Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

But Ben-Menashe knew the torture had continued: “It was good to be away from such awful matters.” He regarded what he was doing, providing arms for Iranians to kill untold numbers of Iraqis, as “different.” Nor did the plight of the Beirut hostages, the very reason for his wheeling and dealing, unduly concern him. The bottom line was the money he was making. Even with Kimche’s departure, Ben-Menashe still believed the merry-go-round he was riding would only stop when he decided—and he would step off a multimillionaire. By his count, ORA’s business was now worth “hundreds of millions”—most of it being generated through the house in the London suburb from where Nicholas Davies ran ORA’s international operations.

Ben-Menashe knew Davies had continued to amass his own fortune, far in excess of the sixty-five-thousand-pound yearly salary he was paid as foreign editor of the Daily Mirror; Davies’s commission from ORA was almost always as much in a month. Ben-Menashe didn’t mind if the newspaperman took “an extra slice of the cake; it left plenty to go around. It was still champagne time.”

Robert Maxwell dispensed it by the magnum from his office on top of the Mirror building to his guests. When the BA flight landed, Ben-Menashe would be chauffeured to see the tycoon in a limousine Maxwell would have sent, a further sign, Ben-Menashe felt, of the importance in which Maxwell now held him. In the car with him would be Nahum Admoni, Mossad’s director general, traveling on board an El Al flight an hour behind the British Airways jet. Ben-Menashe planned to spend the time waiting at Heathrow Airport for Admoni by reviewing all he had put together on how a powerful press baron had become the most important sayan Mossad had recruited.

Maxwell had volunteered his services at the end of a meeting in Jerusalem with Shimon Peres shortly after Peres had formed a coalition government in 1984. One of Peres’s aides would recall the encounter as “the ego meets the megalomaniac. Peres was haughty and autocratic. But Maxwell just drove on, saying things like ‘I will pour millions into Israel’; ‘I will revitalize the economy.’ He was like a man running for office. He was bombastic, interrupted, went off on tangents and told dirty jokes. Peres sat there smiling his Eskimo smile.”

Recognizing that Maxwell over the years had developed powerful contacts in Eastern Europe, Peres arranged for Maxwell to see Admoni. The meeting took place in the Presidential Suite of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, where Maxwell was staying. Maxwell and Admoni found common ground in their central European backgrounds; Maxwell had been born in Czechoslovakia (which had led Peres to utter one of his few remembered jokes, “He’s the only bouncing Czech I know with money”). Both men shared a burning commitment to Zionism and a belief Israel had a God-given right to survive. They also enjoyed a passion for food and good wine.

Admoni was keenly interested in Maxwell’s view that both the United States and the Soviet Union had a similar desire to achieve global domination, but through significantly different approaches. Russia included international anarchy as part of its strategy, while Washington saw the world in terms of “friends” and “enemies” rather than nations with conflicting ideological interests. Maxwell had offered other insights: the CIA’s secret contact with its Chinese counterparts was causing unease in the State Department, which found it could impinge on future diplomatic action and policies.

The tycoon had painted portraits of two men of particular interest to Admoni. Maxwell said that after meeting Ronald Reagan, he came away with the feeling that the president was an eternal optimist who used his charm to conceal a tough politician. Reagan’s most dangerous failing was that he was a simplifier and never more so than on the Middle East, where his second or third thought was no better than his original shoot-from-the-hip judgment.

Maxwell had also met William Casey, and judged the CIA director as a man of narrow opinions and no friend of Israel. Casey was running a “can-do” agency with outmoded ideas about the role of intelligence in the current political global arenas. Nowhere, in Maxwell’s view, was this more evident than in the way Casey had misread Arab intentions in the Middle East.

These views coincided exactly with those of Nahum Admoni. After the meeting, they drove in Admoni’s unmarked car to Mossad headquarters, where the tycoon was given a personally conducted tour of some of the facilities by the director general.

Now, a year later, March 15, 1985, they would meet again.

Not until Admoni and Ben-Menashe entered Maxwell’s office suite in Mirror Newspapers headquarters in London’s High Holborn did their host announce there would be one other person present to share the bagels, lox, and coffee Maxwell had ordered must be available whenever he was in the building.

Like a conjurer producing a rabbit out of a hat, Maxwell introduced Viktor Chebrikov, vice chairman of the KGB, and one of the most powerful spymasters in the world. With masterful understatement, Ben-Menashe would subsequently admit that “for a KGB leader to be in a British newspaper publisher’s office might seem a fanciful notion. But at the time President Gorbachev was on very friendly terms with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, so it was acceptable for Chebrikov to be in Britain.”

More debatable is what the founder of Thatcherism and its freetrade principles would have made of the agenda for the meeting. Sprawled in Maxwell’s hand-tooled leather armchairs, Admoni and Ben-Menashe led the discussion. They wanted to know if “very substantial amounts” of currency were to be transferred to banks in the Soviet Union, could Chebrikov ensure the deposits would be safe? The money was from ORA’s profits in the sale of U.S. arms to Iran.

Chebrikov asked how much money was involved.

Ben-Menashe replied, “Four hundred fifty million American dollars. With similar amounts to follow. A billion, maybe more.”

Chebrikov looked at Maxwell as if to ensure he had heard correctly. Maxwell nodded enthusiastically. “This is perestroika!” he boomed.

To Ben-Menashe the sheer simplicity of the deal was an added attraction. There would be no galaxy of middlemen chipping away their pieces of commission. There would just be “Maxwell with his connections and Chebrikov, because of the power he wielded. His involvement was a guarantee the Soviets would not steal the funds. It was agreed the initial $450 million would be transferred from Credit Suisse to the Bank of Budapest in Hungary. That bank would disburse the money to other banks in the Soviet bloc.”

A flat fee of $8 million would be paid to Robert Maxwell for brokering the deal. Handshakes sealed matters. Maxwell proposed a champagne toast to the future capitalism of Russia. Afterward his guests were flown in the tycoon’s helicopter to Heathrow Airport to catch their flights home.

Apart from Nicholas Davies, not one journalist in the Mirror building realized a monumental story had just escaped them. Soon another would slip from their grasp as Maxwell betrayed their journalistic skills to try to protect Israel.

At the beginning of his relationship with Mossad, it was agreed that Maxwell was too valuable an asset to be involved with routine intelligence-gathering matters. According to a serving member of the Israeli intelligence community:

“Maxwell was Mossad’s high-level Mr. Fixit. He opened the doors to the highest offices. The power of his newspapers meant that presidents and prime ministers were ready to receive him. Because of who he was, they spoke to him as if he was a de facto statesman, never realizing where the information would end up. A lot of what he learned was probably no more than gossip, but no doubt some of it contained real nuggets. Maxwell knew how to ask questions. He had received no training from us, but he would have been given guidelines of areas to probe.”