ESP security

ESP: Inside the government's secret program of psychic spies

In the 1970s, a handsome ex-Israeli army paratrooper popularized extrasensory perception, or ESP. Uri Geller claimed he could bend spoons with his mind, see inside sealed containers, and even read other people's minds.

It was great television. But off-stage, Geller had also caught the eye of the intelligence community.

"This is where it got very interesting, because scientists would consider, 'Wait a minute, maybe we can read the minds of other government officials; maybe we can see inside a nuclear facility in Russia,'" said national security reporter Annie Jacobsen.

It sounds incredible, but it's true. Relying on now-declassified documents, Jacobsen has written about the U.S. government's decades-long to attempts to use Uri Geller, and others like him, for psychic espionage.

"It's sort of like a highly-classified black program inside of a black program," Jacobsen  said. "One, because you don't want the Russians or the Chinese to know what we are doing; and two, because a lot of scientists didn't want their colleagues to know what they were doing, because of the embarrassment factor."

And there had long been reports, said Jacobsen, that the Kremlin was also experimenting with ways to weaponize people with ESP.