Part Two: Robert Maxwell: How Ghislaine Maxwell's Dad Ruined Science

How you doing, Thank you for having me.

is correct about that. And then he kind of goes he takes like a break from his like like a leave of absence, and travels alone to war torn Prague to try and track down the survivors of his family, and he gets nothing but bad news. Really, he is particularly scarred to hear that his nineteen year old sister, Shinya, had been arrested in Budapest and likely shot and then tossed into the river. One older and one younger sister survived.

His younger sister was actually rescued directly by Raoul Wallenberg, who we've covered in our one of our Reverse Bastards episodes. Yeah, Wallenberg in Budapest was like writing, I think Swede. I think of Swedish Swedish visas for everyone on every Jewish person under fifteen, and just like lying, it's like they're all citizens, like every one of them.

acknowledges his Jewish roots for decades. When he returns to occupied Berlin to work as an interrogator, he fully inhabits

Robert Maxwell, British officer. He's promoted to a captain at this point, and it's not like hidden, like he doesn't try to cover up his origins, but he doesn't tell people he starts meeting now about them, and the vast majority of people who know and work with him have no idea that he's Jewish, that he grew up, you know, in eastern Czechoslovakia, and he you know, it's one of

those things I don't think he was ever religious. So I think Judaism was never like his his faith in a meaningful way, because I think he's just kind of a natural atheist. And I think after this, acknowledging that that's his heritage is just too painful because his family has been annihilated, right, and so he just really doesn't for decades. He does take care of his sisters. He sends them both to the United States, he sends his younger he pays for his younger sister to go to college.

So he continues to take care of his family. He just I think it's too painful for him to kind of acknowledge his background in any way.

a captain. He's fairly influential. He's good at meeting and knowing people. He's a war hero, and he's able to take care of his family because number one, his legal status is super clear and he's a hero, right, and he does take care of his family, though what little is left of it. Now he is an interrogator now in Berlin, and it is unlikely that his job as an interrogator always stuck to the letter of international law, by which I mean he probably tortured people. Right, this

is the start of the Cold War. He is in Berlin interrogator people, and initially a lot of former Nazis. But like, one has to assume there's some ugliness to

this job. Now, this is also a time nineteen forty six when a foreign occupier could behave more or less any way they wanted to among the captive German population, and Maxwell certainly did for idea of like how because everyone's starving in Germany, and also most of them had been Nazis, so like for example, my grandpa is in this at the exact same period of time and basically the same area I have in my house, like two grandfather clocks that he bought for like fifty cents each.

He bought like a shitload of these, like one hundred and fifty year old grandfather clocks from starving Germans and just shipped him back to the US because he was as a poor Oklahoma boy. He's like, yeah, I'll take all these formerly rich Europeans grandfather clocks for pennies, fuck them,

like hard to blame anybody for that. I consider them more booty and Maxwell's Maxwell does the same thing, but with so much more panache because so because he's he's got this job where he's like interrogating old Nazis, he meets Hitler's former dentist, which is first very weird connection. Yeah, and so Hitler's old dentist tells Robert Maxwell, you know, I know the guy who bred Hitler's beloved German shepherd Blondie. That's the dog that he like like fed Cyanide to

when the bunker, like this is his pet. And there's this dude who's like the dog, the Kinnel operator who bred the dogs that like were Hitler's dogs, and so Robert Maxwell's like I got to meet this motherfucker. So he visits this guy.

involved in this world of espionage. This will be mythologized, but what we can confirm is really cool, which is that he befriends a Soviet colonel because he speaks Russian really well, and you have to imagine they're very drunk. He convinces the Soviet colonel to break into Georgie Zukov's office so they can photograph his papers. Like so much vodka has to have been part of this story to get this colonel to like, yeah, fuck Zukov, insane. Yeah,

it's nuts. He also carries out clandestine surveillance of his old homeland, Czechoslovakia, which is where he gets noted by the Czech like foreign service is looking like a hotter Clark Gable. He's also described by many who knew him as being a bit of a dick. An article in The Guardian at this time describes him as tall, brash and not at all content with his already considerable success. An acquaintance at the time recalled him confessing his greatest

desire to be a millionaire. So you know what else is there after killing every night? Literally getting down to the fact that you're down to Hitler's dog breeder, so you got no more Nazis to kill?

goes next. So he talks a lot at the time about how he's going to become a millionaire, and he talks about specifically, I'm going to find a great unexploited resource and find a way to put myself in the middle of the distribution chain. Right. So again he has this kind of eye for business, and he doesn't know what he doesn't want to do anything in particular other than find the next great resource and make himself key to it.

So science is a discipline is given how crucial it is to World War two by the time that war starts, Like the concept of science as like a professional field that like people go into is still pretty new, and in fact, even in like forty five forty six, some of the senior scientific minds in the world had grown up and started their careers at a time when science was something gentleman hobbyists did.

the world. What is that infrastructure going to look like?

side during this, they're like, well, fuck we are. We do not have a scientific industry that's capable of competing with the Americans in the way that we need to.

arm was dismal. Science publishers were mainly known for being inefficient and constant broke journals, which often appeared on cheap, thin paper, were produced almost as an afterthought by scientific societies. The British Chemical Society had a month's long backlog of articles for publication and relied on cash handouts from the Royal Society to fund its printing operations. So there is

no money in scientific publishing. It's like they barely even consider It's like, oh yeah, you figured out how nuclear energy works. We should probably write about that at some point in a place other people can read it, but not a priority. You know, we'll just let that happen whenever.

media got a little out of pocket. So he is basically put in charge of all German print media, right, so as these as newspapers start up again, he is like both the censor, so he's like approving everything that goes out, but he's also figuring out how to make these profitable. And he just turns out to be really good at it, Like he's shockingly good at knowing how to make a newspaper work financially. He probably got that

because he has no experience in this. He probably got the job because he was trusted by the intelligence services. You know, he's in with MI I six, and they're like, probably good to have a guy who is with us running the papers in post war Germany. But he launches his first big paper as a social democratic paper that like becomes wildly successful and makes a huge amount of money. And it's like it's really hard in Germany, which is devastated to get enough like ink and paper, and somehow

he manages to and no one really knows how. The assumption is a mix of like bribery and his connections with like organized crime, and just he he's also like people will say, like he was scary. He'd killed dozens of men and he was huge. So if he needed something and he couldn't get it through other reasons, he would just threaten to beat the shit out a few wow, And yeah, I probably wouldn't have wanted to fight. Nineteen forty six Robert Maxwell.

quite well. Now, pre war, Springer had been the world's largest publisher of scientific literature because Germany had been the scientific center of the planet in many ways prior to

Hitler's rise to power. But once the war starts, science kept going because obviously the Nazis still funded science, but Germany was a pariah state and so they weren't publishing anything for the rest of the world, and so papers would continue to be written like sort of collecting the whole history of like all of these scientific achievements being made during the Nazi period, and they were just building up in a warehouse that Springer had that he was

trying to keep, you know, far enough away that it didn't get blown up by Allied bombs. So at the end of the war, Ferdinand Springer is broke, but he has sixty three thousand books filled with like the science of rocketry, which the Nazis had developed to a massive extent, and like advanced metallurgy and medical like all of this really important, crucial science that's going to be a big part of the space race. It's just sitting in springer warehouse, unpublished, right.

And Maxwell becomes this guy's friend, and so while they're talking, Ferdinand explains to him how scientific publishing works. And he's like, you know, so governments fund scientific research, as do universities, and there's grants, and there's grants come from you know, sometimes from governments, from different funds, from wealthy philanthropists, and they pay for the science. And then the scientists produce these papers about their findings and then publishers basically get

them for free. And Maxwell's like, wait a second, free, the most like important valuable resource in the world. People aren't even really charging for it. I got a motherfucking idea. And yeah, part of his idea is that Springer can't do anything with all these papers because German nationals are not allowed to ship things overseas right now, Like, there's a limited quantity that you can mail outside of Germany

as a German for obvious reasons. But Robert Mack can mail whatever the fuck he wants, right Well, so he's found his great resource and he's about to start exploiting it. He starts a company with the goal of shipping Springer scientific publications over to the UK and finding journals to publish them. Right, he gets Springer, who again is broke, hands him the worldwide distribution rights to all of German science, right as long as he can find a way to

move it. Now, he maxwell's comfortable at this point, but he's not rich, and sixty three thousand books worth of stuff is you have to be rich to ship that somewhere. We don't actually know how he pays for this, like because it's expensive. He has no real customers. Initially for years he'll have kind of claimed that, like, oh, my wife's family has some money, so I use my savings and theirs and that funded this. But his family is like, no, he didn't really give him. We didn't like him, Like,

we didn't give him anything. Because his wife comes from like kind of a bougie family and they do know that Maxwell's like a poor Jewish kid from nowhere. They don't care that he's like a war hero now so we find out years later. We don't learn this until after Maxwell dies in the year two thousand. A former m I six officer claims that British intelligence, literally the James Bond Agency, funds Maxwell's startup because he had been working undercover for them and they considered it a potentially

valuable venture. M I six is intelligently like, probably good to have a hand in all of scientific publishing. That like, that might that might work out for us. Actually, here's some money. And the the m I six officer who reveals this says it's the only time m I six ever like completely funded a startup. Maybe that's true, maybe that's not. I don't credit a literal m I six officer with necessarily being honest about everything.

because there's obviously a hunger for this material. But the UK, this just adds to the problem the country has, which is the scientific publishing in the UK can't handle the UK's backlog of unpublished science sixty three thousand books worth of added stuff. It's just over massively overloaded the system right per the Guardian quote, the British government solution was to pair the venerable British publishing house Butterworths with the

renowned German publisher Springer. To draw on the latter's expertise. Butterworth's would learn to turn a profit on journals, and British Science would get its work out at a faster pace. The Butterworth's directors, being ex British Intelligence themselves, hired the young Maxwell to help manage the company, and another X spook, Paul Rosbaud, a metallurgist who spent the war passing Nazi nuclear secrets to the British through French and Dutch resistance,

as scientific editor. When Butterworth's decided to abandon the fledgling project. In nineteen fifty one, Maxwell offered thirteen thousand pounds about four hundred and twenty grand today for both Butterworth's and

Springer's shares, giving him control of the company. Rose Boud stayed on a scientific director and named the new venture Pergaman Press, after a coin from the ancient Greek city of Pergamen featuring athena goddess of wisdom, which they adapted for the company logo, a simple line drawing appropriately representing

both knowledge and money. So what starts as a British program to like get scientific publishing up winds up entirely in Maxwell and rose Boud's hands, because the company that the British government contract with is like, ah, there's probably not a lot of money in this. Yeah, we'll take thirteen thousand pounds for now being in control of all of scientific publishing for Germany and the United Kingdom. That's where Maxwell's made himself. He's not thirty, Like.

early fifties. So he gets in bed with his German chemist and this chemist has set up a deal to exchange chemicals shipped from Germany for glass China and goods manufactured elsewhere. Right, because Germany doesn't have a lot of stuff at the end of the war except for some raw materials. A decision is made midway through the process that we should probably send all of the stuff through

Argentina because Argentina can pay with pork bellies. Now, Like, I'm not an economic expert, I don't know why this made sense to them, but they decide like, oh, yeah, pork bellies, that's better than cash. That'll really work out.

really want these, So maxwell they keep going. He keeps trying to sell these rancid pork bellies to different countries, and he finally finds a country that's like starving to death, Austria, and Austria's like, yeah, we will literally take anything it's rancid. Fine, we'll make it into sausage. We're doing so badly right now,

toxic pork is the best Austria can do, thanks Hitler. Yeah. Again, there's like a if you've been to Berlin, you've had like curry worst, right, which is like a Berlin dish, and it's like curry on a sausage or a hot dog. It got started because in this period of time they're like sausages were like more than a fifty percent sawdust and they had curry powder because the British were there. So it was like people won't notice the sawdust as much if we put curry on it.

hydraulically frack, you know. So they show up at this big conference because there's all these scientists who are presenting papers on like cutting edge nuclear research. So they run an office nearby, and Maxwell spends the whole trip. He's just like crashing seminars and luncheons and dinners and finding every scientist he can who's got a paper out and is like, hey, man, sign an exclusive contract with me. I will give you money in exchange for the rights

to everything you publish. Right, And this isn't a lot of money for him. I think he's giving these people like hundreds to thousands of dollars. But these are like scientists aren't like Richmond traditionally, especially in this period, and paper publishing had never really been worth money before, so they're like this is a great deal, right, you know, suddenly,

finally someone values my work. So Maxwell is just like he's like he's basically just going door to door finding every scientist and being like, what'll it take to sign you right now? Right, Like, He's like, he's like a Hollywood agent. But for nuclear physicists.

Don Frank, a competing publisher, considered this dishonest, but it worked. What made pergam And so profitable was the fact that, and this is something that he realizes as a result of his conversations with Ferdinand, every university and every government scientific organization in the entire Western world needs access to all of the relevant research in their field as it's being published. This means subscriptions to every relevant journal are a necessity.

start figuring this out. But he makes another prediction, which is that this will work the opposite of the way most things work. The more publishers there are putting out more journals, the more money we will make, right, because they can't not subscribe to everything, because all of the research is unique, and in order to stay up to date,

they have to buy everything. And at this point in time, all of these universities, all these government they're just being funded by these massive amounts of like Cold War era defense cash. So the money is unlimited, right, And that's really what he realizes, Like, I can charge whatever I want, I can put out as many journals as I want, and there will be an endless amount of cash for me.

journals to cover new areas of study. The scientific societies that had traditionally created journals were unwieldy institutions that tended to move slowly, hampered by internal debates between members about the boundaries of their field. Rosebod had none of those constraints. All he needed to do was convince a prominent academic that their particular field required a new journal to showcase it properly and install that person at the helm of it.

Pergaman would then begin selling subscriptions to university libraries, which suddenly had a lot of government money to spend. So you're literally walking up to guys and saying, hey, what you do seems new? You should have a journal, And suddenly every college in the western world subscribes. Immediate profits right there are so a really good magazine is working on like a ten to fifteen percent profit margin, right, and that's a magazine that's doing very well. His profit

margins on these journals are over fifty percent. Wow, Like, it's insane how much money they make off of this. Speaking of insane money, help us get some of that, you know, so we can subscribe to scientific journals. No, we use sy hub. Everyone use sy hub. Fuck these people, fuck scientific publishing as an industry. Steal it not legal advice, and we're back. Sihub is a website that collects most of the journals you might want. If you like, find

a journal that's paywalled, you go to syhub. Google it. There's a bunch of different mirrors. Put the doi number or just the URL link to the study you want, and syhub will generally return it for free. It's great anyway, I'm pretty sure I'm not. That's not illegal for me to say.

a great evil. And he leaves, and so Maxwell's in sole charge of Pergama now, and once he grasps Rosebaud's idea, he runs with it like fucking Ussane Bolt. He's launching new journals off the strength of like somebody he's having like drinks and some guy mentions a new idea and he's like, bam, journal motherfucker if a researcher. Yeah, like that, Like that's literally how it's happening. By the late fifties,

he brought us sort of sleazy. He's like the first eighties guy, Like he's amazing, and he brings this energy to scientific publishing. And the fact that he is this way is so out of time that it's shocking to his new peers. So who show up at these scientific conferences in like these fine tailored Italian suits. He's got his hair slicked back like a gangster. He described the journals that he owned as you lambs and himself as

King David, like cutting them up for parts. Basically that's such a Again, this is why Rosebaud quits in fifty six is he's like, I don't know, maybe this feels gross.

He's taking these guys who have spent their whole and ladies who have spent their whole careers with their nose in a book generally don't have much money begging for grants, and he is treating them like movie stars or pop musicians. Like at one point he gets a bunch of these guys together to start a journal, and he puts them on a chartered boat tour of the Greek aisles to

figure out how to make the journal. Like it is like classic Hollywood erashit right where you're like, go go hang out in Italy for three months and write this movie together or something like that. Like that's what he's doing with these scientists, and like yeah, they they're like this is much better than being a poor scientist.

a lot worse. But he makes that process inevitable, even though he is he is really dedicated to the scientists in this period of time. And also I just want to add to what Adam said, if anyone wants to put me on a chartered boat tour of the Greek Isles to start a journal, I'm in. You've got me, you bought me, I'm paid for like yeah. So he told his deputy director at Pergaman, we don't compete on sales, we compete on authors, right, So this is a talent

driven business. And that's what again, it's very much it feels very similar to like Hollywood, I don't like, at least at this time. I don't know how much that's an influence to him, but he is kind of working that way. His attitude is that like drawing in more authors exclusively means like more journals that he owns, and thus more sales. In nineteen fifty nine, Pergama had forty journals.

By the mid sixties it would publish more than one hundred and fifty, which is like almost like ten times as many as el Selvier, which is again the most evil of these companies today, but at this point is just barely keeping up as like a competitor to Pergaman. Maxwell is not like a particularly patriotic businessman. He does not see national borders. He has really good connections with the USSR. It's always considered weird and part of why

people are wondering about his spy credentials. Whenever he visits Moscow, the Soviet government like puts him up in a mansion like they really like him, and I think, I mean, he definitely is doing some spying, and I'm sure they're also putting them up in the mansion because it's like wired and they want aspire out of him. But he has really good connections too. He speaks really good Russian. He knows a lot of prominent people in the Soviet Union.

And the evidence for that is that when like the USSR launches Spudnik, he negotiates within days an English language deal with the Russian Academy of Sciences to become the exclusive English language publisher of like Russian science, right, all of like these. Yeah, so he is connected.

starts are very obvious. Today. The modern field of scientific literature is cripplingly expensive for institutions like libraries and colleges, the latter of which passed their costs on to students. And while Maxwell initially wowed scientists with promises of payouts, by the mid sixties he'd helped to normalize a system where individual researchers were more reliant on journals than journals

were on them. Per the Guardian, scientists create work under their own direction, funded largely by guff and give it to publishers for free. The publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments. A process known as peer review is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis.

The publishers then sell the product back to the government funded institutional and university libraries to be read by scientists who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place. It is as if the New Yorker or the economists demanded that journalists write and edit each other's work for free and ask the government to foot the bill. And like, nothing works like this industry does. And that is, by the way, description of how it is.

fucking random house does that shit? Like, what what is the what is the power that the that these companies have? Like why why wouldn't a university system just start their own journal and do this themselves?

as Maxwell's about to do, buy a palace. And again he's the least he's not as bad as the guys who replace him, right, because he does ultimately he makes a lot of times he will make decisions that cost him money because a scientist says it's the right thing to do, and he does ultimately side with his scientists, and there's and he's able to do that because there's so much flex there's so much extra profit he can

afford to. But the guys who replace him aren't aren't even going to have that little level of scruples, right, They're just not going to give a fuck. And this is going to disrupt the timeline of these episodes a little bit. But in order to talk about kind of where things are today with scientific publishing, I want to quote once more from another Guardian article. The publishing business

is perverse and needless. The Berkeley biologist Michael i And wrote in a two thousand and three article for The Guardian, declaring that it should be a public scandal. Adrian Sutton, a physicist at Imperial College, told me that scientists are all slaves to publishers. What other industry receives its raw materials from its customers, gets those same customers to carry out the quality control on those materials, and then sells the same materials back to the customers at a vastly

inflated price. Today, every scientist knows that their career depends on being published, and professional success is especially determined by getting work into the most prestigious journals. The long, slow, nearly directionless work pursued by some of the most influential scientists of the twentieth century is no longer a viable

career option under today's system. The father of genetic sequencing, Fred Sanger, who published very little in the two decades between his nineteen fifty eight and nineteen eighty Nobel prizes, may well have found himself out of a job. That's actually, I think a really important point is that so many of the foundational discoveries of modernity as we know it were not the result of like a team of people working in for for a company in order to make

a thing. It was the result of a scientists to had an interest and kind of in a meandering way, pursued it for decades until he changed life for every human being. Right, Jonas sal Ketty personal crusade against polio. You know, like that doesn't happen. It can't happen. And this is part of why right, and that's really bad for all of us well.

The noble family who had to live there sold it off in nineteen fifty three, and Maxwell buys it in part because like again, he's not English, he's not naturally part of high society, but by buying this palace he can kind of force himself to be right. Now he can throw these kind of parties that everyone in high society will show up at. And he makes this both his home and the headquarters of pergam And Press, right, and you know, that's kind of the way things work

in the UK. I think still to this day that like you can skip a bunch of levels of the social hierarchy if you buy the right house.

most productive period as a businessman. His son is just in a fucking coma die. It just it kind of breaks everyone. Like his family is sort of ruined. As a result of this, he and Betty stop talking really

like they don't. Their relationship is never the same. And normally when we say that for a man this rich it's because and he does cheat on her a bunch, but like in this case, it's because, you know, it's just this just breaks their relationship and it breaks their ability to kind of care for their other kids, Like he stops talking to his surviving children until And I hate to make anyone sympathetic to Gilan Maxwell, but in nineteen sixty one, his youngest daughter, Gilan, at age three,

tells her mother, Mummy, I exist in an attempt to get attention because like after this accident, they're just ignoring their kids so much. Like she has to like state to her parents, I'm a person at age three.

three year old anymore. Now. If you recall, Maxwell had promised his future wife Betty that during the war he would one day be rich and become the prime minister. He had obviously already become rich, and in the mid nineteen sixties he starts to work towards political power. In nineteen sixty four, he runs for Parliament in the constituency of Buckingham and he wins as a member of the Labor Party. And this is a weird side He identifies as a socialist his entire life.

at this point. But yes, he is, and he is a part of the Labor Party, and he is a He plays a role in the switch from Labor to New Labor Right, which is when the British Labor Party jettisons the unions right, like Robert Maxwell is part of that process. How what does he do we'll talk about that. We'll talk about that. Speaking of things, we'll talk about

here's ads. So Robert has now gotten himself into parliament, is part of Labor and you have to remember again he's a socialist and he's also a business owner though, and so he hates unions because they compete with his power. And so when interviewed after the election, he tells everybody, I come from a very far humble farm laboring family and would rather cut off my arm than betray my class.

And it's true that he does come from a humble farm, laboring family, but there is no bigger class trader than this fucking guy. His political peers who knew him claim that he also told them he wanted to become Prime Minister, and one colleague, cited in the book fall later quoted him as having admitted, well, of course I'm conservative, but I'm not a member of the establishment, so I've got to become labor, which is a very Trumpian comment, right that, Like,

I'm not a member of the establishment. I'm a billionaire, I own all of science, but I'm not part of the establishment fundamentally. So I'm a conservative, but I'm with labor, right, I'm actually a progressive somehow. It's like an Elon Musk statement.

have not been crushed by Thatcher entirely. Eventually, he switched out his chauffeured Rolls Royce for an old land Rover to try to portray himself as a man of the people. And like, Buddy, a land Rover is still an expensive car. Like that's like, no, I'm gonna trade my Maserati for a Lambo so people know I'm a working man, right, I don't know.

like a mob boss next to Kissinger. Eh, I love this picture.

of power. So yeah, I mean, I think you've got a really good point there that, like the way the world opens up after World War Two makes a lot of these guys as improbable lives possible.

himself Rupert Murdock's nemesis. Rupert Murdoch is always like, oh I I've never even heard of that guy. Who are you talking about? Nemesis?

in mirrors accounting practices. He gets removed from the board of directors in the UK starts an investigation in his activities that concludes in seventy one after finding huge amounts of fraudulent payments, moved from one department to another to hide the cost of other investments that went bad, and prop up segments of his business that were struggling. The report concluded, Robert Maxwell is not, in our opinion, a person who can be relied on to exercise proper stewardship

of a public company. And at the end of the story, right obviously you know. Yeah. Now five years later he takes control of Pergament again. He's running it all and his sudden rise and fall earns him the nickname the bouncing check like Czeh, which is not bad. It's not bad, great work the British press good at some things. Yeah, I love that shit. And for the next ten years after this unprobable rise back, he goes from strength to strength.

He buys Europe's largest printing company, he becomes owner of The Mirror, that Britain's largest left leaning paper. And now that he finally owns a paper, this is how he really plays a major role in the shift to new labor because he starts using it the biggest left leaning paper in the UK, to attack union organizers. He runs what Socialist Worker what the Socialist Worker described as a smear campaign against Arthur Scargill, head of the mine Workers union.

This is during a big fight between the mine workers and Thatcher. I believe quote Scargill and the socialist values he represented were seen as a barrier to the modernization of the Labor Party. The vile attacks, which lasted for the better part of a year, were baseless, yet they did terrible damage. And he does this over and over again. Right, he has like a one man war against the unions in the UK, wielding the left wing paper to execute it.

really a thing yet. And Murdoch to a degree cribs a little bit from this guy's notes in terms of like, oh, really, like he's taking some notes, not that he's not doing any of this before, but he's influenced a little bit by the degree to which Maxwell is able to turn these publications he owns to push his own agendas. And he is a famously terrible guy to work for. Per

a biography in the Times of Israel. He bullied and humiliated staff, relentlessly calling his ludicrously titled chief of staff at four am one Sunday morning to ask him the time, and instilled a culture of distrust and rivalry. He bugged his staff, by which I mean he bugged them with surveillance devices, spending hours alone listening to the recordings for evidence of disloyalty, and even had them followed. Thank Christ.

or thank Christ, I'm finally out of the madhouse. And then three months later he hires Ian back on half his salary. He's just such a piece of shit.

and starts investing massively in the Israeli economy. His wealth gives him instant access to the Prime Minister, Yitzak Shmir, and he announces his intention, I'm going to put a quarter of a billion dollars into Israel. And he normally lies when he says stuff like this, but he does that, and he uses his profits from the Mirror in order to do this, and I'm going to quote from his biography.

Over the next four years, thanks to his mere group profits, Maxwell pumped millions into the country, buying newspapers, investing in high tech and pharma companies, and in the process becoming the largest single investor in Israel's economy. Maxwell also began to pass on useful information to the Masad, and boy

is he useful to the Masad. In nineteen eighty six, he tipped, so there's this scientist, this Israeli scientist, Mordechai Venunu, who's part of like Israel's nuclear program, that Israel still does not acknowledge that they have nukes. Right, we know they like everyone knows, but it's like kind of them. Now, I don't believe. I still don't believe they've officially acknowledged their nuclear capacity. I should actually double check on that.

I know it took a long time, but they have not at this point right like they it is not officially stated. It's just kind of a thing everyone knows. And Mordecai goes to the British press with insight info about Israel's newke Clear program, and one of the papers he goes to is The Mirror, and so he leaks to Maxwell's paper, and Maxwell gives him up to the Massad and he's jailed for eighteen years, which is like in journalism terms, bad.

to the Masad about what he was saying. Uh, but yeah, Maxwell definitely was involved when somebody else sold the story to the Sunday Mirror and he went to the Masad over it. So anyway, Mordecai is a very interesting guy, obviously, very courageous guy. Story is really worth looking into. I also did want to note because we had a question about this earlier, Israel still does not officially admit that they have nuclear weapons, although they're believed to have somewhere

between like one and four hundred warheads. It's that their kind of official defense posture strategy is to neither confirmed nor deny that they do. It kind of became clear in the late seventies that they did, but this is not something that is like officially admitted. So anyway, just

wanted to add that clarification. Now, there are allegations, unfortunately, because he's involved in the Massad and he definitely is, there's also insane allegations, right, like you can find every conspiracy connected to this guy, and he's basically framed as like having been a major massad agent, and that's just really not accurate. One of the big things you'll hear is that and this comes from the book Robert Maxwell

Israel Super Spy, which is say somewhat exaggerated. And they alleged that he stole a piece of surveillance software called Promise without an E, which was programmed to let law enforcement agencies track criminals and having a backdoor installed in it. And the Baltimore Sun sums up their argument. They report that Maxwell sold the program to most of the important government intelligence services in the world at a personal profit

of more than half a billion dollars. Into the program, they write, Israeli technicians collaborating with Maxwell implanted an electric trap door that allowed Israeli intelligence to tap many of the highest state secrets of the Soviet Union, Britain, the US, and other nations. And this is not true, and it's also not true in a way that is blaming is denying what the US government did, because Promise is a real thing and it really was used to tap a

bunch of governments. But the US government was the inciting agent here, right, this is one of ours. Now Maxwell is involved, I'm going to explain what happened. So this software was designed by a software developer in Washington called inns Law, so prosecutors could monitor case records and keep track of different people in the system. Right, Like, that is the purpose, So prosecutors can monitor the progression of

cases against different acused criminals. It was developed under a Department of Justice grants, so the dog was licensed to use it. But the license said the government cannot modify, create derivative versions of it, or sell it. And the Reagan Administration's like, oh, fuck it, what do we just do that anyway?

perceived threats to US national interests. A letter from the US Department of Justice in nineteen eighty five, later obtained by ins Law because the company suits the shit out of the government for this documented more plans for covert sale and distribution of the espionage enabled version of Promise, this time to governments in the Middle East, which would surreptitiously allow the US to spy on foreign intelligence agencies.

The letter outlined how sales of the software were to be facilitated by the late Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mafus and the arms dealers Adnan Koshogi and manuchre Gorbanafar. Promise should be delivered without paperwork, customs or delay, it stated, and all of the transactions paid for through a Swiss bank account. So number one, this is on us. The Massad does not start this program and they don't put

the back It's not Israeli technicians. You put the back door, and Reagan's guys do, right, A bunch of the shadiest op Now, Israel does get involved in this, and they do profit from this, but it starts with us. A bunch of the shadiest operators in the nineteen eighties are allowed to sell privated versions of Promise. Basically, the Attorney General under Reagan ed Meese will give you the like basically license you to sell pirated compromised versions of promise

to foreign governments if you're his friend. Like, that's how that's part of how this works. It's like a way the Reagan administration is like rewarding loyal people. Is like, hey, you've got a good Hey you did us good and you've got a good connection over in you know, Ecuador or whatever. Why don't we let you sell this to their government And then we get a backdoor into the government.

And this guy gets to make some money, right and one of the people who gets tapped as a result of this program because they want to sell promise to Iraq, Libya and several other Middle Eastern countries and this is hard, so they enlist the help of a Masad guy named Rafi Eitan, And that guy in the Massad is like, maybe a guy at the Massad isn't the best dude to sell to Iraq, But you know who can sell shit to anybody? Bobby Maxwell, baby, And that's where he

comes into this. Right now, Gordon Thomas, who's the author of that Israel Super Spy book, will claim he's the one. He's the source of the claim that Maxwell makes half a billion in licenses doing this. I don't know how much Maxwell really makes, but he doesn't start like he is. He's kind of a middleman in the process, and Thomas portrays him as like at the core of the process. But this is like fucked up, and he does sell.

He sells, i think to the Soviet Union, he sells to a shitload of governments that allows the US to spy on them, and he profits personally from this. So this is like a lot of skulduggery it's involved in. It's just a lot more centered on ed Meeson the Reagan administration than some of these other claims make. And obviously Israel profits from this too because they are using Maxwell to sell it to countries that they want intel on, right, So that is happening. That is a part of this story,

it's just not the start of it. Now. There are numerous allegations of Maxwell's fingers in arms dealers that the Israeli government found useful to and some of these are true, but it's not. It's often portrayed as he is an arms dealer. He's not. He is a guy who knows logistics, and so when a friend is like, hey, we need the shipment to get through this port, He's like I know guys there, I'll make sure it moves right. He's a you know, that's the kind of thing he's useful for.

And so's he is connected to the Masad because he's a powerful, rich businessman who desperately wants to prove his loyalty to the country, to like to Israel, and has

connections everywhere, and that's kind of his use. And there's a much more accurate look at his spying and his involvement in intelligence agencies in the book Foreign Body, The Secret Life of Robert Maxwell by Russell Davies, and Davies outlines the dimensions of these shady dealings in a way that I think is a lot more accurate, because he argues it's hard to imagine Maxwell himself doing an arms deal directly, right quote, but he could certainly have been

of use securing the cooperation of foreign governments when it came to routing illicit cargoes through their unadvertised and outlawed destinations. Maxwell, he argues, would have been insulted to have been accused of working as a common spy or agent, because again, he is on first a first name basis with every Prime minister of Israel during this period of time, right, like, he's not like an employee of the Massade. He is

incredibly he's way he's so highly connected. By nineteen eighty eight, Maxwell estimated his own net worth at about four billion dollars, and the parties he threw, attended by everyone who was anyone in UK politics, were legendary. John Preston describes his nineteen eighty eight birthday an event that had to take three days because more than three thousand people attended. There's like tiers of guests in terms of like which day you're allowed to be at. Wow, it's it's it's fucked up.

it is sick. I want to read a quote from John Preston's book that sort of gives you a description of the vibe of this party. On the night of the first party, guests passed down a receiving line where they were greeted by Maxwell, Betty, and all seven of their children. Some of the guests arrived bearing birthday presents. The broadcaster David Frost turned up with a five hundred pound bottle of wine. Unaware of how much it had cost,

Maxwell chef later tipped it into a beef stew. As guests sipped their drinks, the band of the Cold Stream Guards marched back and forth across the lawn. Before dinner started, Robert and Betty made their formal entrance into the marquis to an announcement from the Master of Ceremonies, Ladies and gentlemen, would you please welcome your host and hostess, Robert and Elizabeth Maxwell, and a fanfare of Harold trumpetears. Everyone stood to applaud a lot with a row of medals pinned

to his black tailcoat. Maxwell was wearing a large white enamel cross on a chain around his neck. This was the Order of the White Rose of Finland, a decoration normally given to foreign heads of state and recognition of outstanding civilian or military conduct. Betty Maxwell wore a dress made of gold embroidered tul over yellow taffeta silk. So like parties, parties like real rich people parties.

they're made out of cardboard. They're like fake books. Now, Preston says, only the books concealing hy stereo system were fake. I don't know, but this is kind of evidence that as rich as he was on paper, and this is the thing, he's worth four point four billion on paper or something like that, he's not actually doing as well as it seems, right, And nineteen ninety eight is nearer to the end of his time in the limelight than

the beginning. That year, the same year as this fucking party, he spends two point six billion dollars buying US publisher McMillan, and that's a billion dollars more than its own shareholders value it at. Like he kind of as a musk where he's like, I'll offer you a two point six billion and they're like, we were not going to ask for that much, but oh fucking k right. Yeah, he had to borrow from forty four banks to afford it. And he does this not because again he's got profitable businesses.

Preston says, this is out of desperation because Murdoch is buying more and more publishers and he's like desperate to win. He doesn't want Murdoch to get McMillan, so he kind of endangers his entire empire buying it in order to beat Rupert Murdoch. And again, all Murdoch will say about this guy is like, who huh what guy?

It's such a bad buye. The owners pay him sixty million dollars to take it, and they pay him that because it's in a lot more debt than that.

And there's also a bunch of people who had worked for him in different papers in the UK, being like he's actually a giant dick. No one can stand to work for him. This is not going to end well for any of you, and it sure as shit doesn't. Right, So the eighties comes to an end, sadly, I know we're all still mourning that. And suddenly there's a big economic pop, right, and interest rates skyrocket and all all of this debt that he had taken on to keep

building this. He's always robbing Peter to pay Paul, like a certain guy that we all know about right now. Like he's always in debt to a lot of banks for all this stuff. And suddenly it gets a lot more expensive to service that debt. And so in nineteen ninety one. He has to sell pergam and press in order, and that's his baby, in order to keep everything else afloat.

And that's also the profitable part of his empire. So he has now sold the golden goose to pay for the shit that's horribly in debt that he can't make a profit on. Not a great move. So what do you do if you're a guy who sucks ass and hates unions and hates your employees and suddenly you're out of money and you need to keep funding all of this debt? Where do you go when interest rates are fucked and you simply can't take any more loans from banks?

this period of collapse. And also right around this time, it becomes known that he is being investigated for war crimes in World War Two because he wrote letters to his wife and talked about him like to journalists about like again I'm machined gun prisoners. Yeah, and again it's the least bad thing he ever did. But so he's got that too. He's got all these debts. Empire is about to collapse. When he set sail on his yacht,

the Lady Gillen on November first, nineteen ninety one. He's getting letters constantly from different banks being like, hey, this is overdue. Can you even prove that you're solvent in anymore? Swiss Bank is threatening to go public and it has told the London police that he's broken a bunch of laws.

So he's in a lot of trouble. And around five am on November first, I think it's November first, nineteen ninety one, he falls overboard off the stem of his yacht as it passes towards Tenerif, and his body is fished out of the ocean about twelve hours later by a Spanish National Rescue Service helicopter. Nobody knows precisely what happened. The thing that you will encounter most commonly is that the Masad had him killed. And I don't see any

reason to believe that. For one thing, he receives a hero's funeral in Israel, like, attended by the Prime Minister and the Israeli President Shimone Perez is there, right, They give him like okay, so this is this is what the Israeli president says at his funeral. Kings and barons besieged his doorstep. He was a figure of almost mythological stature.

But there are like allegations that basically he tried to blackmail the Masade to get them to pay him four hundred million dollars, and it, I don't know, doesn't seem like the kind of move he'd have made. Again, he's a steal the pension plan guy.

of the coroners could agree. But what the coroners can't agree on is did he have a heart attack or did he jump in? And both are he's sixty, he was in bad health. It's also it's perfectly possible either he knew that he was fucked and he wanted to die right or that he had a heart attack because he was super stressed out in sixty eight and not in good health, and he fell off his boat.

That he stole four hundred million pounds from pension funds, that he there were seven hundred and sixty three million British pounds missing from his companies. He has described as the crook of the century by Newsweek magazine.

to like figure out how to put together. His assets are sold off, most of like the the what are called the Maxwell pensioners, right, and these are the people who lost their retirement savings, get half or less of what they were owed, you know, as a result of kind of this liquidation process. But Gillan stays comfortable for a while, you know, a while.