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Authors: Jonathan Margolis
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the same thing again and again, without getting paid, and then getting constantly abused in the background by the sceptics with their silly, far-fetched explanations of what I did. Some of these people were really low – ignorant and lying, like medieval witch finders.’
Uri with Edgar Mitchell ( far right ) and Wernher von Braun at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, after bending von Braun’s wedding ring in the palm of the scientist’s hand. Picture taken with German Minox spy camera by Shipi.
All in all, he felt – and indeed knew – that his abilities were accepted beyond serious question by the US government, right to the top. Yet although Uri’s period as an experimental subject was drawing to an end, his life as an American spy was just about to begin.
Chapter Three
A SUBJECT OF INTEREST
T he path which led Uri Geller from playground prodigy in the back streets of Tel Aviv – a story we will recount later – to young man groomed as the public face of a US government programme designed, essentially, to create a team of psychic spies working against the ‘evil empire’ of the Soviet bloc, starts in earnest in Cyprus in the late 1950s. Uri and his mother had moved to the island to live with his new stepfather, Ladislas Gero, who ran a modest motel in Nicosia. Gero died a year after the move, leaving Uri’s mother alone again – but in Cyprus, with Uri newly settled in as a boarder at the prestigious Terra Santa Catholic School in the hills outside the city.
Uri, a notably imaginative little boy, had, with the unusual powers he seemed to have acquired, long dreamed of putting his abilities to use as a spy or special agent of some kind. The primacy of intelligence in the espionage sense is close to a founding virtue of the state of Israel and has been key to the country’s survival against the odds in modern times. One of the most common symbols seen in Israel, used on everything from food labels to official literature, shows two men carrying a huge bunch of grapes. It is known to every Israeli schoolchild that these men were two of a group of 12 spies, sent by Moses to check out whether the land of milk and honey promised by God really was as fertile as He had told Moses it would be. The grapes were the evidence they brought back to show it very much was the Promised Land that had been yearned for since Abraham’s day.
In 1959, Uri was a 13-year-old, tearing around Nicosia on his bicycle like many other youngsters. As we will see, he was known to some boys and teachers at Terra Santa to have some very odd abilities, but it seems like any child striving to appear normal and unexceptional, he kept his paranormal powers mostly under wraps. He told no one about what he called a green television screen he could envisage.
His stepfather’s unprepossessing little motel happened to be close to the Israeli consulate, and attracted a few business visitors from Israel. One of them was Yoav Shacham, a tall, well-built man in the grain-buying business. Uri was a sociable lad who missed his father, a career soldier back in Israel, and became friendly with the tough-looking Shacham. He reminded Uri of his father: certainly not his stepfather, who had been a gentle, mild, older man. Uri, who went by the more Greek name of George, now mostly spoke English but enjoyed speaking Hebrew with this interesting man, who knew judo and offered to teach him some moves. But while they were practising, Uri says he got the feeling that Shacham was somehow more than a grain buyer. He saw that Shacham got mail from Arab countries, and moreover, Uri believed he could see on his mental TV screen that his friend was both adept with firearms and working with secret documents in some way. It occurred to the young teenager that Shacham was a spy, something that appealed intensely to his increasingly cinema-fired imagination.
One afternoon, Uri says, that when he had to go into the motel’s loft, he found himself above Shacham’s
Uri with Edgar Mitchell ( far right ) and Wernher von Braun at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, after bending von Braun’s wedding ring in the palm of the scientist’s hand. Picture taken with German Minox spy camera by Shipi.
All in all, he felt – and indeed knew – that his abilities were accepted beyond serious question by the US government, right to the top. Yet although Uri’s period as an experimental subject was drawing to an end, his life as an American spy was just about to begin.
Chapter Three
A SUBJECT OF INTEREST
T he path which led Uri Geller from playground prodigy in the back streets of Tel Aviv – a story we will recount later – to young man groomed as the public face of a US government programme designed, essentially, to create a team of psychic spies working against the ‘evil empire’ of the Soviet bloc, starts in earnest in Cyprus in the late 1950s. Uri and his mother had moved to the island to live with his new stepfather, Ladislas Gero, who ran a modest motel in Nicosia. Gero died a year after the move, leaving Uri’s mother alone again – but in Cyprus, with Uri newly settled in as a boarder at the prestigious Terra Santa Catholic School in the hills outside the city.
Uri, a notably imaginative little boy, had, with the unusual powers he seemed to have acquired, long dreamed of putting his abilities to use as a spy or special agent of some kind. The primacy of intelligence in the espionage sense is close to a founding virtue of the state of Israel and has been key to the country’s survival against the odds in modern times. One of the most common symbols seen in Israel, used on everything from food labels to official literature, shows two men carrying a huge bunch of grapes. It is known to every Israeli schoolchild that these men were two of a group of 12 spies, sent by Moses to check out whether the land of milk and honey promised by God really was as fertile as He had told Moses it would be. The grapes were the evidence they brought back to show it very much was the Promised Land that had been yearned for since Abraham’s day.
In 1959, Uri was a 13-year-old, tearing around Nicosia on his bicycle like many other youngsters. As we will see, he was known to some boys and teachers at Terra Santa to have some very odd abilities, but it seems like any child striving to appear normal and unexceptional, he kept his paranormal powers mostly under wraps. He told no one about what he called a green television screen he could envisage.
His stepfather’s unprepossessing little motel happened to be close to the Israeli consulate, and attracted a few business visitors from Israel. One of them was Yoav Shacham, a tall, well-built man in the grain-buying business. Uri was a sociable lad who missed his father, a career soldier back in Israel, and became friendly with the tough-looking Shacham. He reminded Uri of his father: certainly not his stepfather, who had been a gentle, mild, older man. Uri, who went by the more Greek name of George, now mostly spoke English but enjoyed speaking Hebrew with this interesting man, who knew judo and offered to teach him some moves. But while they were practising, Uri says he got the feeling that Shacham was somehow more than a grain buyer. He saw that Shacham got mail from Arab countries, and moreover, Uri believed he could see on his mental TV screen that his friend was both adept with firearms and working with secret documents in some way. It occurred to the young teenager that Shacham was a spy, something that appealed intensely to his increasingly cinema-fired imagination.
One afternoon, Uri says, that when he had to go into the motel’s loft, he found himself above Shacham’s
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