The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

abortion clinic and Atlanta Olympic Park bomber, but Rich could nevertheless continue to do business all over the world. He traveled “extensively,” as the police documents stated—Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Bolivia, Great Britain, Eastern Europe, Israel, Scandinavia, and the former Soviet Union.
    “What are the reasons that the most powerful government in the world cannot apprehend some of its most notorious fugitives?” asked an exasperated Rep. Robert E. Wise (D–West Virginia). 15 “This isn’t your miscreant who has fled the country for knocking over fifteen 7-Elevens and is kicking around the dock at Marseilles. This is Marc Rich operating with total impunity out of a tall office building in Switzerland. And why hasn’t this been made a high priority?” 16 Such questions led to hearings by the House Committee on Government Operations, then led by Michigan Democrat John Conyers, in spring 1992. 17
    Rich’s lasting ability to escape from his pursuers led to the suspicion that someone was protecting him. The best proof was that Howard Safir’s plans to snatch Rich in Switzerland were betrayed to Swiss police. One can assume that Rich (or those surrounding him) regularly received information that enabled him to avoid arrest, although this is officially denied by all sides. “I’m very sure the Mossad helped him,” Ken Hill told me in Florida. Jean Ziegler, a former UN special envoy and member of the Swiss parliament, stated that Rich enjoyed “secret protection in the Swiss Administration, particularly in the Federal Department of Justice and Police.” 18
    Ken Hill, the man who was on Rich’s trail for fourteen years, sees nomore room for doubt. The former U.S. marshal understands that Rich was a valuable business partner for a number of countries. He was much too important for them to forgo his services and turn him over to the Americans. “I mean, he was a key element in providing commodities to many nations in Europe and Asia,” Hill told me. “Don’t forget, there are only a few people that can loan one billion dollars to each other. This is a very exclusive club, a very strong network. This privilege turned out to be a safety net for him. He must have got the protection of [intelligence] services.” Such statements help explain the fact that the United States did not receive the cooperation it had hoped for from a number of countries. The prosecutors submitted requests for provisional arrests to several countries, all of them members of Interpol, but none of these requests was successful. “He was hard to get because he had a great deal of influence in a lot of countries,” Howard Safir confirmed. 19
“Crusade Against Me”
     
    “Other nations did not share the U.S. view and consequently refused to be instrumentalized for their crusade against me,” Rich says calmly. When I ask if he had been tipped off and protected, Rich’s answer is as short as it is telling. “Maybe,” he says, smiling, before taking another sip of wine.
    Even today, hardly anyone realizes that employees at the U.S. State Department, who naturally were aware of the government’s international activities, were in direct personal contact with Rich, as I will show later, even though he was considered a fugitive and was at the same time being pursued by other government agencies. In the powder keg of the Middle East, of particular strategic importance to the United States, Rich was actually considered an active diplomatic asset.
    The gumshoes in the field were also aware of this. Howard Safir proved particularly outspoken and blunt. “I have found that the biggest impediment to operational law enforcement is having to deal through the bureaucracy of the State Department,” he stated in his testimonybefore the Committee on Government Operations. He criticized certain “policy restraints” and stated that in his opinion the failures to apprehend the fugitives were due to the lack of support at the highest levels of government: “I believe that if a political decision was made at the highest levels of this government that we were going to apprehend Marc Rich and Pincus Green and use all of the available tools, that we would have Marc Rich and Pincus Green very quickly.” The Committee on Government Reform came to the same conclusion: “The United States lacked the political will to effect the return of these fugitives.” 20 At the same time, it lacked the political will to settle the