The Secret Life of Uri Geller (18 page)

The staff officers ordered Uri’s platoon to spread out and set up the guns, ready to fire. He was so petrified that he began to shake. He did not want to take the empty gun case, minus its barrel and firing parts, out of the canvas, but he had to. As he did so, his mind racing to think of some way out of his appalling predicament, he could see daylight through the thing. His companion handed him the ammunition belt, which he fed it into the useless shell of the gun before cocking the non-existent mechanism.

In despair, he looked again through the lid of the gun at the first bullet waiting to be fired with nothing to fire it. He hoped, ridiculously he knew, that something might have changed, or that it was a bad dream he was about to wake from. The first group was ordered to fire its gun; the end of Uri Geller’s military career was seconds away. He would be taken away, court martialed and jailed, then, at the end of what would have been his military service, he would be dishonourably discharged. His father would certainly never speak to him again. He would have no friends beyond the riffraff he would undoubtedly meet in the prison camp – if he were not actually kept in solitary. His mother would doubtless take pity on him, but would never be able to hide her tragic disappointment, let down by her husband first, then her son. If he were lucky, a job as a street cleaner or a lavatory attendant might see him into old age. If he could not even find anyone to trust him that far, he might end up joining the few tramps and bums who existed even in such a young, vital country. The general and the staff officers were hovering just behind him. As his mind was in freefall, the sergeant major continued barking orders: ‘Company B … FIRE! … Company C … FIRE! …’

Then he had an idea of sorts; it was not likely to work, but it was certainly evidence, for all the good it would do Geller, of the quick thinking the young man was capable of when his back was against the wall in the middle of a deception. He decided to take his small side arm, a standard-issue, Israeli-made Uzi, and surreptitiously place it next to his dead Browning. When the order came to fire, he would pull both triggers. The report of the Uzi would be feeble and too sharp to be mistaken for that of the Browning, but in the noise and confusion and cordite of so many heavy machine guns firing almost simultaneously, he might just get away with it. A bit of chaos, an instinct told him, might work wonders at concealing what he was doing, perhaps even from the eagle-eyed top brass behind him. They, after all, weren’t expecting the
wrong
sound to issue from soldier Geller’s Browning. They were expecting the
right
sound. And it was just, faintly possible that the ploy might work.

He heard the command to fire and pulled both triggers. What unfolded in the next few seconds was a sequence that he claims he still relives all these years later. He insists vigorously that it was not a fantasy or a daydream. Yes, he knows he was always famed for his imagination as a child; he admits willingly that he had a wondrous ability as a young teenager to spin compelling stories out of nothing and to keep an audience rapt; he needs no reminding that what he maintains happened out in the Negev sounds suspiciously like one of his science fiction flights of fancy.
Both
guns fired.

The spent cartridges spat out of the Browning until there was no ammunition left. His first thought was that God had intervened, and as he has never had any other explanation for it, that tends to remain his belief. An officer behind Uri, obviously impressed by the young man’s performance, even leant down to tap him on the helmet and said, ‘Good shooting, soldier.’ Trembling, Uri put his hand on the hot gun, which was now dripping black oil, and kissed it.

In the whirlpool of thoughts that followed, there was no one he could tell, not even in the rush of satisfaction and good humour which swept through the men as the officers drove off, leaving them with a short march back to the camp. He had told his closest army friend, a man called Avram Stedler, something about his powers, and his dream of being a spy, but knew that if he tried to tell even Avram such a story as this, he would probably abandon Uri as a friend, or just think he was a particularly implausible liar.

What happened, or what Uri perceived had happened, would already be enough to unhinge most people. When Uri got back to the camp, he was naturally anxious to examine whatever it was he imagined he had so deceitfully left in his kit bag. And now came, if such a thing can be imagined, a still greater shock. He peeped into his kitbag and saw the barrel and firing parts of the gun, exactly where he had left them. He went back to the canvas bag to look at the Browning again. The case was empty, just as it had been on the cliff edge when the general and the officers pounced on his unit. He returned to the kitbag and drew out the internal gun parts. The apparatus had been clean when he left for the exercise a few hours earlier; it was now oily and blackened – just as it would have been had it been fired. The mechanism had clearly been fired; it even needed cleaning. Yet Uri was certain it had not left the kitbag.

The sequence of events as he saw it gave Uri, to put it mildly, a few things to think about as he cleaned the gun. His mind was full of Cyprus; of the light in the Arabic garden when he was three; of the bent spoons; the telepathy with Mrs Agrotis. What had happened presaged the kind of bizarre madness that would happen around him – much of it with witnesses – over the coming decades. But in his tent in the Negev, anxious as he was to unburden himself, there was absolutely nobody he could share it with. Could he talk about it with someone else? Perhaps Yoav, if he saw him again?

Yes, but that would mean admitting the dreadful deception to his macho man, military hero. ‘I knew no one would believe me. What would I say to someone? That I left the barrel in my kitbag and then it reappeared shooting? I just decided not to think about it, because it might make me insane. I thought, maybe I am crazy and I never really hid the barrel; I only think I did. But I know I didn’t. I
am
a logical and rational person; I know my deeds. I don’t take drugs, I don’t drink, nothing can alter my consciousness or subconscious or clarity and thinking. When something like that happens you are amazed and shocked, and because of the shock, you erase it and try not to think about it any more.’

Uri’s military service continued untouched by paranormal phenomena. He got his corporal’s stripe, and was recommended for officer training. Sometimes, he says, a knife or spoon would bend on the table in front of him without him having tried to do anything. But so long as they went unseen by his colleagues, these events served as a tiny reminder of what he had come to believe by now – that he was under the protection of some outside force, which was unfathomable, but thankfully not malevolent towards him.

He went off to officer school. Out on a field exercise in teeming rain one day, he was overjoyed to come across Yoav Shacham in the front of a Jeep. Shacham was back from the Mossad and doing a stint as a paratroop officer. Yoav got him to jump out of the rain and into the vehicle. The two embraced. Uri was overjoyed to see his mentor and role model and Yoav and was delighted to hear that Uri was taking the path he was. He asked if Uri was still doing telepathy, and reasserted his feeling that Uri’s abilities could be put to good use in due course. Uri confirmed that he still dreamed of being a spy for the Mossad. Yoav encouraged him to put all his effort for the moment into officer school, then to go back to the paratroops and establish a fine record there as an officer. Then they parted.

With the Six Day War brewing, Uri was promoted to sergeant. After the war started, his unit was ordered at 3am on Tuesday 6 June, to head for a point called the French Hill, between Jerusalem and Ramallah, to try to prevent the tough Jordanians getting supplies through to their much-feared legionnaires in Jerusalem. Although he was not to know the entire picture, he formed part of the northern jaw of a pincer movement designed to encircle Jerusalem. Ramallah was a cool summer retreat favoured by rich Arabs, and where King Hussein had been building a summer palace until the war intervened.

Uri had a feeling, he says, that he would survive whatever was to come. Somewhere on the road, though, where they were refuelling their vehicles from a tanker, Uri saw Avram Stedler and became convinced that his friend was going to die. ‘Avram,’ he called out, ‘can I shake your hand?’ Stedler was puzzled and asked, why. ‘Just shake hands with me,’ Geller insisted. He felt sickened, he says, by the burden of somehow
knowing
so much he was not supposed to.

Not long afterwards, it was Uri who was nearly killed on the French Hill. His unit was ambushed by a Jordanian battle group in Patton tanks. Sheltering in a graveyard, as hastily called-in Israeli tanks engaged with Jordanians and Israeli aircraft bombed the enemy, a bullet ricocheted into his left elbow. The impact shattered his elbow bone. Uri tore off his shirt off to see if the profuse blood was coming from anywhere else, and, thinking, despite the pain, it was only a flesh wound, he tied it up.

Minutes later, he watched as one of his unit’s cannon-equipped Panhard semi-light armoured cars came head to head with a Jordanian tank. The Panhard’s gunner was Avram Stedler, but Uri’s friend could only land his shell to within a few metres of the tank, where it exploded harmlessly. Uri then saw the tank fire at the Panhard from close range and watched helpless as Avram’s vehicle tilted and shuddered.

What he describes as a strange rattle could be heard before there was a rumble from inside the car, followed by smoke and flames. Uri and another soldier ran to the wreck to see if anyone was alive. The bodywork was red hot. The driver and the captain were dead, but Avram was still alive. As they pulled him out, an Israeli tank shell fired from a distance away hit the Jordanian Patton and destroyed it. The shock wave knocked Uri off his feet.

‘I saw Avram’s left leg was blown off,’ Uri recounts. ‘He was very pale, but conscious. As I dragged him, all he cared about was his penis. He kept saying, “Is my thing all right? Is it still there?” I opened his trousers and looked. It was all blown away with the leg. I lied to him, and said everything was fine. We got him to a house. He asked if there were helicopters coming.’ Geller grabbed a walkie-talkie that had two bullet holes through it and called into the dead radio to pretend to ask for a helicopter with a
chovesh
, a medic. ‘I said a helicopter was on its way to pick him up and he’d be fine. Later on, of course, I found out that he’d died right there.’

There was no time to grieve for Avram. The gunfire that was still pinning the group down was coming from a Jordanian pillbox above them, and Uri decided to lead a party up to knock it out. As they sneaked up the hillside, a Jordanian soldier jumped from behind a rock and shot twice at Uri from, he estimates, three or four metres, but missed. Geller pulled his gun up to waist height and looked the soldier in the face. He noticed he had a moustache before he fired accurately, killing him instantly. Some moments later, in the confusion, with shells exploding and bullets flying all around, Geller was hit again, this time really seriously, either by lumps of metal flying off another stricken enemy tank, or perhaps by bullets: it was never established which. He felt a blast, sensed something hitting his right arm and the left side of his forehead, and, as he blacked out, assumed with resignation that he was dead. He remembers being surprised at how easy it was.

A
fter the traumas of seeing his friend Avram killed, shooting the Jordanian soldier – something that was to affect him deeply – and being wounded and hospitalized himself, Uri Geller’s military service wound down quite gracefully. He left hospital with his left hand and arm in a cast, but with the right healed. At a later date, he needed an operation to remove some bone from his left elbow, and still cannot stretch or retract the arm fully, but he was in relatively good shape for a wounded serviceman.

As part of his recuperation, he spent the rest of the summer of 1967 as an organizer at a children’s holiday camp, called Alumin. And it was here he met the man who was to become his devoted and loyal
de facto
kid brother, lifelong business manager, friend and confidante. Or to put it another way: if by any chance Uri Geller has been pulling the wool over the world’s eyes these past 60 and more years, Shimshon Shtrang is the one person on the planet who, as they say, knows where the bodies are buried.

Shipi, as Shimshon has always been known, was 12 when he went to Alumin; Uri was 21. His job was to supervise in the dining room and to keep the children generally occupied. So he told gripping stories and organized exciting and ambitious outdoor games. But Uri, who was still in uniform, also had a mission at the camp –to try to instil a feeling of patriotism in the children and encourage them to join combat units when they were older.

Shipi Shtrang today is an easy-going, smiling, patient man, who speaks slowly, says little, and has an aura of wisdom about him. He well remembers telling his parents on the phone about the wounded soldier who was looking after his group. It was not so much that he told good stories or invented great activities, the young boy would say, but that the injured soldier could perform extraordinary mental feats with his group. ‘In between the stories, he would ask someone to think of something or draw something,’ Shipi explains. ‘The whole subject of telepathy and mind reading was really new to us, and I suppose we looked on it as magic tricks, as part of entertainment. But it was amazing.’

More amazed still was Uri, who was staggered by the results he could achieve when he conducted telepathy tests with children, and most especially with Shipi. Shipi would get numbers which Uri had written down and sealed in envelopes; the boy would then go upstairs in a nearby building, draw his own pictures and apparently be able to transmit them to Uri outside on the lawn.

Uri started showing the children metal bending and again, when Shipi was close, the distortion in the metal would far exceed that which occurred with any of the other children. The two experimented with nails, watch hands and any metal they could get hold of. ‘It seemed to me that Shipi was some sort of a generator to me, like a battery. The telepathy between us blew the other kids’ minds because I didn’t know him well. It wasn’t as if we were friends or relatives.’