American Kompromat

by Craig Unger

  This time, Finnerty was more definitive. “William Barr is not now, and has never been, a member of Opus Dei—he has never been a numerary, nor an associate, nor a supernumerary. He has never been a member of Opus Dei, period. Nor has he ever been a cooperator of Opus Dei.”23

  In other words, William Barr had nothing to do with the organization—or so they said. That answers it once and for all, right?

  Well, not exactly.

  “People have a hard time parsing what Opus Dei is, who’s a member, who’s not, and all the strange categories they have,” said Frederick Clarkson, senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, a nonprofit that tracks right-wing networks, and the author of Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy.24 “In a limited sense, it may be true that Barr isn’t a member of Opus Dei. But you don’t put somebody on the board of directors of your headquarters unless they have some significant relationship here.”

  There’s also the possibility that in explaining that Barr had nothing to do with Opus Dei, the prelature had chosen to enact the Catholic doctrine of “mental reservation,” which recognizes “the lie of necessity” and holds that when there is a conflict between justice and truth, justice should win out. As Thomas P. Doyle, a priest in Virginia who is an expert in canon law, told the Los Angeles Times, the doctrine has been used in modern times to “claim that it is morally justifiable to lie in order to protect the reputation of the institutional church.”25

  Indeed, according to a former member of Opus Dei, the loyalty of Opus members is constantly tested, and members are expected to implement the Opus agenda at the same time they are denying they are part of it. “You are expected to stand up and tell the world that you are acting in your own name when you carry out the secret indications of your directors,” former member Dennis Dubro told ABC News.26 Dubro had been with Opus for seventeen years before leaving the sect.

  That’s the nature of a secret society: It’s secret. So it’s difficult to determine exactly who is a member and who isn’t and whether they are operating under strict ideological and/or theological constraints. What we know and see is a small but elite group of powerful attorneys, some of whom were openly part of Opus Dei and some of whom worked with or were associated with the Catholic Information Center and other entities linked to Opus Dei, who are vital parts of the Catholic right.

  So it’s reasonable to question whether it was merely a coincidence that William Barr later served on the board of directors of the Catholic Information Center, a body that was largely run by Opus Dei, that has a base of operations in the nation’s capital, and whose chapel was named after its founder. Was it merely a coincidence that Barr speechwriter John Paul Wauck was an Opus Dei member? That Pat Cipollone, who served as assistant to Barr when he was first attorney general from 1992 to 1993, and later became President Trump’s White House counsel, also served on the board of the CIC, as had Barr and Leonard Leo, and that all were in the Federalist Society, close to Trump, and played key roles in helping select judges—including Supreme Court judges—and in defending Trump during his impeachment?27

  Other members of this so-called Catholic Mafia include Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who, like Barr and Cipollone, was an alum of Kirkland & Ellis; and Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who converted to Catholicism with Cipollone’s help and who calls him her godfather.28

  This was the world Barr had begun assembling—one of powerful cultural warriors, all of whom, including Barr himself, were fierce and vigorous adversaries of the very world he had grown up in: the world of liberal, secular humanism prevalent on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Instead they were fighting for a deeply conservative Catholicism that railed again and again against the boys he had grown up with at Horace Mann.

  To that point, an unpublished speech before the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, given just after he became attorney general in 1991, gives a glimpse of Barr’s zealotry and rage, with the newly appointed chief law enforcement officer in the country launching a wholesale attack on nonbelievers. “The secularists of today are clearly fanatics,” Barr said, as reported by the Associated Press. Their criticism of the “Judeo-Christian moral tradition” has produced “soaring juvenile crime, widespread drug addiction, skyrocketing rates of venereal disease, 1.5 million children aborted each year,” he added.29 Public schools, he said, had undergone a “moral lobotomy.”

  All of which, he explained in an article in the Catholic Lawyer, he blamed on the Enlightenment. “We live in an increasingly militant, secular age,” Barr wrote. “We are locked in a historic struggle between two fundamentally different systems of values. In a way, this is the end product of the Enlightenment. On the one hand, we see the growing ascendancy of secularism and the doctrine of moral relativism. . . . First, through legislative action, litigation, or judicial interpretation, secularists continually seek to eliminate laws that reflect traditional moral norms. Decades ago, we saw the barriers to divorce eliminated. Twenty years ago, we saw the laws against abortion swept away. Today, we are seeing the constant chipping away at laws designed to restrain sexual immorality, obscenity, or euthanasia.”30

  And he was determined to fight back.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE BOUNCING CZECH

  On November 6, 1991, twenty-nine-year-old Ghislaine Maxwell, the youngest daughter of British media baron Robert Maxwell, landed in Tenerife, the largest of Spain’s Canary Islands, and quickly made her way to her father’s yacht.1 The day before, her father, the sixty-eight-year-old billionaire publisher, had been seen before dawn, at 4:25 a.m., pacing the deck of the 180-foot vessel off the coast of Tenerife.2 Later that morning, he was discovered to be missing. It was not until 6:46 p.m. that day that he was found, a search helicopter hovering over his immense three-hundred-pound corpse. “It was naked, stiff, and floating face upward,” said a member of the search team. “Not face down which is normal.”3

  Maxwell’s body was hoisted from the ocean by helicopter. The next day, reports of his shocking death were in almost every paper in the English-speaking world, including, of course, his own six papers in the Mirror Group, including the Daily Mirror in London and the New York Daily News.

  Ghislaine had been the favorite of her father’s nine children—he had even named his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, after her—and soon after she arrived in Tenerife, she joined her oldest brother, Philip, and her mother, Elisabeth, on board. The boat was anchored near Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the island’s capital, and they spent much of the day trying to get Maxwell’s affairs in order and making plans to fly to Israel, where he was to be buried. As a Jew, Maxwell had wanted to be buried in the Orthodox tradition, which has it that no burial can take place on the Sabbath. That meant they had to leave right away.4 So late that night, after a somber dinner, they all disembarked from the Lady Ghislaine and took a private plane to Israel with Maxwell’s coffin on board.

  Ghislaine, like the others, had many unanswered questions about how her father died, but there is reason to believe she had not been left in the dark when it came to his dubious financial machinations and entanglements with certain foreign intelligence services. Before they left the yacht, Ghislaine scoured it for anything that could be detrimental to the family. “Ghislaine rushed through the yacht’s lounges and cabins . . . rifled drawers and cabinets, plucking documents from them indiscriminately and throwing them to the ground,” wrote Mirror reporter John Jackson, who said he saw Ghislaine overseeing the shredding of thousands of pages of documents. “She shouted to the crew, ‘I order you to shred immediately everything I have thrown on the floor.’”5

  Ultimately, three conflicting autopsies left unresolved the big question of whether he had died by suicide or been murdered. Family members discounted the first of those. “He did not commit suicide,” Ghislaine said many years later. “That was just not consistent with his character. I think he was murdered.�
��6

  And if she was right, who did it? And why?

  Maxwell’s papers—or at least those that had not been shredded—were already packed up in bags that had been flown back to London. One had to wonder if they contained secrets that might answer the mystery of Maxwell’s death. According to Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy, by Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, Maxwell’s safe on the yacht had been sealed. What was in those papers? What did Ghislaine know about them? Was he stealing from his company’s pension funds? Could that have led him to suicide? There were reports that he was involved in illegal arms dealing. Were they true? And had he been laundering money? Did he have illicit intelligence connections?

  These questions tantalized the press all over the world as well as his youngest daughter.

  * * *

  —

  Born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch, Ghislaine Maxwell’s father was better known as British press lord Robert Maxwell, a larger-than-life figure whose Falstaffian bonhomie dwarfed his enormous crimes and daring exploits. With media holdings including the New York–based Macmillan Publishers, the Israeli daily Ma’ariv, the English-language Moscow News, the Oxford-based Pergamon Press, MTV Europe, and many other companies, Maxwell was a self-invented Anglicized Citizen Kane of sorts, and a precursor to and rival of Rupert Murdoch. He was also one of the most extraordinary intelligence assets of the twentieth century.

  He grew up in a poor, Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish family in what is now the small town of Solotvyno, Ukraine (then known as Slatinské Doly, in what was easternmost Czechoslovakia), became known as “the Bouncing Czech” during his financial travails, and came to occupy an unusually sensitive and pivotal place between the Soviet Union and the West during the last years of the Cold War. On the one hand, Maxwell had ties to Israel dating back to the early 1980s that included close relationships with the most powerful people in Mossad, the legendary Israeli spy agency. On the other, in the Soviet Union, Maxwell’s regular visits to the KGB’s Lubyanka headquarters went all the way to the top—to the office of the KGB chairman General Vladimir Kryuchkov.

  Maxwell’s history as a Soviet asset dated back to just after World War II, when, as a fiery young Czechoslovakian Jewish expatriate who had enlisted in the British army, he was sent to Berlin as an interpreter (he spoke eight languages) and first made contact with the Soviets. According to Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy, he acquired unparalleled access to the most dreaded spymasters of the Eastern bloc over the years, from the KGB’s Yuri Andropov to the East German Stasi’s Markus Wolf, and knew secrets that could topple governments. Before long, he had begun to indulge in the treacherous game of espionage while simultaneously serving multiple masters—Russia, Israel, and Great Britain. At the same time that Maxwell was working for the KGB, he was also in bed with Israel’s Mossad, playing an increasingly dangerous game while he danced on the world stage as a media baron in London, Moscow, and New York.

  I first became familiar with Maxwell in 1991 when I traveled around the United States with a rogue Israeli operative named Ari Ben-Menashe, who, among other things, was spreading seemingly absurd tales about how Maxwell was really an Israeli agent who was being used to disseminate Israeli propaganda and disinformation through his media holdings and, even more astonishingly, was actually using his company, the Mirror Group Newspapers, to facilitate the illegal and clandestine sale of Israeli arms to Iran.

  I was working at Newsweek at the time and had dozens of hours of taped interviews with Ben-Menashe, but one editor after another dismissed his stories as outlandish fabrications. They thought the mere idea that a newspaper publisher was facilitating illegal arms sales from Israel to Iran was ludicrous.

  But in fall 1991, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Seymour Hersh published The Samson Option, reporting for the first time, among other disclosures, on Robert Maxwell’s ties to Israeli intelligence and the role of his Daily Mirror in secret and illegal arms deals with Iran.

  According to the Sunday Age, in Melbourne, Australia, on November 2, 1991, a few days after the publication of Hersh’s book, an unnamed source close to the Israeli cabinet told Hersh that Maxwell would soon be eliminated. The author did not know how seriously to take the threat.7 Three days later, Robert Maxwell went missing, until searchers found his naked body floating faceup in the Atlantic.

  At the same time that Maxwell’s company was being exposed by Hersh, debts from his failing media empire had been spiraling out of control, concealed by creative accounting, unsecured loans, stolen pension funds, and money laundering. Paying no heed to the bottom line, Maxwell had expanded into the United States earlier that year by purchasing the New York Daily News and rescuing it from oblivion. To help warm up New York for his imminent arrival, Maxwell had sent Ghislaine to the city to be the advance guard for his foray into New York society.

  * * *

  —

  Meanwhile, Maxwell’s problematic relationships in the crisis-stricken Soviet Union didn’t help matters. At the time, the Soviet Union was in crisis economically and politically, internally and externally. Mikhail Gorbachev had just negotiated a new treaty ceding enormous amounts of power to the Soviet republics, and hard-line Communist Party members who were already opposed to Gorbachev’s reforms had had enough.

  They included General Vladimir Kryuchkov, the KGB chief who was Maxwell’s pal and who orchestrated a coup in August 1991 in an attempt to overthrow Gorbachev.

  The coup failed, however, after only three days. Kryuchkov and his fellow conspirators were imprisoned and disgraced. Several killed themselves. If Maxwell, thanks to his ties to Kryuchkov, were in any way linked to a coup that tried to oust the West’s favorite Soviet leader, there would be hell to pay from the CIA—not to mention the Kremlin.

  In addition, Maxwell’s business practices were a disaster. For all his purported wealth, Maxwell had also run up $2.2 billion in debt.8 Newsday reporters went so far as to compare him to another New York con man who was similarly creative when it came to waving pieces of paper prepared by accounting firms that inflated his fortune and made it seem as if he did not have billions in debt. “But all those pieces of paper mean is that the accounting firm got a fee to certify that it had looked at the numbers, not that the numbers are realistic,” the paper reported.9

  Along with his strong ties to the KGB, Maxwell had a long, clandestine history working for Mossad, and as the Soviet Union disintegrated, he provided Mossad with access to the halls of power in the Kremlin and intelligence agencies in various Soviet satellites. A report in his own paper, the Daily Mirror, asserted that Maxwell was so desperate for cash he told Mossad that unless they came up with the money, “they could no longer count on his silence.”10

  If that report is true, Maxwell, in effect, was threatening to blackmail Mossad, an act that many people believe was a fatal mistake. Thomas and Dillon’s Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy concludes, “Mossad had decided it could no longer afford to ignore the threat posed by Maxwell.”

  In life, Maxwell had been feted in Israel as if he were a head of state. In death, he was buried in Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives with the splendor and solemnity of a state funeral,11 attended by Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir and President Chaim Herzog, both of whom gave eulogies, and no fewer than six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence.12

  And yet, for all that, Maxwell’s killers were likely operating on behalf of Israeli intelligence.

  * * *

  —

  Maxwell’s entry into the world of intelligence dated back to the immediate aftermath of World War II, when, as a Jewish Czech expatriate, he had interrogated German scientists while serving in the British army. Shortly afterward, with funding from MI6,13 Britain’s foreign intelligence service, he started a scientific publishing firm that soon became the leading authority on Soviet bloc publishing—and a way for MI6 to obtain intelligence about Soviet scientists.14 In naming the company
Pergamon Press, Maxwell, whether he knew its provenance or not, settled on the Book of Revelation’s name for Satan’s throne—the Pergamon Altar. In return for the funding, Maxwell was to pass on information and help MI6 contact and recruit scientists.15

  Along the way, Maxwell became so wired into the Kremlin that he knew all the top Soviet leaders personally—Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Mikhail Gorbachev, among them—and was on speaking terms with the heads of intelligence in one Eastern bloc nation after another, including Bulgaria, Romania, and Czechoslovakia.16 Which was all well and good, so long as Maxwell wasn’t playing both sides and offering similar tidbits to the Soviets, too.

  But that was exactly what the FBI feared when they saw Maxwell at the nexus of Soviet and Western science, a highly sensitive place to be just as the Cold War erupted.17 Indeed, as early as 1953, the year Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed after being convicted of providing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover ordered what became an eight-year investigation comprising thousands of pages of documents that assert Maxwell was “in contact with Russians in East Germany, who were prepared to facilitate trading by their companies with Eastern bloc countries in return for political and economic information regarding policies of the Western Powers.”18

  Throughout the fifties, FBI files show that Maxwell traveled throughout the United States under the aliases of Wallace Chesterton, Ludwig Hock (a variation on his birth name), Enian Robert Maxwell, and others, striking up relationships with top scientists all over the country—including the brilliant mathematician and physicist John von Neumann, commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission and one of the scientists behind the hydrogen bomb—in the interests of sharing the fruits of international science, translating Russian scientific journals into English, and, as one FBI report had it, “trying to ascertain from various American scientists if they would be interested in publishing an American edition of ‘The Journal of Nuclear Energy.’”19