The Secret Life of Uri Geller

Uri Geller.

We all think we know everything about him.

After all, he's been on our television screens

for more than 40 years performing his little miracles.

Bending spoons, bending forks, bending keys,

and seeing things at a distance

and drawing them with sometimes uncanny accuracy.

Today, 40 years since his first TV appearances,

Uri lives in a palatial home on the banks of the River Thames.

And he's still working on entertaining us.

His garden is like a map of his mind, full of New Age wonders.

Where do I start? That lantern is from Mount Fuji.

John Lennon, who... we were good friends,

he said, "Find spirituality."

And Yoko says, "Go to Japan." And I went to Japan.

Let's go through the torii gate.

The Japanese legend says

if you go through a torii gate, you enter spiritual realms.

Shall we do that?

Imagine we are in spiritual realms now.

And this is what John gave me.

I mean, he claimed that he got it from an alien.

An alien hand stretched out

and dropped this into the palm of his hand in the Dakota building.

And he gave it to me!

And I carry it everywhere I go.

It's heavy.

It's unexplainable.

And I get thousands of emails from people asking me,

"Uri, did you have it tested? Give it to scientists.

"It could be something really from another planet."

And you know what I say?

I don't want to test it.

I don't want to find out that it's made in Taiwan.

Well, that's Uri Geller through and through.

Yet there are tantalising clues

that suggest there's more to him than meets the eye.

Supposing his public career as a famous

and sometimes notorious entertainer has all just been a front.

For years, he's let drop hints about something far more cloak and dagger.

Secret work as a psychic spy

for military and intelligence agencies

in the Americas, Britain

and for Israel's legendary secret intelligence agency, the Mossad.

Perhaps that explains the extraordinary security measures

installed all over his estate.

'If I may, let me tell you how it started in me, in Uri Geller.'

I always had this James Bond in mind, you know.

I was a great storyteller in school.

I could fantasise and imagine things

and I would utter them out and create a story about everything.

And I would tell stories in front of my class and so on.

So when my parents divorced,

my mother fell in love with a Hungarian Jew

that lived in Cyprus, Nicosia.

And he had a bed and breakfast, a little motel or establishment.

We had 12 rooms which he would rent out.

We're talking about 1960, '61.

One day, I befriended a guy called Yohav Shacham

who stayed in our little hotel.

Yohav saw me bend a spoon and a key and I did telepathy with him.

And I told him one day, "Yohav, I can read your mind,

"and I know that you're an Israeli spy, aren't you?"

He said, "Uri, when you grow up

"and you have to join the Israeli army,

"I want you to go to the paratroopers.

"Then go to officer's school, and I'll help you.

"I'll get you into the Mossad

"because your capabilities, your abilities, are incredible.

"And we need them."

You can imagine, you tell this to a 13-year-old, 14-year-old kid,

I'm over the moon.

"Wow, I'm going to be the greatest spy in the world.

"I'll work for the Mossad.

"And I'll read minds and I'll bend gun barrels."

To make a long story short, 18, 19,

I go back to Israel, I join the paratroopers, jump out of planes.

I do my stuff and then I go to officer's school.

I do exactly what Yohav told me.

But, you know, that when I was in the paratroopers

and the Six Day War started,

my unit, we were sent to Ramallah in Jerusalem.

We were under tremendous attack by the Jordanian Patton tanks.

And some Israeli jets threw napalm bombs

and some didn't hit the right target.

And it was a mess.

And suddenly, from behind a rock,

a Jordanian soldier jumps out holding a weapon.

And he was about to shoot me.

And I was holding my Uzi,

and I looked him in the eye, Vikram.

He looked into my eye and it was like time froze.

Then suddenly, my whole life played like a movie, in a flash,

in a split-second in my mind.

And I snapped out of it, luckily, because I realised

that whoever is going to press the trigger first will survive.

And I was faster than him and I shot him.

I killed him.

Soon after that, I was wounded in my two arms.

And I woke up in Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem.

Only then it dawned on me what I've committed.

And the ideological power in you,

the love for Israel, for the Jewish nation worldwide,

was imbedded in me even deeper because of that war.

So at 20 years old, with the Six Day war over, and won,

Uri Geller knew three things.

He was deeply committed to the cause of Israel,

he wanted to become a spy for the Mossad

and he had some pretty extraordinary paranormal powers.

He began making his living using these paranormal powers,

playing Tel Aviv nightclubs,

and made home movies of everything he did.

We've drawn on his personal archive in making this film.

As Uri became more famous all over Israel,

he also began his lifelong pattern

of making friends with influential people.

Well, we were both very, very young,

maybe going back almost 40 years.

I was in a special unit in the army and Uri came to entertain us.

At the time, there was a song in Israel,

a popular song about how the bananas come out in this shape.

And they said there was a secret man who comes at night

and he bends the bananas.

And I remember that we met the secret man who bent the bananas.

Well, he didn't bend bananas, he bent spoons.

And he did these amazing things,

and it made a tremendous impression on me when I was a young soldier.

And that's how we first met,

and then we met again and again and again

and each time, I was amazed more. I'm still amazed.

I haven't the faintest idea how he does these things.

Very early in my career, I was taken

to a place called Midrasha.

It's just out of Tel Aviv in Herzliya

on a hill and it's top secret.

You know, cameras everywhere and barbed wire.

There were all Mossad and Secret Service agents

and generals and spies and... you name it.

And I was taken there to give a big lecture,

and I think I blew their minds.

I moved the hands of a watch.

I did mind-reading.

I instilled pictures in other people's minds.

I did things that they

could grab and twist

and use for their own missions.

So for me, to get to work for the Mossad later on,

which I can't talk about what I did,

but I dealt with all the oldies there,

people like Moshe Dayan, a couple of generals,

the head of Mossad and Aharon Yariv.

He asked me if I can do certain things.

And which I answered to some yes, to some no.

And then to the ones that I said yes,

he arranged me to execute those requests,

and those, I cannot talk about.

It was just an interesting situation

because I believe that that performance

was watched by a scientist called Itzhak Bentov,

who wrote back a letter to an American scientist,

saying that he's just seen this young guy called Uri Geller

who does these most amazing things,

bending spoons and forks and reading minds.

And somehow, that started it.

The Americans at that time were worried about Nina Kulagina

moving things on the table

and matches and bell jars.

And they were worried.

"Hey, the Russians have these amazing psychics

"that can do these things, why don't we have somebody?"

And that's how it all started.

That letter got to the desk

of one of the high officers in the CIA.

Then they said...

They all knew that the Russians

were ahead of the Americans in psychical research,

and probably one of the heads of the CIA said,

"Get this guy. "Bring him to America."

The very senior CIA officer

who handled Uri Geller's case was Dr Kit Green.

One afternoon, I got a telephone call on my desk,

in the headquarters building.

And the phone call initially was on what we call the red line.

It was a classified line.

It was an intelligence agency of a very powerful ally

of the United States of America.

And they were troubled

because a member of their military, an enlisted man,

who was doing things for them that they couldn't understand

that appeared to have an electromagnetic aspect,

That he was capable of altering highly-sophisticated electronics,

which included imaging electronics, at will.

And they didn't know how he was doing it.

At the time, I had a position of leadership in the division

that was responsible for life sciences,

biological and chemical warfare.

So I got the first call, and the question was simply,

"Can you help us?"

My response initially was, "Of course. I'll be glad to try."

And so it was that Uri came to America in 1972.