Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy - 9780786712953

The world knows only half the story of British media magnate Robert Maxwell's well-publicized career: how he was born poor but thrived on ruthless ambition; how he devoured his competitors and outsmarted his most formidable peers to build an international empire as a publisher, politician, and industrialist. Now, for the first time, this explosive, assiduously researched book from best-selling author Gordon Thomas and terrorism expert Martin Dillon tells the other, long-secret half of Maxwell's story - the half that shows how he achieved and executed his topmost objective as a superspy for Israel's Mossad.
According to Thomas's well-placed sources in Israel, Washington, and London, the flamboyant 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, PROMIS. Of it Mossad made an electronic Trojan horse, a means by which the Israelis could surreptitiously amass strictly classified information from inside the very organizations to which they were covertly selling it. Mossad's representative in these extremely sensitive multimillion-dollar transactions with China, Russia, India, and more than twenty other countries was Robert Maxwell.
Increasingly, though, Mossad's super salesman and key operative in both the United States and the Soviet Union became Mossad's problem. Heralding the financial scandals currently rocking the American economy, Maxwell was helping himself to inflated percentages of Mossad's profits - as well as to $750 million from his own employees' pension fund - in more and more desperate attempts to maintain his media empire and meet the demands of intolerant creditors.
The conflict between the news tycoon's public interests and the spy's secret pursuits grew. Eventually, inevitably, it proved to be untenable to Mossad. And fatal to Maxwell. In November 1991, as his yacht cruised offshore of the Canary Islands, the life of media tycoon Robert Maxwell ended - officially, by drowning. What facts the news media did not then report or know, what truths even the Maxwell autopsies concealed, Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy now reveals.