True History

ON THE 1948 REBIRTH OF THE NATION OF ISRAEL

by Dr. William P. Grady

In the providence of God, three unsaved Jews were uniquely responsible for Israel’s miraculous birth in May of 1948. While posing as an Abwehr spy, KGB double-agent Richard Kauder (a.k.a. Fritz Klatt), repeatedly thwarted Hitler’s Wehrmacht through his covert network (a.k.a. Max/Moritz), ultimately saving the Yishuv from genocide. As portrayed in the film Cast a Giant Shadow, American Colonel David “Mickey” Markus (alias, Michael Stone), clandestinely provided the needed military expertise to unify, prepare, and direct Israel’s fragmented underground militias to defeat five Arab armies in their War of Independence. Utilizing a contact from Kauder, Robert Maxwell (a.k.a. Lev Hoch) procured the all-important munitions for Israel’s future prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. The following article will center on Maxwell with the lion’s share of material coming from my fifth book, Holy Ground: The True History of the State of Israel (pages 458-459 and 461-465).

Arms Embargo

When a reporter asked David Dinkins to recall his initial impression upon becoming the first black mayor of New York City, he insisted that his experience was not the vicarious dilemma of a dog that had finally caught the car he was always chasing, i.e., “Now what do I do?” The tiny State of Israel was faced with this reality.

On December 5, 1947, President Truman’s Secretary of State, George Marshall, declared an arms embargo on all combatants in the expanding Middle East crisis. Having pushed the envelope with his surprise endorsement of Israel, Harry was ill-prepared to reverse the Marshall doctrine. (At least such pre-election acquiescence showed that his earlier magnanimity was not solely about votes). According to divine providence, Truman was now in the role of King Darius, who, being hamstrung by similar political realities, had to pass a sleepless night before enquiring, “O Daniel…is thy God, whom thou servest continually, able to deliver thee from the lions?” (Daniel 6:20) Of course, modern Israel was a long way from serving Jehovah. Thus, once again, while Laodicea’s political leaders took their cue from their budding apostate religious counterparts, the LORD Himself would intervene, for “hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?” (Numbers 23:19)

The rank hypocrisy of contrived US “neutrality” was that the Arabs had already been armed to the teeth by the British vis-à-vis an annual military subsidy of £2,000,000. Thus, Britain’s own “embargo,” imposed in February 1948, was equally disingenuous. Furthermore, as award-winning authors John Loftus and Mark Aarons document, certain German POWs (i.e., hardcore, Jew-hating Nazis) still being “held” in Egypt were somehow “escaping” and finding their way into Palestine via Muslim ratlines “where they became instructors for the Arab units.”

Arabist Alison Weir inanely states, “Zionist military units…before the UN vote…had acquired massive weaponry…were better equipped and had more men under arms than their opponents.” She then cites the equally biased Kathleen Christison: “America’s diplomats…knew from the beginning that the Arabs were certain losers in their war with Israel. Every source confirmed the overwhelming military superiority of the Israelis over their Arab opponents.”

However, as we have already seen, the two most powerful officials in the Truman administration were predicting the very opposite. While Defense Secretary Forrestal told Clark Clifford: “Forty million Arabs are going to push four hundred thousand Jews into the sea.” General Marshall went on record, warning, “militarily the Jews were embarked on a very risky venture in Palestine, and should the tide turn against them, there was nothing to guarantee help from the United States.”

Czech Guns Via Richard & Robert

Jilted by the West, David Ben-Gurion was ultimately forced to procure his first and most significant weapons cache from behind the descending Iron Curtain. (Israel’s future would be secured by Golda Meir’s early 1948 cross-country fund-raising tour in America, procuring fifty-million dollars in Jewish contributions.) It was fitting that the source was Czechoslovakia, given her betrayal by Britain and later Nazi occupation. (As late as 2012, a UN resolution to make “Palestine” a non-Member Observer State was voted against by the Czech Republic—the sole European country, and one of only nine to do so, against 138 yeas and 41 abstentions.)

In late November 1946, two young Jews arrived in Vienna from Paris. The men were Haganah intelligence agents Georg Überall (later known as Ehud Avriel) and future six-term Jerusalem mayor, Theodor “Teddy” Kollek (a.k.a. “The greatest builder of Jerusalem since Herod”). Their original assignment was transporting Jewish refugees from Austria to Palestine. Their first contact was Harry-Peter Smolka-Smollett, a London Times correspondent in Austria and childhood friend of Teddy. To avoid the British, the men agreed to hold their meetings at the Esquire Club, a popular watering hole in the American district of Vienna. At their next conference, Smolka-Smollett showed up with a British officer, introducing him as Ludwig “Lev” Hoch, a Czech Jew. Hoch was an interrogator for the local MI6 office and would navigate the cadre through British checkpoints in the capital.

Smolka-Smollett then recommended that Kollek and Überall meet another well-connected friend recently settled in Salzburg. Shortly thereafter, the four Zionists conferred with the man at a Salzburg eatery. The next day they visited local refugee facilities. After several weeks of shuttling between Vienna and Salzburg, Kollek finally broached his greater burden during a discussion at the Esquire—acquiring arms for Palestine. While Smolka-Smollett quickly ruled out Austria, Hoch hinted that they should try the Czechs, noted for their munitions expertise (lately exploited by Nazi Germany). When Kollek and Überall asked how they might do this, Smolka-Smollett had a ready reply; he told them to ask their newfound colleague in Salzburg.

About this time (February 1947), David Ben-Gurion burst on the scene, ostensibly to tour DP camps. However, his real purpose was to see “the Jew from Salzburg.” Before Ben-Gurion departed, “Richard” assured him of his personal commitment to the struggle ahead. In a follow-up talk with Kollek and Überall, the man lifted a letterhead from his wallet bearing the emblem of the nationalized Zbrojovka Brno (ZB) arms plant in Czechoslovakia—signing his full name on the back—Richard Joseph Kauder. He then handed the paper to Kollek, saying, “Give this to Otto Šling in Brno and tell him that I asked him to help you.” Šling, a Bohemian Jew, had originally sent the stationery to Kauder (via Smolka-Smollett) with the attached message: “Give this to Richard and tell him that if he needs anything, I will be happy to help. Tell him to write ‘Kauder’ on the back of the paper and I will know that it is from him.” In his book, The Hitler Kiss: A Memoir of the Czech Resistance, Radomir Luza writes: “As secretary of the regional committee of the Communist Party in Brno, Šling decided the affairs of everyone in and around the city….” Retired Israeli Colonel Avi Ziv-Tal affirms, “This was the first step towards the arms deal with the Czech Republic.”

Having saved both the Yishuv from genocide and the Continent from Nazification through his Max network as “Fritz Klatt,” Richard Kauder would now do his part to rescue the pending Jewish state from impending annihilation. According to Aarons and Loftus, Richard’s compatriot for his final achievement was the MI6 officer, Lev Hoch. To summarize an intricate narrative, after Hoch escaped the Nazis in Slovakia, he availed his services to the French Resistance, then the French Foreign Legion, and finally, to the British, only to land in a prison camp in England on a skewed charge of insubordination. By now he had changed his name to “Robert Maxwell.” However, it was here that he had a providential encounter with another political detainee, Vladimír Clementis, an ethnic Czech communist and former parliament member. Through a series of further developments, Robert was able to join the British army, rise to lieutenant, win the Military Cross for bravery (rescuing a platoon trapped by Germans), finally, parlaying his skill in foreign languages (especially Russian) into a job with MI6—all while keeping his Zionist aspirations under wraps.

In 1946, Robert was shocked to learn that MI6 was preparing to oust the postwar Slovakian government of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk. Why would Whitehall want to blindside the only democratic nation in the Eastern bloc with barely a 30% Communist vote? The intel came from British super-sleuth Kim Philby (Moscow’s best-kept secret). At Stalin’s order, the double-agent told his MI6 superiors that the Kremlin was secretly calling the shots in Prague and that Masaryk had to go. (Of course, in reality, Comrade Stalin was incensed at the Czech social democracy with its free trade unions and other political embarrassments.) Then, “oddly” enough, Philby endorsed the unpalatable Vatican-backed, anti- Communist, former Nazi quisling, Dr. Ferdinand Ďurčanský (listed as a UN Category A war criminal.)

Losing most of his family in the Holocaust, Robert must have recoiled at the thought of the British installing a fascist Catholic thug over his beloved homeland. He therefore seized the moment, apprising his old cellmate of the approaching putsch. The plot was subsequently exposed by the non-Red Czech Security Service. While the hard-line Slovenian communists attained a successful countercoup in the parliament (Philby’s plan all along), Vladimír Clementis, the more moderate vice-minister of foreign affairs, became the new Foreign Affairs Minister in March 1948. (Ďurčanský would later take a ratline to Argentina). Loftus and Aarons provide the anticipated finale:

Maxwell had watched the buildup of Arab arms from France, the US, and Britain with secret horror. He knew that Truman’s arms embargo tolled the death knell for the Jews of Palestine. In return for saving his native country from Ďurčanský’s civil war, Maxwell begged the Czechs for weapons for his adopted country, Israel. He wanted Clementis to send guns to Ben-Gurion, when no one else in the world would supply them.

The authors then corroborate Ziv-Tal’s “Maxwell-Max” nexus:

There is considerable evidence that Maxwell’s Czech strategy was coordinated by Ben-Gurion’s secret double agent inside Soviet intelligence. In fact, it is almost certain that in the aftermath of the Communist coup, Maxwell was supported by another secret Zionist agent, an Austrian Jew. It was, say our sources in the intelligence community, Richard Kauder, code-named Klatt, the head of the Max network. At the end of 1947 Kauder helped a team of Zionist intelligence agents to travel to Prague, where they quickly made contact with the Czech government through his local sources from the Max network. By early 1948 they had concluded the first of a series of crucial arms deals with the Czech authorities, thanks to Maxwell’s warnings about the Ďurčanský plot.

British historian Richard Deacon also alludes to Kauder’s role:

In the early stages Czechoslovakia was earmarked as the most promising source of supply for arms, not only because it was an arms-producing country, but because at that time it was freer from Soviet domination than any of the other Soviet bloc countries of Eastern Europe. Nevertheless it still required Secret Service style activities to plan the purchase of such arms. The Palestinian Jews were helped by a former German Jew who had been one of a number of such Jews specially recruited by Admiral Canaris as agents for his Abwehr (German Secret Service)….

Ziv-Tal states that the initial shipment constituted “four crates of Bren machine guns,” the cargo proceeding to southern Italy by rail, then to northern Africa and Palestine by ship. The author concludes with a heart-pounding postscript that perfectly illustrates the aforementioned theme of God’s unconditional personal commitment:

Surprisingly enough, the Americans did find out about the deliveries but decided to turn a blind eye to them and allow them to proceed. The story was as follows: the Bren machine guns came with English-language manuals. Someone brought one of the manuals to the DP camp in Bad Gastein in search of someone who spoke English and could translate the manual into Yiddish. He approached a Jewish American sergeant who conversed with the refugees in fluent Yiddish. The sergeant agreed to translate the manual and informed his commander, who allowed him to proceed and promised to remain silent.

Ziv-Tal repeated the same account to this author during a 2014 interview in Jerusalem. Upon the successful trial run, a consignment of 200 MG-34 machine guns, 4,500 P-18 rifles, and 50,400,000 rounds of ammunition in early 1948 marked the beginning of “Operation Balak”; plenty more would follow, from bayonets to German Spitfires and Messerschmitts. Ben-Gurion later opined, “Without these weapons, it’s doubtful whether we could have won. The arms deal with the Czechs was the greatest assistance we received.” Sadly, while Clementis’ timely pipeline saved Israel, it took his life in return. For defying Koba, the Slovakian patriot was condemned in a show trial and hanged on December 3, 1952. (Otto Šling was also executed on this date.) Loftus and Aarons conclude: “But for a few brave hours in 1948, Maxwell’s friends in the Czech government had done what no other nation on earth was courageous enough to do. They had, for the first time in two thousand years, given the Jews a fair fight.”

Post-War Career

Born in 1923 into a poor Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish family in the small Czech village of Slatinske Doly (now Solotvyno, Ukraine), Ján Ludvik Hyman Binyamin Hoch, later, Ian Robert Maxwell, was naturalized as a British subject on June 19, 1946, rising to become a successful media proprietor, publisher (Pergamon Press), and Labour Member of Parliament. Among his many acquisitions were the British Printing Corporation, Mirror Group Newspapers, and Macmillan Publishers. He even purchased the New York Daily News in 1991.

While most of his relatives were dying at Auschwitz (estimated at over 300), Captain Maxwell’s bravery in “storming a German machine-gun nest” earned him the Military Cross presented by Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, no less. After the war, the Orthodox Jew married Elisabeth “Betty” Meynard, a French-born Protestant of Huguenot descent. Their uncommon union would produce nine children. As Britain’s foremost “tabloid tycoon” expanded his company, the former MI6 agent was also heavily involved with Israel’s Mossad.

Considered one of the richest men in the world, Maxwell led the quintessential “Jet Set” life, residing in Oxford at Headington Hill Hall a 53-room mansion. On November 4, 1991, following a rancorous phone call with his son Kevin over a scheduled meeting with the Bank of England (regarding Pergamon’s default on £50,000,000 in loans), Robert skipped the appointment, opting for a Canary Island cruise aboard his superyacht, Lady Ghislaine (equipped with a Jacuzzi, sauna, gym and disco). The following day his naked body was recovered in the Atlantic Ocean. Apart from a “graze to his left shoulder” there were no noticeable signs of foul play. Insiders have speculated that he probably fell overboard while urinating, as he often did. Given his recent heart and lung problems, the official inquest report was “death by heart attack combined with accidental drowning” (though three pathologists were unable to agree on the cause of death). Finally, his son ruled out suicide, stating, “I think it is highly unlikely that he would have taken his own life, it wasn’t in his makeup or his mentality.”

The hero of the 1948 War of Independence was afforded an elaborate state funeral in Israel led by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Israeli President Chaim Herzog and attended by numerous dignitaries and politicians along with six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence. Shamir eulogized him, “He has done more for Israel than can today be told.” The celebrated Holocaust survivor was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

However, in the market pandemonium following Robert’s unforeseen death, the nasty discovery surfaced that he was basically Israel’s version of Jimmy Hoffa, having misappropriated hundreds of millions of pounds from his companies’ pension funds to save his empire from bankruptcy. Sadly, when the litigation dust settled, the late publishing magnate’s pensioners received only about half of their company pension entitlement.

The Rest of the Story

Maxwell’s widow, Elisabeth, a 1981 graduate from Oxford (at the age of 60), devoted much of her later years to ongoing research on the Holocaust. She also worked as an advocate of interfaith Jewish-Christian dialogue. Her autobiography, A Mind of My Own: My Life with Robert Maxwell, was published in 1994. Elisabeth died on August 7, 2013, at the age of 92 in Dordogne, France.

The Maxwells’ youngest child, a daughter, was born in 1961 in Maisons-Laffitte, France. Raised an Anglican, she attended Marlborough College and Balliol College, Oxford. Regarded as her father’s favorite, unfortunately, she emulated him more than she did her Protestant mother, becoming the consummate global socialite and businessperson. In the wake of Robert’s scandal, she moved to the United States, exacerbating his victims’ rancor by crossing the Atlantic on a pricy Concorde (akin to Marie Antoinette’s, “Let them eat cake”). Thanks to a prior trust fund established by her father in Liechtenstein, Maxwell received a hefty annual allowance of £80,000. By 1992, she was living in a Manhattan apartment overlooking Central Park, selling real estate by day and gracing the Gotham social scene by night.

According to one source, in the late 1980s Robert introduced his daughter to an unsavory well-connected Jewish financier. Over the next three decades their relationship would devolve into a crime spree of unparalleled debauchery. For her part, the joyride ended when she was arrested by the FBI while hiding in Bradford, New Hampshire, on July 6, 2020. By this time, her father’s famous 180-ft. yacht had already been purchased and resold by an Arab businessman and ultimately renamed Dancing Hare. As she sat in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, awaiting trial for six federal crimes, perhaps her mind went back to better times, like the special ceremony she attended in the Netherlands fourteen years earlier when her father had his new vessel christened in her name ─ Lady Ghislaine. Such reflections were certainly more pleasant than pondering whether she would meet the same fate as her longtime partner in crime Jeff had ─ and in the very same facility, no less ─ not to mention her father’s “accidental drowning.”