Robert Maxwell

The Czechoslovak bandit, Robert Maxwell, disappeared from his yacht, Lady Ghislaine, in 1991, a short while before his publishing empire collapsed and his theft of vast amounts of money from Mirror Group pension funds became known.

Maxwell’s funeral in Israel 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.

At the funeral, his epitaph, which he had written himself, was 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."

At his funeral, the Israeli President, Chaim Herzog, described him as 'influencing a large sector of mankind in many countries.'

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. Maxwell's 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."

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

"Wealthy British Jewish media mogul Robert Maxwell was in some ways a (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 'aundering,' 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’s, 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".