Remembering Marc Rich, Jewish American Patriot Spy
What the stories get wrong about a great American who served his country and promoted peace
“[Marc Rich] loved America, he loved the American way of life.” — Swiss journalist Daniel Ammann, author of The King of Oil: the Secret Lives of Marc Rich.
Glencore is once again in the news and so I thought I might take this occasion to discuss the great man behind its founding — Marc Rich, the brilliant mining magnate turned international man of mystery.
We’ve rightly turned away from bribery as a way of doing business — though not as long ago as you’d think — and the $1.1 billion settlement paid by Glencore is a welcome departure from business as usual.
Yes, all of that bribery stuff is interesting and there’s much to be said about mining at another time — I’m particularly drawn to Steve Jobs’ friend and fellow billionaire Robert Friedland — but there’s even more to be said about Rich, the founder of Glencore. I subscribe to the view as laid out in Haaretz by Eytan Avriel — that the two phone calls from Ehud Barak to Bill Clinton likely perpetuated the popular sentiment that the Clintons were corrupt. That spymaster turned prime minister Ehud Barak later entered the Israeli elections against Netanyahu and that his protégé — the notorious spy Jeffrey Epstein — would later end up arrested and then dead in American prison only compounds the legend. Some day, hopefully soon, I’ll write up everything I know about Jeffrey Epstein but it is too soon to talk honestly about one of the most interesting figures I have ever met.
Note to the reader: I had timed this post for Memorial Day but family matters compelled me to delay its publication. I could very easily have written about my many ancestors to have served—and some who have died—since America became a country. This stuff is all very important but others can say it much better than I can and besides, it’s all out there anyway. You know it and I know it.
While it is commendable to serve in a war it’s equally important to work toward making war difficult to impossible. That, too, requires real risk. Is the federal informant who infiltrates white nationalist gangs or cartels any less brave than the solider who is killed in war?
I am often struck by how seldom we talk about those who serve quietly and who nonetheless make real sacrifice on behalf of this great country. They come in all shapes, of every race, and all backgrounds. They are America. We never really talk about the sacrifices American covert agents and assets make on behalf of our national security. Oftentimes they endure quite considerable opprobrium in the mass media. Sometimes their families die never quite knowing the truth. It’s my hope to put it right for posterity.
Of course having been targeted by foreign funded smear merchants myself — I am currently litigating Johnson v. Huffington Post — I’m obviously being somewhat autobiographical. Subtlety was never my strong suit but that’s precisely what a subtle person would say, isn’t it? So let’s dispense with subtlety: Marc Rich was a Jewish-American patriot whose world we still live in. He struck a blow against oligopolistic energy companies which gauged the consumer and made energy shortage a thing of the past, at least for a time. “It was actually Marc Rich who enabled a lot of African countries to exploit their own resources and to be independent of multinational companies,” says his biographer Daniel Ammann.
Upon Rich’s death in 2013, James Breiding wrote a great encapsulation of a life well lived, which took him up from the concentration camps to the Swiss chalets.
Today’s world oil markets are partly the product of Rich’s vision. Back in the early 1970s the vast majority of oil was extracted, refined and sold by a handful of big integrated oil companies, including BP and Exxon. Rich went to officials in producer countries and persuaded them that they would be better off cutting out the oil majors, selling straight to customers – with Rich as agent – and keeping more of the revenues.The producer countries were often poor and unstable. To enable them to act as reliable exporters, Rich provided them with services such as financing, insurance, customs clearance, transport and storage.
He repeated that formula across a range of commodities, forging in the process close ties with decision makers in countries where few other big corporations felt comfortable because of political or governance risks.
Rich felt, if anything, more at ease in such places as they offered the chance to buy commodities more cheaply. Most people would run away from civil wars, coups, and natural disasters; he ran towards them. His definition of risk was quite specific: “When someone can’t pay.”
Bribery and corruption were common practice in many places that Rich worked. He got his hands dirty. He saw corruption as a cost of business, saying: “The bribes were paid in order to do the business at the same price as other people were willing to do the business.” To put this in context the bribing of foreign officials was legal in the US until outlawed by the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in 1977.
His relationships included some of the most powerful people on the planet, including intelligence services and President Bill Clinton whose decision to pardon Rich was among the finest of his presidency.
Whenever someone favors sanctions they create a black market. In the modern context sanctioning is Sinofication.
I want you to keep that in your mind when you read about sanctions on Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and now, of course, Russia. Even where sanctions are held up as beneficial — apartheid South Africa — that policy culminated in the Chinese extending their influence and extracting resources. In the case of Iran sanctions have created a black market
It continues to this day. One of our largest venture funds — Sequoia — is run by Roelof Botha, grandson of Pik Botha, the mining minister who served under both the apartheid and ANC government. Today the younger Botha is married to a Chinese-Singaporean woman and has millions in investment from China. One wonders if the rest of Sequoia’s “investments” aren’t themselves weaponized against America.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.
What do you think happens when we sanction a country? Qui bono? Xi bono! And he bonos by being able to get all those resources on the cheap.
As a believing Christian I have never once believed in the morality of sanctions targeting civilian populations. Collective punishment is, and always has been, wrong, and un-American. There’s no due process. I look upon sanctioning whole countries as the sort of thing that savage nations do. It’s the functional equivalent of carpet bombing. To the extent we can, we should focus those punishments on those who have done wrong. There are, of course, times in which total war is necessary — the atomic bombs stopped World War II from being even bloodier — but in the main, we should do what we can to hold war criminals accountable.
I am particularly pleased at the crucial role that Clearview.AI has played in bringing those Russian war criminals to justice. Cross cultural exchanges are necessary for global peace. Don’t let Patri Friedman and the rest of the seasteaders convince you otherwise: “No man is an island.”
Instead, I believe Matthew 18:20: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Blessed are the peacemakers. You don’t make peace with your enemies, and all of that.
There has to be a better way — the number of failed states has increased year after year. I remain somewhat optimistic that financial tracking technology like those on offer from companies like Payala can provide a solution in difficult areas. We need far more carrots and far fewer sticks beating populations that want to rejoin the global economy.
(If such things interest you please reach out to me. I may soon invest in that company.)
During the Trump years I’d often hear how bad President Bill Clinton was for having pardoned Marc Rich. You were expected to know how bad Rich was and no other explanation was proffered. Why, he traded with Iran! Heaven forfend! Left unexplored is why a Jew would want to trade with the Ayatollahs and how everyone, Israel especially, would want to look the other way so long as the spice flowed. Oh, and by the way, there’s more than $80 billion that gets rerouted around the Iranian sanctions.
Rich, in other words, was a CIA asset whose Rolodex kept diplomats “jaw, jaw, jawing” instead of war, war, warring. This was known but never really publicly discussed. You can find oblique mention of it in David Ignatius’s roman à clef The Sun King, which was published in 2000 — right before the Rich pardon. Ignatius, his website tells us, is “a prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post and has been covering the Middle East and the CIA for nearly four decades.” He is also a novelist because only in novels can you tell the truth.
Such facile criticism of Rich was often made by friends of Netanyahu or by Fox News partisans — a network which owes its very existence to Murdoch’s purchase theft of Rich’s 20th Century Fox which Murdoch bought only after U.S. Attorney (and future Fox News contributor before being barred) Rudy Giuliani had brought prosecution.
Rich, of course, may yet have his revenge as the lawsuit against Fox News works its way through the courts. I hope he does. Fox, having long since gone morally bankrupt, deserves to be financially bankrupt, especially after Murdoch secured a $100 million fee for services rendered loan from the Chinese. Don’t you worry! His son backs other causes.
You can watch an example of that slavish hatred of Rich on — where else? — Fox.
Thiessen and other Rich critics point to the FBI’s decision to release its file on Rich days before the 2016 election as somehow proving that Rich was a baddie. He was anything but.
In time, I have come to believe that Clinton made absolutely the right decision and that Rich’s malicious prosecution by the since disgraced Rudy Giuliani and James Comey. To give you a sense of it, Rich’s daughter died of leukemia while he was abroad and Giuliani spitefully refused to let Rich visit without a security guarantee. U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White also strenuously objected to Rich being pardoned. She would go on to defend the Sackler family, one of the greatest mass murderers in American history. The very China backed Sacklers are, naturally, large donors to the American Enterprise Institute — the very same place where Mark Thiessen is a fellow.
Giuliani’s oddities are well known and never far from view. Less well known is how connected he was to the Italian mob and how his prosecutions made way for the Russian-Jewish mob to take over New York.
In point of fact his deputy mayor, Richard Schwartz, and my cofounder, along with Hoan Ton-That, of the leading facial recognition company, Clearview.AI, was acting mayor when Giuliani was eating at mob restaurants and sleeping with mob girls.
After serving as deputy mayor and before cofounding Clearview, Schwartz served as editor of the New York Daily News. There, Schwartz said, Comey, sitting for an interview, confessed to him that he, Comey, had been molested as a boy. I have never seen this reported anywhere but if it’s true it raises a lot of interesting questions about Comey and his ultimate selection as director of the FBI.
(Recall that Comey was the prosecutor in the case against Rich from 1987 until 1993. He took over the investigation into President Clinton's pardon in 2002 when he was the U.S. attorney for Manhattan. In a 2008 letter, Comey wrote he was "stunned" by the Rich pardon.)
Might Comey have been a bit all over the place? It seems as if he was. His departure from the FBI has more or less confirmed his lack of a backbone or anything approximating a compass.
But not Marc Rich. He always knew where his true north was — even after he was forced into exile for 18 years, telling his biographer, "I was always very pro-American. It's a generous country that accepted my parents and me. I'm still very pro-American."
Wish that today’s oligarchs felt the same. Are you listening, Silicon Valley? Hello? Hello?
