The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

of the peace process.” 11
    Azulay reminded Shimon Peres of this fact in December 2000. Peres played a central role in the Oslo Accords, and for his efforts he shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat. “If you could just say a few good words about the character of this man,” Azulay asked Peres. “Say that he is not the devil that he is painted to be in the media.” Peres did not have to think twice about putting in a good word for Rich. He had already lobbied the U.S. government on Rich’s behalf in the mid-1990s. He was enthusiastic about the idea of Israeli and Palestinian economic cooperation and wanted Rich to be able to move about more freely without running the risk of arrest.
    So Peres called Clinton on the same day as Ehud Barak. It was December 11, 2000—the day that Clinton received the petition for Rich’s pardon. Peres also asked the president to pardon Rich and extricate him from the legal impasse his case had reached. According to an e-mail from Azulay to Jack Quinn, President Clinton “took note of his intervention.” 12 Rich’s importance to Israeli politicians is further illustrated by the fact that Barak spoke to Clinton about a possible pardon on two additional occasions. 13 In a telephone call of January 8, 2001, Barak again stressed Rich’s importance to Israel’s security: “He helped Mossad on more than one case.” “It’s a bizarre case, and I am working on it,” Clinton answered. “I really appreciate it,” Barak said. On January 19, 2001, the same day that President Clinton finally attended to the presidential pardons, Barak called again and asked, “Might it move forward?” “I’m glad you asked me about that,” Clinton answered. “The question is not whether he should get [the pardon] or not but whether he should get it without coming back here.”
    “He just told the truth,” Rich said when I asked him about Barak’s support. “He knew about me. I’ve met him. We talked about my case, and he knew I was a positive element for Israel. They appreciated what I was doing for and in Israel, so he decided to be positive.”
The Role of Denise Rich
     
    As soon as the pardon had been made public, the media began their descent on a single individual: Denise Rich. She was the perfect subject for a story. She was a member of the international jet set who was worth hundreds of millions of dollars and owned a luxurious penthouse on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, an extrovert socialite who had once flooded her penthouse terrace to form an ice rink for one of her fabulous parties. She was a successful songwriter known throughout the music industry. She was also a woman who was prepared to stand up for her ex-husband, even though he had left her for another woman.
    Denise’s involvement in Marc Rich’s pardon was particularly scandalous as she was one of the biggest and most loyal supporters of the Democratic Party, to which she had donated more than1.1 million since 1992. The list of leading Democratic politicians whose campaigns she had supported reads like a roster of the U.S. Senate. Geraldine Ferraro, Edward Kennedy, Tom Harkin, Barbara Boxer, Charles Schumer, and Barbara Mikulski all received donations from Denise Rich. She was particularly close to Bill and Hillary Clinton, whose election campaigns she helped finance, and she donated450,000 to Bill Clinton’s presidential library in Little Rock, Arkansas. Politicians and members of the media soon began to voice the opinion that Marc Rich’s ex-wife had managed to “buy” her ex-husband’s pardon.
    The House Government Reform Committee, which was tasked with investigating the circumstances surrounding Rich’s pardon, described Denise as a “key figure in the effort to obtain a pardon.” 14 In truth, Denise did enjoy a special relationship to the president as a result of her generous donations. During the Clinton administration, she visited the WhiteHouse on no fewer than nineteen occasions, and President Clinton once even described her as one of his “closest friends.” 15 In 1998, when the president appeared in public for the first time after the publication of independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s report on the Monica Lewinsky affair, it was at an event held in Denise’s penthouse. Clinton also appeared as a speaker at a fund-raiser for the G&P Foundation, a cancer research organization Denise founded after Gabrielle’s death. (The
G
stands for Gabrielle and the
P
for Philip,