Don't Miss the Big Picture Here Caught Up in the Ghislaine Maxwell Trial

Editor's note: Ever hear the expression "don't take your eyes off the ball?" Well, in this case it's don't take your eyes off the technology.

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Source: Espionage History Archive

Robert Maxwell & The KGB

DECEMBER 20, 2019 | By MARK HACKARD

According to new revelations, the ultra-wealthy financier and elite sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein had a mentor who recruited him into Israeli intelligence early in his career: billionaire media tycoon Robert Maxwell. And nearly three decades before Epstein's highly suspicious death, Maxwell would suffer a similar murky fate. What did Soviet intelligence know about Maxwell? KGB veteran Col. Nikolai Shvarev tells Moscow Center's side of the story: 

At the beginning of the 1990s, his mysterious death became a sensation. And that's just for starters, after all, 68-year-old Lord Robert Maxwell – owner of one of the largest media empires on the planet; a billionaire; friend of Leonid Brezhnev and other politicians around the world; a carouser and debauchee whose impressive size and ferocious personality earned him the nickname "the killer whale" – had died. 

On that fateful night of November 4th, 1991, Maxwell's yacht Lady Ghislaine was not far off from the Canary Islands. The Lord had gone to bed after an early-morning phone call with his wife. And…he disappeared. Only the next day did search and rescue personnel discover his body in the ocean. Doctors ascribed it to a heart attack that caused Maxwell to fall overboard. But soon the doctors' verdict would be disproven. Judging by the injuries to his body, they determined that someone had dumped him from the deck into the water.

Along with the death of the billionaire, all his money disappeared from his accounts. His great media empire collapsed like a house of cards. And there came rumors that the drowned man had been an agent of four of the world's intelligence services at the same time!

[Image] Author KGB Col. Nikolai Shvarev

A Tangled History

The English lord changed names like pairs of gloves. He was neither Robert nor Maxwell, said Genadii Sokolov, a historian on intelligence who worked with the magnate at the end of the 1980s. He was born in 1923 in Czechoslovakia, in the Carpathian village Slatino-Selo, now the Ukrainian village of Solotvino. Abraham Lazby was the ninth child in Mikhail and Anna Hoch's family. They lived in a small clay cottage with an earthen floor.

When Hitler's forces occupied Czechoslovakia, the parents registered their son as Jan Ludvik Hoch. From that time, he became a member of an underground organization that was illegally ferrying youth to France. He was arrested and sentenced to death, but the young man escaped. Through Serbia, Bulgaria and Turkey, he reached Syrian Aleppo, then French territory. There Jan joined the Foreign Legion.

Soon after, he was sent with his group of legionnaires to France. Here the lad took up a new name, now calling himself Ivan du Maurier. At this time he participated in the French Resistance movement and then the Allied landing at Normandy. Further on fate landed him in Great Britain, and now Ivan became Leslie Johnson. The British recruited the young man into the intelligence service. Leslie was fluent in English; German; French; Czech; Slovak, Hungarian; Romanian; Russian; and Hebrew.

When he received a combat decoration from the hands of Marshal Montgomery, he had changed his name for the fifth and last time – to Robert Maxwell. Our hero finished the war as a captain. It was then that he contacted a representative of Soviet intelligence for the first time.

Work for the KGB and Mossad

It happened in the following manner: After the end of the war in 1945, Maxwell began searching out his relatives. Czechoslovakia at that time was in the Soviet occupation zone, and therefore he sought help from Soviet military authorities in Germany. And so contact was established with emissaries of the USSR's NKVD. News about the fate of his parents was tragic: they died in Nazi concentration camps. But Soviet intelligence's relationship with Maxwell got its necessary development.

We'll note that Maxwell has been christened one of the greatest spies of the Cold War. His record, however, isn't limited to work for Moscow. The main intelligence service in his life was Israel's Mossad. Itzhak Shamir himself, the future Prime Minister of Israel, enrolled Jan Ludvik Hoch into the Zionist underground organization Irgun at the beginning of World War II. There he received the agent callsign "Little Czech," under which he worked his entire life. The French Resistance and British Army became the first phases of the Little Czech's service in Zionist intelligence, well before the founding of the State of Israel and Mossad.

Further on fate took its own turn, and Maxwell left the British Army in 1947, entering the publishing business. Moreover, after the war Captain Maxwell had been the head of the British Foreign Office's press bureau in occupied Germany, where he made the needed connections. The capital for his scientific publishing house Pergamon Press made up all of 100 pounds sterling.[1]

Having foreseen its importance in the modern world, the enterprising Maxwell made his bet on scientific information. This sphere became fertile ground for the intelligence services as well. After all, scientists and academics aspired to publish their works in his journals and release books under his label. The Little Czech's masters could find much of interest there. Maxwell published, for example, the Soviet physicist Lev Landau.

Soon the publishing house became a leader in scientific-technical literature as well history, politics and memoirs. This was also done with an intelligence objective. At once the spy took under his control the publication of the UK Mirror Group's six newspapers, plus the US publisher Macmillan's magazines, books and newspapers. These were so-called publications for everyday people.

The Empire Spreads

Over the course of the 1980s, Maxwell's media empire encompassed 125 countries. He was known as a major publisher in Britain and held second place in the United States. Aside from newspapers, magazines and books, he had a stake in radio stations and television channels (MTV, for example). Competitors called him "Hurricane Bob," and intelligence services – Captain Bob.

Please go to Espionage History Archive to read more.

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