Maxwell murder: Addendum

A couple of posts ago, I gave the title of the Gordon Thomas/Martin Dillon book on the Maxwell controversy as The Assassination of Robert Maxwell. In America, the title is Robert Maxwell: Israel's Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul

As I said before, the book rewards study, but examine it with caution. Thomas and Dillon include a number of howlers. For example, they write that the former Marina Oswald testified to the Warren Commission that John Tower was involved in the JFK assassination conspiracy. Nonsense; she did no such thing.

The book also delves into the PROMIS software imbroglio. You may already know about that controversy; if not, a little Googling should provide reams of material of varying quality. Maxwell appears to have been involved in selling the much-vaunted software to governmental agencies around the world. Israeli engineers had, we are told, placed a "backdoor" into the code, allowing Mosad to gain remote access to sensitive material. Alas, about ten years ago the PROMIS story became a lint trap for occult speculation. Wacky conspiracy buffs spread all sorts of tales: The software could be used to facilitate CIA mind control, to communicate with the space people, to engineer the New World Order's great gun round-up (always scheduled for "some time next year" -- or so runs the story I've heard since I was a kid), and to do god-knows-what-else. So much nonsense began to pile up that I soon hoped never to hear the name "PROMIS" again.

Thomas relates a tale to the effect that the Mossad had placed a chip into the software, in order to facilitate eavesdropping. When I first heard that claim in the early 90s, the obvious question occurred to me: How the hell do you put a chip "into" software? Thomas and Dillon don't provide an answer.

The most extraordinary aspects of their book concern former senator John Tower. The writers allege that Tower sold his services to Maxwell, providing the publisher with an entrance into places he might not otherwise have accessed -- Sandia labs, for example. These sales pitches were conducted of behalf of the Mossad. Tower died in a plane crash that a number of people found suspicious; the book claims that Tower had to go for the same reason Maxwell did.

Obviously, a conspiracy theory of this sort requires good sourcing; Thomas's phobic attitude toward footnotes makes the reader scream in frustration. The authors claim that one of their primary sources was John O'Neill, the former FBI terror expert who died in the World trade Center disaster. O'Neill has become something of a hero to many, yet this aspect of his career has gone almost entirely undiscussed. (Try a Google search linking the names of O'Neill, Maxwell and Tower.)

The book even prints a lengthy and startling O'Neill quote stating that the murder of John Tower had White House approval. (The death occurred in 1991, during the first Bush presidency.) I presume that an audiotape lies behind this quotation -- if so, we should be given the chance to hear it.

Maxwell's daughter Isabel, who used to run an Israeli internet company, has denounced Thomas and Dillon as sloppy sensationalists. Public access to original source material will render irelevant any negative opinions of the authors; the speaker, not the scribe, is what matters.