The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

In reality it was Marc Rich who made it possible forEgypt and Israel to reconcile their differences. As luck would have it, the State Department recommended Rich’s lawyer Leonard Garment to represent the interests of Tali Griffel in the compensation negotiations. 2 The State Department trusted Garment and was aware of the contacts he maintained in the Middle East. After serving as special counsel to President Nixon, Garment was appointed U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, where he was often involved in issues dealing with Egypt and Israel.
    The Ras Burqa negotiations threatened to break down over the issue of the amount of compensation. Egypt insisted on a sum based on its own standards, which the victims’ families believed was insufficient. Neither side was prepared to back down from its own position. As it was not feasible for the United States to secretly add funds to the Egyptian offer, the State Department began to look for a third party who could discreetly sweeten the deal. Discussions between Garment and the State Department soon turned up a rather controversial name: the “fugitive” Marc Rich.
    Rich, who had supplied Israel with large amounts of oil and also done business with Egypt, was ready to offer his assistance the moment Garment asked him. “Rich gave me discretionary authority to commit up to500,000 of his funds if I needed it,” Garment remembers. 3 Thanks to Rich, the damages that Egypt was prepared to pay were more than doubled by the addition of400,000 of Rich’s own money. The State Department was not concerned with the fact that Rich was on the run from U.S. authorities and named in an outstanding international arrest warrant, and State Department officials had absolutely no qualms about accepting Rich’s money. “We saw no impropriety to having Marc Rich contribute to the settlement,” said Abraham Sofaer, a former legal adviser to the State Department. 4
    “In the end, decent regrets were expressed and decent payments made to the Israeli families of the Ras Burqa victims,” Garment remembers. “This closure in turn proved to be the key to unlocking the Taba issue and bringing about a reconciliation between Israel and Egypt—aprecondition for more progress in the peace process. The bone was out of both countries’ throats.” 5
    Egypt was particularly thankful to “the European partner” who had allowed it to save face on the international stage. Osama El-Baz, President Mubarak’s most important political adviser, sent Garment a letter of thanks: “The assistance we received from your European partner was a critical factor for solving the controversy on Ras Burka [
sic
]. We wish to express our gratitude, to you also, especially in view of the fact that, one week later, the solving of the Ras Burka issue helped create the climate contributing to the solving of the difficult controversy surrounding the Taba issue. I want you to know that Mr. Mubarak greatly appreciates your input and your substantial contribution to helping the two sides to finalize this matter.” 6
Sealed Documents
     
    On January 23, 1989, the U.S. Justice Department secretly added a sealed document to Rich’s court file with the docket number 1:83-cr-00579-SWK. The contents of this document are considered secret, and it could only have been opened had Rich’s case been tried before a court. The sealed document confirmed Rich’s involvement in the Ras Burqa affair and was intended to serve as a mitigating factor in the event of his conviction.
    There is, however, a second sealed document in Rich’s court file dated March 1, 1994, concerning American financier Tom J. Billman. The former chairman of the Community Savings and Loan Association in Bethesda, Maryland, was suspected of embezzling millions of dollars in depositors’ savings. Billman fled the country, and federal prosecutors suspected he was in hiding somewhere in Europe—most likely Switzerland—where he held various bank accounts. In early 1992 Marc Rich’s lawyers were approached by the Justice Department, which wanted to know if Rich had any information regarding Billman and asked for his assistance in the search for this particular fugitive financier.Rich agreed and assigned Avner Azulay to the complicated task of finding a needle in a haystack.
    The reason was clear. “We hoped the Justice Department would treat Marc differently,” Avner Azulay told me. “We contributed to the search for this fugitive,