Pick of the week’s Gossip

In Britain, Uri Geller is best known as a spoon-bending magician. But the CIA once took his “paranormal” powers very seriously indeed. Newly declassified documents show that, over a period of eight days in 1973, US intelligence agents conducted a series of tests on Geller (right), with a view to recruiting him as a “psychic warrior”. The Israeli illusionist was placed in an “opaque, acoustically and electrically shielded room” behind two locked doors. Researchers outside the room – and in one case, on the opposite side of the country – then drew random pictures and asked him to visualise and copy them. Geller correctly drew pictures of a firecracker, a bird, a kite, and a bunch of precisely 24 grapes – the same number as the original. His CIA handlers concluded that Geller had “demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner”. Geller said this week that he had done extensive spying work for the CIA, and his spoon-bending antics had only been a “good cover”.

The world trembled this week when Donald Trump took possession of the two items that enable a president to launch a nuclear strike. The “biscuit” is a small, laminated card bearing a code that allows him to access the “football” – a black leather case containing the secret instructions for

launching nuclear weapons. An aide known as the “bagman” carries the football wherever the president goes. But the biscuit stays on the president’s person at all times – at least in theory, says Christopher Andrew in The Sunday Times. Jimmy Carter once left the biscuit in the pocket of a jacket that the White House sent to the dry cleaners. Ronald Reagan’s biscuit went missing after he was shot by a would-be assassin; it later turned up in a hospital plastic bag. And Bill Clinton’s biscuit went missing when he was distracted by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. One insider later reported: “The codes were actually missing for months”.