Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy

Robert Maxwell — ruthless, volatile, defiant; a man of gargantuan appetites, for food, wine, women, power, money — unabashedly bared his ambition to the world, as he strove to build a publishing empire. But, throughout his career, Robert Maxwell also nurtured another, more driving, and — until now — altogether hidden ambition, and that was to spy for Israel’s Mossad. In the end, as Gordon Thomas, an author who has long been trolling the murky waters of international intelligence, shows in this gripping narrative, the conflict between the tycoon’s public interests and spy’s secret pursuits led to his mystifying death, officially by drowning, in November 1991, offshore of the Canary Islands. According to Thomas’s well-placed sources in Israel, Washington, and London, Maxwell first came into Mossad’s orbit in the 1970s, when the crack Israeli spy organization stole from the United States its most sophisticated piece of intelligence-gathering software, Enhanced Promis. Of it Mossad made an electronic Trojan horse, secretly amassing strictly classified information from inside the very organizations worldwide to which they were selling it. Mossad’s representative for these extremely sensitive transactions costing tens of millions of dollars in China, Russia, India, and twenty other countries was Robert Maxwell. Only Maxwell was also helping himself to some of Mossad’s profits — as well as 750 million from his employees’ pension fund — in desperate attempts to maintain his empire and to meet the demands of increasingly intolerant creditors. Aboard his yacht that November night in 1991 Maxwell no doubt still clung to the hope of a bailout by Mossad. But Mossad’s spy masters could not afford to smile on blackmail. This book reveals all the shocking reasons why. Eight pages of black-and-white photographs add to this astonishing tale of international intrigue, espionage, the Mossad, and murder.