Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul

Robert Maxwell—ruthless, volatile, defiant; a man of gargantuan appetites, for food, wine, women, power, money—unabashedly bared his ambition to the world, as he strove to build a publishing empire. But, throughout his career, Robert Maxwell also nurtured another, more driving, and—until now—altogether hidden ambition, and that was to spy for Israel’s Mossad. In the end, as Gordon Thomas, an author who has long been trolling the murky waters of international intelligence, shows in this gripping narrative, the conflict between the tycoon’s public interests and spy’s secret pursuits led to his mystifying death, officially by drowning, in November 1991, offshore of the Canary Islands. According to Thomas’s well-placed sources in Israel, Washington, and London, Maxwell first came into Mossad’s orbit in the 1970s, when the crack Israeli spy organization stole from the United States its most sophisticated piece of intelligence-gathering software, Enhanced Promis.