Robert Maxwell
Mossad super-spy was murdered!
Publisher Charged With 'Sabotaging' New Israeli Spy Book Public Statement by Martin Dillon & Gordon Thomas 12-6-2
'The Assassination of Robert Maxwell: Israel's Super Spy' (Robson Books UK)
Two best-selling authors have bitterly accused their American publisher of "sabotaging" their book on Robert Maxwell he is to publish.
The book, supported by FBI documents, and files from intelligence agencies across the globe, details the tycoon's until now unsuspected links to organised crime families in the Balkans - and how Maxwell penetrated America's nuclear arsenal at Los Alamos on behalf of Mossad. The book reveals the tycoon worked for the Israeli intelligence.
But unknown to the authors, their US publisher, Carroll-Graf, secretly delivered an uncorrected proof copy of their manuscript weeks ago to Maxwell's daughter, Isabel.
She admits she took the book to Israel and consulted with, among others, "a family friend" David Kimche, a former deputy director of Mossad.
Last week, in the Jewish Chronicle, Isabel Maxwell launched a ferocious attack on authors Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon over "The Assassination of Robert Maxwell: Israel's Super Spy" (Robson Books UK).
She accused them of not even getting the names of her siblings correctly-spelled (common in uncorrected manuscripts). But in the finished book, published last week, they are spelled correctly.
And the authors have been told by their UK publisher, Jeremy Robson, that the American publisher, Carroll & Graf of the Avalon Publishing House to whom he sold the book - and who had agreed to maintain the contents confidentiality - had leaked the book to Isabel Maxwell "because she was a family friend of the publisher".
Herman Graf, head of Carroll-Graf, refuses to explain to the authors how the book was sent to Isabel Maxwell. Further, he has delayed publication until December 16. And he has refused to promote the book.
"Everyone in the trade knows this is the worst week to launch a book of this nature. It will be lost. And the US publisher won't even confirm what his print run is or whether he is taking even a small ad in the trade press. In 50 years of being a published author I have never encountered such a situation," said Gordon Thomas.
In what the authors see as a conspiracy of silence, they have also enjoined the august Jewish Chronicle. The voice of Jewry in Britain has refused to publish in full their detailed retraction of Isabel Maxwell's attack.
"Initially the paper offered us space for only a letter. They said they would publish a letter 'twice the size of one (from me) they had previously published'. We asked for the same space as they gave Isabel Maxwell. We have heard no more," concludes Thomas.
But now that other bastion of Jewish opinion, the Jewish Telegraph has come to their aid. The Manchester-based weekly has agreed to publish their article in full. It includes intriguing details about Isabel's own relationship toward Martin Dillon.
Using a succession of emails and contemporaneous notes, Martin Dillon, a former BBC Timewatch producer and an acknowledged expert on the murky world of Eastern European crime, reveals how Isabel, and her mother, collaborated with him despite her subsequent public denials.
"She phoned me constantly - even late at night. She even wanted a photo of me. She asked me to meet her in Washington and London and she revealed intimate family secrets," confirms Dillon, who now lives in New York.
In the rebuttal that the Jewish Chronicle refused to publish in full, Thomas, 69, and Dillon, 53, hint that they may now publish all their email correspondence with Isabel and Betty Maxwell.
What they have already written of Isabel Maxwell's revelations about her siblings has also come from their mother, Betty Maxwell.
"We have been told that some senior members of the family have met with a member of the editorial staff of the Jewish Chronicle. The paper is understandably concerned that Isabel's attack was based on an uncorrected version of the book," said Gordon Thomas, at his home outside Dublin.
The Ghost Of Maxwell Hangs Over New Book
London Times Article (This week)
Even in death, Robert Maxwell, some of whose pensioners learnt yesterday that they face a 50 per cent cut in their retirement schemes, continues to wield huge influence in certain quarters.
Publication has been mysteriously delayed of a new book, apparently supported by a number of FBI documents, which alleges that the tycoon had links to organised crime in the Balkans and that he worked for Mossad, the feared Israeli intelligence service.
Unknown to Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, the authors of The Assassination of Robert Maxwell: Israel's Super Spy, their American publisher, Carroll-Graf, allowed an uncorrected proof copy of their manuscript to fall into the hands of Maxwell's daughter, Isabel.
She took it to Israel. where she showed it to a family friend, David Kimche, who just happens to be a former deputy director of Mossad. Publication has now been delayed until December 16 with no promise of any promotional drive.
The authors have yet to establish why their manuscript was sent to the Maxwell family. Thomas said: "The US publisher won't even confirm what his print run is or whether he is taking even a small advertisement. In 50 years of being a published author I have never encountered such a situation." But then he was writing about Robert Maxwell.
A Case Of Selective Recall
By Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon
Isabel Maxwell's diatribe last week shows she has learned from the black art Robert Maxwell made his own. He used it to dissimulate and obfuscate. She uses a similar technique to try and discredit our book, The Assassination of Robert Maxwell: Israel's Super Spy (Robson Books).
What child wants to learn her father was a crook, an associate of criminals, a man who was under investigation by the FBI, a bully, a womaniser, and high rolling cheapskate?
We publish the FBI documents. We publish the evidence Isabel and her mother helped to provide. We name our sources, including direct quotations provided by Betty Maxwell via Isabel. We have her scores of emails and detailed transcriptions of her many hours of telephone conversations. They throw new light on how Robert Maxwell operated - and give unique insight from a daughter who wanted to work with us because, "I know you will tell the truth".
For the first time, we have detailed Robert Maxwell's close links to organised crime families in the Balkans. How he acted as their bagman. We name the crime-linked companies he helped to set up. We show how billions of dollars flowed to secret bank accounts out of Eastern Europe into Maxwell-created accounts around the world.
Until now all those details have remained secret. We obtained them from prime sources in Bulgaria, Hungary and other Eastern European nations. Free of the Communist hierarchy that Robert Maxwell cultivated, those sources gave us a small library of never-seen-before documents that, if he was alive, would have seen Maxwell undoubtedly face criminal charges.
This week, the European Community Anti-Fraud Office announced an investigation is to begin into the very crime families Maxwell counted as his friends. We will be happy to provide the EC with all the evidence we have from a two-and-a-half year investigation. There are disturbing links with Robert Maxwell that still exist in the Balkans today.
We deal with his involvement in the plot to overthrow democracy in Russia by having Mikhail Gorbachev toppled. Russia's first democratic president called him a friend. But later, quoting Mrs Thatcher, he found that "nobody could surprise like a friend".
Again we have the plot details in our book - based upon first hand interviews. Our sources - in Moscow and Israel - help to explain why a small group of senior Mossad officers decided Maxwell had to be assassinated before he did more damage to Israel and the relationship with America.
Isabel summons Shimon Peres as a witness her father never worked for Mossad. Peres was at the meeting where Robert Maxwell was recruited. Among our list of 54 prime sources are the names who can corroborate that. Not to forget the 22 secondary sources.
Contrary to what Isabel Maxwell states, many are alive, including our vital sources in Central Europe.
They took us into a world far removed from Isabel's description of her father as simply "a well known public figure".
He was that - of course: well known now as a con-man, thief, rogue and as we detail for the first time, a spy.
For the past 20 years, by her own admission, Isabel has lived in California. She said in one telephone conversation, "that for Mom and myself there are parts of Dad's life which remain a mystery".
Betty Maxwell was anxious we should not speak with Dr Ian West's widow, who had assisted her late husband in the autopsy on Robert Maxwell. In the end we did speak with Mrs West. She confirmed both she and her husband had noticed the puncture mark.
Dr West's final report, which we also published, goes some way beyond that of Israel's State Pathologist, Dr Hiss. West writes that he could not rule out homicide. Until we published them, those results have remained out of the public domain.
Though some of our sources are now dead, their documentary evidence lives on. We will make it available to the new EC investigation into those organised crime families Robert Maxwell helped.
In naming Isabel and Betty Maxwell as sources, we did so because of the wealth of intimate details they provided - and because they urged us to discover "the real facts" as Betty once called them.
We have. We did not expect it to please the Maxwell family. But then facing the truth about Robert Maxwell cannot be easy for any sibling.
In one of her small library of emails she sent us, she calls David Kimche a "close friend of the family" and urges us to contact him. She now quotes him as saying he had a dim recollection of meeting Gordon Thomas "with many other people" only once. Kimche not only met Thomas several times, but he appeared in the author's film for Channel-4, The Spying Machine. It was Kimche, talking about Maxwell, who told Gordon Thomas: "when you deal with Maxwell remember the sins of the father must not be visited on the children".
Quite so. But Isabel has, for reasons only known to her, now thrust upon us one sin of her father: an ability to twist the facts.
An example. The pivotal role Robert Maxwell played in the global marketing of the Promis software Mossad had stolen from an American company. Portions of that story had appeared in previous books by Gordon Thomas: Gideon's Spies and Seeds of Fire. But neither book contained anywhere near the full story. That only emerged later when we, as authors, combined our resources to uncover all we reveal in our book. And we list both previous books in our bibliography - a sure sign we had nothing to hide.
With all the skill of a lawyer her father could have done with, Isabel rewrites the story of her close relationship with us.
To end her barrage of half truths, innuendos and libels, we now detail that relationship. No doubt it will be embarrassing to her, for she revealed to us tensions within the Maxwell family and much else. However, unless she forces us to do so with further baseless attacks on our integrity, we will continue to keep confidential certain matters that she did tell us.
The inescapable, documented fact is she entered into a voluntary and detailed email and telephone conversation with one of us (Martin Dillon). She did so in full knowledge we were planning a book.
Who knows what pressures have been now exerted on her for having the courage to break ranks with her siblings. But she did. And went far beyond what her fun loving sister, Ghislaine said. Breaking her own self-imposed silence on February 19, 1996, Ghislaine told Hello, the celebrity magazine: "there was no evidence of suicide or a heart attack. I think he (her father) was murdered".
Isabel does not mention Ghislaine's judgement.
Instead, with a technique familiar to those of us who remember her father's manipulation of the facts, she tries and fails to ignore the central theme of our book: that he was Mossad's super spy.
Isabel first began to communicate with Martin Dillon on January 24, 2001 at 3.04pm. In that email there is more than a hint of her father's paranoia.
"What nationality are you?" "What are your published books etc?" "What aspect of my father's life (or is it just his 'death') is the challenge of this 'book' to cover?" "Who gave you my email address?"
Next day she telephoned Dillon. "Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?", she demanded. Then came the first volunteered admission. "My father was not perfect, but he never committed suicide."
For some 30 minutes she expounded on this truth. As we show in our book, he was assassinated.
Over the next months, her emails swung from one mood to another. "It sounds like you have an independent mind and you don't mind tough stuff" to "well you have distracted me from my life for this day".
She offered material from a "private book". She wrote that her father's story has "not ended and actually I don't think there is/will be a conventional ending".
On January 26, 2002 - she was sending emails at an unusual speed for someone who had written, "I guard my privacy fiercely". She gave unsolicited and fascinating insights about what it was like to be the daughter of Robert Maxwell.
"I am sure my father had an inner theatre that never 'quit'. But he was a master of putting it aside to the outside world, to his family and probably also to himself. And everything had to be larger than life".
Indeed, indeed.
Only two days after Dillon had first contacted her - her revelations on the phone suggested she might be using them as some kind of therapy.
We did not have to encourage her to unburden herself. No one would probably have been able to stop her outpourings, her bitter attacks. Tom Bower, a fine writer, was given a good kicking. The Daily Mail was savaged. No one escaped her wrath for having dared to attack her father.
Interposed were some strange questions of her own to Dillon. She wanted to know about his "attitude to money". She asked about "what is your love life like?" She invited him to meet her - "I don't suppose you would be coming out to the West Coast any time soon?" She ended one email with "I don't mind that your questions are not ordered. It is of no import; nor are my memories". She asked him for a photograph. She called him in the small hours, saying she was "thinking" about him.
She was clearly anxious to continue her relationship. Given that Martin Dillon had established such a close professional contact with her, it was decided that Gordon Thomas would not join in the dialogue.
That she now sees deception, or even something sinister, in that decision is sad and delusional.
Here is how she ended another email to Dillon: "enuf 4 2nite. I'm curious how you react to these latest reflections r u getting more curious/less curious, more involved HOW ARE YOU?"
Whatever a therapist might make of all this, we simply concluded that Isabel was a woman more than ready to help us.
And the revelations continued. On January 30, she wrote: "I remember a dinner with Dad and 'the Bulgarians'."
That encouraged us to probe deeper into Robert Maxwell's Eastern European connections - to explore and expose for the first time his criminal associations in the former Soviet bloc.
And still the revelations came. About money. About Maxwell, the driven man. About her own "high source" in Israel. About her "need" to meet Dillon - "when all will be revealed". In a telephone conversation close to midnight on February 3, she attacked the accounting firm of Arthur Anderson for "stripping my father's companies after his death".
Day by day, email by email, telephone call by telephone call, Isabel Maxwell unburdened herself.
She introduced her mother, Betty, into the relationship with Dillon. In the early hours of February 12, 2002, she said: "of course I think you are the writer to write this book".
By then she had given details of her father's drug-taking habits (Halycon and Zanex); of the "unseen material in Mom's archives in France".
She spoke of her mother's relationship with her father (a sad passage of a daughter still trying to come to terms with that). She attacked the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz: "full of many inaccuracies". She ended an email with, "I hope you uncover some truths and that you will tell them".
We have, Isabel. They are all there in our book.
To help us she offered to have her brother, Phillip, provide us with "a copy of his report which includes very detailed interviews with all the crew".
Alas, she could not persuade her brother to part with the document. But she did her best to fill in the gaps in our story about her father's last days on the yacht.
By the end of March, she was writing she was "annoyed" with her sister, Ghislaine.
On the 30 of March, she was acting as a conduit between her mother and Dillon. "My Mom had additionally this to say". Time and again she provided verbatim quotes from Betty for us to use in the book she was so keen to see published. These quotes are reproduced in our book.
And so it went on, week after week, month after month. On April 2, 2002, Betty Maxwell wrote to Isabel (who promptly copied the email to Dillon):
"What I am interested in, and would be prepared to collaborate with, is to challenge the conclusion that Dad committed suicide."
We have challenged that conclusion. Isabel sent us copies of Ian West's autopsy report, of the autopsy report by Professor Yehudi Hiss; of the Spanish autopsy report.
Betty urged us on. "The whole story is extremely complex with endless ramifications," she wrote via Isabel.
It was those ramifications that both Betty, via Isabel, helped us to unravel.
Betty wrote she was working hard to provide "primary materials and I can see absolutely that you need them".
They came by email and by lengthy conversations in which Isabel relayed her mother's words. None of this material had appeared elsewhere. It was the stuff of history. Here is Betty. She asks Isabel to:
"Tell Martin that the mystery is far deeper than he thinks. I was advised by a former CIA American agent and friend, who knows a great deal (Arnold Kramish), to drop everything if I cared for my life, and I could tell him hair-raising stories about the actions of British intelligence services in the case and in particular that they made files disappear from the official archives."
Our own research showed this was not paranoia. Or when Betty said: "when I had my last conversation with Arnold, I felt like it had lifted a corner of my carpet and the sewers of London had started gushing in my drawing room. I felt completely nauseated and I must add, frightened."
Having read Isabel's article last week, we can only wonder what forces drive her - knowing all the evidence she had provided us had helped to prove our unchallengeable case that her father was assassinated?
The rest of her outburst we can dismiss - whatever Shimon Peres now says, or David Kimche says, or indeed the others she cites in support of her attempt to conceal what she has done.
We have her emails. We have the contemporaneous notes of many, many hours of her telephone conversations. We have her, if we may borrow a phrase from Robert Maxwell, "bang to rights".
Isabel should now stop digging deeper into a hole she has opened for herself. It's time now for her to recognise that her sister, Ghislaine, was right when she said her father was murdered.
What we have done is to show not only why, but how he was assassinated.
We rest our case.
Gordon Thomas is the multi-award winning author of 43 books. His global bestsellers include Voyage of the Damned, nominated for five Academy Awards; and Gideon's Spies: Mossad's Secret Warriors, published in 54 countries, the book became a Channel-4 documentary which he narrated. It carries the imprimatur of former Mossad director Meir Amit: "Thomas tells it like it was - like it is".
Martin Dillon is one of the foremost authorities on global terrorism. He is the author of such bestselling non-fiction books as Shankill Butchers, The Dirty War and God and the Gun. He is a former writer/producer on Time Watch and a regular guest on Sky TV, CNN and other US networks.
New book claims Robert Maxwell murdered by Mossad
26th October 2002 British media tycoon Robert Maxwell was murdered by the Israeli secret services, according to a new book, which also alleges that the flamboyant millionaire was an Israeli spy and had links to organized crime in Eastern Europe. "Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy," to be published in December by Carroll and Graf, claims that Mossad decided to get rid of Maxwell because he was threatening to expose his knowledge of Israeli secrets unless he received Israeli help in propping up his failing businesses.
Maxwell’s sudden death at sea in November 1991 off the Canary Islands brought about the collapse of his worldwide publishing empire and triggered theories ranging from suicide, murder or accident.
He disappeared overboard just as the complex web of financial deals keeping his businesses afloat was beginning to unravel and a few weeks after U.S. investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a book claiming Maxwell had close ties with the Israeli secret services.
Maxwell had denied the claims and initiated a lawsuit against Hersh for libel — a favorite Maxwell tactic against critics — in the weeks before he died.
The new book, by British thriller writer Gordon Thomas and Irish journalist Martin Dillon, is based on interviews with former Mossad agents and chiefs including David Kimche, a former assistant deputy director-general of Mossad.
The authors also interviewed former Bulgarian, British and U.S. intelligence officers to substantiate their claims that Maxwell acted as a conduit for information and deals in his high-level business and political contacts in the United States, the former Soviet Union, Bulgaria and Israel.
LETHAL NERVE AGENT Thomas and Dillon claim that Maxwell was killed by Mossad agents who boarded his private yacht under cover of darkness and plunged a needle filled with a lethal nerve agent into Maxwell’s neck. They then lowered his body off the deck and into the sea.
Maxwell did not raise the alarm because he had been expecting a packet to be delivered secretly to him on the yacht shortly before dawn that November night, the book claims.
Joseph Alpher, a former Mossad official who now works as a political and security analyst, told Reuters: "It sounds like utter nonsense ... This is not the first time sensationalistic writers say they talk with former Mossad officials, make allegations and then write about them."
Israeli officials had no immediate comment on the book. Kimche’s family said he was out of the country until Sunday and was unavailable for comment before then.
Comment from The Mirror, which Maxwell owned at the time, was not immediately available.
Maxwell, who was born to an impoverished Jewish family in Czechoslovakia, often boasted he was a confidant of both U.S. presidents and Soviet leaders. The book’s authors claim he used those contacts to relay information and influence between the White House, the Knesset and the Kremlin.
But his relations with Israel soured in 1991 when his repeated requests for Mossad to use its influence with Israel’s bankers to arrange loans to stave off demands from his creditors fell on deaf ears.
It was "clear he was saying he would blow the whistle on all he knew about Mossad. That was a threat no-one could expect to get away with," former Israeli intelligence advisor Ari Ben-Menashe is quoted in the book as saying.
Maxwell was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem in a ceremony attended by Israel’s leading statesmen. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir called him a "passionate friend of Israel."
"Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy" is due to be published in Britain and the United States on December 16.
British Publisher Robert Maxwell Was Mossad Spy New Claim On Tycoon's Mystery Death By Gordon Thomas And Martin Dillon The Mirror - UK 12-6-2
Eleven years after former Daily Mirror owner Robert Maxwell plunged from his luxury yacht to a watery grave, his death still arouses intense interest.
Many different theories have circulated about what really happened on board the Lady Ghislaine that night in May 1991. Some believe the
67-year-old tycoon simply slipped into the sea, perhaps after a few drinks.
Others think Maxwell took his own life amid increasing troubles in his business empire - after his death investigators discovered he had been secretly diverting millions of pounds from two of his companies and from employee pension funds in an effort to keep solvent.
But now, after two and a half years of investigative journalism, we believe we have unearthed the true story of Maxwell's death and can reveal how he was murdered by the Israeli secret service, Mossad.
Our work, supported by documents, including FBI reports and secret intelligence files from behind the Iron Curtain, shows Maxwell had
worked as a secret super spy for Mossad for six years.
The Jewish millionaire and former Labour MP [born Ludvik Hoch
in Czechoslovakia] died the way he had lived - threatening.
He had threatened his wife. Threatened his children. Threatened the staff of this newspaper.
But finally he issued one threat too many - he threatened Mossad.
He told them that unless they gave him £400million to save his crumbling empire, he would expose all he had done for them.
In that time, he had free access to Margaret Thatcher's Downing Street, to Ronald Reagan's White House, to the Kremlin and to the corridors of power throughout Europe.
On top of that he had built himself a position of power within the crime families of eastern Europe, teaching them how to funnel their vast wealth from drugs, arms smuggling and prostitution to banks in safe havens around the globe.
Maxwell passed on all the secrets he learned to Mossad in Tel Aviv. In turn, they tolerated his excesses, vanities and insatiable appetite for a luxurious lifestyle and women.
He told his controllers who they should target and how they should do it. He appointed himself as Israel's unofficial ambassador to the Soviet Bloc. Mossad saw the advantage in that.
Having learned many of the key secrets of the Soviet empire, Maxwell was given his greatest chance to be a super spy.
Mossad had stolen from America the most important piece of software in the US arsenal. Maxwell was given the job of marketing the stolen software, called Promis.
Mossad had reconstructed the software and inserted into it a device which enabled them to track the use any purchaser made of the it. Sitting in Israel, Mossad would know exactly what was going on inside all the intelligence services that bought it. In all, Maxwell sold it to 42 countries, including China and Soviet Bloc nations. But his greatest triumph was selling it to Los Alamos, the very heart of the US nuclear defence system.
The more successful Maxwell became the more risks he took and the more dangerous he was to Mossad. At the same time, the very public side of Maxwell, who then owned 400 companies, began to unwind.
He spent lavishly and lost money on deals. The more he lost, the more he tried to claw money from the banks. Then he saw a way out of his problems.
He was approached by Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB. Spymaster and tycoon met in the utmost secrecy in the Kremlin.
Kryuchkov had an extraordinary proposal. He wanted Maxwell to help orchestrate the overthrow of Mikhail Gorbachev, the reformist Soviet leader. That would bring to an end a fledgling democracy and a return to the Cold War days.
In return, Maxwell's massive debts would be wiped out by a grateful Kryuchkov, who planned to replace Gorbachev. The KGB chief wanted Maxwell to use the Lady Ghislaine, named after Maxwell's daughter, as a meeting place between the Russian plotters, Mossad chiefs and Israel's top politicians.
The plan was for the Israelis to go to Washington and say that democracy could not work in Russia and that it was better to allow the country to return to a modified form of communism, which America could help to control. In return, Kryuchkov would guarantee to free hundreds of thousands of Jews and dissidents in the Soviet republics.
Kryuchkov told Maxwell that he would be seen as a saviour of all those Jews. It was a proposal he could not refuse. But when he put it to his Mossad controllers they were horrified. They said Israel would have no part in such a madcap plan.
For the first time, Maxwell had failed to get his own way. He started to threaten and bluster. He then demanded that, for past services, he should receive immediately a quick fix of £400million to bale him out of his financial difficulties.
Instead of providing the money, a small group of Mossad officers set about planning his murder. They feared that he was going to publicly expose all Mossad had done in the time he worked for them. They knew that he was gradually becoming mentally unstable and paranoid. He was taking a cocktail of drugs - Halcion and Zanax - which had serious side effects.
The group of Mossad plotters sensed, like Solomon, he could bring their temple tumbling down and cause incalculable harm to Israel. The plan to kill him was prepared in the utmost secrecy. A four-man squad was briefed.
Then Maxwell was contacted. He was told to fly to Gibraltar, go aboard the Lady Ghislaine and sail to the Canary Islands. There at sea he would receive his £400million quick fix in the form of a banker's draft. Maxwell did as he was told.
On the night of November 4, 1991, the Lady Ghislaine, one of the world's biggest yachts, was at sea. Unknown to its crew, the death squad had cast an electronic net over the yacht to block all radio transmissions. The security cameras on board had been switched off.
After midnight there were only two men on the bridge. One hundred and twenty feet behind them, Maxwell appeared on deck.
He had been instructed to do so in a previous message from Mossad.
A small boat came alongside. On board were four black-suited men. Three scrambled on to the yacht. In a second it was all over.
Two held Maxwell. The third plunged a syringe into his neck behind his ear. A measured dose of nerve agent was injected. Robert Maxwell was immobilised. He was lowered off the deck into the water.
As Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad agent told us: "On that cold night Mossad's problems with Robert Maxwell were over."
The incontrovertible facts about his murder are contained in a previously-unseen autopsy report by Britain's then-leading forensic pathologist Dr Iain West and Israel State Pathologist Dr Yehuda Hiss. Of all the documents in our possession, these reports confirm the truth about Maxwell's death.
Gordon Thomas & Martin Dillon are authors of The Assassination of Robert Maxwell: Israel's Super Spy, published by Robson Books.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12419168&method=full&siteid=50143
Reproduced gratefully from http://www.rense.com
Book Review
The Other Side of Deception: A Rogue Agent Exposes the Mossad's Secret Agenda
By Victor Ostrovsky. HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. (New York) 1994, 315 pp. List: $24; AET: $18 for one, $24 for two.
Reviewed by Andrew I. Killgore
April/May 1995, Page 58, 81
Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky was in Larnaca, Cyprus in 1980 on an operation involving cooperation with Belgian authorities to halt shipments of arms by leftist Belgians to Palestinians. One night in the hotel he decided, on his
own, to strike up an acquaintance with a Palestinian businessman from Amman who had just arrived from Libya.
To Ostrovsky's surprise, the Palestinian described to him a Mossad scheme to force down a plane flying top Palestine Liberation Organization leaders from Tripoli, Libya, to Lebanon. The Israeli intelligence agency's plan to capture PLO leaders would fail, the Palestinian businessman told Ostrovsky, because the PLO was aware of the Mossad's plan. Ostrovsky tried to warn his superiors that the Palestinians had knowledge of the plan, but failed to reach them in time to halt it.
The Palestinian, as it turned out, was right. When Israeli aircraft forced the small plane to land in Israel, the PLO leaders were not aboard, and the Israeli act of aerial piracy over international waters caused it great embarrassment.
Somehow the blame for that embarrassment fell on Ostrovsky, however, because he had broken Mossad rules in cultivating the Palestinian. His superiors chose to believe that his conversation with the Palestinian was the reason for their failure.
From that day forward, Ostrovsky was a marked man within the Mossad. At that point in his plummeting career as an Israeli spy, according to Ostrovsky's own account, he agreed to work with higher ranking Mossad officers (whether they were still in or outside the agency is hazy) to thwart hard-liners within Mossad who were planning, among other things, to arrange the assassination in southern Lebanon in 1982 of a relatively moderate Mossad director-designate to prevent his taking office.
That's how Ostrovsky, whose first book about life within the Mossad was By Way of Deception, begins his second book, The Other Side of Deception.
The author and his co-conspirators set out to discredit the Mossad-as-is by revealing its dirty tricks to the intelligence services of other nations, and to replace it with something less repulsive. They walk a fine line between hurting Mossad without harming Israel. In fact the conspirators seem dedicated to Israel, although the Canadian-born author eventually describes Israel, where he was raised by his grandparents, as "a nightmare of prejudice, wallowing in racism and waving the white and blue flag of oppression."
The Israeli government inadvertently boosted sales of Ostrovsky's first book by attempting, in vain, to suppress its publication in Canada, to which Ostrovsky had fled and where he had gone into hiding. The grisly picture of Mossad dirty tricks painted in his second book by Ostrovsky's almost novelistic writing style, plus a human reluctance to accept that anybody could be that bad, may leave the reader wondering, "Can all this really be true?"
For this reviewer the answer was supplied by Ostrovsky's account of Mossad's assassination of a German politician named Uwe Barschel. The account in his book, completed early in 1994, was confirmed in chilling detail in a January 1995 Washington Post article datelined Berlin and based upon German, Spanish and Swiss police investigations of the murder, and the possible motives for it.
According to Ostrovsky, Barschel, the premier of the north German state of Schleswig-Holstein, adamantly refused in 1987, during the Iran-Iraq war, to allow Israeli arms for Iran to be shipped from Schleswig-Holstein ports. Subsequently, he was accused, falsely it now appears, by one of his press aides of authorizing dirty tricks against his political rivals. Although Barschel asserted his innocence, he was forced to resign, leaving his career in ruins. Barschel, who had a wife and four children, then traveled to the Canary Islands (shades of publisher Robert Maxwell, who also ran afoul of Mossad, according to Ostrovsky, and came to an untimely end there).
In the case of Barschel, according to both Ostrovsky and the subsequent Washington Post account, the disgraced politician was lured to Geneva by a telephone call he received in the Canary Islands from a Robert Roloff (according to Barschel's widow, who insists that her husband was murdered) or Robert Oleff (according to Ostrovsky) who promised to provide Barschel information that could clear his name. Immediately after his arrival in Switzerland, however, Barschel was found dead and fully clothed in his Geneva hotel bathtub. His death was ruled a suicide at the time.
But the Post article reports that the case has been re-opened as a murder investigation because of evidence that "a third party" may have been involved and that the overdose of sedatives found in Barschel's stomach may actually have been forced through a tube inserted down his throat after he was dead. Just who the third party who went to such lengths to make a murder look like a suicide might be is unclear. The Israeli government, however, has issued a "formal denial" that it was involved. But in a Middle East where the "opposite test" rule is often applied, a denial, especially if it is "formal," is widely accepted as confirmation that the opposite is true.
In addition to his insider's account of how deaths such as Barschel's occur, Ostrovsky's assessments of the Palestinian, British, Soviet, Jordanian and other intelligence services make exciting reading: A personal touch is added by the fact that Ostrovsky constantly looks over his shoulder for "hit men." As others have corroborated, Mossad may not be very good overall at assembling and assessing intelligence, but it excels at assassination.
Among other kinds of dirty tricks in which Mossad also specializes, Ostrovsky asserts that it doctored the file of then-U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim to implicate him in Nazi crimes. The doctored file subsequently was "discovered" by then-Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Benyamin Netanyahu to smear Waldheim.
The reason? Israel was unhappy with Waldheim's criticism of Israeli activities in southern Lebanon. (This is chillingly reminiscent of the great Hannah Arendt's memorable rumination on the "banality of evil" in her monumental Eichmann in Jerusalem.)
Ostrovsky also charges that Mossad framed Libya in the April 5, 1986 bombing of the West Berlin discothèque in which two U.S. servicemen and a Turkish woman were fatally injured. The background was that by planting an unmanned radio of its own in Libya, Mossad broadcast fraudulent orders for terrorist attacks to Libyan embassies around the world. Although the orders were rejected as false by the Spanish and French intelligence services, they were picked up and accepted as real by U.S. intelligence. As a consequence Libya was blamed by the U.S. for the La Belle discothèque attack. Ironically, according to Ostrovsky, even Mossad had no clue as to whom the real culprits were.
The tragic implication of the U.S. acceptance at face value of the intercepted radio signals rejected by the French and Spaniards is that American intelligence has been "conditioned" to accept as true anything that Israel claims. The subsequent American aerial attack on Tripoli, in which an adopted daughter of Muammar Qaddafi and American airmen were killed, seems to be one of the most obvious and extreme cases of the Israeli tail wagging the American dog.
Particularly shocking to American readers is Ostrovsky's claim that a right-wing clique within Mossad decided, unbeknownst to then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, to assassinate President George Bush when the president was in Madrid at the end of October 1991 for the opening of Arab-Israeli peace talks. Evidence was to be manufactured implicating the Palestinians. The clique believed that Shamir would have ordered the assassination himself if he hadn't been gagged by "politics" because the American president had frozen U.S. loan guarantees to Israel.
Three named Palestinian extremists were "taken" from Beirut to Israel's Negev desert and held incommunicado, according to Ostrovsky. Meanwhile Mossad-generated threats on the president's life, seemingly from Palestinians, were leaked. These were designed to throw suspicion on the organization of rogue Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal. Names and descriptions of the three terrorists were leaked to Spanish police so that, if the plot was successful, blame would automatically fall on them.
Eventually, however, the assassination plot was called off, for reasons Ostrovsky does not explain. In a grisly conclusion to the story, however, the three Palestinian prisoners met the fate that had been decreed for them from the time the plot was hatched. In the Negev hideout where they were being held they were "terminated," to employ Ostrovsky's chilling word.
Ostrovsky also charges that Mossad murdered British press magnate Robert Maxwell, whose body was recovered from the seas around the Canary Islands. (At the time Maxwell had overextended his media empire by entering the successful bid, for which he couldn't come up with the cash, to buy The New York Daily News.)
And, as has been widely speculated in the press, Mossad murdered Gerald Bull in Brussels when the Canadian engineer rejected Israeli demands that he cease work for Iraq during the Iraq-Iran war on a super long-range gun.
Author Ostrovsky is not kind to his fellow North American Jews. He says Mossad divides them into three categories. First are the sayanim , volunteer spies for Israel. Second is the Israel lobby, which follows Mossad's guidance. And third is B'nai B'rith, which can be relied upon to "tarnish as anti-Semites whomever they can't sway to the Israeli cause." (The recent statement by Israeli journalist and ex-Mossad agent Josef Lapid on Canadian television that Mossad shouldn't have to assassinate Ostrovsky since some Canadian Jew surely could be found to do the job lends credence to this classification.)
The Other Side of Deceptionis a fast-paced, exciting book. On one level it can be read simply as a first-person adventure tale of one man dodging and running for his life from a bunch of killers justifiably famed for their competence at their trade. But what makes the narration totally absorbing is the realization that The Other Side of Deception is not a novel, but essentially true.
At a more cerebral level, the book also depicts Israeli officials and their American partisans as neither idealistic nor boring collectivist automatons, as depicted by the American media, but rather as fascinating, but dangerously misguided, individuals who are a menace to themselves and to all who choose to identify with them.
The Other Side of Deceptionis far more than information excitingly packaged. It is an insider's probing exposé of some Middle East realities that have been hidden too long from all but Israeli eyes.
Andrew I. Killgore is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
Reproduced gratefully from: http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0495/9504058.htm
The Ostrovsky Files
Poison Used in Failed Amman Assassination Attempt Could Shed Light on Mysterious Death of Robert Maxwell
By Victor Ostrovsky
April 1998, pages 11, 92
Amidst all the apparent chaos since Bin yamin Netanyahu became prime minister of Israel, there is a master plan. Despite all that is said about him, Netanyahu is well aware of the fact that the devil is in the details. And there is no one who can manipulate them better than he. The fact that the United States could not put together a coalition against Saddam Hussain is a result of U.S. leniency toward the madman in Jerusalem, who also has in his possession weapons of mass distruction, and who will use them if, in his somewhat delusional state, he feels the need.
From the day he took office Netanyahu wanted to control all bases of power. The fact that a Labor appointee remained at the helm of the Mossad, Israel’s CIA, was something that caused him great pain.
Therefore it was clear from the start that he was looking for an opportunity to rid himself of Gen. Danny Yatom, and hand the reins to someone Netanyahu could manipulate. Having control over the Mossad would give Netanyahu not only a powerful tool for his flaky international endeavors (assassination and insurrection), but also for internal purposes.
Whoever is in charge of the operational section of the Mossad can launch operations inside Israel with impunity. And since the Mossad is trained to work in hostile environments, doing so in Israel without raising the suspicions of the internal security apparatus is no challenge.
Therefore current changes taking place in the Mossad hierarchy fit nicely with Netanyahu’s ambitions. Mossad head Yatom has announced his resignation as a result of the findings of the Ciechanover commission of inquiry into the botched attempt to assassinate Hamas official Khaled Meshal in Amman. It was former Israeli superhawk Gen. Ariel Sharon who suggested the members for the commitee, knowing full well that Joseph Ciechanover—a mild, well-respected man who has a built-in fear of offending anyone—would never indict Netanyahu. In a worst-case scenario, he would wrap up the investigation as inconclusive. Ciechanover did better than he’d been expected to. He placed the blame partially on the head of the Mossad and then spread the blame on down to the ranks and away from the political echelon.
As this commission was an internal one, appointed by the prime minister, it had to report its findings to him. He then would decide what would be made public and what would remain secret. So there was little for Netanyahu to fear.
He made a minimum gesture of backing the Mossad chief until Yatom found himself at the end of a well-placed political plank. He had little choice but to jump into the water as food for the Israeli media sharks, who had been agitated into a frenzy for weeks with well-measured portions of his blood.
As expected, Netanyahu came out of the inquiry clean. Had Ciechanover and his team of yes men had the courage to point the finger at the man who ordered the assassination, things might have been different. However, the commission members made a point of saying they did not feel qualified to interfere with the political decisions of the country’s elected leaders.
As a means to correct such mishaps in the future, the commission members suggested appointment of an intermediary, knowledgeable in the ways of the intelligence community. The intermediary would make sure the prime minister is well aware of the potential consequences of operations as they are planned.
Once again Israel’s leaders have chosen the easy way out. Instead of realizing the stain on the national conscience a sanctioned murder has, the leaders of Israel preferred to find ways to perfect the tools with which such actions are taken.
In fact, more often than not, history teaches that violence breeds violence and a nation that believes it has a right to eliminate whomever it perceives to be an enemy wherever and whenever it wishes should not be surprised when someone—“for the sake of the country”—kills its prime minister, or when others plant bombs in public places killing the innocent.
The state of Israel was created with violence and since its inception some of its leaders have achieved their goals through such terrorist acts as the blowing up of the King David Hotel on the orders of future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Until the state of Israel proves ready to take a unilateral step in outlawing all terrorism against all of its “enemies,” it will continue to legitimize the terror aimed at itself.
Coming Apart at the Seams
The Mossad, it appears, is coming apart at the seams, not as a result of any operational slack but as a direct result of a deterioration in the moral fiber of the organization. It is not how Mossad does things that is the problem, but rather the things it is asked to do.
Even after the bungled assassination attempt on Khaled Meshal in Amman, Netanyahu has once more come out on top. He has managed to rid himself of Yatom and replace him with his own pick for the Mossad leadership, Gen. Amiram Levin. The 54-year-old Levin presently heads the northern command of the Israel Defense Forces and was Netanyahu’s commander during the prime minister’s military service.
In fact Levin is a “cowboy,” and it will not be long before the so-called “long arm of Israeli justice” will strike again.
Knowing that insiders in Mossad shrink from the thought of an outsider running the organization (outsiders do not know the “rules”), Netanyahu, in a stroke of manipulative genius, will appoint as a temporary head of Mossad a widely disliked former deputy Mossad chief, but one who knows all the dirty tricks needed to keep this gang in check.
He will run the foreign relations end of the organization while Amiram Levin, who will be a deputy for the time being, will be in charge of operations. In doing this Netanyahu kills two birds with one stone. He has his own man running the operations and he is dividing the Mossad into two separate organizations.
The one that is the clandestine side will be in the hands of a man he can trust intimately and the other is in the hands of Efraim Halevy, who will not do anything to jeopardize his own personal career.
During the inquiry into the Meshal affair, a witness who was asked why there was so little preparation in the field for the assassination replied that this method had worked before. From that one can safely infer that the Mossad had used this method of assassination more then once in the past.
Therefore there is little doubt that more then one person who seemed to have died from natural causes was in fact murdered. I believe it is the responsibility of the Jordanian government to make the poison used in the Meshal affair known to the world.
In so doing King Hussein will allow investigators to determine if, when and where it has been used before, and also will enable all nations, by being prepared to apply the antidote, to make sure it cannot be used again. Should the Jordanians decide not to do this, one should look suspiciously at their motives for protecting the tools of the Mossad.
Once that chemical is no longer a secret, and assuming the Spanish authorities have kept some of the tissue from the body of the late publishing tycoon, Robert Maxwell, who died mysteriously on his yacht a few hours after an unexplained stop in the Canary Islands, another mystery might be solved.
Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad case officer, has written two books about his experiences, By Way of Deception: The Making and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer and The Other Side of Deception: A Rogue Agent Exposes the Mossad’s Secret Agenda. Both are available through the AET Book Club.
Reproduced gratefully from: http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0498/9804011.html
From:
http://www.davidicke.net/emagazine/vol28/reviews/seedoffire.html
SEEDS OF FIRE: China and the Story behind the Attack on America
by Gordon Thomas
A BOOK NO ONE CAN AFFORD TO IGNORE
On the eve of the first war in the 21st Century, one perplexing question remains: the role of China.
The answer comes in what will be seen as one of the most important books of all time. It explains how China will use the crisis to launch itself as a new Super-Power – and become America’s new major enemy.
China by 2015 will have deployed tens to several tens of missiles with nuclear warheads targeted against the United States, mostly more-survivable land and sea mobile missiles. It will also have hundred of shorter-range ballistic and cruise missiles for use in regional conflicts. Some of these shorter-range missiles will have nuclear warheads; most will be armed with conventional warheads.
That prediction is from a CIA briefing paper to the Bush Administration. It is one of almost 100 pages of never-before published official documents in Seeds of Fire: China’s Voices of Conscience, by Gordon Thomas.
Using his unsurpassed contacts in Israel, Washington, London and Europe, Thomas tells a story no one else could tell. As the author of the global best-seller, Gideon’s Spies (published in 45 countries), he has written on intelligence matters for a quarter-century.
In Seeds of Fire he has created a masterpiece that reveals and explains much that is still secret. Seeds of Fire explains the headlines of tomorrow – and sets the scene for events that will change our lives forever. Essential reading for all those who want to understand the mind-set of the Bush Administration as it goes to war, Thomas takes you inside the secret briefings that finally led to Bush launching the first war of the 21st century. It reveals the crucial background concerning President Bush and his father in relation to China and explains why China refuses to back the West in its declared war on terrorism. Thomas reveals the story behind the downing of the US spy plane incident earlier this year and exposes the secret dealings between Russia and China – which explain their own roles in their lip-service support for countering terrorism.
Official documents never published before also include many that pertain to the Chinese acquisition of nuclear intelligence information from the Los Alamos National Laboratory on the W-88 Warhead; and proof of the link between newspaper magnate, Robert Maxwell and Los Alamos. Thomas also includes memos and redacted documents about an alleged copyright infringement by the U.S. Department of Justice – referred to by William Hamilton, President of INSLAW, developer of PROMIS (Prosecutors Management Information Systems) software -- as “the largest Global Software Theft in History.” These documents show Hamilton’s thwarted attempts to obtain the truth from the U.S. Government. They further indicate the continued cover-up that has hampered among others, the RMCP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) investigation in Canada.
In addition to being a social history which ranges deep behind the hidden face of China, Seeds of Fire is also a narrative which lends numbing credibility to what so far has only been a hint of China’s real intentions in the Third Millennium.
Seeds of Fire: China’s Voices of Conscience, by Gordon Thomas
History/Current Affairs/Non-Fiction; Dandelion Books - ISBN 1893302547; $25.95
Seeds of Fire:
China and the Story
behind the
Attack on America
by
Gordon Thomas
· Essential reading for all those who want to understand the mind-set of the Bush Administration as it goes to war.
· Takes you inside the secret briefings that finally led to Bush launching the first war of the 21st century.
· Reveals the crucial background concerning President Bush and his father in relation to China.
· Explains why China refuses to back the West in its declared war on terrorism.
· Reveals the story behind the downing of the US spy plane incident earlier this year.
· Exposes the secret dealings between Russia and China – which explain their own roles in their lip-service support for countering terrorism.
SEEDS OF FIRE IS A BOOK FOR THOSE WHO “NEED TO KNOW” …
…How does President Bush respond to a crisis behind the scenes?
…Why does Condoleezza Rice sit in on a debriefing of a Chinese defector?
…How does CIA Director, George Tenet handle the Bush Administration? How much does he tell them?
…How did the CIA learn of North Korea supplying Libya with state-of-the-art rockets?
…How did Saddam Hussein bankroll terrorism – with the help of a top British financier?
…How did the CIA learn of a new Russian-Chinese treaty – whose consequences could have a lasting effect on the President’s success in the first war of the 21st Century?
SEEDS OF FIRE:
· Reveals the reasons for the ever-closer relationship developing between Israel’s Mossad and China’s Secret Intelligence Service, CSIS.
· Explains how those close ties enabled America’s ultra-secret plans to be stolen from Los Alamos – giving China a powerful weapon in its determination to become the new military super-power of this century.
· Explains how this latest theft culminates a number of other spectacular operations by Mossad against the United States: the stealing of the Stealth bomber blueprint; the purloining of fissionable material that enabled Israel to found its own nuclear weapons facility; and, most sensational of all, the theft of software that has enabled Israel to insert a trapdoor, a Trojan Horse, which allows it to listen-in to all the intelligence secrets of the West, and now share them with China.
· Reveals how that theft was the result of the role played by the notorious Robert Maxwell, newspaper tycoon and Israeli government asset.
· How and why Maxwell stole over $750 million from his employees’ pension fund, from the City of London, and Wall Street bankers, as well as Israeli millionaires, to facilitate his life-style and intelligence activities.
· Why a high-level decision was taken in Israel that Maxwell must be murdered – and how that killing was carried out by a Mossad-trained assassination squad.
· How until now the facts were covered up, beginning with Maxwell’s autopsy.
· Reveals the background to the recent downing of the US spy-plane in the South China Sea – and challenges the official version by using a high-level named US intelligence source to provide a very different version.
· Untangles how all this came about because of the way the United States, Britain and Europe mishandled the massacre of the Chinese students on Tiananmen Square, Beijing, and in other PRC cities during June 1989.
· Reveals how diplomats from the West knew the exact details of the impending massacre – but were ordered not to share the information with the students.
· How President George W Bush’s mother resented having her favorite television show “Dallas” interrupted by the reports from China.
· Why the President’s father – then the President of the United States – refused to intervene even on the eve of the massacre – because he did not wish to disrupt the financial involvement of some six hundred American companies trading in China.
· Why the CIA now believes that an inevitable war is coming in the next 15 years between China and the United States.
· How China and Russia are forging a new alliance – one that includes up-dating Iran’s nuclear facilities as well as building new nuclear reactors for China.
· How China has increased its intelligence activities in Britain, Ireland and Europe – against state-of-the-art software facilities.
· Supported by some 80 plus pages of hitherto secret documents, Seeds of Fire lays bare the stunning truth of what the future holds.
The Distinguished Author:
GORDON THOMAS is the author of thirty-eight books. They have achieved total sales of 45 million copies in 36 countries. A number were Main Selections for Book of the Month Club; The Literary Book Club; and the Readers’ Digest Book Club. He has received two Mark Twain Society Awards for Reporting Excellence. Seven of his books have been made into major motion pictures, including the five-times Academy Award-winning Voyage of the Damned. Experiences won the Jury’s and Critics’ prizes at the Monte Carlo Film Festival. His Edgar Allan Poe Award was for Shipwreck. Currently his series of best-selling David Morton novels are being filmed by IAC International for a 22-hour television series to be screened internationally in 2002. Gideon’s Spies is also in the process of being filmed by Helkon International Media. Gordon Thomas’s next book, Mindfield, has already been pre-sold around the world. Currently he is a daily commentator for TV-3 of Ireland and the UK and his up-to-the-minute reportage appears throughout Europe in major independent and syndicated newspapers. He lives in Ireland with his wife, an interior designer, and his two children.
Available from HiddenMysteries.com