The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

and we provided a lot of information on his whereabouts with the help of American and European detective agencies,” he says. “I made a huge effort to find this man and transferred the relevant data to the official American agencies. The operation was completely financed by Marc. He spent somewhere between half a million and a million dollars.” United States prosecutors had no qualms accepting the aid of one fugitive from justice in order to catch another. “His budget for that case was bigger than ours,” as postal inspector David P. Cyr put it succinctly. 7 Billman was, in the end, recognized accidentally by a friend in Paris, arrested, extradited to the USA by the French authorities, and sentenced to a forty-year prison term in 1994. The authorities managed to catch Billman without Rich’s support. Rich’s assistance in the hunt for Billman is nevertheless officially recognized in this second sealed document.
Secret Cooperation with the U.S. Government
     
    Marc Rich told me that he regularly helped the country that considered him a traitor and was diligently trying to track him down and put him behind bars. As Rich freely admits, he had his own self-serving reasons for offering his assistance. “I felt if I was helpful to them, they might be helpful to me and change their attitude,” he says. Over twenty-five years ago, in June 1983, Rich hurriedly fled the United States and took up residence in Switzerland. He has not set foot in the United States since. When I spoke to him about his case, I could sense the deep resentment he felt toward those responsible for the “witch hunt” and the “crusade” against him. Yet Rich harbors no hatred of the country that took him in when he was a refugee on the run from the Nazis during the SecondWorld War. “I was always very pro-American,” Rich says over a cup of tea. “It’s a generous country that accepted my parents and me. I’m still very pro-American.”
    The U.S. State Department benefited from Rich’s continual support, and its agents were in regular contact with the fugitive trader—a fact that has remained shrouded in secrecy to this day. They wanted his opinions on various “key people in power” in some of the politically sensitive countries where he did business. State Department officials especially sought details concerning politicians and business people in Iran, Syria, and Russia. He gave them what they asked for. “That’s normal,” Rich says, as if he had only been quoting the Americans a few commodities prices. When I ask for names, he shakes his head. “I promised not to tell,” he says.
    Rich maintained contacts in precisely the same countries in which the United States had hardly any contacts left. It was indeed a remarkable network. He knew Iran, Africa, and the Arab nations better than nearly any other businessman in the Western world. He had direct contact with the inner political circles of countries such as Iran, Syria, Angola, and Cuba—countries that, at least officially, wanted nothing to do with the United States, and vice versa. His business dealings were proof of just how good his sources truly were. “Our intelligence gathering was the most sophisticated in the world,” a longtime employee of Rich’s company proudly told me. “Sometimes we knew critical information before the CIA, especially regarding events in Iran.” Marc Rich and some of his employees regularly shared this knowledge with U.S. and Israeli officials. I have spoken with several traders who were involved in this exchange of information, and they have substantiated this version of events. They were following the trader’s proven motto: Give and you shall receive.
    The State Department’s willingness to cooperate with a fugitive suspect (and his traders), who was at the same time being hunted by other governmental agencies, might be interpreted as cynical and hypocritical. Yet any intelligence service in the world would have been interestedin maintaining a relationship with a man such as Marc Rich—a man who had both the contacts and the ability to bring such disparate partners together time and time again.
     
    The true value of such contacts and the trusted information that only they can provide becomes tragically clear when they are no longer available. In its 2004 report, the 9/11 Commission, created by the U.S. Congress to investigate the September 11, 2001, attacks, criticized what it saw as a series of “intelligence