In this account, Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon reveal the secret plot to assassinate one of the world's most powerful businessmen. This is the story of Robert Maxwell's execution - the motivation, the planning, and the events of that cold night at sea when he met his fate.
Some of those intelligence sources were close to men like the KGB chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov, Ognian Doinov, and Andrei Lukanov, central figures in the story of Robert Maxwell's criminal activities in Eastern Europe. Through these sources, we were able to recreate, from their oral testimony and documents in their possession, the minutiae of Maxwell's activities. Again, it was possible to check the evidence of one source against another; in the great majority, their evidence was tallied. In a number of cases, particularly in Bulgaria and Russia, some of those sources had been directly present at meetings Maxwell had attended. In other instances, they had listened to, or read transcripts of, secretly recorded conversations. Their contemporaneous notes were invaluable in describing what he said and how he reacted. Those notes form part of our considerable documentation.
In the case of some serving members of the Israeli intelligence community, they are prevented by the country's laws from allowing their names to be published. Again, it does not invalidate their contribution.
Secondary sources are based upon interviews those sources have given on repeated occasions to newspapers and magazines and the broadcast media worldwide. In the great majority of cases, those sources gave almost identical interviews on the same subject on the same day, especially in the closing weeks of Robert Maxwell's life. We, therefore, decided it would be unnecessary, indeed pointless, to identify statements of those secondary sources to each publication in which they appeared.
Please refer to the notes and documents section, which contains facsimiles of important documents relating to Robert Maxwell's life and untimely death.
