Gideon's Spies полностью

On that somber note, the meeting concluded that Admoni would see Maxwell and remind him of his responsibility to both Mossad and Israel. That night the two men met over dinner in Maxwell’s hotel suite. What transpired between them would remain a secret. But hours later, Robert Maxwell left Tel Aviv in his private plane. It would be the last time, it would turn out, that anyone in Israel would see him alive.

Back in London, Maxwell, against all the odds, seemed to be succeeding in holding on to his newspaper group. He was likened to an African whirling dervish as he went from one meeting to another seeking financial support. From time to time he called Mossad to speak to Admoni, always informing the director general’s secretary that the “little Czech” was on the line. The sobriquet had been bestowed on Maxwell after he had been recruited. What was said in those calls would remain unknown.

But a clue would later emerge from the former katsa, Victor Ostrovsky. He believed Maxwell was insisting it was payback time; that the huge sum of money he had stolen from the Mirror pension fund should now be returned to him. At the same time, Maxwell also proposed that Mossad should, on his behalf, lobby for Mordechai Vanunu to be freed and handed over to him. Maxwell would then fly the technician to London and personally interview him for the Daily Mirror. The story would be Vanunu’s “act of atonement,” written in a way that would show Israel’s compassion. With the chutzpah characteristic of so many of his actions, Maxwell added it would be a huge circulation booster for the Mirror and would unlock those doors still closed to him in the City of London.

Ostrovsky was not alone in believing that the preposterous plan finally convinced Mossad that Robert Maxwell had become a dangerous loose cannon.

On September 30, 1991, further evidence of Maxwell’s bizarre behavior came when he telephoned Admoni. This time there was no disguising the threat in Maxwell’s words. His financial affairs had once more taken a turn for the worse, and he was being investigated in Parliament and the British media, so long held at bay by his posse of high-priced lawyers and their quiver of writs. Maxwell then said that unless Mossad arranged to immediately return all the stolen Mirror pension fund money, he could not be sure if he would be able to keep secret Admoni’s meeting with Vladimir Kryuchkov, the former head of the KGB. Kryuchkov was now in a Moscow prison awaiting trial for his role in an abortive coup to oust Mikhail Gorbachev. A key element of the plot had been a meeting Kryuchkov had on Maxwell’s yacht in the Adriatic shortly before the coup was launched.

Mossad had promised that Israel would use its influence with the United States and key European countries to diplomatically recognize the new regime in Moscow. In return, Kryuchkov would arrange for all Soviet Jews to be released and sent to Israel. The discussion had come to nothing. But revealing it could seriously harm Israel’s credibility with the existing Russian regime and with the United States.

That was the moment, Victor Ostrovsky would write, when “a small meeting of right wingers at Mossad headquarters resulted in a consensus to terminate Maxwell.”

If Ostrovsky’s claim is true—and it has never been formally denied by Israel—then it was unthinkable that the group was acting without the highest sanction and perhaps even with the tacit knowledge of Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, the man who had once had his own share of killing Mossad’s enemies.

The matter for Mossad could only have become more urgent with the publication of a book by the veteran American investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel, America and the Bomb, which dealt with Israel’s emergence as a nuclear power. News of the book had caught Mossad totally by surprise and copies were rushed to Tel Aviv. Well researched, it could nevertheless still have been effectively dealt with by saying nothing; the painful lesson of the mistake of confronting Ostrovsky’s publisher (also the publisher of this book) had been absorbed. But there was one problem: Hersh had identified Maxwell’s links to Mossad. Those ties mostly involved the Mirror Group’s handling of the Vanunu story and the relationship between Nick Davies, ORA, and Ari Ben-Menashe. Predictably, Maxwell had taken refuge behind a battery of lawyers, issuing writs against Hersh and his London publishers. But, for the first time, he met his match. Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize winner, refused to be cowed. In Parliament, more pointed questions were asked about Maxwell’s links to Mossad. Old suspicions surfaced. MPs demanded to know, under parliamentary privilege, how much Maxwell knew about Mossad’s operations in Britain. For Victor Ostrovsky, “the ground was starting to burn under Maxwell’s feet.”