The death of Robert Maxwell

The recent financial troubles of Bear Stearns and now British mortgage lender HBOS have caused some commentators to see resemblances with the empire of the 1980s tycoon Robert Maxwell which collapsed on his mysterious death in 1991. The Times’ Patrick Hoskins suggests that the City could have done with a few more naysayers when he says, “half the City was employed in puffing up [Maxwell’s] house of cards”.

That media mogol’s house spectacularly collapsed on 5 November 1991, when aged 68 his disappeared at sea off the side of his yacht during the night. The official verdict was accidental drowning though this finding was disputed at the time, including by family members. While some have called it suicide, the most overwhelming evidence for his death is that of murder, especially as presented in the book “The Assassination of Robert Maxwell: Israel’s Superspy” by Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon. As the subtitle suggests, the authors say it was Maxwell’s espionage exploits on behalf of Israel that brought about his eventual death – at the hands of Mossad, the Israeli spy he gave so much service too.

There was no doubt that Maxwell was Jewish. He was born in 1923 in the village of Slatinske Doly in a remote anti-Semitic corner of what was to become Czechoslovakia. His father was given the surname Hoch (German for “tall”) by a census taker. When the Czechs took over after the war, his name was changed to Ludvik. Robert Maxwell’s earliest name was Jan Ludvik. He was a model pupil and a quick learner. But these were dangerous times to be Jewish. Encouraged by his mather young Jan left Czechoslovakia before the Nazis took over.

Maxwell went to Budapest. He claims he joined the Czech resistance there in 1939 and fought with the exiled Czech army in Eastern Europe. What is known is that by 1940 he was in Marseilles where he joined the Czech Legion before sailing to Liverpool. In England, he felt instinctively at home. Frustrated by the anti-Semitism of his fellow Czechs, he transferred into the British Army’s Pioneer Corps under the name of Jan Hoch. Here he perfected his English and assumed the mannerisms of a born and bred Englishman.

But it was Maxwell’s German language skills that got him his break and he was transferred to an intelligence unit in the North Staffordshire Regiment. He changed his name again, this time to Leslie du Maurier and returned to France in the second wave of the Normandy Landings. Once he was promoted into the officer class, he picked a new and very British name Ian Robert Maxwell which, with the Ian dropped, he would keep for the rest of his life. He fought with distinction in a number of battles and won the Military Cross. Stationed in liberated Paris he attracted the eye of a young woman named Elizabeth Maynard. They married in 1945, shortly before the end of the war.

After the war, he served in Berlin and then went into business as a distributor for scientific books. Maxwell’s fortune was linked with Pergamon Publishing, a specialist firm he set up in 1951 that launched scientific publishing in Britain. The now wealthy Maxwell was elected to parliament in 1964 as a Labour MP in Harold Wilson’s first Government. He was unseated in Wilson’s surprise defeat by Ted Heath in 1970. But his media interests prospered and in 1984 he acquired Mirror Group Newspapers which printed the Daily and Sunday Mirrors and the Sunday People. From then on, he was one of the most well-known people in the world.

His business empire’s Israeli head was the son of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Maxwell and Shamir were good friends, especially since Maxwell invested $100 million in Israel’s unsteady economy. One of the Israeli companies he acquired was a Tel-Aviv software house called Degem Computers. Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad used this company as cover for many of their worldwide operations. Israeli was also interested in Maxwell’s links with the USSR. Maxwell met then Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in 1978 and since then had met every important member of the Politburo and those who ruled over the Soviet satellite states. Israel now wanted Maxwell’s help to bring home USSR’s Jews.

He would become Mossad’s most valuable asset. As well as his Soviet bloc contacts, Maxwell was also friendly with then US President George Bush (senior) and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He also knew French President Mitterand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. He also knew most of the key players in the intelligence world since his work in the British army and the scientific world since his work in the publishing industry. Through them all, he could open any door for Mossad.

Meanwhile Mossad had illegally gained access to a super-spy computer software. Promis (Prosecutor’s Management Information Systems) was owned by American company Inslaw. It was used by the US Justice Departments to track intelligence information across the world. Incredibly they gave a disk copy to a Mossad operative who told it back to Israel where it was reverse engineered and enhanced. They added a trapdoor, a microchip that would allow Israel to know what information was being tracked by a purchaser of the system. But coming from Israel, any purchaser would be suspicious of the software. What they needed was a trusted outsider, someone beyond reproach who would sell it on their behalf – their ideal man was Robert Maxwell.

His first client was Robert Mugabe. Maxwell told him Promis was better and cheaper than anything else on the market. He assured Mugabe that it would enable him to track any plotters among the remaining white tobacco farmers in the country. Then he went south and sold it to the apartheid regime in Pretoria. They day after he left, black miners’ leaders planning a strike were all arrested. Similarly in Guatemala where the Promis purchasers rounded up 20,000 government opponents thanks to Maxwell’s software. He also persuaded Swiss banks to install it, which gave Mossad valuable information on what Israeli businessmen were illegally sequestering money out of the country.

But as the 1980s drew to a close, Maxwell’s empire was in trouble. With interest rates high and the share price falling in his major companies, he secretly brought millions of his own shares through taxhavens in Virgin Islands, Gibraltar and Liechtenstein. But he purchased these through collateral for bank loans. He was secretly withdrawing vast sums of money from the pension funds of his 24,000 Mirror Group employees which he invested in French and Israeli companies. By 1990 his repayments to his bankers had reached £415m a year as he became caught in a vicious debt spiral.

With police and journalists now on his trail, an increasingly desperate Maxwell turned to Israel to bail him out. Mossad were worried that if he went down, he might take many people in high places down with him. When Israel refused to help, Maxwell threatened to spill the beans in his Mirror newspaper. The first claims of links between them and Maxwell were starting to become public. Mossad became seriously alarmed. Despite the fact that he was a hero to many in Israel, they concluded he had to be silenced before he could do serious damage to the cause. They recruited a four man “kidon” (death squad) to solve the problem.

The kidon team hired a small motorised yacht in the Gran Canaria port of Las Palmas. Ostensibly it looked like four men on a fishing trip. On board, the men had locked onto the frequency of Maxwell’ superyacht the Lady Ghislaine (named for his favourite daughter). They followed the Ghislaine up the coast. Mossad passed a secret message to Maxwell to expect a secret package on board in the early hours of the morning. They told him go on deck between 4 and 5 am and stand on the starboard side.

With Maxwell in place for the hit, a dinghy from the kidon’s yacht crept up under the radar and hidden by the noise of Ghislaine’s engine. Two frogmen climbed aboard and reached Maxwell in a few strides. One held a syringe which he plunged into Maxwell’s neck. It contained a lethal nerve agent developed by a biological research institute in Tel Aviv. The men gripped the body and lowered it over the side and into the sea. They returned to the dinghy and fled the scene. It would be another six hours before anyone on Maxwell’s yacht realised he was missing. His body was recovered from the sea 30km south of Gran Canaria.

A botched Spanish autopsy concluded his death was due to heart failure. They ruled out suicide because Maxwell was a good swimmer. His unhappy insurers insisted on a second autopsy which occurred before his burial in Jerusalem. This one found the most likely cause was drowning but the insurers refused to pay up anyway claiming it was a suicide. Maxwell was buried with full state honours in Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives. Prime Minister Shamir, who probably authorised his death, eulogised “He has done more for Israel than can today be said".