Fall

by John Preston

  That summer Maxwell also made what would be a final attempt to reconnect with his past. At the end of July he went to Jerusalem, where he was filmed visiting the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. With his head lowered and his hands plunged into his jacket pockets, he walked through canyons of stone blocks bearing the names of communities that had been wiped out.

  Stopping in front of one of the blocks, he pointed at the lettering. ‘At the bottom is the shtetl Solotvino where I come from,’ he said. ‘It is no more. It was poor, it was Orthodox and it was Jewish. We were very poor. We didn’t have things that other people had. They had shoes and they had food and we didn’t. At the end of the War, I discovered the fate of my parents and my sisters and brothers, relatives and neighbours. I don’t know what went through their minds as they realized they had been tricked into a gas chamber. But one thing they hoped is that they will not be forgotten . . .’

  Tears welled up in Maxwell’s eyes as he glanced towards the sky. Barely able to speak, he managed to add: ‘And this memorial in Jerusalem proves that.’

  Overcome, he walked away.

  A month later, Maxwell appeared unexpectedly at Betty’s house in south-west France, where Ian and Laura Maxwell were having a party for friends and family who had been unable to make it to their wedding. Betty was stunned by the deterioration in his appearance. ‘All of a sudden, he looked very old; he was gasping for air and sweating profusely,’ she recalled. ‘At first I took it to be the heat, but I couldn’t get over how much weight he had put on since I had last seen him barely two months previously. Bob was far from his usual exuberant self.’

  However unwell her father was looking, Isabel Maxwell saw a side of him that she hadn’t seen in years. ‘He played pick-a-stick with me and my five-year-old son. As we were playing, he looked at me and said, “Izzy, you’re a very nice person.” I was flabbergasted; it was the first and only time he ever said that.’

  After Maxwell had left, Betty discussed his health with another of the guests – a nephew of hers who was a heart and lung specialist. ‘He told me that unless he went in for serious treatment, he was courting disaster.’

  It wasn’t just Maxwell’s finances that were spinning out of his control. So too was the world he had known, and whose fortunes he’d once helped shape. A series of revolutions in the winter of 1989 had toppled Communist leaders across Eastern Europe. In Romania Nicolae Ceaus¸escu and his wife, Elena, had been executed by firing squad. Like President Zhivkov of Bulgaria, Ceaus¸escu had been the subject of one of Maxwell’s Leaders of the World series, lauded for his ‘constant tireless activity for the good of the country’.

  On 18 August 1991, a group of senior army officers went to see the President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, at his dacha in the Crimea. There, they presented him with an ultimatum: he must either declare a state of emergency or resign.

  Gorbachev refused.

  The next day Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic – the largest republic in the Soviet Union – clambered on to a tank outside the Russian parliament building in Moscow and called on the rebel soldiers to lay down their guns. They promptly obliged. The collapse of the attempted coup set off a political earthquake whose effects were felt around the world. Four months later Gorbachev resigned. A month afterwards the Soviet Union officially ceased to exist.

  Less than a year earlier, Maxwell had warned Mrs Thatcher that this might happen. Now his prediction had come true – but, far from feeling vindicated, he couldn’t accept that it had taken place without his involvement. Ken Lennox was covering the story for the Mirror: ‘I phoned up the news desk to tell them what I had seen. Maxwell happened to be standing there at the time, so the News Editor said, “Why don’t you tell him yourself?” When I’d finished there was a long pause, and then Maxwell said to me, “Don’t be a cunt. Don’t you think Yeltsin would have called me before making a speech like that?”’

  Maxwell had underestimated Lawrie Guest’s conscientiousness. Although Guest had been sidelined, he still noticed that something was amiss. At the beginning of August 1991, he went to see Maxwell to ask about the £38,000,000 that had gone missing from MGN’s accounts.

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ Maxwell told him. ‘I’ve deposited it with American banks.’

  Four weeks later, Guest told the Managing Director of MCC that he was having what he described as ‘problems’. Specifically, there was some money missing – £38,000,000. Once again Maxwell was asked for an explanation. This time he gave more details. Apparently the money had been deposited with Goldman Sachs in New York – ‘to improve our credit rating’. It was only a temporary arrangement, he said, the money would be returned shortly.

  Guest waited.

  Nothing happened. Ten days later, he went back to see Maxwell. When was the money going to be returned? Just as he’d done before, Maxwell told him not to worry. Only this time he showed an unexpected concern for Guest’s welfare. ‘You really need a holiday,’ he told him. ‘Take three weeks immediately. Everything will be sorted out by the time you return.’

  Guest agreed that he could use a break. But before he left he wrote a memo to Michael Stoney outlining his concerns. Stoney wrote back: ‘I’ve spoken to Bob. The money is coming back within one week. You’ve nothing to worry about. But please don’t shake the tree. You must be loyal to the company.’

  As soon as Guest returned three weeks later, he checked the Mirror Group accounts. Just as he had feared, the £38,000,000 was still missing. People in the office noticed that Guest, always a heavy smoker, now seemed to be smoking more than ever.

  On one of Maxwell’s now rare visits to Headington Hill Hall, he was alone in his bedroom late one night when his son Ian walked in. To Ian’s surprise, he saw his father bending down with his nose almost touching the glass of his enormous television. On the television was a documentary showing newsreel footage of Jews arriving at Auschwitz, being unloaded from the cattle cars and divided into two groups – those deemed fit for work and those who were to be sent straight to the gas chamber.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Ian asked.

  Slowly Maxwell straightened up, and then turned around.

  ‘I’m looking to see if I can spot my parents,’ he told him.

  31.

  Hurricane Bob

  Ever since Andrea Martin’s departure from the Mirror, Maxwell and Nick Davies had trodden warily around one another. Davies knew that Maxwell was still seething with jealousy and apt to explode at any moment. The best way to ensure this didn’t happen, he decided, was to stay as far away from him as possible. In theory, that shouldn’t have been too difficult. As the Mirror’s Foreign Editor, Davies inevitably spent a good deal of time abroad. The trouble was that circumstances kept pushing them together.

  In October 1991, Davies flew to Zimbabwe to attend the Commonwealth Conference. It wasn’t expected to be a taxing assignment – a few days in a smart hotel with no need to file more than the occasional paragraph. But while he was there Davies had some unwelcome news. He learned that the American investigative writer Seymour Hersh was about to publish a book called The Samson Option, in which he claimed that both Maxwell and Davies were international gunrunners.

  The following day, as Davies put it, ‘all hell broke loose’. The allegations centred on his friendship with a man called Ari Ben-Menashe. A former government official in Tel Aviv, Ben-Menashe had met Davies in the early 1980s, when he passed on a number of stories about his time as a Mossad spy. As Davies put it, ‘He would feed me titbits which turned out to be true, but I was never totally satisfied that his information was always on the level.’ None the less, they got on sufficiently well for Davies to invite Ben-Menashe to stay with him and his then wife, Janet Fielding, whenever he was in London, much to Fielding’s annoyance – ‘I thought he was a creep.’

  Ben-Menashe was also responsible for Davies’s becoming involved in arms-dealing, she believed. Shortly before their marriage broke down, Fieldin
g had come across a letter from a company called Armter in Ohio. Addressed to Davies, it confirmed his order for 155 guns and 30,000 rounds of ammunition, as well as the hire of a five-ton truck to transport them. When she tackled him, Davies admitted that in addition to working at the Mirror and running his underwater television business, he’d recently added a third string to his bow.

  For Fielding, it was the final straw: ‘How can you respect someone who’s an arms-dealer? The odd thing is that I think part of Nick really wanted to be an old-fashioned man of honour; it was just that the need for cash got in the way.’

  Arrested in 1989 for trying to sell three military cargo planes to Iran, Ben-Menashe spent a year in jail in California before the charges were dropped. By the time he emerged, he and Davies had fallen out; Davies claimed to have realized – belatedly – that Ben-Menashe was not on the level, or anywhere near it.

  In The Samson Option, Seymour Hersh wrote that the two of them, together with Maxwell, had been involved in a company which sold arms – principally to Iran. Three years earlier, Davies had apparently gone to Cleveland, Ohio, where he had met up with another arms-dealer, called Ben Kaufman, to broker a sale.

  At first, no newspaper would touch the story for fear of being sued for libel. But after two MPs, protected by parliamentary privilege, had raised the matter in the House of Commons, the Daily Mail decided to run extracts from Hersh’s book. When the allegations were put to Nick Davies in Harare, he dismissed them as nonsense. Apart from anything else, he’d never been to Ohio, he insisted.

  But there was more to the story than that; Hersh also claimed that Davies – acting on Maxwell’s orders – had betrayed the whereabouts of the nuclear spy, Mordechai Vanunu, to Mossad. In 1986, Vanunu, a technician at a nuclear base in the Negev desert, had secretly taken photographs of Israel’s nuclear weapons programme which he passed on to the Sunday Times. After an anonymous tip-off, he’d been snatched off a street in Rome by Mossad agents, injected with a paralysing drug, smuggled on board a ship and taken back to an Israeli prison.

  Previously divided by their respective feelings for Andrea Martin, Maxwell and Davies now found themselves on the same side. As soon as the extracts appeared, Maxwell sued Hersh’s publishers and the Daily Mail for defamation. The claims, he declared, ‘were ludicrous’. As for Davies, Maxwell said he was ‘innocent of whatever the allegations are’.

  In Harare, Davies found that his colleagues were no longer paying much attention to the Commonwealth Conference; instead, they were far more interested in him. Two days after he had denied ever having been to Ohio, Rupert Murdoch’s Sun published a front-page photograph of Davies and ‘notorious arms-dealer’ Ben Kaufman at Kaufman’s house in Cleveland drinking cups of ice-tea.

  The Sun’s headline read: ‘YOU LIAR’.

  Besieged in his hotel room, Davies recited Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’ to himself to keep his spirits up. He found the opening two lines especially comforting:

  If you can keep your head when all about you

  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you . . .

  But on the flight back to London he appears to have forgotten all about Kipling’s counsel. Davies found himself sitting next to Simon Walters, a political journalist on the Sun. Like many others, Walters felt that Davies’s nickname of Sneaky suited him down to the ground: ‘He loved to talk in whispers and to give the impression he knew about top-secret matters.’

  Maybe Davies was more stressed than he let on, or maybe he was more tempted by the free alcohol than was entirely wise, but he proceeded to unburden himself. Walters listened with growing fascination. ‘What struck me most was how extraordinarily confident he was – and how slick. It seemed to me that he was in big trouble, but he just acted as if nothing odd was going on.’

  Walters’s account in the following morning’s Sun made gripping reading. Headlined ‘I Only Use A Third Of My Talent’, it went on, ‘Lying Nick Davies has opened his heart about his life on the Daily Mirror, his eye for the ladies and his secret assignment for publisher Robert Maxwell.’ Davies’s comments about ‘the ladies’ are unlikely to have gone down well with Andrea Martin: ‘I can’t stop myself,’ he was quoted as saying. ‘I would go to work on Monday and say to myself I must stop, but by Tuesday I had gone off with another one.’

  As well as being sexually rapacious, Davies, by his own account, was a man of enormous, largely untapped, abilities. ‘I’m good at my job but I only use 30 per cent of my potential; it bores me at times,’ he had told Walters. ‘Really, I am very frustrated. There is an anger inside me.’ Again he emphasized that he’d never been an arms-dealer, and nor had he ever been to Ohio. He also took a passing swipe at Janet Fielding: ‘I married her simply so she could stay in Britain.’

  During the flight, Davies had been making vigorous efforts to chat up the stewardesses, but as soon as their plane landed in London, Walters noticed that he was a lot less confident than he had been before: ‘He completely panicked and this cocky façade just evaporated.’ Picked up by Mirror representatives, he was bundled into the back of a car and driven off, leaving his last words to Walters hanging unconvincingly in the air: ‘I am not a Walter Mitty character.’

  Taken to the Mirror offices, Davies was interviewed by Richard Stott, now reinstalled as Editor of the Mirror after the dismissal of Roy Greenslade, and Joe Haines, the paper’s Political Editor. In his defence Davies said that he had happened to visit Ben Kaufman when he was on a trip to America, not having any idea he was an arms-dealer. He also claimed to be unaware that Cleveland was in Ohio.

  Haines was not impressed. ‘I said to him, “For Christ’s sake, Nick, you’re the bloody Foreign Editor.”’

  They both recommended that Davies should be fired for gross misconduct. Then came an unexpected turn. Maxwell pleaded with Stott and Haines to give him another chance. At first, neither of them could work out what was going on. Finally, the truth dawned on them – even now, Maxwell was trying to curry favour with Andrea Martin by preventing her boyfriend from being sacked. But, Stott and Haines stood their ground: Davies had to go.

  The next day the Mirror announced his departure on its front page under the headline ‘A Matter Of Trust’. ‘The truth,’ it declared with feverish piety, ‘is our only currency. We cannot duck and dive around it, play fast and loose with it, or regard it as an occasional companion.’

  Although Maxwell had reluctantly accepted that Davies couldn’t stay, he continued to phone him at home to reassure him it would all be fine in the end.

  ‘I will work everything out,’ he said.

  The allegations against Maxwell may have been flimsy – there is no convincing evidence he was involved in arms-dealing – but they reinforced his increasing sense that everyone was out to get him. They rattled the City too. The slump in MCC shares now began to accelerate. On the day the story broke, they lost another 6 pence to finish at just 80 pence each. Having spent millions of pounds buying his own shares to try to prop the price up, Maxwell effectively had no more money left to spend.

  It wasn’t just the City that had sniffed Maxwell’s demise. For months he had known that the BBC current-affairs flagship, Panorama, was preparing a programme about his business activities. Worried what they might have unearthed, Maxwell threatened to obtain an injunction to stop the programme from going out. He also took to phoning Panorama’s Editor, Mark Thompson, with a familiar mix of threats and bluster. Thinking it might be useful if any attempt to stop the programme came to court, Thompson decided to record Maxwell’s calls.

  One conversation in particular stuck in his mind. As they were talking, Maxwell suddenly announced, ‘The pension funds are completely safe with me!’

  Thompson was baffled. What was he talking about? There’d been no mention of pension funds before. Why on earth was Maxwell bringing it up now?

  Despite Maxwell’s fears, there was no mention of pension funds in the BBC Panorama programme. Instead, it concentrated on his efforts to rig various Mirror co
mpetitions, including Spot-the-Ball, to make sure there was never a winner. But the programme did note that MCC’s shares had lost a third of their value in the last four months, and that Maxwell – ‘a man of influence who moves on the world stage’ – had been inflating his pre-tax profits to make MCC appear in better shape than it was.

  On the evening it was due to be transmitted, Panorama’s Deputy Editor, David Jordan, took the tape to BBC TV Centre. ‘As a precaution, I did something I’d never done before: I took an alternative programme with me, so we could put that on in case Maxwell issued a last-minute injunction. I can remember sitting there watching the clock as the time got nearer and nearer, waiting for the phone to ring. We didn’t know we were safe until the titles rolled.’

  Maxwell seems to have decided that he would draw more attention to himself by trying to stop the programme than if he let it go ahead. For once in his life, he kept his head down. But if Panorama wasn’t the body blow he had been dreading, it still landed enough punches to make the City take further fright.

  Meanwhile Lawrie Guest was getting more and more anxious. Privately, he wrote down his suspicions. ‘I am now convinced that MGN resources have been used to support other parts of the group. But I have no proof. I think I have frightened the Chairman, but my main concern must be to get the money back.’ As he knew by now, any attempts to do so were likely to come at a heavy cost. In August, one of the directors of MGN had warned him, ‘Don’t forget that you have a wife and a mortgage to pay.’