BULGARIAN TRACK SOUGHT IN MAXWELL`S DEATH*

Views on BG | October 28, 2001, Sunday // 00:00

ABSTRACTED from The Independent
BY CHRIS BLACKHURST

At 4.45am on 5 November 1991, Robert Maxwell picked up the internal phone aboard his pounds 20m yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, and called the bridge. Twenty minutes earlier he had phoned to complain that his cabin was too hot - could they turn the air-conditioning up? Now, it was too chilly.

"The temperature is now too cold. Turn the air-conditioning off," he growled. They were the last words he is known to have spoken.

At 5.25pm the same day, a fisherman reported a body in the sea, some 15 miles from where Maxwell's yacht had been cruising when he moaned about the air-conditioning. A little over an hour later, a Spanish helicopter hovered overhead. "Naked, stiff and floating," was the matter-of-fact police description of the corpse of a man who, in life, was a bullying, monstrous figure - media mogul, tyrant, and corrupt wheeler-dealer.

His death, however, remains a mystery. Even now, remarkably little is known about it. He was 68, in poor health, weighing 22 stone and with a weak heart and lungs. Shortly before dawn, he left his cabin and went to the rear of the boat. He fell forward over a low rail and dangled over the water 10ft below. He clung on with his weaker left arm, tearing the muscles on that side of his body. Eventually, he tumbled into the sea, where he was found about 12 hours later. It was dark and the ship's engines were running. If he shouted and waved, the crew heard and saw nothing. He was naked, although it was later reported with a member of his family - with his son Ian at 10.40 on the night he died - he gave no indication of what was about to happen.

"See you tomorrow," Ian said. "You bet," was Maxwell's reply. Maxwell's last evening was spent alone. He ate a meal of fish and salad at a restaurant in Santa Cruz, Apart from the uncharacteristic isolation, there is no clue in this description as to what was really going on in Maxwell's life. And that is part of the mystery.

Among the more sober details is the fact that, six weeks before he died, Maxwell was visited by the late Andrei Loukanov, the former communist prime minister of Bulgaria and one of the publisher's closest Eastern European associates. Loukanov had access to Bulgarian secret service files on the killing in London in 1978 of Georgi Markov, who was injected with poison, possibly from the tip of an adapted umbrella.

According to rumours that refuse to go away, the Bulgarian files contained evidence linking the Markov murder with MI6. His assassination was planned by an agent working for both MI6 and the Bulgarians. The details of the Markov murder were contained in tapes and documents held by Bulgarian security. In later years, this rumour has it, MI6 made strenuous attempts to cover its tracks, including paying a Bulgarian official pounds 50,000 to have the archive destroyed.

Loukanov is reputed to have copied the file and, so the story goes, delivered it as a favour to Maxwell, who subsequently kept it with him at all times. Terrified that he was going to pass the documents and tapes to journalists on his own paper, the Daily Mirror, MI6 agents are supposed to have tracked him to the Lady Ghislaine, forced him to open the safe and hand them over, and then forced him over the side. The Mossad theory is equally lurid. This casts Maxwell as the keeper of Israel's dirty secrets, the Western "Mr Fixit" who disguised the funding of the country's top secret and diplomatically hypersensitive nuclear weapons programme through his businesses, and as a money launderer and arms buyer.

Alarmed that Maxwell, whose behaviour had become erratic and who was desperate for cash, might be about to blow their cover, the Israelis silenced him. Fantasy? Probably. Yet Maxwell is known to have made at least one vital contribution to Israel's nuclear industry. In 1986, the Sunday Mirror was approached with the inside story of Israel's Dimona nuclear weapons facility by an Israeli, Mordecai Vanunu, who had worked there. Maxwell took an obsessive interest in the story, working closely with the Israelis to rubbish the story and ordering staff to take Vanunu's pictures and documents to the Israeli embassy in London. Yet if Mossad really was afraid that Maxwell knew too much, what are we to make of the Israeli government's behaviour after his death?

Maxwell was accorded the next best thing to a state funeral, with President Chaim Herzog intoning over his corpse as it lay in Israel's Hall of the Nation: "He scaled the heights. Kings and barons besieged his doorstep. He was a figure of almost mythological stature. An actor on the world stage, bestriding the globe, as Shakespeare says, like a colossus." At his graveside on the Mount of Olives stood Herzog, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres, to name a few of the country's most powerful figures. For some, the turnout and Herzog's words testified that Maxwell had been a faithful servant to Israel in the darker recesses of power and arms. The last few months of his life were a whirl of deception and dishonesty. Hideously overstretched, with borrowings of pounds 2bn, his companies were running on empty. He was having to take from one side to pay the other. He had given shares owned by a finance company, First Tokyo Trust Corporation, as security on a loan from Swiss Bank Corporation for pounds 55m; he had been stripping the pension funds of their investments to prop up his share price. The media were closing in - first Panorama, then Hersh, then the Financial Times probed his affairs. Normally, Maxwell would see off such threats. As long as they got their cash, the bankers would be pacified - they were not to know where it came from. The press, too, would be silenced by a writ. But this was different. The cash was getting tighter and the banks less forgiving. Press coverage was increasingly emboldened.

The FT, he knew, was methodically assembling a picture of the true state of his businesses. So intense was the pressure that when Maxwell left, unannounced except to a few close aides, for his yacht to cure his cold, senior staff in London thought he had absconded. By then, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Citibank, three of Maxwell's biggest financial supports, had had enough. Goldman sold some of its shares in his company, MCC, while Lehman was preparing a global default notice on loans worth pounds 93m. Citibank wanted $40m (pounds 30m) it was owed. At one point a senior Citibank banker had refused to leave the office of one of Maxwell's senior lieutenants until the bank had its money. For a businessman like Maxwell, this was as bad it could get. The financial community would see Citibank's harder stance for what it was - a total loss of faith in Robert Maxwell.

He knew this as he boarded the Lady Ghislaine. He knew, too, that on the morning of 5 November, the FT was due to quiz his son, Kevin, about what the paper had found. He knew these things as he stood on his yacht. Finally, as he clung on to the rail with his weaker arm, the fight went out of him.

* Title, changed by the Editorial Staff of Breaking News

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