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Title: Robert Maxwell: Israel's Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul by Martin Dillon, Gordon Thomas ISBN: 0-7867-1078-0 Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub. Date: December, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.43 (7 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Spy Thriller
Comment: Through British citizen Robert Maxwell, vain, gross, brilliant and criminal, Thomas and Dillon paint a picture of corruption and decadence in the West, Eastern Europe and the Middle East today. Maxwell's loyalties are to himself and to Israel; Senator John Tower is in his pocket; and so forth. The United States, apart from furnishing the likes of Tower, furnishes the intelligence stolen by Israel and the subidies that keep that country in business stealing from its patron! The Maxwell- Mossad team steals spy software PROMIS from the United States, Mossad puts an undetectable trap door in it so Mossad can track the activities of anyone using it, then Maxwell sells it around the world (including back to the U.S. -- with the trap door). When Maxwell finally goes bankrupt, the losses are passed on to "the little people," while Israel and Maxwell's protected heirs remain in the black, at least materially. Thomas/Dillon present, in thrilling mystery adventure mode, the theory that Maxwell became a loose canon to his beloved Israel, among other things hitting on Mossad for a bigger pay-off, and its agents assassinated him.
The authors, both top-notch investigative journalists, base their study on official documents and on interviews -- what they uncover speaks for itself.
Rating: 1
Summary: Shoddy research, muckraking, and likely Dead Wrong
Comment: Robert Maxwell was surely one of the 20th century's most interesting rogues, and both his life and death contain many mysteries. But the single most shocking revelation in the Dillon/ Thomas (not to be confused with Dylan Thomas) book is that the authors have managed to be wholly uncredible as they tell their tale.
The obvious, open source, information is frequently wrong and shows that the authors never visited most of the places they describe. A single example will suffice: They that Sandia National Laboratory is part of the "Los Alamos complex". It isn't; they are separate and have been since the mid 1940s. Albuquerque, NM is said to be in a bowl ringed by mountains with cool air coming from Los Alamos; sorry. No. ABQ is not in a bowl and Los Alamos is 90 miles, as the road twists, away.
Bill Casey and Bill Colby are cited as prime interviewees for the book, which sounds plausible until you realize that by the time the authors started work Messrs Casey and Colby were dead. A good interview trick if you can do it. Of course the authors never reference a "fact" to a specific source except to quote the ubiquitous Ari Ben-Menashe who shows up in almost every anti-Israel book on the market.
There is an undertone and an overtone of real anti-semitism or at least anti-Israel feeling throughout the book, off putting of course. But it also undermines what little credibility the authors have left after you realize that nearly every page contains at least one obvious error of historical or geographic fact.
Don't buy it. If I could have rated it zero stars, I would have.
Rating: 5
Summary: This, maybe, is more than the truth
Comment: I doubt if I will ever read another book about Robert Maxwell. This book has more information than a lot of people, presuming the innocence of just about everything, would want to cope with. Among the people listed as interviewees in the front of this book are Efraim ---, six other former members of Mossad, William Casey, and William Colby. The death of William Casey was famously reported in VEIL by Bob Woodward, published in 1987, after Casey had a craniotomy and had been taken to Mayknoll to die. "He contracted pneumonia and was hospitalized on Long Island. There, the morning of May 6, the day after Congress began its public hearings on the Iran-contra affair, Casey died." Woodward interpreted Casey's death as a kind of silence which fell in line with the question: What hurts, sir? "What you don't know," he said. (Veil, pp. 506-507). This book, ROBERT MAXWELL, ISRAEL'S SUPERSPY/ THE LIFE AND MURDER OF A MEDIA MOGUL, (2002), was written in the spirit of William Casey's final interview. If the factual basis for some of its assertions seem a bit ghostly, you might blame all the Bills, or other outrageous bills, or the authors, Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, or anyone who seems to know more than any trap-door possessing Prosecutor's Management Information Systems software salesman with investments in newspapers, scientific journals, and an account in the Bank of Bulgaria could keep track of, at the age of sixty-eight, or after November, 1991, when Robert Maxwell, also, was dead.
A society which employs Certified Public Accountants presupposes that people will be able to keep track of certain things, certainly money, for sure, and who people are, though this book finds a certain glory in how easy it is to fool official guardians of the identity assumptions with simple tricks. Obviously, this works best at places like Numec, a company specializing in reprocessing nuclear waste, in Apollo, Pennsylvania. Anybody ought to be able to figure out how likely it is that the following events, prior to December 1982, but reported as background information, might have actually occurred:
His two companions were described on their cards as scientists from `The Department of Electronics, University of Tel Aviv, Israel'.
There was no such department.
The men were LAKAM security officers whose task would be to see the best way of stealing fissionable waste from Numec. All three spent four days in Apollo, passing many hours touring the Numec plant, sitting for more hours in Shapiro's office. What they spoke about would remain a secret. On the fifth day Eitan and his companions left Apollo as unobstrusively as they had arrived.
A month later the first of nine shipments of containers of nuclear waste left Numec. Each container would bear the words: `Property of the State of Israel: Ministry of Agriculture'. The containers would carry a stencil stating they had full diplomatic clearance and so were exempt from customs checks before they were stowed on board El Al cargo freighters to Tel Aviv.
The containers were destined for Dimona, Israel's nuclear facility in the Negev Desert. (pp. 55-56)
One way to be a Mogul, buying companies close to bankruptcy and investing enough to turn them into successes, is described in this book as just the starting point for how "Robert Maxwell was the Barnum and Bailey of the financial world, the great stock market ringmaster able to introduce with consummate speed and a crack of his whip some new and even more startling financial act. But increasingly his high-wire actions had become more dangerous - and long ago he had abandoned any idea of a safety net." (p. 34). Maxwell's arrangements with Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the Soviet KGB, who had been involved in the August plot to oust Mikhail Gorbachev from office, made certain bankers insecure enough to want Maxwell to pay some of their loans. Maxwell thought 400 million pounds might be enough "to stave off his more pressing creditors. He asked Mossad to use its influence with Israel's banker's to arrange a loan. He was told to try to do what his fellow tycoon, Rupert Murdoch, had done when he had faced a similar situation. Murdoch had confessed his plight to his bankers and then renegotiated his debts, which were almost twice what Maxwell owed." (pp. 13-14). Actually, Maxwell must have owed far more than he told the Mossad. A Daily Mirror headline in the photographs section, after the "Maxwell Dies at Sea" picture, reported, "Maxwell: 536m pounds is missing from his firms/ The increasingly desperate actions of a desperate man."
Assuming that much, the rest of the book is written around questions raised by Efraim.
`If the truth about Robert Maxwell surfaces and he is destroyed in the process, who else will be compromised? How great will the damage be to Israel?' (p. 15).
Americans might be interested in this book for judging the current chances for success of American policies that seem to parallel the desperation of Robert Maxwell, but might cause Bill Casey even greater pain, if he were still in charge.
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Title: Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad by Gordon Thomas ISBN: 0312252846 Publisher: Griffin Trade Paperback Pub. Date: March, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: By Way of Deception by Victor Ostrovsky ISBN: 0971759502 Publisher: Wilshire Press Inc. Pub. Date: 01 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Seeds of Fire: China And The Story Behind The Attack On America by Gordon Thomas ISBN: 1893302547 Publisher: Dandelion Books Pub. Date: November, 2001 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: Israel's Secret Wars: A History of Israel's Intelligence Services by Ian Black, Benny Morris ISBN: 0802132863 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: June, 1992 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network by Ari Ben-Menashe ISBN: 1879823012 Publisher: Sheridan Square Pubns Pub. Date: 01 January, 1992 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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