Informant (4 page)

“Yeah, Liz, what’s up?’’

“Somebody’s on the phone for you, but I can’t pronounce his name. But he sounds Asian.’’

Whitacre picked up the telephone.

“Mark Whitacre.’’

“Hello, Mr. Whitacre?’’ Liz was right. The caller’s Asian accent was thick.

“Yes?’’

“I do not know if you remember me,’’ the caller began.

At about six-thirty in the morning, Whitacre stepped off the staircase that brought him up from ADM’s basement garage. He walked past the trading floor, straight for Mick Andreas’s office. Mick was at his desk when Whitacre walked in, looking flustered.

“Mick, you’re not going to believe what the hell’s happened,’’ he said. “I think I know the reason why we’ve been having all these problems in the plant.’’

Andreas leaned back in his chair. “Well, I’ve only been asking you to come up with one for eight weeks,’’ he said. “I’m all ears.’’

Whitacre was jumpy and breathless. He clearly thought he had latched onto something explosive, and told the story to his boss in a rush of words. The recent contaminations in the plant, he said, were not the result of mistakes. Instead, he had just learned that they had been caused by a competitor. Ajinomoto in Tokyo had engineered an incredible plot of corporate espionage. The Japanese were behind the viruses plaguing the ADM plant.

Andreas listened silently. He wanted to hear everything before asking questions.

Pacing as he spoke, Whitacre explained that he had received a call at his office the previous day from an Ajinomoto executive named Fujiwara, one of the group who had toured the plant a few weeks before. During the call, Fujiwara had asked for Whitacre’s home number. The request had seemed innocuous, he said; because of the time difference from Tokyo to Decatur, it made sense that Fujiwara might need the number.

“So last night, the guy called me at home just after eight o’clock,” Whitacre said. “And Mick, he knew everything. Almost first thing, he said to me, ‘Do you remember the total nightmare during May, June, July, and August that you had in your plant?’ And when I asked him what he meant, he said, ‘Those months when ADM was losing about seven million dollars a month in the lysine business.’ ”

The statement had taken him by surprise, Whitacre said, and faster than he could respond, Fujiwara began listing ADM’s lysine production for the past three months.

Both Andreas and Whitacre knew
that
was serious. Those numbers were proprietary, and no one outside the company was supposed to have heard about the problems in the plant. How could this Fujiwara person have found out?

Before he had been able to raise that question, Whitacre said, Fujiwara began toying with him, asking coyly why he thought the ADM plant was having so many start-up problems.

“I couldn’t believe what he said,’’ Whitacre fumed, his voice unnaturally high. “He told me that one of our highest-paid employees is an employee of Ajinomoto, and is sabotaging the plant.’’

Andreas sat expressionless as Whitacre spelled out the ugly details: The mole was acting on instructions from Tokyo and had been ordered to inject a virus into containers of dextrose for the purpose of wreaking havoc on the plant.

As he spoke, Whitacre seemed to vacillate between anger and dismay. This Fujiwara call reinforced every bad thing he had heard about Japanese corporations.

“I’ll tell you Mick, it’s like
Rising Sun
,’’ Whitacre said, referring to the Michael Crichton best-seller about intrigue at the American headquarters of a Japanese corporation. “Just like
Rising Sun
.’’

The idea of using the mole, he said, had come from Ikeda, the top man who attended the plant visit. Fujiwara seemed frightened of the senior Ajinomoto executive, Whitacre continued, and had openly expressed fears that Ikeda might have him killed or deported if he learned of the phone call.

“I couldn’t understand why he would talk to me, so I finally asked him why he was calling.’’

Andreas anticipated the answer before Whitacre even said it: money.

Fujiwara wanted $10 million, Whitacre explained. For that, he would identify the saboteur, give ADM some new microorganisms immunized against the virus, and describe where and when the sabotage had occurred.

“He said that, with his help, in three days we could solve the infection problems we’ve been wrestling with for four months,” Whitacre said.

Whitacre finished, and Andreas paused before asking his first question.

“How well do you know this guy?”

Whitacre stumbled with the answer, again mentioning Fujiwara’s visit to ADM a few weeks before. Andreas pressed the question, and Whitacre conceded that he didn’t know Fujiwara well at all.

Andreas thought for a moment. What Whitacre was describing sounded crazy. Still, it fit the reports that Andreas had heard about the plant’s problems—the sudden appearance of the virus, the futile effort to stop it. Fujiwara couldn’t simply be ignored.

“I gotta get this clear in my mind,’’ Andreas said. “Go through it again.’’

Whitacre repeated the story. Andreas asked a few more questions.

“Okay, if you hear from this guy again, I want you to talk him down on the price,’’ Andreas said. “I want you to find out the least amount of money he’d settle for.’’ Maybe, he reasoned, they could just strike a deal for the bugs that were resistant to the virus.

Also, Andreas said, keep this quiet. If there was a mole inside the plant, the last thing they wanted was to give any sign that ADM was onto him.

A pause. “Keep me informed,’’ Andreas said.

“Okay, Mick,’’ Whitacre replied, nodding.

Whitacre headed out the door, while Andreas sat at his desk in thought. Had the news come from anyone but Whitacre, he might have dismissed Fujiwara’s bizarre call as a clumsy extortion plot. But Whitacre understood the plant better than anyone else did. Without him, ADM’s “Mr. Lysine,’’ the company could never have moved so quickly into the business. If he was taking this Fujiwara call seriously, then Mick figured
he
had better be worried, too.

Andreas reached for the phone to call his father, Dwayne, who was staying at his apartment in Florida. This was just the kind of threat the ADM chairman needed to know about. With everything Dwayne had done to build his company and his influence, he would not sit back and let his new business be wrecked by a competitor. No one who knew the history of ADM or its iron-fisted chairman could expect that.

The modern era of ADM was set in motion on October 21, 1947, when Shreve M. Archer sat down for a meal of cooked chicken. The fifty-nine-year-old ADM chairman and descendant of its cofounder was enjoying his meal in the company’s hometown of Minneapolis when he abruptly stood, gasping for air. A bone had caught in his throat. Archer turned blue, then grimaced in pain as he swallowed the bone. He was rushed to nearby Miller Hospital, but it was too late. Twenty days later, he died of complications from the incident.

The sudden, disturbing death of Archer left a void at the company he had directed since 1924. In his years at the helm, Shreve Archer had in many ways become ADM. He had pushed the company to acquire competitors, providing a diversified product line that helped it weather the darkest days of the Great Depression. Most important, he had made an open-ended commitment to the promise of the soybean, a farm staple that had gained prominence only since World War I. Archer pushed ADM into the budding industry, building a giant soybean-processing plant in Decatur. That decision, and countless others like it, had helped transform ADM from a single Midwestern plant at the dawn of the twentieth century into one of the nation’s big grain processors. Succeeding Archer would have been hard for anyone; with no one groomed as a successor at the time of his death, the task seemed all but impossible.

The man chosen for the job was Thomas Daniels, a descendant of the company’s other cofounder. Daniels had an unlikely background for the position; he had planned on a career in the foreign service and was probably the first head of a grain-processing company who had taken his own polo ponies to college at Yale. But as Daniels took over, ADM was on the verge of a descent into disarray, one that would end almost two decades later in a desperate search for a savior.

In the same year as Archer’s death, across town at rival Cargill Inc., a twenty-nine-year-old vice president named Dwayne Andreas was rising to power. He had joined Cargill two years before, when it had purchased his family’s business, Honey Mead Products Company of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Now Andreas, the fourth son of a Mennonite farm family, was a millionaire and Cargill’s youngest senior executive. At first glance, he seemed unimposing, standing five feet four inches and weighing just 137 pounds. But his bosses marveled at his intelligence and tenacity. He seemed destined for great things at Cargill.

No one at that time could have imagined the unlikely pairing of this young, hard-charging executive with a midsized competitor on the verge of decline. For that to occur, Andreas and Cargill would have to part ways, an idea that surely seemed far-fetched. With Cargill’s high hopes for him, it seemed only Andreas himself could derail his career there.

In the early 1950s, America was a place of paranoia and fear. The Soviet Union had obtained awesome nuclear weaponry. Communists had won control of China, the first major defeat of American interests in the nascent Cold War. In Washington, an array of demagogues stoked alarm with shouts of treason, destroying reputations often with little more than innuendo. Accusatory fingers pointed at Hollywood, industry, and government, creating the widespread impression of a wholesale national betrayal.

At the height of the hysteria, in March 1952, Dwayne Andreas presented an audacious idea to his colleagues at Cargill: He planned to fly to Moscow the following month to attend a trade conference. He thought it was the perfect first step toward setting up a deal to market vegetable oil in the Soviet Union. Obtaining a visa would be no trouble; in his few years at the company, Andreas had won enough political allies in Washington to take care of that.

Persuading Cargill was another matter. The company was already reeling from complaints brought against it by government regulators that charged the firm with violating commodities trading laws. The last thing it needed was the whiff of further controversy.

“I am
ordering
you not to go,’’ Julius Hendell, the firm’s dean of grain trading, told Andreas as they discussed the Moscow trip.

“Now, Julius,’’ Andreas replied soothingly. “You know you don’t mean that.’’

Later that day, Andreas received a note to call John Petersen from Cargill’s top management group. Andreas ignored the instruction and left on his trip.

Andreas found Moscow an incredible experience and hurried back to Cargill with invaluable information about the Soviet market. His managers would have none of it; they were outraged, muttering darkly about insubordination and expressing fears that Cargill’s banks might react poorly to news of the visit.

As internal wrath mounted, Andreas offered his resignation, and it was accepted. Andreas left for another family-owned company, in the vegetable oil business. He seemed destined for an anonymous life in an obscure corner of the agricultural world.

But Andreas had other ideas. He enjoyed life at the top. He was not about to give that up so easily.

Vice President Hubert Humphrey leaned forward on his gold upholstered chair before pulling his dark blue suit down to smoothness. On the television in front of him, the lead delegate from Pennsylvania stepped up to the microphone on the floor of the Chicago Civic Center. Humphrey’s friends and supporters stood quietly about him in the large suite on the twenty-fifth floor of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, watching as Pennsylvania cast 103
³
/
₄
votes for their candidate. At that moment, 11:47 on the evening of August 28, 1968, Humphrey was put over the top. He was the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.

The suite erupted into cheers. Humphrey rose from his chair, applauding.

“I feel like really jumping,’’ he said. He leaned over and kissed the cheek of Mrs. La Donna Harris, the wife of his campaign cochairman.

Then Humphrey turned and kissed Inez Andreas. Nearby, her husband, Dwayne—a member of Humphrey’s elite brain trust—beamed.

In the sixteen years since leaving Cargill, Andreas’s reputation had grown immeasurably. The onetime Iowa farm boy had parlayed the lessons and connections from his Cargill days into a speaking role on the national political stage. He had met Humphrey back then, after sending a one-thousand-dollar contribution to the Minnesota politician’s first Senate campaign. In time, the Humphrey family was joining the Andreases for vacations at the Sea View Hotel in Bal Harbour, Florida—a hotel owned by Andreas. Their friendship was cemented in 1948 with the birth of Dwayne’s son, Mick; Hubert Humphrey was named his godfather.

Andreas had also extended his political connections through a friendship with another political powerhouse, Thomas Dewey, the former New York governor and two-time Republican presidential candidate. Again, Andreas had met Dewey while working at Cargill. But their friendship blossomed when Andreas hired Dewey as a legal advisor and arranged for him to become special counsel for a national association that promoted soybeans. Dewey, like Humphrey, became a frequent visitor to Andreas’s Sea View Hotel.

Dewey also ensured that Andreas extended his contacts in both political parties. He advised Andreas to contribute heavily to election campaigns, providing money to politicians across the ideological spectrum. Andreas became what was known in Washington as a “swinger’’—one of the big-time contributors who hedges their bets by making donations to both sides.

Even as his influence extended in Washington, Andreas became known in foreign governments as well. He often accompanied Humphrey and Dewey on overseas trips, at times blending their political goals with his own commercial interests. He cut deals with Juan and Evita Perón of Argentina and touted the benefits of soybean oil to Francisco Franco of Spain. In Yugoslavia, he stayed up into the wee hours with Tito and in the Soviet Union, chatted with Joseph Stalin about vegetable oil.