by Albert Jack
If that all seems a bit thin—and let's face it, it does—that's because the authorities only needed to remove one word and the whole cover-up would have been completely unnecessary. Think about the difference between reading “Glenn Miller died after being involved in a fight in a brothel bar” and “Glenn Miller died after being involved in a fight in a bar.” That's it, no inter national outcry, just a respectable period of public mourning. No shame would have been heaped upon the Miller family and no extensive and complicated cover-up story would have been necessary. But if Wright's hypothesis is true, how could all those people who would need to have been involved for this story to have any basis in fact—including any witnesses, the French police, military personnel, flight crew, medics, doctors, nurses, administrators, gravediggers, family, friends, and probably Inspector Clouseau himself—have not failed to give the game away hundreds of times over the ensuing fifty years? Instead we have the silence of a film star, a six-berth burial plot, and the testimony of a Parisian tart well past her sell-by date.
My vote goes with the recent evidence that has emerged that Miller was on board the Norse man after all. The new story has a much more convincing explanation of the Americans’ fear of the truth coming out. According to this theory, Miller boarded the Norseman at Twinwood Farm on December 14, 1944, just as Don Haynes said. The aircraft took off at 1:45 P.M. By 2:40 P.M. it was traveling through what was known as a jettison zone in the English Channel, an area set aside for returning bombers to drop their undischarged loads safely into the sea before they crossed the south coast. A fully laden bomber exploding on landing could wipe out an entire air base, so the jettison zone was stringently enforced. The only bomber to use the jettison zone that afternoon is known to have crossed it at around 3:40, at the time Miller should have been landing in Paris, and so it has never been thought relevant to the Miller mystery before. However, it has only recently been noticed that while the Miller flight would have been charted on Greenwich mean time (GMT), all military flight operations were logged using Central European time, which is one hour later. Therefore the bomber would have released its load directly over the area where Miller's Norseman would have been flying through, at a much lower altitude and in the opposite direction. Did the Americans hit their favorite musician with some not-so-friendly fire? There is certainly strong witness evidence to suggest they did, including some of the military aircrew themselves.
Fred Shaw, a navigator in one of the bombers, claimed, in an interview for an amateur film, that he saw the bombs his aircraft jettisoned strike a small plane beneath him. According to Shaw: “I had never seen a bombing before so I crawled from my navigator seat and put my head up into the observation blister. I saw a small high-wing monoplane, a Noorduyn Norseman, underneath us.” Mr. Shaw claimed he didn't make any connection to the disappearance of Glenn Miller until he saw The Glenn Miller Story in 1956. “There is a kite down there, I told the rear gunner, there's a kite gone in,” Shaw con tinued. “He then replied, yeah, I saw it too.” At the time authorities had dismissed his claims as a publicity-seeking exercise, but Shaw remained adamant he had seen the small plane spiral out of control as a result of being hit.
In a sworn statement given on April 10, 1999, Fred W. Atkinson, Jr., a member of the 320th Air Transport Squadron responsible for taking Miller to Paris, stated the following:
You will recall in the movie, The Glenn Miller Story, the letter that Glenn Miller wrote to his wife that day [in which] he expressed the feeling that he might not see them again. Given the weather con ditions and the type of aircraft that was a realistic probability.
Several days after our plane left London, we were notified that an aircraft that might be ours had crashed on the coast of France and that the occupants were dead. We dispatched a plane to that location and the aircraft and the bodies of our pilots were identified. Our crew also said that the other body definitely was that of Glenn Miller. They said there were identification papers and dogtags on his body. Our second crew that was in London at the time verified they had witnessed Glenn Miller and our two pilots board the aircraft and depart.
I recall the papers being processed to salvage our aircraft and report the death of our pilots on the squadron morning report. This report was turned in on a daily basis and notes the changes in status of all personnel as they occur. We had not experienced any deaths in our squadron until this time and this was a “double whammy” to us because of the loss of our pilots and the loss to the U.S. Armed Forces of probably the greatest morale booster (along with Bob Hope) that we all loved.
The flight logbook of another airman, Derek Thurman, appeared to corroborate the claim: “The bomb aimed down in the nose … saw an aircraft first, [and] remarked on it. The navigator shot out of his seat to have a look through a side blister [window] and he saw it sort of whip by, then the rear gunner said ‘it's gone in,’ sort of flipped over and went in. Whether it was brought down by a blast from one of the bombs, or was hit, is anybody's guess, really.”
These three reports, all from independent sources, are consistent in the details they provide. The idea that a small aircraft could have been hit or damaged by an explosion nearby, thus causing its pilot to ditch it onto the beach, breaking its propeller, is not so far-fetched. And if so, the idea that the American military may have recovered the bodies, then dragged the prop-free plane back into the sea and created a cover story, is a racing certainty.
It tends to be the case that the first information to emerge from a suspicious incident such as the Miller mystery is the most accurate and reliable, especially where governments are concerned, as they won't have had time to concoct a story to suit their purposes. For my money, Miller was accidentally shot down by the very military he was traveling to Europe to entertain. The Miller family were told the truth, which explains the sixth burial plot, and in return for their patriotism in never speaking publicly of the accident, were handsomely compensated for their loss. David Niven, on the other hand, was warned he would never work in Hollywood again if he ever mentioned the matter to anybody, so he didn't; and the French prostitute was just looking to sell a story for enough francs to buy a new horsewhip and a couple of cheap bottles of Beaujolais.
It is hard to conceive of a more ludicrous story than the idea Glenn Miller was beaten up in a Parisian bordello and died of his injuries. In the case of Liam Gallagher, however, I doubt there would be any such cover-up if he was found dead in a Basra brothel. Although these days it's far more likely he would be stabbed in the school yard by a teenager after his mobile phone.
Who finally stopped the bouncing Czech? The
extraordinary life and death of Robert Maxwell.
In 1940, Jan Ludvik Hoch did what many young Jews in Eastern Europe were doing at that time, and ran away to England to fight the Nazis. The seventeen-year-old refugee then fought his way from the beaches of Normandy to the center of Berlin. After the war he went on to become a publisher, Labour MP, football club owner, company chairman, owner of the Mirror Group Newspapers, owner of the New York Daily Times, embezzler, and fraudster before finally slipping from the back of his yacht and into oblivion. The official autopsy report concluded the cause of death had been “accidental drowning,” but, as in life, mystery shrouded the death of Jan Ludvik Hoch, a man who courted controversy from the moment he arrived in England and changed his name to Ian Robert Maxwell.
Maxwell joined the British army under a series of aliases, presumably because the War Office had suggested refugee soldiers should serve under invented names in case they were captured. Because he went by the names of Jones and du Maurier in addition to Maxwell, it is hard to find out much about what he got up to in the Second World War, although he did earn himself a medal. This was in January 1945 when his unit, the 6th Battalion of the North Staffordshire Regiment, was based at the river Meuse in Holland. He had recently been promoted to second lieutenant and his men were tasked with clearing a block of flats occupied by German soldiers. Maxwell led the assault
and charged straight for the building, drawing heavy fire. Luckily for him, although not so luckily for his future employees, every bullet aimed at him missed. It was an act of bravery that won him the Military Cross.
But not all of his wartime exploits were quite as distinguished. His authorized biographer, Joe Haines, reveals how Maxwell's unit attempted to capture a German town by calling for the mayor to meet with Maxwell in a neutral location. He then told the mayor that the German soldiers would have to surrender or face destruction by mortar bombardment. In a letter to his wife, published in Haines's book Maxwell (1988), he wrote: “But as soon as we marched off a German tank opened fire on us. Luckily he missed so I shot the mayor and withdrew.” Maxwell showed no remorse at killing an unarmed man in cold blood, and it was a sign of things to come.
As the war drew to a close, Robert Maxwell found himself working for the Control Com mission, an Allied organization formed to manage the economy, state industry, and government of the defeated German people. His natural intelligence and gift for languages had been noticed by the high command of the Allied forces, and he soon found himself organizing various sections of the West German services, including the national newspapers. Back in Britain, his entrepreneurial spirit was quickly in evidence, and he became a shareholder in a London import and export company originally owned by a German, but Maxwell was soon in sole command.
Two years after the end of the war, Robert Maxwell's company was distributing scientific literature and manuals to both Britain and America after a deal was hatched with the German publishing heavyweight Springer Verlag (later Axel Springer) that established Maxwell in the marketplace. Another two years would pass before he launched his own publishing company, Pergamon Press, after securing heavy investment from Springer. Such was his initial success that he was able to buy Springer out of the contract and take over as sole owner while settling in to the business of becoming seriously wealthy during the 1950s.
In 1959 he became the Labour candidate for Buckingham and won the seat in 1964 as the new Labour government led by Harold Wilson swept into power. He remained an MP until 1970, when the Conservatives under Ted Heath defeated Wilson in the general election of that year. Maxwell too lost his seat but by then had already realized that true power lay in journalism: the pen really was mightier than the sword. In 1969 Maxwell had unsuccessfully tried to buy the News of the World, having been beaten to it by the Australian entrepreneur Rupert Murdoch. Maxwell did not take defeat well and accused Murdoch of “employing the laws of the jungle,” claiming he had made a “fair and bona fide offer which has been frustrated and defeated over three months of cynical maneuvering.” In response Murdoch stated that News of the World shareholders had judged him on his record of newspaper ownership in Australia and were confident in his ability. This was a clear slight on Maxwell's character as well as the start of a bitter and lifelong rivalry between the two men.
In 1969 Maxwell had opened negotiations with the American businessman Saul Steinberg, who had declared an interest in buying Pergamon Press Ltd. (PPL) on the understanding that the company was making vast profits. Discovering this to be untrue, the American, despite months of negotiations, abruptly pulled out of the proposed purchase. An investigation by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) followed, in which inspectors revealed how transactions between private Maxwell companies had been used to inflate the PPL share price. Steinberg initiated legal proceedings against the former MP, and in 1974 it was discreetly announced in The New York Times that he had received a payment of $6.25 million from Maxwell and his investment bankers. In their 1970 report, the DTI inspectors had concluded: “Notwithstanding Mr. Maxwell's acknowledged ability and energy, he is not in our opinion a person who can be relied upon to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company.”
He lost control of Pergamon and the company's investment bankers appointed a new chairman in the shape of Sir Walter Coutts, who, with three independent directors, reversed the fortunes of Pergamon spectacularly and returned control of the company to Maxwell in 1974. Naturally, the “bouncing Czech,” as he had become known because of his questionable integrity and his ability to bounce back from adversity, claimed the credit for the successful turnaround of his company. Coutts was later quoted by a biographer as saying: “Maxwell has an ability to sublimate anything that stops him getting what he wants. He is so flexible he is like a grasshopper. There is no question of morality or conscience. Maxwell is Number One and what Maxwell wants is the most important thing and to hell with anything else.”
Building on the success of Pergamon, Maxwell bought Mirror Group Newspapers from Reed International for PS113 million on June 13, 1984. Behind the scenes, he had already built up a mini empire consisting of, among other things, a record label, Nimbus Records, a printing company, a book publishing house, half of MTV Europe, 20 percent of Central Television in Britain, a cable television company, and two newspapers, The People and Sporting Life. As his empire, now called Maxwell Communications Corporation PLC (MCC), grew, so did his interest and influence in politics, especially as one of his various companies published the speeches of Chernenko, Ceausescu, Brezhnev, Andropov, Kadar, Husak, and other Eastern Bloc leaders. He also published sycophantic bio graphies of world figures and used the opportunity to meet and interview them, which caused him to be ridiculed at home but strengthened his links with several totalitarian regimes.
Maxwell also claimed to have influence in Israel, and during a magazine interview for Playboy he boasted that it was he who had been responsible for persuading Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir to exercise restraint in the face of Scud missile attacks from Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War. He even boasted of close ties with the Israeli secret service, Mossad; indeed, after his death it was revealed that Maxwell had worked with the organization for many years and was known to a handful of elite Mossad agents by his code name “the Little Czech.”
Journalists would later point out how Max well's companies would invariably take a downturn financially whenever Mossad was engaging in expensive covert operations, leading to speculation he was an important source of funds. Mossad was even rumored to have funded Maxwell's first big business venture, prompting suggestions that the whole of Maxwell's business empire was in fact a Mossad fund-raising venture. Stranger things have happened.
But in early 1991, the Little Czech was beginning to lose his bounce. A Panorama documentary for the BBC had drawn attention to the DTI's findings in the 1970s and suggested Maxwell had been bolstering the MCC share price through transactions with secretly owned companies in Liechtenstein and Gibraltar. The inevitable libel writs were issued, but a number of biographers followed with similar accusations. During the summer of 1991, Maxwell's relations with Israel soured when his repeated requests to Mossad to apply pressure on Israeli bankers to refinance his business were ignored. By now even the British Parliament was keeping a close eye on Maxwell's international business dealings.
Government ministers had known for a long time about Maxwell's influence with the various world leaders he had connections with. After all, it had been Maxwell who had liaised between Moscow and Tel Aviv during the August coup of 1991, in which the former head of the KGB Vladimir Kryuchkov and other hard-line Communists had attempted to oust Mikhail Gorbachev from power. (Who can forget the images being broadcast live by satellite during the early days of Sky Television of Boris Yeltsin standing on his tank with a bullhorn, organizing the defense of Moscow's White House?) Maxwell had been involved in arranging a meeting between the Israeli secret service and high-level KGB officials, including Kryuchkov, to discuss Mossad support for the plot to replace Gorbachev, the first Russian president to show any sign of being about to work closely with Western governments.
But then, according to the sworn testimony of former Mossad agent Ari Ben-Menashe, Maxwell had made the mistake of threatening Mossad with revealing information about the meeting unless they supported him financially. According to Ben-Menashe, both
Maxwell and the Daily Mirror‘s foreign editor were longtime Mossad agents, and it was Maxwell who informed the Israeli Embassy in London that Mordechai Vanunu had revealed details of Israel's nuclear capability to The Sunday Times. Vanunu was immediately lured from his Sunday Times-provided safe house in London to Rome, where he was snatched by Mossad agents. He was later returned to Israel, convicted of treason, and spent the next eighteen years protesting his innocence from prison before finally being released in 2004.
On October 21, 1991, two members of Parliament, Labour's George Galloway and the Tory Rupert Allison, were persuaded to bring up the Vanunu affair, and Maxwell's part in it, in the House of Commons. Protected by parliamentary privilege, in which members could make allegations without fear of litigation, newspapers began to report a wide range of Maxwell-related intrigues and mysteries.
