The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

rear. The commodities trader still takes security very seriously. We enter the Glashof—which Rich’s company once bought in order to provide Pincus Green and other observant employees with kosher meals—by means of a side entrance and are seated in a private room. We are greeted personally and served by the restaurant’s manager. We drink Rich’s favorite wine, the one he served in his chalet in St. Moritz: a 2000 CVNE Rioja Imperial Reserva. “I was careful,” he says, “and while being careful I learned they tried to make certain attempts.”
    He then tells me a story that sounds as if it could have been taken directly from the pages of a spy novel. In the late summer of 1992, Rich received a visitor from Israel whom he had known for quite some time. He introduced a Russian who was interested in doing business with Rich involving a big oil deal. “It seemed very attractive,” Rich explains. Mikhail Gorbachev had just resigned from office in December 1991, and the Soviet Union was officially dissolved on December 25 of the same year. The Communist “Evil Empire,” as Ronald Reagan once described it, had simply ceased to exist. Boris Yeltsin, the new Russian president, immediately introduced a program of economic reform. He put an end to the Soviet-era price controls, cut state spending, and introduced an open foreign trade regime early in 1992. Russia embarked on the largest privatization program that the world had ever seen. If that was not a gigantic business opportunity, what else is?
    “The Russian businessman told me that I had to come to Moscow in order to sign the deal,” Rich says. Nothing spoke against the trip, and Rich trusted the Israeli acquaintance who had arranged the contact. He was a former agent of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, and now worked in London for Kroll, the global risk consulting company. “If you don’t have the time, we can send you a private aircraft. The new Russian government is interested in you,” the Russian casually mentioned. They discussed the possibility of meeting in the second week of September 1992.
    On September 1 at 8:56 P.M . EDT, the FBI sent a confidential fax tothe Russian bureau of Interpol marked FOR POLICE USE ONLY : “The FBI has received reliable information that Rich will travel to Moscow on or about September 6, 1992, for meetings in Moscow on September 7, 1992, possibly until September 11, 1992. He will reportedly stay at the Metropol Hotel in Moscow.” The FBI asked the local Russian police to determine if Rich would indeed be staying at the Hotel Metropol during these dates. The Office of International Affairs at the Department of Justice issued a provisional arrest warrant. The Russian police were informed that Rich might register at the hotel under a different name, and the “use of his photograph left with Interpol will be essential.” The FBI thought of everything and warned their colleagues in Russia that “Rich should be considered armed and dangerous because he allegedly travels with armed bodyguards and may utilize, in addition to his own personal staff, hired uniformed private armed security guards who reportedly travel with Rich in a motorcade through the streets.”
Avner Azulay
     
    “They offered to send him an aircraft?” Avner Azulay pricked up his ears when Rich told him of his plans to fly to Moscow. “This didn’t sound kosher to me.” We were drinking coffee in a stylish hotel in the center of Lucerne in the heart of Switzerland. “I only trust once,” he warned me before our interview began. He wanted to know everything about me before I was allowed to ask him any questions. Azulay, a good-looking man in his early seventies with warm eyes and silver hair, was responsible for Rich’s security for many years. He was paid to be suspicious and ask the right questions. “Who is going to protect you in Russia?” he asked Rich and raised a cause for concern. “They don’t have any laws there just after the fall of the Soviet Empire. And don’t forget, they would do anything to please the Americans.”
    Rich grudgingly canceled his trip to Moscow—which turned out to have been a wise decision. Azulay’s instincts had once again proven accurate, and he later found out that the entire affair had been a cleverplan to lure Rich to Russia. Of all people, the Israeli acquaintance—a former intelligence agent—had unknowingly been used by American agents. They had successfully smuggled a mole