Excerpt Re Robert MaxwellFrom
The Octopus, Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaroby Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith
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"With the help of
Wackenhut and the Cabazons, according to
Ben-Menashe, the U.S. developed its own version of the back-door and the U.S. and Israel began looking for a neutral company through which it could sell the program to foreign intelligence services. The company chosen for the task was Degem, a computer firm with offices in Israel, Guatemala and the South African Bantustan homeland. It had been taken over for the purpose by Robert Maxwell, the publishing mogul who drowned under mysterious circumstances in 1991.
Maxwell's body was found floating in the ocean near his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, off the Canary Islands on November 5, 1991. He had not been seen for hours preceding his death. These types of rumors, of connections to Mossad and other international spy groups, had long circulated about Maxwell, and his publishing empire's finances had come under official review. Nevertheless, Spanish authorities concluded that Maxwell died of a heart attack, although he had no history of heart disease.
Maxwell's daughter Ghislaine said the family was satisfied with the investigation, but his sons, widows and lawyers insisted that the death was accidental, perhaps with an eye toward Maxwell's $35.8 million insurance against accidental death. ('Maxwell's Mysterious Death Raises More Questions," MIN Media Industry Newsletter, No. 47, Vol. 44, November 25, 1991.)
One of the forensic specialists who worked on the autopsy later noted that a perforation under Maxwell's left ear could have been caused by an injection of a lethal substance. Labor Party MP George Galloway openly speculated in the British House of Commons that Maxwell was murdered because 'dead men tell no tales.' Britain's PM John Major was even moved to deny publicly that British intelligence was investigating Maxwell's finances after his death. By 1995, however, Britain's Serious Fraud Office had spent $13.9 million tracing Maxwell's web of over 400 companies (Reuters, 2/15/95), resulting in charges against Maxwell's financial advisors, Larry Trachtenberg and Robert Bunn, and his two sons, Ian and Kevin, for defrauding pensioners. A second charge of conspiring with his father was brought against Kevin Maxwell, age 36. The charge claimed that months before the elder Maxwell's death, he and his son used other pension assets and shares in another Israeli company, Scitex Corporation, to illegally raise money for other Maxwell companies (Reuters, 5/26/95). The collapse of Maxwell's empire -- which ultimately led to son Kevin standing in the unemployment line and widow Elisabeth unsuccessfully fishing for a publisher to handle her memoir -- began well before he died, lending credence to the suicide theory."
Pgs. 23-26
"[Robert] Maxwell's role as a cutout for a foreign nation's sale of computer software has been implicitly acknowledged by the actions of the FBI. Robert Maxwell's dissemination of computer software was the subject of an FBI foreign counterintelligence investigation in 1984. Ten years later, in January 1994,
Inslaw obtained, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 18 pages relating to an investigation on this subject in New Mexico in June 1984. The FBI furnished the documents to Inslaw in response to a FOIA request for documents relating to Maxwell's involvement in the 'dissemination, marketing or sale of computer software product, between 1983 and 1992.' The FBI heavily redacted the 18 pages and ascribed the redactions to the secrecy requirements of national security. One month before the FBI released the documents to Inslaw, it partially reclassified two of the pages that had been officially declassified in their entirety one year earlier. The FBI redacted the newly reclassified portions in the copies given to Inslaw.
"Robert Maxwell also developed a business relationship during the latter half of the 1980s with two computer systems executives from the Meese Justice Department, at least one of whom had responsibilities relating to the proprietary version of PROMIS. Robert Maxwell set up a tiny publishing company in McLean, Virginia, in August 1985. That company then hired two senior computing systems executives from a unit of the Meese Justice Department that operated the proprietary version of
PROMIS. One was the Director of the Justice Data Center, the Justice Department's own internal computer time-sharing facility where the proprietary IBM version of PROMIS was operating for one of the legal divisions under license from Inslaw. The Director of the Justice Data Center resigned his estimated $90,000-a-year Senior Executive Service position to become Vice President for Technical Services at the six-employee start-up national defense company owned by Robert Maxwell." (Richardson, Elliot L., et al., Inslaw's Analysis and Rebuttal of the Bua Report, 7/12/93).
p. 128-129