An Essay review of the book The Assassination of Robert Maxwell, by Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon
If you can believe the two retired Mossad agents among the thirty or so people interviewed here, Robert Maxwell's fate had been sealed in secrecy three months prior to his body being discovered missing from the cabin of his yacht on the early morning of November 5, 1991.
This book details the harrowing story of how Robert Maxwell perhaps sealed his own fate, and who likely helped him carry it to its inevitable conclusion. It is a "high jinks-packed" biography of one imperious and restless soul.
Driven by deep-seated psychological forces that took hold of him at a young age, Robert Maxwell embarked on a life of constant motion, perpetually living on the edge of a self-made precipice. One of these, or more likely a combination of them, arguably, inexorably led to his untimely death in the early hours of November 5, 1991.
To truly understand Robert Maxwell is to grasp how his inner demons, obsessions, compulsions, aspirations, and psychological imperatives orchestrated and ultimately overtook his life, shaping him into a restless international "energizer bunny."
Once these are understood, it becomes rather self-evident that Robert Maxwell's life could have ended in only one way: in a mysterious death somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Cap'n Bob, a six foot five towering 280-pound giant, began his colorful life as a dirt-poor Czechoslovakian Jew in a large family barely surviving on the fringes of what was once the Hapsburg Empire.
He left home at 16, joined the war against the Axis powers; acquitted himself heroically and ended up as his mother had wished, as an English gentleman, but also as a larger-than-life Israeli spy, a doubling-crossing soldier of fortune who sold his secrets to the highest bidder, and eventually became a much-reviled but incredibly wealthy media tycoon.
This egocentric, theatrical, and vain man was driven by three equally powerful compulsions: (1) an unending desire to help Israel and thereby exact retribution against the world for the loss of his family to the European Holocaust; (2) an obsession to become an English gentleman; and (3) a compulsion to become one of the world's wealthiest men.
Had these goals been stripped away from his uncontrollable psychological urges, Robert Maxwell would have been a resounding success by any normal standards, and may well have lived to enjoy the rest of his well-earned life as the English gentleman his mother had always wanted him to become.
However, Robert Maxwell's life was not destined to end in quiet success in a 300-year-old Italian castle in the British countryside. Instead, it ended in the secrecy of having served for over two decades as an Israeli spy. He waited for three other intelligence agencies to converge on him for his duplicitous activities with each of them. He watched his empire crash and burn financially. And he ended it in a mysterious death in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Herein lies the textbook example of why forward motion compelled by uncontrollable urges, and the systematic pursuit of life's goals, are often not quite the same things.
In every instance, as Maxwell shot pass his hard-earned goals, his restless obsessions took hold of him, slowly consuming him until nothing remained but the debris of scandal and questions surrounding his duplicitous spying for Mossad, the KGB, the CIA, and Bulgarian intelligence; his trafficking in arms and sensitive technology from West to East, and his international money laundering practices -- all converged at the same time into his mysterious death.
His story is the quintessential Shakespearean tragedy of near epic proportions, offered up here as a poignant object lesson for our times.
The two retired Mossad agents who handled Maxwell claimed that he made a fatal threat to reveal all his knowledge about his actions for Mossad, unless they bailed him out of his financial troubles to the tune of 400 million pounds.
However, anyone familiar with the actual workings of the spy game in the real world understands that if Robert Maxwell had made such a rookie threat against Israel, he was already "a dead man walking."
Why is this the case? Because working as a spy, or as a contract employee, is always a mutual arrangement. A spy is essentially a well-compensated, highly controlled, and closely monitored contract employee.
The mythical world of swashbuckling James Bond-style heroics is purely fictional. In reality, every agency has a "kill switch" attached to the lapel of all its agents.
In the real world of spy-dome, free-wheeling free radicals don't exist. Once you contract out your services, your degrees of freedom for independent action are reduced to a single task: carrying out the directives of the agency that owns your contract. Every time you sign a contract, you essentially surrender your life.
Robert Maxwell's life was temporarily leased to no less than four security agencies, all of whom sooner or later undoubtedly knew who else had a share of him.
They undoubtedly all also knew too that, given his age, poor health, mental instability, and deep debt, he had exhausted his nine lives and was no longer trustworthy, making him of diminished value to them all.
Robert Maxwell had become an international multi-dimensional security risk. He was living on borrowed time. His continued existence was just a question of timing, a question of which agency would pull his kill-switch first.
It's not entirely out of the realm of possibility that one or more of them might have even informally consulted on the sidelines of the spy game, drawing straws to decide who would be the first to execute a man who had outlived his usefulness to them all.
Since Mossad seemed to be the one who had been "into him the longest and the deepest," there might have even been a tacit agreement among them to let Mossad have the honor of eliminating this multiple double-crossing threat.
Regardless of who decided to carry out the act, you can be certain that the others were aware of when and where it was likely to occur. That's the essence of the real international spy world.
It cannot be stressed enough that contract agents are never globe-trotting James Bond-like free-radicals, darting across the globe engaged in mind-boggling derring-do. Even high echelon spies like Robert Maxwell, live out their lives only at the behest of those who control them.
Thus, Robert Maxwell's death was always overdetermined and a foregone conclusion. He had big juicy targets on his back, his lapel, and his head.
The very fact that he threatened to "go public" about what he had been doing for Mossad unless they forked-up 400 million pounds, either meant he did not fully understand the game he was deeply enmeshed in, or had a death wish and had decided to commit suicide under "spy kill-switch control."
Or worse, he was so arrogant as to believe that he was the only exception to the rules of spy dome.
Could the brilliant Robert Maxwell genuinely have believed that his controllers at Mossad headquarters would direct him to a secluded spot in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean solely to fork over 400 million pounds to him? Only a delusional megalomaniac could have believed such a ruse.
Yet, in the days just prior to pulling the kill-switch, Mossad guided him around by the nose, chasing his own tail, leading him to think it was the 400 million pound pot of gold at the end of the spy rainbow.
The very thought that the brilliant Robert Maxwell would show up at such an obvious appointment unaware that it had been arranged solely to terminate his life, sounds preposterous enough to be a weak plot to a bad spy movie.
I won't rehearse them here, as the book delves into great detail about each of them. However, a mere list of the numerous twists and turns in Maxwell's intricate spy web is enough to reveal to the reader the reason behind the mysterious death trap set for him on the edge of the high seas.
Neither James Bond nor Houdini could have escaped the traps Robert Maxwell had set for himself. Five stars
