COVER FROM KOESTLER’S FINAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY PUBLISHED IN 1984
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Arthur Koestler’s suicide NOT a Mossad operation

By Arthur Topham
February 23, 2010

Recently, in a number of emails coming across my desk screen, I have read statements accompanying articles on Arthur Koestler’s 1976 book, The Thirteenth Tribe, claiming that Koestler was murdered (or “suicided”) by the Israeli Mossad for having revealed the information contained in his provocative and unsettling book on the origins of the Kazar Jews, better known as the Ashkenazim.

This assertion, on the part of whomever started spreading the rumour is, according to the information contained in the Introduction to Koestler’s final autobiography, Stranger on the Square, and published posthumously by Arthur’s longtime friend and literary executor Harold Harris in 1984, clearly erroneous. As to why such a falsehood would be foisted upon Internet readers is another story and one possibly explained by the author of the said rumour who I am unaware of at this time.

Those who have studied the Jewish Question in any depth will be familiar with the complex aspects of this particular group and how they tend to present to the Gentile world a multi-faceted story of their origins and their mission in life so as to both promote and shield themselves from public scrutiny as they continue manifesting their ultimate, fundamental agenda of global hegemony in all spheres of political, financial, social and cultural endeavours.

Now, lest those who wish to believe this rumour about the Mossad start to think that I’m simply making up a defense for this group of calculating Israeli killers and schemers, I want to counter such thinking with the facts surrounding Arthur Koestler’s death as portrayed in the words of Harold Harris and in the process, hopefully, put an end to yet another literary false flag that ultimately could be used to make the anti-Zionist forces look both silly and inept.

The following excerpt comes from the Introduction to Stranger on the Square by Harold Harris of which I have a copy in hand:

“This book is in essence a love story, but unlike any other love story I have read. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a story of an obsession.

It was in July 1949 that Cynthia Jeffries, a pretty but painfully shy and rather awkward girl from South Africa, answered an advertisement. A writer wanted a temporary secretary. The writer was Arthur Koestler. He lived at the time in a house near Fontainebleau with Mamaine Paget, one of the beautiful Paget twins, whom he was later to marry when the divorce from his first wife came through. Cynthia was living in Paris.

She got the job and worked at intervals as his secretary for the next six years, partly in France, partly in England, partly in the USA. During that time she herself was married and divorced. In 1955, she threw up her job in New York in response to a cable from Koestler, and returned to London as his full-time secretary. At what stage they became lovers readers of this book must decide for themselves, but there is no doubt that Cynthia loved Arthur almost from the moment of her first awkward interview with him in Paris.

From that reunion in 1955 their lives were shared. In 1965 they were married. On 3 March 1983, their bodies were found in the sitting room of their house in Montpelier Square which figures in the title of this book. Koestler was sitting in an armchair, a glass of brandy still in his hand. Cynthia was lying on a sofa, a glass of whisky on the table beside her. Each had taken a massive overdose of barbiturates.

Koestler was seventy-seven years old. For the past seven years he had suffered from Parkinson’s disease, which had first been kept under control but had latterly taken its progressive toll. For the past four years he had suffered from leukaemia which, a pathologist testified at the inquest, was in its terminal stages. Cynthia was fifty-five and in perfect health.

To none of us who knew and loved them both did Arthur’s suicide come as a surprise. He was a writer unequalled in his generation for the extraordinary breadth of his genius. Over the years his literary output had been witness to his many-sided imagination, to his intellectual power, and to his extraordinary literary prowess as a master of the English language – in his case, an acquired art. In addition, he was usually actively involved in some campaign and, as this book demonstrates, he led a very full social life. Even though he bore the handicaps imposed by his terminal illnesses with expected fortitude, with unexpected patience, and with his own unrivalled brand of wry humour, no one who knew him anticipated that he would quietly submit to the final removal of his physical and mental faculties. Indeed, on the last occasion on which I saw him (Thursday, 24 February 1983) I felt that he might have left it too late. He was unable to stand, his speech was disjointed, and he clearly found it difficult to concentrate on what was being said to him. I felt that he might not last the night and I begged Cynthia to send for me if she needed help. Next day she told me on the phone that Arthur seemed a good deal better and had told her that he had been hallucinating when I was there. But he was unable to speak on the telephone and Cynthia had to cancel their appointments for the weekend.

As has been widely reported, he was vice-president of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, and the news of his death on 3 March was not unexpected. The finding of Cynthia’s body at the same time, however, was not merely unexpected but came as a profound shock to all their friends. I do not think it had occurred to a single one of them that she intended to take her life at the same time as Arthur.

When did she make this decision? And why? These were the two questions we asked each other, blaming ourselves for not having foreseen it, for not having intervened in some way.

So far as the first question is concerned, we know that when Arthur wrote his farewell note ‘to whom it may concern’ in June 1982, there was no intention whatever that Cynthia would join him on his final journey. (He had written: ‘What makes it nevertheless hard to take this final step is the reflection of the pain it is bound to inflict on my few surviving friends, and above all my wife Cynthia.’) It is my belief that she had not considered doing so when I saw her on 24 February nor when I spoke to her on 25 February. All the evidence is that they took the fatal dose on 1 March, and I believe (although there is no proof) that Cynthia made her decision either on that morning or during the night of 28 February – 1 March. We do know that that it was on the morning of 1 March that she took her beloved dog, David (a twelve-year-old Lhasa Apso), to the vet and had him put down, giving as the reason that she could not look after him properly any more as she had to spend all her time caring for her sick husband. (She told their cleaner that she had given David to a friend. The 1st March was a Tuesday, and the cleaner did not go to the house on Wednesdays.)

In a brief typewritten addition to Arthur’s farewell note which I have quoted, Cynthia wrote: ‘I should have liked to finish my account of working for Arthur – a story which began when our paths happened to cross in 1949. However, I cannot live without Arthur, despite certain inner resources.’

I believe that this realization was borne in upon her when she knew that the day had actually arrived when Arthur could no longer tolerate the burden of existence.”

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