See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (27 page)

Once we made eye contact, Tamraz sailed across the lobby as if he owned the place, just like the New York banker he had become. We were still introducing ourselves when he whispered something in Pechous’s ear, handed him his briefcase, and turned his back on him as Pechous scooted away.

Nice touch, Roger, I thought. This had established him as just another Middle Eastern high roller who hired retired spooks, Secret Service agents, colonels, and ambassadors for the status: a bargain, too, less expensive than a private jet or a yacht anchored at Antibes, and easier to unload when budgets get tight.

After the waiter brought us coffee, I got down to business.

‘How’d your meeting with Sheila Heslin go?’ I asked.

‘Wonderfully. She loves the idea of the Armenian route.’ (According to Heslin’s version of the meeting, which I heard later, she all but threw Roger out of her office. It lasted a frigid twenty minutes.)

Tamraz pulled out a map of the Caucuses and Turkey, which he slid across the table for me to look at.

‘I’m going to connect the Caspian to the Mediterranean with an oil pipeline,’ he said, running his finger along a line that traversed Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenia, and Turkey. ‘It’s the deal of the century’

For the next thirty minutes Tamraz droned on about his ‘peace pipeline. ‘! think he sincerely wanted me to believe that a pipeline would bring Armenia and Azerbaijan to the bargaining table. It didn’t matter to Tamraz that history had fairly well established that when political tensions rise, the first thing blown up is an oil pipeline.

‘Seems like all this is going to cost a lot of money;’ said, hoping to sidetrack him and bring the meeting to a quick end.’ Who’s going to pay for it, Roger?’

‘The Chinese.’ He pulled out a press photo of Matt Steckel, the president of Tamraz’s Oil Capital Limited, presumably at a signing ceremony commemorating the Chinese agreement to finance the pipeline. Since the caption was in Chinese, I had to take Tamraz’s word that it wasn’t a picture of his bankruptcy proceeding.

‘Roger, this is all very interesting. We need to talk about it more. Is there anything I can do for you now?’

Roger paused and then said,’ Yes, as a matter of fact, there is. I need the president to hear my proposal.’

Clearly, Tamraz had a romantic view of my employer. He thought ‘CIA’ was a kind of abracadabra that would magically open all the important doors in Washington, including the one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Somehow he had missed the press reports about Bill Clinton’s turning away his CIA briefers when they showed up in Little Rock the day after he won the election.

‘You know, Roger, we don’t have the same juice we used to at the White House’ I said, trying to clue him in to reality. ‘Frankly, it’s difficult for even me to get a meeting at the NSC.’

‘What should I do?’

‘Well, I think most people in your position hire a lobbyist.’

Roger looked at me, all but begging for a name. I had just read something about Clinton’s former counsel Lloyd Cutler in The Washington Post, and said that I’d heard he was good.

Roger gazed at me in awe, as if I’d just invented peanut butter.

‘We’ll keep in touch,’ he said as he shook my hand and rushed off to another meeting.

I learned later that Tamraz knew more about lobbying the Clinton administration than many people. In 1994 he had hired the firm of Arnell and Hastie to buy access in Washington. The firm claimed to be especially close to Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown and did manage to broker a few meetings for Tamraz. Pleased, Roger sent a fat retainer to Arnell and Hastie for a ticket on Ron Brown’s plane carrying a trade mission to Moscow. At the last minute, Brown got wind of Roger’s Interpol warrant and disinvited him. What if Russia honored the warrant and picked up Roger on arrival? What if Russia seized Brown’s US government-issue airplane for transporting a wanted felon? International business was tricky that way.

Arnell and Hastie didn’t care whether Roger missed the flight or not. The ticket was prepaid, nonrefundable, and nontransferable, and the firm wanted its money. It filed suit and won a judgment against Oil Capital Limited, Panama, for $130, 000 - a pyrrhic victory, since OCL, Panama, had about 23 cents in its account.

Roger had also been lobbying the State Department hard. He’d won some converts and lost others. During his last visit to Turkey and Armenia, he started a fight between the US ambassadors in Armenia and Azerbaijan that grew so nasty the two embassies stopped talking to each other.

When I started asking my contacts in the petroleum industry about Roger, the first reaction was invariably, why would the CIA be asking about one of its own? Now I understood how Heslin had found out about Roger’s connection with us - apparently he’d told everyone he ever knew.

I went to see an oilman who knew more about crooked oil deals than Tamraz, mainly because he’d been involved in even more.

‘If you need to talk to the Mafia, why don’t you go straight to it?’ he asked.

I confessed I had no idea what he was talking about.

‘Did you ever hear how Tamraz started in oil?’

No.

He smiled, pleased to be the one to tell me. Before he began, he poured himself a double chilled white Armagnac and clipped a cigar.

‘Roger Tamraz was in Beirut working for Kidder Peabody on the Intra Bank liquidation. He was going through one of Intra’s safes and found a document concerning the former head of Saudi intelligence, Kamal Adham. Tamraz recognized its value right away. It was crucial to resolving a dispute in Adham’s favor, so he called Adham for a meeting. When Tamraz handed Adham the document, he said only, ‘You may need this.’ Adham was stunned: ’How much do I owe you?’ Tamraz replied, ‘Nothing, but let’s keep in touch.’

‘Sometime later, Adham called Tamraz and asked him if he wanted to help with a deal in Egypt. It was a pipeline from the Bed Sea to the Mediterranean, involving huge commissions that Adham didn’t want his fingerprints found on. Tamraz agreed, the pipeline was built, and he got his cut as well as a reputation for being a savvy entrepreneur. It didn’t matter that all he was doing was operating a shell game on Adham’s behalf.

‘Tamraz did so well with the Egyptian pipeline that he started nosing around for a new deal. It wasn’t long before he found one in Italy.’

The oilman stopped to relight his cigar and pour himself another Armagnac. ‘Do you remember Amoco’s problems in Italy?’

‘Come on,’ I answered, ‘let’s get on with it.’

‘You’ll love this. Amoco was at its wit’s end, trying to solve its labor problems in Italy. It was about ready to shut down its Italian refineries and distribution networks - simply abandon them. No dummy, Tamraz saw an opportunity where others saw nothing at all. He persuaded Mu’ammar Qaddafi to buy all of Amoco’s downstream facilities. With a buyer in hand, he is reported to have used some of his private contacts in Sicily to facilitate the deal. It worked like a charm. The labor problems went away, the deal was signed, and Tamraz got a five percent commission with an interesting bonus: When the Libyans decided it wasn’t a good marketing strategy to have their name on Amoco’s old gasoline stations, Tamraz loaned them his. That’s why you see Tamoil stations all over Europe.’

Next I called an oil trader who I thought might know something about Tamraz.

‘Did you know that Ozer Ciller - the husband of the Turkish Prime Minister, Tansu Ciller - and Tamraz are business partners?’ he asked me.

I didn’t, although I did know that Roger had spent a lot of time in Turkey promoting his Armenian pipeline, and that he had met Prime Minister Ciller on at least one occasion. Our embassy in Ankara had reported that the Turkish ultranationalist group, the Gray Wolves, made the introduction.

As for Madam Ciller’s husband, Ozer, he was said to keep bad company. Among others, he was connected to the Turkish narcotics baron Omar Lutfu Topal, who would be gunned down in a 1996 mob war in Istanbul. At the time, Omar had an outstanding arrest warrant in the US for selling narcotics.

‘So what business were Roger and Ozer in?’ I asked.

‘Oil. Tamraz is paying Ozer to front for him.’

I checked the story in the files and found a reference to OCL’s sharing an office in Turkmenistan with a Topal company named Emperyal that ran a half-dozen casinos in Turkmenistan involved in laundering drug money. The Turkish state pipeline company, Botas, was the third tenant in the building in Turkmenistan - a nice, cozy setup.

A week later the same oil guy called me back. ‘I can’t confirm this, so take it with a grain of salt, but my friends in Turkmenistan tell me that Roger and Ozer were silent partners in Block I.’

Block I was Roger’s concession in Turkmenistan - an expensive piece of property with estimated reserves of 358 million barrels of oil and 3.7 trillion cubic feet of gas. CIA energy analysts had always wondered where Tamraz had found the money to buy it.

‘Why would Ozer Ciller invest in Turkmen oil? It doesn’t make sense,’ said.

‘Not if you don’t understand the oil business. It wasn’t Ozer’s money. Lapis Holding fronted for him. It put up all the money for Block I, including a thirty-million signing bonus that undoubtedly went right into the pocket of Turkmen president Saparmurat Niyazov’

‘Why would Lapis do that?’ I asked.

‘It wasn’t Lapis’s money, either. The TYT (Turkish Tourism and Investment Bank) loaned the money to Lapis. After Ozer and Lapis bled TYT dry, it collapsed. Both the liabilities and assets were written off. So, to answer your question, it was TYT’s depositors who paid for Block I.’

‘Are you absolutely certain of this?’

‘No, but that is what I hear.’

‘So who is bribing whom?’

‘For the use of thirty million, I suppose Tamraz could pay a little out of his pocket, don’t you think?’

This was too good. I had to share it with someone, so I called Sheila Heslin. Again, she grunted and hung up the telephone without comment, but I found out she made a note to herself shortly afterward. It read: ‘Mon . . . Roger Tamraz . . . bribing Ciller’s husband . . . Sep 28 . . . Instructions: Bob Baer.’

You’d think that the ‘instructions’ Heslin had in mind were to issue me a merit badge. If Roger Tamraz was bribing government officials, he was in violation of US law, which meant she had him by the short hairs. Without US support, Roger would never worm his way into the Caspian oil deal. Heslin did have a hangman’s noose in mind, as things unfolded, but it was my neck, not Roger’s, she wanted to fit it around.

I also picked up another tantalizing lead: Roger Tamraz may have been involved with Ozer Ciller and Omar Topal in a coup in Azerbaijan, even though the facts were murky.

In March 1995, about the time Roger was traveling around Turkey and Armenia, Azeri president Heidar Aliyev had nearly been driven from office by an uprising led by the interior minister, Rawshan Javadov. After it failed, Javadov was killed, probably in an attempt to surrender. Those were the only facts we were certain of, at least at the beginning, but within weeks two Turkish intelligence officers working in Azerbaijan were arrested and tortured for their part in the coup. That made no sense at all - Turkey officially supported Aliyev - until it emerged that the two intelligence officers might have been working directly for Prime Minister Tansu Ciller, who paid them out of a secret slush fund. Soon the rumor mill was reporting that the Gray Wolves had been involved as well, along with Omar Topal. Since the Gray Wolves apparently had introduced Tamraz to Ciller, and since Tamraz and Topal were known business associates, it seemed prudent to be at least suspicious.

I made one last stab at trying to pin down Roger. At one point he had waved in my face a fax from a Manhattan-based company he was associated with called Avis Capital. Roger said Avis Capital was going to help pay for his pipeline, so I had a friend in New York run down the company. The address on the fax Tamraz had shown me was real - a tenement in the Bowery - but there was no sign of Avis Capital. The building superintendent said he’d never heard of the company, nor had any mail ever arrived addressed to an Avis Capital.

I’d seen enough of how foreign hustlers had worked their way in Washington during Iran-contra to realize that Tamraz and the Clinton White House were an accident waiting to happen. The question was: How could I get out of its way?

In the meantime, the CIA was circling the drain.

When the FBI arrested Rick Ames on February 21, 1994, I was in Dushanbe. Watching on CNN as Ames stood handcuffed by the side of his new Jaguar XJ6, my first reaction was that no one at the CIA owns a Jaguar. The officers who once could have afforded one - the investment bankers and lawyers who fought with the OSS in World War II, and the few who’d stayed on to establish the CIA in 1947 - were all gone. Ames’s Jaguar must have been the only one in the CIA parking lot. How could security have missed it?

But the lapse in internal security was just the beginning of the misery. Rick Ames wasn’t your average spy: When he gave away a dozen Soviet agents at one liquor-soaked lunch, he established himself as one of history’s greatest traitors, in the company of Benedict Arnold, the Rosenbergs, and Kim Philby. Just as Britain’s MI-6 would never live down Philby, so the CIA would never live down Ames. He had ratted out our crown jewels, the reason we existed. The only difference between the two was that Philby sold out for ideology, while Ames did it for money, pure and simple.

When I got back to headquarters in August 1994, I could see how Ames’s betrayal was playing out. Then director Jim Woolsey was turning over the CIA’s counterespionage to the FBI, an act that would be almost as destructive to the agency as Ames. In fairness, Woolsey didn’t have much choice. The CIA had screwed up so badly with Ames that it could no longer be trusted to clean its own house. Congress was breathing down Woolsey’s neck, and the press wanted its own pound of flesh. To appease everyone and atone for our sins, Woolsey turned the CIA over to its worst enemy in Washington - the FBI. Way back at the beginning of the cold war, J. Edgar Hoover had wanted to keep all national security operations, domestic and foreign, under his heavy thumb. Now it looked like his ghost was about to get its way.