Sam Vaknin, Mystery Man
These texts were published in a blog in April 2017 by a Washington DC pro-Russia “analyst” in whom I confided this information. He was introduced to me in Skopje, Macedonia by a mutual friend, a senior editor of various print media there. At the time, I was on assignment in Russia and this betrayal was a part of an intricate web of warnings sent in my direction.
My name is Patrick Martin Benoit (not real name).
I am a private investigator in Geneva and Brussels and former journalist in
Geneva. I met Vaknin in Geneva many years ago, in 1983.
At age 21 he was friends with the richest
billionaires in the world: Shivdasani, Gaon, Taman, Raccah, Cornfeld. He had a private jet he
allegedly bought from Adnan Khashoggi
and later sold to Donald Trump (more about it in a later post). In Russia, in a
public lecture recently, he boasted that the jet was "bigger than
Trump’s". He went skiing in Gstad. He
established a literary association in Geneva with someone like Peter Ustinov. I
could not understand what was going on. Just 2 years before he was a very poor
Israeli from a slum!
I started to be interested in Mr. Vaknin. I
asked my people (now I have more than 20 workers) to begin to look into him,
make a dossier.
Almost first thing they found was this leak
from Wikileaks. It reminded me of what Brendan Howley wrote of Sam Vaknin in a review of his book he
published in Blue Ear:
“Vaknin's
considerable intellectual armory reminds me of that
of the ex-MOSSAD people I met in Poland in the early 1990s, retired spooks now
running trading houses: utterly realistic, Talmudically
concise in their opinions, and damn relentless. “
Now my interest was roused. I made it my hobby
to study this man. Over the last 18 months I and my team began to find amazing
facts and impossible counterfacts in Vaknin’s official
curriculum vitae. So many that I do not know where
to start most efficiently. So many that I
decided to establish a blog and publish my findings and discoveries.
Take for example the most
simple question:
The District Court of Tel-Aviv-Jaffa issued an
order banning Vaknin’s exit from Israel. If he tried
to leave the country, he was to be arrested at the airport instantly. This was
related to a lawsuit 1288/90 (Bank Mizrakhi against
Vaknin et al.).
Yet, Vaknin comes and goes as he wishes from
and to Israel. He is living in Skopje, Macedonia now but before that he lived
in Prague and Moscow in very prestigious and expensive addresses (in Moscow in Patriki). How can he do that?
Recently, Vaknin posted a zip file
with many Hebrew language articles about him from the 1980s. We are
translating it. But already it is clear that he is telling the truth about his
connections with the Israeli intelligence community, especially the Mossad, very senior people like Elkana Gali and Rafi Eitan. But he was only 23 then!
At the same time that he is working with the
most senior people of the Mossad, he is good friends
and business partners with Eli Ronen, restaurateur and top organized crime mob
figure! And with Uri Geller, the famous
psychic.
We were completely confused.
Maybe the first clue is Vaknin’s
family from his mother’s side. Her nee
is Pardo. Like the family name of the ex head of the Mossad, Tamir Pardo who is, like her,
from the same city in Turkey, Istanbul.
Vaknin’s younger
sister is Sima Gil-Vaknin, another senior military and
intelligence figure (former IDF Brigadier General Chief Censor and now Director
General, Ministry of Strategic Affairs.)
Another brother of Vaknin, Avinoam,
is senior intelligence officer in the Israeli Air Force.
This is not a usual family. Not
at all. And Sam Vaknin is hiding more than he is saying about his true
life.
For example: what was Vaknin doing in senior
position with the Moonies (Unification Church)?
He was head of the Israeli affiliate of the prestigious Professors World Peace Academy when he
was only 25! Then he worked as head of the Israel desk for the Washington Times
and then Senior Business Correspondent in United Press
International (UPI). All these were properties of the Reverend Moon.
Or consider this amazing
photo. Vaknin, an Israeli in his early twenties, meeting secretly with top
Arab politicians and intellectuals in the middle of the worst Intifada by the
Palestinians against Israel.
Vaknin’s
intellectual work is very controversial. He is well known for his studies of narcissism, but he actually
contributed to physics, economics, computer science, philosophy, political analyses, published short fiction in Hebrew and
English and also poetry.
We began to look at Vaknin like someone with
100 personalities, not one. There was more fog than light. Now he became from
hobby to obsession and the more we discovered, the more this guy looked like a
Hollywood movie waiting to happen.
Sam Vaknin claims to have done time in prison
in 1995-6. We checked the records of the courts and the prison system in
Israel. It is true. He was first put in Eyal, now a
closed prison camp, mostly for white-collar criminals. There he worked in the
library of the prison (the books were for the students at the warden school
nearby). Nadav
Nackan, the convicted hitman,
was also working there with him.
Then, after he verbally attacked during his
appeal process the all-powerful Supreme Court Chief Justice Aharon
Barak and gave an interview on the radio against the Israeli court system,
he was expelled from Eyal and put in a much worse and
more dangerous prison in Ramla, among murderers,
rapists, Arab terrorists, and armed robbers. He described this setting in one
of his short stories, “Write
Me a Letter”.
During this period that he was supposed to be
in a maximum security facility, he was giving lectures
in the Tel-Aviv University Law Faculty with Prof. Shlomo Giora Shoham.
Even accoding to his own CV, he worked in “Namer Tikshoret”, publisher of “Namer shel Neyar”
(a fax to subscribers about the advertising industry). We verified this with
the owner at the time, Yuval.
How is this possible and why was he released
after only 11 months out of a verdict of 36 months?
Again, during these 11 months supposedly in
prison, he wrote his bestselling book, “Malignant
Self-love: Narcissism Revisited” (430 dense pages in English in the first
edition in 1999) as well as 5 other manuscripts, including his book of short
stories, “Requesting
My Loved One”, which won a prestigious
prize from the Council of Culture and Art in 1997!
How can anyone write so many works in prison,
with the terrible conditions in Ramla?
We found evidence that Vaknin was cooperating
with Dov
Raviv, the Arrow missile engineer who got bribes
from a supplier while he was working in the Israeli Aircraft Industries (IAI)
and was in prison the same time as Vaknin. Vaknin got money from Raviv days after he left prison. What were these two
working on? No one knows or no one wants to talk.
Was Sam Vaknin really in prison or was it a
cover for some secret mission or job? My investigators become more and more
convinced that Vaknin was sent to prison to build up some important part of his
future story, biography.
By who? The Mossad?
Ex Mossad agents we
talked to said that the Mossad do not use tactics
like this. Some of them pointed the finger and us at a completely different
angle and direction: a private, secret, global organization of ex senior
intelligence officers. It is known only as “The Organization”.
As far as we could ascertain, the Organization
was run via a now down website, International
Analyst Network. Vaknin is listed there, together with all the most senior
“who is who” of the espionage world. We also came across this mind blowing
email correspondence
with Clive Prince and Lynn Picknett, the authors
of bestseller books about conspiracies.
We wanted to know with all urgency what is the truth behind this incredible story. So, we involved
colleagues in the Balkans to begin the hunt for the Real Sam Vaknin: to find
out everything about his assassinated (?) partner, Gideon
Sandel, and about his shadow work in Serbia breaking the
embargo imposed by the West on the Milosevic regime (together with then Industry
Minister Dusko Matkovic
and via the MKS conglomerate and its accounts
in Cyprus and Lebanon), and, later, in Macedonia with Nikola Gruevski,
the Prime Minister until a year ago.
Vaknin constantly appears in countries where
there is a crisis. After he appears, there is always some big change in the
politics of those countries.
In 1990, Sam Vaknin was arrested and interrogated
several times by the new securities fraud squad of the Israeli police. He was
suspected of (and, in 1995, convicted of) securities fraud in a strange affair
involving the purchase of a state-owned bank, Agriculture Bank.
His brokerage house, Mikbats
Tesuah, was closed and he paid millions to banks, the
tax authorities, and individuals he owed money to, including some very
dangerous crime personalities. He went to live with his new wife, Nomi, who was
just out of the Israeli army, in Ramat-Gan, not far from
the Diamond Exchange and the Elite chocolate factory (Lean st.
24).
Yet, in 1991, Vaknin was back. By 1994, he had
enough money to buy big part of the state-owned IT company (Malmata”m)
and a HVAC factory, Omega as well as temp agency employing 8000 people.
In 1991, together with an also mysterious
Israeli businessman, Gideon Sandel, he had a meeting
with representatives of a giant Yugoslav company, MKS (Metalurski
Kombinat Smederovo). The
meeting was very secret in an office in the building of the gigantic Israeli
holding company, Klal.
No one knows what was discussed there, but
months later Vaknin travelled to Serbia (without any problem even though he has
been arrested!). There he met with Dusko Matkovic, then general
manager of MKS and, later, Minister of Industry in the Milosevic regime.
In this trip, Vaknin met all the big economic
players of Serbia and political figures like the mayor of Belgrade and, after
that, Milosevic himself. It was agreed that Vaknin will help Serbia break the
international sanctions that were then beginning to be imposed on it.
Over the next 4 years, Vaknin engineered fake
transactions, created shell companies, and moved
4 billion (!) USD from Serbia to many accounts in banks in Israel, Cyprus, and
Lebanon. This money was used by Milosevic to buy fuel, weapons, raw
materials, and finished industrial products and to pay to his loyalists.
Without this money, the regime would have collapsed.
Vaknin operated in Novi Sad, from the offices
of Sand-Trade, a trading company owned by an ex Israeli parachutist, Gideon Sandel. Sandel fell from a mountain in Macedonia and died in 2012
in very suspicious circumstances.
In 1995 Vaknin returned to Israel to be in
prison! After 11 months, he was released on good behavior (!) and moved
immediately to live in Macedonia, again working with Gideon Sandel
and with Tose Kocevski, a
Macedonian-Russian businessman, who owned VessoLink
and Pikon, two paging companies.
For 2 years (1998-9) Vaknin lived with his
girlfriend (later, wife) LidijaRangelovska, in Prague and in Moscow in the most
prestigious area: Patriki. He was in Moscow during
the economic crisis of 1998 that almost destroyed Russia’s economy. Ostensibly,
he worked as advisor to a foreign-owned communication company, Vessolink. While there, he collaborated with major
financial houses (most of them Western owned), banks, and prominent figures
which later featured - and still feature - in the highest echelons various
Putin administrations and as eminences grise.
But collaborated doing what? No one has a clear
answer.
He and his wife were kidnapped for ransom once
by rogue KGB agents, when they got separated from his bodyguards. That is all
we were able to find out. Two years of activity there and not a trace left
behind. All amidst a mega bond crisis, carefully orchestrated by mysterious
forces.
Vaknin also wrote a few articles for Pravda, Izvestiya and other papers explaining why the crisis was
good for Russia. He is back in Russia now. Interesting times
ahead?
While in Macedonia 1996-8, Vaknin acted
publicly against the socialist government. He started as an advisor to the
Privatization Agency and the Stock Exchange of Macedonia but then became a
shadow consultant to the rightwing party, the VMRO-DPMNE.
Vaknin selected a young, junior banker, Nikola Gruevski,
and published with him in the print media a long series of dialogs about
economic issues. These were later made into a book
that Gruevski was giving copies of to his guests when
he became Minister of Finance.
The dialogs with Vaknin made Gruevski very famous. In 1998, the VMRO-DPMNE won the
elections. Gruevski became Minister without Portfolio
and then Minister of Trade. Vaknin returned from Prague to Macedonia to become
economic advisor to the government. He convinced Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski to appoint
Gruevski as Minister of Finance.
Vaknin told people that he will make Gruevski into Macedonia’s Prime Minister. Everyone laughed.
Until in 2006 this exactly happened. Many people in Macedonia consider Vaknin
as the brain and éminence grise behind Gruevski’s
coming to power.
Vaknin’s
military service in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) is another enigma. His
military dossier shows that in 1979 he served as a private first class in Golani,
an infantry unit. He was a witness for the prosecution in a war crimes trial
after he documented atrocities committed by his Golani
superiors and soldiers in the West Bank town of Halhul.
But then he went to study computer programming
and to be a parachuted medic. After that, he became a kitchen hand (!) in Bik’at Ha’yareakh (“Moon
Valley”), Israel’s remotest air base not far from Eilat,
the Red Sea resort. Three months among pots and pans and he is in the Air Force
in Sde
Dov (AFB 15) in the center of Tel-Aviv. There, he
teaches physics and mathematics to air force pilots and mechanics. He also
manages the Air Force library in the base.
Yet, our research discovered that Vaknin was
secretly working with all the intelligence arms of the IDF. He was nominally
under the command of Brigadier General Zusia Kniager (“Zizi”). He was involved
in two projects: “mind reading” (studying how to read and interpret brain
electricity, possibly for pilot helmets) and predicting geopolitical and
military events using computer models and simulations based on mathematics.
And he was starting to become very famous in
the media: television, newspapers.
For one whole decade, Vaknin was fully covered by all the media in Israel just
for being a “genius” and with no real achievements (except his IQ and academic
career which will be discussed in future).
And, contrary to all army regulations, he was
allowed to travel outside Israel freely to ... gamble in casinos! This is
really getting very strange, even surrealistic because these trips were with known
top-level mafia figures in Israel. More about these mysterious gambling trips
in one of our next exposes.
All his life Vaknin has one official biography
and one true resume, a visible, public side and a dark, hidden part. It is like
he is not one person but many, with multiple personalities.
Consider his involvement in Africa.
First time Vaknin visited this continent in
1983. He was already a senior member of the business empire of the Jewish
Sudanese multi-billionaire, Nessim Gaon. Gaon sent him to Nigeria to start the population census
project – the biggest of its kind in the world. Vaknin was supposed to
design the specifications of the census: hardware, software mainly.
Later, he travelled to Nigeria with the project
manager, Mayer Landau, but the first few times he was on his own or with Gaon. He worked closely with the General Manager of the
Ministry of Interior of Nigeria and with a computer scientist, Abimbola Salako. Corruption
must have been a big part of what he did. Nothing happens in Nigeria without
it.
Then, after an affair when Vaknin was arrested
in Geneva for stealing secret documents of Gaon and
leaking them to the Swiss press (he didn’t, the judge cleared him) – he went to
Paris (to manage Gaon’s office there!) and then to
Israel. He made a trade company with the top names and idols of the Israeli
secret services and military. For example: one of his partners was Mordehai
(“Motti”) Hod, the
legendary commander of the Israeli Air Force in the Six Days War.
With a few of these partners, he moved to
London where he leased a house with five floors not far from Marble Arch (34
Connaught Square, where Tony Blair resides today). He moved there with his
new girlfriend, Sigal Bareket,
a used bookstore owner from Tel-Aviv. It is impossible to read the list of his
partners without being shocked. He was only 24! Here they are:
Elkana Gali (Mossad, Israel Aircraft
Industries – IAI); Al Schwimmer (IAI); Marcus
Katz (one of the world’s biggest weapons dealer); Ya’akov
Nimrodi (one of the richest men in Israel,
ex-intelligence); Ephraim
Illin (owner of car factory, art collector); Motti Hod: Gershon (“Gigi”) Peres,
brother of Shimon Peres,
most important politician of Israel, was also involved as was Alexander Haig, a
senior American military leader and politician.
Amazingly, these were exactly the same group of
people who were responsible for the Iran-Contra
affair in the same years that Vaknin was with them all in London: 1985-7. Could
this be a coincidence? Hard to believe so! The Iran-Contra affair affair almost destroyed Ronald Reagan, the President of the
United States and his administration!
From London, Vaknin started to operate in
Sierra Leone. He cooperated with Shel Silverstein and
Jack Peters, two American businessmen that some say were actually senior CIA
figures. They made contact with the owner of a bus service (“Liat”) and diamond concessions in Sierra Leone and ex
advisor to Israel’s Prime Minister, Golda Meir. His name was Shabtai
Kalmanovich.
The idea was to bribe the President of Sierra
Leone, General Momoh, to give him a private jet and to get from him an
island where they could bury nuclear and chemical waste materials from Germany
and other west Europe countries. Vaknin met Momoh to
discuss the details of the deal and spent a lot of time with Kalmanovich in Africa and in Germany.
The deal collapsed when Kalmanovich
was arrested and in a way kidnapped by the Mossad (in
collaboration with British law authorities). He ended up in Israeli prison for
being a senior KGB agent. Later, he returned to Russia and was assassinated
there in his car.
All this time, Vaknin presented himself as a
“financial engineer”, owner of IPE, an Isle of Man company set up by Bernard Garbacz, an accountant at Landau-Morley LLP.
Ten years later, Garbacz arranged the financing needed for Vaknin to buy the
IT unit of the Israeli government in a corrupt privatization tender.
In 1987, Vaknin returned to Israel. He
established a big brokerage house, “Mikbats Tesuah”. Again, he was operating in the light, but living
in the shadows.
Return
to “The Suffering of Being Kafka”
Sam
Vaknin’s Media Kit and Press Room
