The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

Jewish. Second, Israel is a country I’m involved with. I’m a citizen. It’s a natural thing for me to help Israel.” I ask him if it was dangerous for him to ask high officials in “enemy countries” about missing Israeli soldiers. Rich again remains silent for quite some time, as if considering what he could safely tell me. His answer was not as concrete as I had hoped. “There were not many people that I could talk to about it, but a few people who I felt I could talk to I did talk to.” How did they react? Rich raises both his hands, shrugs, and says, “It was no problem.” “In which countries?” I ask. He shakes his head. Mainly Iran and Syria? “Yes,” he says. I notice that this line of questioning is making Rich increasingly uneasy.
    As a final question I ask him if he had served as an informal mediator between Iran and Israel. “To some extent I guess I was, but it wasn’t a position I was officially looking for. I just wanted to be helpful on a case-by-case basis.” One case was about the secret pipeline, the joint venture between Israel and Iran (see chapter 6 ). After the Islamic revolution in 1979, Iran cut off all contact with Israel and stopped supplying it with Iranian oil. Six years later, the National Iranian Oil Company filed lawsuits against Israel. 11 Iran claimed about500 million for unpaid oildeliveries. Negotiations through lawyers reached a dead end. Iran objected to direct contact with Israel. So Marc Rich met in Jerusalem with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993 and proposed a possible solution—that his company would buy Israel’s shares and negotiate a solution with Iran in a businesslike way. “Rabin agreed,” Avner Azulay, who was present at this meeting, told me, “but the affair was torpedoed by the bureaucrats who made the conditions so complicated that Marc Rich eventually lost interest. I’m sure, today they are sorry.”
    Marc Rich was not a Mossad agent, as some have occasionally claimed. He was not a spy in the true sense of the word. He regularly offered his services as a volunteer, and he was of great use to the Mossad. He organized contacts in places where the Mossad had none. He offered money in situations where Israel officially could not. That is why Rich has been personally acquainted with all Israeli prime ministers from Menachem Begin to Ehud Barak. The Mossad refers to people like Rich as
sayan
—the Hebrew word for “helper.” It is a fitting name for the commodities trader, who above all considers himself a provider of services.

 

     

The
PRIVATE LIFE
of the
RICHES
     

    O
n September 8, 1996, a Sunday, Gabrielle Rich was lying in a hospital bed at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. She had been diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia, an extremely aggressive form of cancer that prevents the body from producing normal blood cells and renders it powerless to fight off infection. There was no longer any hope. Gabrielle, Marc and Denise Rich’s second daughter, was dying. She was twenty-seven years old.
    “It was horrific,” Denise Rich says, “all this pain.” The emotion in her voice makes it seem as if she is talking about events that had happened yesterday. She reaches out with her arm for her daughter Danielle’s hand while fighting back the tears. The three of us are sitting in her nineteenth-floor penthouse—once estimated to be worth40 million—on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. The floor-to-ceiling windows offer a breathtaking view of Central Park. Denise Rich sits underneath Andy Warhol’s interpretation of
The Birth of Venus,
the Renaissance masterpiece of Sandro Botticelli. The name of the Italian artist means—how fitting for the ex-wife of a billionaire oil trader—“little barrels.” Denise is dressed casually in a light blue V-neck sweater and leggings. It was at a fund-raising dinner in this very same penthouse that President BillClinton referred to Denise as one of his “closest friends.” 1 It was another era—the era before Marc Rich’s pardon.
    Before I met Denise I had no idea to how I should broach the subject of her daughter’s death. I only asked her after we had spoken about a variety of issues and only when I was sure that she would not misinterpret my asking as mere voyeurism. There is nothing worse for a mother—or father—than a child’s death. Such an experience can change a person forever—and it had definitely affected Marc Rich, who was already divorced from