by Ed Berger at Unlimited Hangout
When Robert Maxwell’s body plunged into the cold waters of the Atlantic on November 5th, 1991, he left in his wake a seemingly endless parade of unanswered questions about the many lives he had led. In his outward facing persona, he was a giant in the world of media, controlling everything from major publishing houses to newspapers. Towards the end, this facade had crumbled under the weight of revelations that he had systematically looted the pension funds of his employees. This points towards Maxwell’s other life: that of a serial criminal, whose crimes escalated from theft to involvement with a worldwide network of organized crime outfits— with the Russian mafia, the Japanese Yakuza, and Chinese Triads just being some key examples.
There was the life of Robert Maxwell the arms merchant, thanks to the globe-trotting activities of his close business partner, Nick Davies. This life was overshadowed by that of Robert Maxwell the spy, with an espionage career stretching back to jaunts with British intelligence during the Second World War. Work for MI6 seems to have been long-running for Maxwell, but he tirelessly collected fellow—and rival—intelligence agency contacts throughout the years. The most important of these was his connections to the Israeli intelligence apparatus, though he also nurtured ties to American intelligence, and to the Soviet KGB.
This impressive range of contacts saw Maxwell embroiled in the infamous PROMIS affair, a joint CIA-Mossad operation that involved a case management database software, developed by Bill Hamilton and his company Inslaw, which had been stolen by a joint effort involving Israeli spymaster Rafi Eitan and President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department. One of the versions of PROMIS that was fitted with a “trap door” was weaponized by Systematics, a bank data processing firm owned by Arkansas financier Jackson Stephens, and by figures operating at a weapons development facility located on the Cabazon Indian Reservation in Indio, California. This trap door allowed intelligence agencies to peer into users of PROMIS, and so the software was sold to enemy and ally alike. Maxwell was selected as one of the ‘salesmen’ to peddle PROMIS abroad.
The entire operation advanced along several parallel tracks. Maxwell, working for the Israelis, marketed PROMIS to intelligence agencies and national security installations around the world and within the US, including to Los Alamos and Sandia laboratories. The version of PROMIS marketed by Systematics, meanwhile, was sold to large banking institutions, particularly those in Switzerland. This appears have to be been part of the CIA’s “follow the money” program, which tracked and monitored the financial flows of rival nations.
Against this backdrop there are lesser known,…
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