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
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:
