Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Maxwell had personally removed the money through a series of interlinked financial maneuvers which, years later, would leave fraud investigators awed by his skilled duplicity. Maxwell had given mass-scale swindling a whole new dimension, transferring hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time into the special account Mossad maintained at the Bank of Israel in Tel Aviv. The funds had sometimes been laundered through an account the Israeli embassy in London had with Barclays Bank. Other banks Maxwell used for his fraud, unbeknown to them, included Credit Suisse in Geneva, the bank from which Ben-Menashe had transferred $450 million of ORA profits, with Maxwell’s connivance. Sometimes the stolen pension funds traveled around the world, touching down at Chemical Bank in New York, Australia’s First National Bank, and banks in Hong Kong and Tokyo. Only Robert Maxwell knew the money was purloined and where it was at any given time in its journey. What made matters worse was that he frequently ordered his newspapers to attack “white-collar crime.”

Victor Ostrovsky, a Canadian-born Israeli who served as a Mossad case officer from 1984 to 1986, was the first to discover what had been happening:

“Mossad was financing many of its operations in Europe from money stolen from Maxwell’s newspaper pension fund. They got their hands on the funds almost as soon as Maxwell made the purchase of the Mirror Newspaper Group with money lent to him by Mossad, together with expert advice he received from its financial analysts. What was sinister about it, aside from the theft, was that anyone in his news organisation, travelling anywhere in the Middle East, was automatically suspected of working for Israel, and was only one rumor away from the hangman’s noose.”

On visits to Israel, Maxwell was feted like a head of state; he was a regular guest of honor at government banquets, and was given the finest accommodations. But Mossad had taken the precaution of being prepared should the proverbial “hand that fed it” suddenly withdraw its largesse. Discovering Maxwell had a strong sexual appetite and, because of his massive size, favored oral sex, Mossad arranged that during the tycoon’s visits to Israel he was serviced from one of the stable of prostitutes the service maintained for blackmail purposes. Soon Mossad had acquired a small library of video footage of Maxwell in sexually compromising positions. The bedroom suite of the hotel where he stayed had been rigged with a concealed camera.

Ostrovsky’s allegations had surfaced in two personal books that still inflame the entire Israeli intelligence community. By Way of Deception and Other Side of Deception tore aside the veil of secrecy about his time in Mossad. He described operational methods and named numerous serving officers, and may well have compromised some of them in a classic exposé by a whistle-blower who believed he had been unfairly treated when he was dismissed from Mossad.

Ironically, the Israeli government had ignored the advice of Maxwell to say nothing about Ostrovsky’s claims. In a meeting in Tel Aviv with Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, the tycoon cited what happened when the Thatcher government tried to halt publication of a book by a former MI5 officer, Peter Wright. His Spycatcher also contained similarly embarrassing details about Britain’s security service. Pursuing its campaign to stop publication, the British government had been finally routed in the Australian courts, where Wright’s prime publisher was based. Spycatcher had become a world best-seller and Britain had looked foolish.

The same fate had befallen the Israeli government. Pressured by serving and former members of Mossad—Meir Amit and Isser Harel had been particularly vocal in demanding action against Ostrovsky—Shamir ordered his attorney general to take legal action to halt the former katsa ’s first book.

The case also stoked Shamir’s virulent anti-Americanism, rooted in a fixed belief that the United States was partially responsible for the Holocaust. There were claims that he believed that President Roosevelt should have come to an “arrangement”—one of Shamir’s favorite words—with Hitler to replace Britain, then the dominant power in the Middle East, with the Third Reich. In turn, Hitler would have allowed the Jews to travel to Palestine, and the Holocaust would never have happened.

Nonsensical as the idea was, it had colored Shamir’s views of the United States to the point of near hatred. He had personally authorized, “as a gesture of goodwill” (another favorite phrase of Shamir’s) to pass on to the Soviet Union a portion of the estimated five hundred thousand pages of documents Jonathan Pollard had stolen. Shamir hoped this would improve Israel’s relationship with Moscow. The documents included current U.S. intelligence on Soviet air defenses and the CIA’s annual review of the entire Russian capability to make war. One document included satellite photographs, communication intercepts, radar intelligence, and reports from CIA agents in the Soviet Union. When Shamir had been told by Nahum Admoni that the data would almost certainly enable Soviet counterintelligence to discover the spies, he had reportedly shrugged.

At their meeting to discuss what to do about Ostrovsky, Shamir repeated to Robert Maxwell what he had told others: he would do anything to reduce American influence in the world, and was convinced that Washington had encouraged Ostrovsky to publish his books as an act of retaliation.

Shamir asked Maxwell to mobilize his powerful media resources to destroy Ostrovsky’s credibility. Maxwell pointed out that before employing him, Mossad would surely have checked his background.

Nevertheless, Ostrovsky became the object of a smear campaign in the Maxwell media, including the Tel Aviv tabloid Maariv, which Maxwell had bought. He was attacked as a fantasist, a liar, and, unlike Maxwell, not a true friend of Israel.

Having studied Ostrovsky’s books, senior members of the Israeli intelligence community knew much of what he claimed was true.

The New York court refused to accept the Israeli government’s argument that Israel’s national security was endangered by Ostrovsky’s revelations. His book became a best-seller.

Though the first person to publicly identify Robert Maxwell’s links to Mossad, Ostrovsky had by no means revealed the full story. Like so much else, it had its roots firmly entangled in the activities of Shamir’s old and valued friend, Rafi Eitan.

The two men had known each other since the 1950s, when they had served in Mossad, sharing an equal determination to fight to achieve Israel’s place in the world.

Thirty years on, in 1986, it had been Shamir who had stood by Rafi Eitan during the crushing criticism he had faced in the aftermath of the Pollard affair, condemned as the leader “of a group of renegade intelligence officers acting without authorization.”

The lie was a desperate attempt by the Israeli government to distance itself from an episode from which the intelligence community had hugely benefited, as had those of the Soviet Union and South Africa. With the full connivance of Israel, both countries had received valuable information about U.S. spying activities.

Nevertheless, with the concurrent unraveling of his role in the arms-to-Iran scandal, Rafi Eitan was professionally severely damaged. Though deeply hurt and angry at the way his own peers had singled him out for blame, the old spymaster had remained stoically silent in public; and for those trusted friends who had once sat in his living room and listened enthralled to his account of the capture of Adolf Eichmann, he had a new story to tell: how Israel turned on its own.

Increasingly fewer people rang Rafi Eitan’s doorbell on Shay Street, or joined him in admiring his latest creations fashioned from scrap metal. For hours he would stand alone before his furnace brandishing his fiery torch, his mind filled no longer purely with anger over the way he had been treated, but with plans to find a way not only to “get back into the game,” but also to make himself some “real money.” His decision to continue to help his country despite the ignominy poured on him contained a touching simplicity: “Patriotism is not a fashionable word anymore. I am a patriot. I believe in my country. Right or wrong, I will fight anyone who threatens it or its people.”