight of hand at a show, but we all lived together, and we saw things that happen without him having control. When you put one and one together, it's obvious that something was happening.'
'One Sunday morning in our apartment in New York, a whole series of things happened in quick succession,' Katz says. 'I went to get a newspaper, and when I came back, I saw my plant holder, which was a very, very heavy glass thing, which one person could not lift. in front of the elevator door. I thought maybe Uri played a joke on me, and I went into the apartment and he wasn't in. He was in the other apartment, so I phoned him, and he came down said he didn't do anything. We both had to lift it and put it back in my bedroom, and as we came out from the bedroom, the lamp that was in the lounge started rattling and moving, I had a little - which I still have - marble frog in my bedroom, and all of a sudden, it fell through the wall from my bedroom into the main room. It actually went through the wall. I saw it do so. Then a chair that was in the lounge turned around and fell in front of us, and Uri started not so much panicking, but he was a little concerned. He said, "Yasha, I have to write this down, can you get me a Coke. And I went into the fridge, and as we opened it, a pencil came out of the can.'
'Another time, we went to a gala opening on Broadway called Galactica - it flopped. We were sitting there, and Shipi, myself and another Israeli friend of ours were next to Uri. I noticed that there was no arm between our two chairs, and Uri didn't feel very comfortable, so I put my jacket down, and he put his arm on it. We went out and it was pouring with rain and our car was parked in a garage. While I got it, they went into a telephone booth to keep out of the rain. On the way to collect the car, I saw something floating in the air - floating, not falling. It slowly dropped down. I picked it up and I saw it was the arm of the theatre chair. I still have it. The funny thing was that, although it landed in a puddle, it was completely dry.'
In another complicated case Katz details, a large round film reel box - it had contained Zev Pressman's SRI movie on Uri - apparently teleported from Zurich, where Katz had left it, to New York, where Uri was getting furious about not having it to hand. 'We heard a boom,' Katz says, 'and looked behind us and saw the box appearing from the ceiling and falling into our lounge. We phoned the guy I left it with in Switzerland straight away and asked him where this box was, and he said it's in the cupboard. So we asked him to go and have a look, and he did, and came back and said it's not there.'
'When Randi came to Israel to convince me to repudiate Uri, he stayed for hours and he was quite persuasive,' Katz concludes. 'But I think it was only greed on my part. And then, I only got something like 500 dollars for this interview, and I was very, very sorry. Later we were reconciled, and we became friends again and I am strongly behind him. Whatever he thought of me, it took a big man to forgive something like that, and he did. Then, in 1994, I had cancer of the colon and had to go for an operation. Uri obviously didn't know about it, but one day my secretary phoned me just as I was going to the hospital, and said Uri Geller phoned you at half past eight. . He hadn't phoned me for at least a year. My wife spoke to him and he said he just felt that something was wrong. I think he phoned about 10 times to wish me well

In secret, back in the late 1970s, Uri had been suffering his own health problems, but in his case, nobody other than he knew a thing about them. It all started, he says, with a call from the impresario Robert Stigwood. 'Robert is a multi-millionaire. He was the manager of the Bee Gees, he did Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar and Saturday Night Fever. He first read about me in Time, when they did their negative story on me. He had a burn on his finger, and he saw my picture, placed his finger on my face, and it went. He called me out of the blue over to his apartment overlooking Central Park. He said, "Uri, I want your story," and offered a quarter of a million pounds to sign me on a deal. So he bought the rights to make a major motion picture based on my life.
But then one day he said to me, "You know, Uri, I want you to lose weight if you are going to be in the film." Now I was chubby, because I loved eating, and I thought about this and said I am not going to give up food. What I will do is when I eat, I'll just vomit it.'

'It was as if I had invented bulimia. I had no idea it already existed. And I didn't know that it would mean me losing minerals. So it was a great way for me to continue indulging in the excess of wealth. I was getting rid of guilt, stress, anxiety - and getting myself looking good. I vomited everywhere. When a plane landed, I used to stay on in the first class compartment until everyone got off, and then I would take the sick bag out. I collected sick bags from all the airlines. The stewardesses didn't see what I was doing, but at one point, I was asked by a male steward and I said that I collect airline symbols. To tell someone that I collect vomit bags would have been crazy. These bags were solely for use in cars, so when I ate lot of food and we had to drive back home or wherever, I used to sit alone in the back of the limousine, pull out the bag and force myself to vomit in the back of the car. I always managed to do it somehow without anyone noticing. I was really killing myself.'

'I hid it from everyone, It was private.' Uri recounts. 'It is hard for me to tell you in words how I camouflaged it, how I hid it, the manoeuvres that I used to do, the showers that I turned on, the taps that I let water run in the bath from, the toilets I'd flush, bidets I'd sprinkle, tissues stuff under the doors. Of course, it was taboo. Compulsion is an understatement, it was an addiction, a total addiction. Hannah noticed I was getting thin, but she thought it was because I was running around the reservoir in Central Park five times. That was my excuse. I'd say I exercise a lot, and I did. I ran three hours a day. I was already obsessed by money and on an ego trip where I wanted everything. Now I could walk into a restaurant and order ten desserts and devour everything and still look nice and trim thanks to my excusing myself to go to the toilet, sticking my finger down my thought and vomiting.'

Uri saw a doctor because his bulimia was accompanied by panic attacks, during which he thought his heart was about to explode. The self-created secrecy about the problem also meant he felt 'the loneliest person in the world'. Uri did not explain the bulimia, so the doctor said there was nothing wrong with him apart from being too thin, and prescribed Valium for the panic attacks. For the year that the bulimia was at its peak, the tablets became his best friend.

It was in Israel more than in the States that people noticed his thinness. 'They used to say, "How thin you are, you're a skeleton, what happened to you?" I used to say, "Oh I'm exercising, I couldn't be fitter." I didn't see the Auschwitz figure staring back at me from the mirror. I saw someone really good looking, thin. Scales were another obsession of mine. In the morning, I would get up and be on the scale; after breakfast, I would get on the scale, before I went to sleep, I would check. I used to measure the glasses of water I drank, just to check how many pounds they would add to my weight. And I wrote all these weights down - with shoes, without shoes, with clothes, without clothes. I was so satisfied when my weight was low.'

'When I realised that I would kill myself at the end of this then I had to stop it. I was being driven back to my apartment from somewhere in the Cadillac, the one I have the spoons on now. I was in the back, and I opened the door, but was so weak I couldn't get myself out of the car. I had to grab the roof and pull myself out. I was losing protein, I was losing fats, I was losing energy. And I remember that I was walking very slowly towards the apartment and I said, "Wait a minute," and it all flashed in a few seconds in my mind. I said to myself, "OK, Uri, if you don't stop this you'll be dead. Now is the time to stop it." And in the middle of the street, in the middle of the day, right under my canopy, where that weird teleportation had happened, I shouted "ONE, TWO, THREE, STOP!". People looked at me. But who cares? I got into the house, said hello to the doorman, went into the elevator, pressed 12D, got out in the apartment and never vomited again I just stopped.'

'After that, I gradually went back to my ordinary weight and even today I imagine I weigh what I was when I was 19 or 20. But I don't even know what that is - I don't get on scales any more. The funny thing was that Robert Stigwood kept paying me lots of money and made me a very wealthy man, but he got busy with his other big movies and never made that film. The rights reverted back to me and I was quite happy. I still speak to him. There's nothing not to be friendly with him about; on the contrary I have to thank him for putting me on a firm financial footing. My bulimia wasn't his fault at all - it was my obsessive personality, I guess. It was vanity, and the obsession that no-one tells me what to do; it was not wanting to lose the power of being able to create phenomena around me. And the physical weakness didn't seem to affect my powers.

It was in the midst of his year of living skeletallly that Geller set off on another odd episode in his life - a period of over a year between 1976 and early 1978 living in Mexico City as a sort of psychic court pet of Carmen Romano de Lopez Portillo, known as Muncy, and the glamorous wife of the country's president, Jose Lopez Portillo. Geller had been brought down to Mexico originally by Lopez Portillo's predecessor, Luis Echeverria and immediately felt an affinity with the place. Echeverria had a hunch that Uri Geller could help Mexico locate oil reserves it knew it had, and was anxious to exploit. It was Echeverria's immediate successor, Lopez Portillo, who put Echeverria's hunch to the test after he became president in January 1977.

Geller's dowsing abilities, which were to be his financial mainstay from his mid-thirties onwards, had been discovered in England by the chairman of the British mining company, Rio Tinto Zinc, Sir Val Duncan, who met him at a party in London and suggested that bending spoons might not always be the best way for him to make use of his psychic abilities. Duncan, took him down to his villa in Majorca on the RTZ company jet, and taught him his surprising knowledge - surprising for a man who had been an ADC to Montgomery during the war, and was now a director of BP and the Bank of England - of dowsing, the ancient art of psychically seeking out hidden precious substances. Moshe Dayan had got Geller to do the same kind of thing for him, seeking out buried antiquities - illegally under Israeli law, but Dayan was Defence Minister at the time, so Geller got away with it.

He did well when Sir Val, who seemed to regard Geller as the son he never had, tested him in Majorca, and his new patron tried unsuccessfully to get the RTZ board to employ Geller as an official dowser. Anglo-Vaal, a South African mining company, as reported by Newsweek, had some success with Geller locating coal deposits in Zimbabwe, but generally, large companies, as Geller later discovered when his dowsing sideline overtook his entertainment business, tend not to want their board and stockholders to know they are using psychic help, He tends, therefore, to be employed today by smaller oil and mineral companies, who hire him under conditions of great secrecy, palming him the odd million dollars in petty cash. They certainly seem to be happy with what they get; as Uri told me while he was making coffee once at his Thames-side mansion, with its acres of grounds and electronic gates. I was pressing for details of who uses his dowsing services. 'I'd love to be able to tell you,' he said, 'Even though only one of the oil companies is a household name, and then only a very small one. But I don't want to blow my living away, because total non-disclosure is part of my contract in every case. But let me put it this way, this house alone costs £140,000 a year to run, which is quite a lot from taxed income. We travel by helicopter to most places, we live quite well, we give a lot to various charities, but I've hardly done any paid entertaining for years. So you have to ask yourself where my wealth comes from. If I were a drug baron, that might be the answer, but you probably gather that drugs and crime aren't quite my thing. So you may draw the conclusion that someone, somewhere is paying me for legitimate work, on which I happily pay full British taxes. The price is usually $1m, payable in advance, whether the search is successful or not. So I make a living.'

In Mexico in 1976, with a foreign debt nightmare growing daily, they were less fastidious than in the developed world about such things as employing a psychic to find oil, and when President Lopez Portillo invited Geller to Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, he brought along the director-general of Pemex, the state oil company, a man, later jailed for corruption, called Serrano. Geller was put through an informal test, in which he was to search Los Pinos for a hidden liqueur glass of olive oil. He located it in a flower pot, which Serrano had rather cleverly buried the glass in, so that the oil was by now part of a lump of greasy dirt. The gathered Mexican elite was delighted, and soon Geller was in a Pemex helicopter with two geologists, doing a similar test. He did not receive any feedback, other than to be told by Serrano that his dowsing had been 'very precise'. Geller believes the Mexicans located oil at his suggested site.

He did not get paid in money for this work, but instead received the munificent patronage of Muncy, who saw to it that Uri Geller became Mexico's number one citizen, whisked around Mexico City with armed outriders, given all the best seats in the best restaurants, and photographed by the press daily with the first lady. Uri insists, and he is not one to deny such things, that he was not sleeping with the wife of the Mexican president, and the rather grey, ageing Lopez Portillo does seem to have been very trusting of a handsome 30 year-old who had once seriously considered being a gigolo as a career. The president presented him with a priceless gold and silver-plated Colt semi-automatic engraved with a Mexican emblem. He was given a card entitling him to free first class travel anywhere in the world on Aeromexico, and another identifying him as an Agent of the National Treasury, and thus able to carry the gun, should he so wish, on his free flights - a hint, perhaps, that even as a Mexican presidential favourite, you couldn't be too careful. He was also given full Mexican citizenship for life, with naturalisation certificate number 00001, signed by the president. (Shipi was made naturalised Mexican number 00002). Uri and Shipi were also presented with lifetime Mexican passports, on which they still travel, Uri under his official name in Mexico, Uri Geller-Freud.

Even from down Mexico way, Uri was able to continue making social inroads in the States, specifically into politics. At a dinner at the American Embassy for Henry Kissinger and the wife of the US President-elect, Rosalynn Carter, Geller wowed Mrs. Carter by bending a silver spoon in her hand. He then found himself, or more correctly, manoeuvred himself, next to Kissinger, and promised to read his mind. He recalls Kissinger recoiling, looking worried and 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 drawings party piece, which unfortunately, according to Uri, went so well that Kissinger asked sharply, 'What else did you get from my mind?' Uri replied, 'I'd better not talk about that here,' as a joke, and Kissinger became quite agitated, causing an awkward silence for a few seconds, until Uri explained he'd been kidding. Kissinger nevertheless ended the encounter looking thoughtful, Uri says.

Kissinger may have appeared to be ambushed by Geller, but it appears now that the entire scenario had, in fact, been orchestrated by an agent of the CIA at its Mexico City Station. Whatever the agency officially thought of Uri Geller by 1977, this agent, known as Mike, obviously thought he was close enough to the Los Pinos regime - yet at the same time provenly loyal to the USA - to be of use again. Mexico represented a major security problem to the US. Far more than Cuba, it was a huge KGB spying station. Not only was Geller obviously an intimate of the Lopez Portillo circle, which meant he might be able to help influence the Mexicans to reduce to Soviet presence in their country; he was also a little concerned about his and Shipi's visa arrangements back in the States. Mike worked out that Uri would very likely be happy to help out Uncle Sam if Uncle Sam helped out Uri. And another thing; he may not have been representing CIA policy exactly, but Mike was seriously interested in the possibilities of psychic spying, and of Uri doing a little work from the outside looking in at the KGB's building in Mexico City. All in all, he seems to have concluded, Uri Geller was a useful asset to the CIA. Not only that, but Mike was fascinated by the fact that the Jimmy Carter, who was due to move into the White House in January, appeared to be a fan of the paranormal. Could Geller be used to eat away at those surrounding Carter and help bring about funding for an official paranormal programme at the CIA? Mike thought and hoped so, and it was he, Geller says, who asked him to get alongside Kissinger and Mrs Carter at that Mexico City reception - to which Uri's friendship with Muncy had, of course, been an easy open sesame.

Thus began Uri's brief career as a spy, technically, in fact, a double agent. Under Mike's direction, he snooped into the business of KGB case officers, their local agents and arrangements. It was Mike who introduced the question of whether Uri could stop a man's heart, with special reference to Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB.

'I was used,' Geller says, 'to erase floppy discs on Aeromexico flights when KGB agents were flying with diplomatic pouches to the west. I did that a few times, because the agents went back home via Aeromexico
to Paris, and then from Paris, took Aeroflot to Russia. I would sit there and concentrate on these pouches. I must have been successful, I guess, because they CIA guys kept asking me for more and more. I told them about drop outs and drop ins in the Russian Embassy, and they 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. I just loved it because there were by now two agents in charge of me, and it was so James Bond-y.'

Mike had now decided, Uri says, to try to get Uri right into the Oval Office, to establish a direct line of communication over his pet psychic spies project with President Carter. 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 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 famously over-the-top imaginative capacity, which had been both his making and breaking since he was Achad Ha'am school in Tel Aviv aged six - but for one thing. When, on January 20th 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.

Seven years later, a report in the New York Times, claimed that Carter in 1977 ordered a high level review of Soviet psychic research, and called Uri Geller in for a meeting in the White House to discuss what the Americans could do in response. Uri, again never normally reticent, still refuses 'to confirm or deny' the Times report. I am confident, however, that a half hour meeting with the President happened exactly as described by the newspaper.

Uri and Shipi's sojourn with the presidential lifestyle down in Mexico, however, came to an abrupt halt. Uri's social progress around Mexico City with Muncy set tongues wagging, not just among the Mexican elite, but as far away as in Fleet Street, London, where in February 1978, the Daily Express gossip column ran a tiny piece headlined, 'Bending the rules for Uri., suggesting 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 Mexican Watergate, and talking of the pair 'behaving intimately' at a shared holiday in Cancun.

The text of the gossip snippet was Telexed to Lopez Portillo by some brave soul in the Mexican Embassy in London in time for him to read over breakfast. The president's son, Pepito was on the phone to Uri within minutes to say his father was in a rage about the Express piece, and advising Uri and Shipi to 'Get out of Mexico - quickly.' They were on a plane to New York - first class Aeromexico, of course - by mid morning.