Robert Maxwell

On 5 April 2013, the Rob Cooper article ‘Was Robert Maxwell a Soviet spy? FBI files reveal US fears the media mogul was working for Russia’ was published in The Daily Mail.

This is it:

“The FBI feared that media mogul Robert Maxwell was a Soviet spy who tried to use his publishing empire to send intelligence behind the Iron Curtain, newly-released files have revealed. The media mogul's attempts to publish papers from leading US universities in Russian repeatedly raised suspicions among leading academics.

Maxwell, who was born in Czechoslovakia, was building up his Pergamon Press publishing empire in the US in the late 1950s and 1960s when he was covertly investigated. But the FBI concluded there was no evidence the businessman was involved in 'any acts of espionage' after carrying out extensive inquiries.

They closed the case in April 1957 but still faced further claims from scientists that he was working as a spy. Details of the investigation were revealed in heavily-redacted FBI files which have recently been published online.

Researchers have previously claimed the colourful publishing boss, who bought the Daily Mirror newspaper in 1984, was a spy working for the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad.

In Britain, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office released files a decade ago which revealed they were concerned about Maxwell's company and its links to the Soviet Union in the 1950s. However, they also wound down their investigation after failing to prove the claims.

A letter marked 'secret' written to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in February 1955, revealed an investigation had found no evidence that Maxwell had been working as a spy… A subsequent letter sent to an unnamed academic in the Duke University engineering department by the FBI reiterated there was no evidence Maxwell was involved in espionage and the case was shut. However, suspicions about the former British army officer lingered well into the 1960s.

Russell Maguire, the chairman of the American Mercury magazine, wrote to the FBI in 1957 requesting information about the 'political preferences' of the members of Pergamon, and their 'financial report'. An internal FBI note added that there was no evidence of espionage activity 'on the part of Robert Maxwell in the United States; however... (redacted).' The FBI wrote back to Maguire saying: 'You may desire to discreetly look into the activities of one Ian Robert Maxwell.'

In 1958, Senator Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of the two future US presidents, forwarded a letter from Yale University which raised further questions about Maxwell. It said there were concerns he 'may be engaged in a large scale effort to transmit scientific information to the Russians.'

And in 1962 an agent raised the question that Maxwell's publications may be subsidised by the Soviets because they were a source of technical and scientific knowledge from around the world. There were also suspicions because Maxwell was allowed to enter the Soviet Union six times a year while most people struggle to get any access.

Maxwell, who later became a Labour MP in Britain and lived an extravagant lifestyle, made his millions from the publishing empire he set up after leaving the Army. He died in 1991 after 'falling' off his private yacht off the Canary Islands after plundering his publishing group's pension fund.”

Yep, if you’re Jewish you can be suspected of spying for Mossad and the Soviets, become a Labour MP, be a media moghul, plunder the pension fund of your employees and issue injunction after injunction to ensure you never get prosecuted, all at the same time.

Maxwell was buried in Israel. His funeral was attended by the Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, the Israeli President, Chaim Herzog, and cabinet ministers Ariel Sharon, Moshe Arens, Ehud Olmert, and Shimon Peres. His epitaph, which he wrote himself, read:

"I do believe in the ethical lessons of Judaism. I love and admire my peoples' devotion to the study of the Torah. I definitely see myself as a Jew. I was born a Jew, and I shall die a Jew, so help me God."

Seven months after Maxwell's death, his two sons, Kevin and Ian, and an American associate, Larry Trachtenberg, formerly a lecturer at the London School of Economics, were arrested in England on charges of fraud and theft of $250 million. Thereafter, the Maxwell companies filed for bankruptcy protection in 1992. At their trial in 1995, the whole of the defence costs of the Maxwell boys was paid by legal aid.

Maxwell’s fellow Jew, John Gross, had this to say in a 1994 panel discussion about anti-Semitism:

"A Jew from an obscure part of the Eastern Central Europe arrived in England. Starting from nowhere, he accumulated a vast fortune. Those who knew him realized he has amassed it by the most ruthless and brutal means, though he is able to keep up a facade as a public benefactor. He changes his name to one which nobody would take to be Jewish; when the question of his Jewishness is raised, he announces that he is a member of the Church of England...

Then, in his later years, he reverts to his origins. He dies, and although for most of his career he has been firmly embedded in English public life, his is buried in Israel. His funeral, an Orthodox Jewish funeral, takes place on the Mount of Olives...

Within days of his dying, his malfeasances are exposed: they involve colossal swindles of a particularly nasty kind, including ripping off five hundred million pounds from a pension fund. Thousands of ordinary workers see their pensions disappear...

What I have given you is an account of the career of the late Robert Maxwell…

An affair of this magnitude would once have produced a torrent of Anti-Semitic comments, possibly even Anti-Semitic violence. In the 1990s, the dogs didn't bark."

Outside of the Nationalist arena, they still aren’t barking. (Though some are beginning to growl)

In 1992, Nicholas Davies, a former Foreign Editor of The Mirror, wrote:

"Wealthy British Jewish media mogul Robert Maxwell was in some ways an Armand Hammer clone. Maxwell also was once a courier and money launderer for Soviet Russia, later becoming a fabulously rich and particularly corrupt capitalist…

For decades Maxwell had been involved with the KGB, not, as far as is known, as an active agent or in spying activities, but according to KGB sources in Moscow, he acted as a conduit, a banker ‘laundering,' the KGB's money outside the Soviet Union."

In, 1991, Jack Nusan Porter, a Jewish sociologist, wrote the following in The Jewish Advocate:

"Maxwell has been called the ‘crook of the century,' following revelations that he looted $900 million from his workers' pension funds and his complicated web of companies. Hour by hour, new and lurid details surface of Maxwell 's chicanery, deceit, and international intrigue. Yet, Maxwell was an ardent Zionist devoted to Israel and the Jewish people... Despite all the National Equirer glamour and clamor, beneath the swashbuckling image of ‘Cap'n Bob,' beat the heart of a real mensch, a decent, sensitive man, a Holocaust survivor."

In 1986 Ari Ben-Menashe, an Israeli undercover agent and arms dealer, claimed that he had dealt directly with Maxwell as a ‘sayan’ (unofficial Mossad aide) in soliciting his help for an Israeli coverup, to impugn actual photographs taken inside Israel's 1986 nuclear weapons plant by Mordechai Vanunu as fraudulent. This was elucidated in Seymour Hersh’s 1991 book, The Samson Option. Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy.

Almost all of the recognised media were, in 1991, convinced that Maxwell had committed suicide. However, the December 1991 edition of Spearhead, the magazine edited by John Tyndall, leader of the British National Party, disagreed:

"One agency which might have had a reason to bump off Maxwell, as well as the necessary means of doing so, is the very Israeli Secret Service Mossad with whom the late press Baron's name has been linked."

At this time Tyndall was very much alone with his ‘conspiracy theory’. But, in 1999, Gordon Thomas’ Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad, hit the bookshelves. Richard H. Curtiss, a former US Foreign Service Officer and Executive editor of the ‘Washington Report’ specialising in Middle East Affairs, reviewed this expose thus:

"Robert Maxwell… was murdered by a two-man Mossad assassination squad who, after Maxwell was lured to the Canary Islands, slipped aboard his yacht, killed him and pushed his body overboard. The reason, according to Thomas, was that Maxwell was threatening to expose secret Israeli operations if Mossad did not return funds he had lent it from the pension fund of his London Daily Mirror, newspaper to help Mossad finance its extensive operations abroad.

This arouses a question in the mind of any reader who has followed Israeli clandestine operations over the years. This writer had noted that Maxwell was murdered by Israel agents while he was negotiating the purchase of the New York Daily News, the only remaining non-Jewish-owned New York newspaper. A logical explanation was that when Israel was unable or unwilling to provide the remainder of the funds needed to finance his purchase, Maxwell had threatend to expose his extensive previous collaboration in shady Mossad financial and media operations.

The difference might seem minor, but if Thomas’s explanation for Maxwell’s assassination is accepted, U.S. investigative reporters might someday be less inclined to look into the circumstances of the subsequent purchase of the Daily News by U.S. real estate and media tycoon Morton Zuckerman, whose pro-Zionist media empire in the U.S., which also includes US News and World Report, and the Atlantic Monthly, bears some resemblance to Maxwell’s in Europe.

In fact, Thomas’s book outlines in some detail the manner in which Mossad and other Israeli agencies have built up a network of prestigious publications and journalists in order to have the means to discredit Israel’s enemies, and to float false explanations for events that might otherwise discredit Israel".