See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (29 page)

‘They should have just given up their car,’ the branch chief responsible for Bosnia said. ‘That’s how we would have handled it in South America.’

I was stunned. I knew the desk officer had spent only two years in some quiet post in South America doing administrative work. Worse, she knew nothing about Bosnia. She had refused to make a familiarization trip to Sarajevo. She spoke no Serbo-Croatian. I could have overlooked it all if later, she hadn’t suggested the couple be put up in front of a Personnel Evaluation Board and reprimanded them for not giving up their car. No wonder that a headquarters staffed with officers so badly misidentified the Chinese embassy in Belgrade that we sent a missile into it.

After months upon months of listening to Roger Tamraz’s many schemes to get rich quick, I finally learned why the CIA had kept up contact with him all these years: He could get to anyone, any where. He must have had a Rolodex the size of the New York City telephone book.

I had just walked into my office one morning when the telephone rang. It was Roger, even more ebullient than usual. The night before, he’d had dinner with Vice President Al Gore at Senator Ted Kennedy’s house in McLean, Virginia.

‘I sold the vice president on my pipeline,’ he said. ‘Your tip on Cutler really paid off.’

What Tamraz didn’t tell me, and I would find out only much later was that he had put Senator Kennedy’s wife, Victoria, on the payroll along with Lloyd Cutler. Victoria was supposedly helping to recover the money Tamraz had lost in Lebanon. His first check probably paid for dinner with Al Gore.

The former, and perhaps still active, international fugitive was not only pleased with his new dinner partners, he seemed to have suddenly become a Friend of Bill. President Clinton, Tamraz informed me, had called Azerbaijani president Aliyev to press for ‘multi-pipelines.’ It didn’t matter to Tamraz that Clinton no doubt had in mind the Turkish route, Baku-Ceyhan, not the Armenian route. Amoco and British Petroleum, Amoco’s ally in the Caspian, had been openly dumping buckets of money on Washington lobbyists to persuade the White House to back the Turkish route. Any Washington insider - including, one would think, Lloyd Cutler - could have told Tamraz it was only a matter of time before their money prevailed and the White House specifically named Baku-Ceyhan. But Tamraz wasn’t a man to accept defeat without a good brawl, and he certainly wasn’t going to be intimidated by a pair of eight-hundred-pound gorillas like Amoco and BE After all, who did Amoco come crying to when it wanted out of its problems in Italy?

‘This lobbying thing is really paying off,’ he said before he hung up.

I learned later that President Clinton had indeed called Aliyev, but that his call had been scripted largely by Sheila Heslin. Although I didn’t know what the exact circumstances were that led to Clinton’s call, I already knew for sure that Heslin didn’t have Roger Tamraz’s best interests in mind.

The way things worked on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue would soon become a lot clearer, but to see what I was looking for, I would have to fly halfway around the world to the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan.

It was dusk, and the snow-covered Caucuses were bathed in a radiant pink as the Gulfstream made a sharp right turn and dropped into Baku. A few minutes later, we were on the ground, taxiing up to an eerie, half-built, half-abandoned terminal that reminded me of a junked stage set from Star Wars.

We had a white-knuckle drive from the airport and dinner at a government guest house then began the inevitable waiting. Around midnight, just when we were about ready to head back to the hotel, President Heydar Aliyev’s gofer arrived to pick us up for our meeting.

Aliyev was one of the few Soviet leaders left standing after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Once a member of the Communist Party politburo and chairman of the KGB, he would have been a serious contender to rule the Soviet Union had it survived. Instead he had to settle for Azerbaijan, a backward Soviet republic that sat on vast oil reserves and occupied a strategic position on the western side of the Caspian. Aliyev knew exactly what he had, and he intended to make the most of it. Although he wasn’t about to liberalize Azerbaijan politically, he threw open its oil industry to foreign investors, in particular the American majors.

Aliyev signed his first major oil contract on September 20, 1994, granting Amoco, Pennzoil, UNOCAL, Ramco, Statoil, Delta, and BP drilling rights for three offshore Caspian fields. The companies would work as part of the Azerbaijan International Operating Consortium (AIOC). With estimated recoverable reserves of about 4.4 billion barrels and a peak production of 700, 000 barrels a day by 2010, AIOC’s concession rivaled some of Saudi Arabia’s mega fields. The oil companies’ PR departments started calling it ‘the deal of the century.’ For Aliyev, AIOC not only provided badly needed cash, it also helped persuade the US and Britain to lend him some necessary political support. With Russia on his north and Iran on his south, Aliyev lived in a bad neighborhood.

Although it was a little after one in the morning before we were ushered into Aliyev’s Soviet-style office, he was wide awake. Comfortable in the corridors of power and with foreigners, he graciously went around the room and shook our hands. Although he was in his seventies, he still had a spring in his step.

Aliyev started the conversation with a rambling account of the failed March 1995 coup, the one the CIA suspected Prime Minister Ciller had a role in. According to Aliyev, just about everyone was involved, from Russia to Turkey. He even named some Azeri dissidents living in the US I took notes for a while but lost interest as Aliyev waded deeper and deeper into the details; anyhow, I was half asleep. My interest perked up, though, when Aliyev brought up Exxon and Iran. I noticed Aliyev himself became more animated. There was even a trace of anger.

‘You know, gentlemen, I am ready to help the United States and its oil companies, but I expect you to live by your bargains.’

Aliyev looked around the room. It was clear no one knew what he was talking about.

Aliyev filled us in. In March 1995 he had received a call from the State Department’s undersecretary for economic affairs, Joan Spiro. She said she was speaking in the name of Secretary of State Warren Christopher. In unmistakable terms, Spiro threatened that if Azerbaijan wanted to maintain good relations with the US, Alivev would have to give Exxon its 5 percent. When Aliyev countered that he would face a lot of heat from Iran, Spiro brushed it off: ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get help.’ The next call was from Deputy Energy Secretary Bob White. White also insisted on Exxon’s 5 percent. When Aliyev again mentioned Iran, White said, ‘We’ll take care of it, just make sure Exxon gets its deal.’

‘So now that Exxon has its five percent, what are you going to do about Iran?’ Aliyev asked. ‘I share a long, porous border with that country.’

Listening to Aliyev, I found it hard to avoid the conclusion that the Clinton administration was pimping for Exxon. Naive that I was in the ways of the White House, I had assumed that the job of the government was to back US business in general but never a specific company, especially when other American oil companies, including Mobil, gladly would have taken the 5 percent and probably paid even more for it.

After it broke in the press that Tony Lake and his wife had skirted the law by holding on to $304, 000 in energy stocks when he was appointed national security adviser, I wondered if Lake had anything to do with Spiro’s and White’s calls. If so, the tension at home must have been thick enough to cut: Lake owned Exxon stock, while his wife held Mobil.

But the issue ran to more than money. It was about this time that the Sudanese decided they had had enough of hosting Osama bin Laden and offered him to us on a platter. Maybe if the White House and National Security Council had been spending less time thinking about Exxon and Mobil and Amoco and more time thinking about the implications of letting a known venomous snake slither away to Afghanistan, we might have all been spared a lot of future misery.

Oil seemed to be making bad bedfellows all over Washington. Jim Giffen was Mr. Kazakstan. If you wanted an oil concession in Kazakstan, you went to Giffen because his consulting company, Mercator Corporation, held all the keys to the kingdom. If you wanted to get out of your concession in Kazakstan because you’d been ripped off, you went to Giffen. He collected the commissions and distributed them, no questions asked, as long as the numbers on the check were right.

But Giffen did a lot more than business. He was Washington’s de facto ambassador to Kazakstan. When Kazak President Nazarbayev wanted to come to Washington, he didn’t phone Beth Jones, our ambassador in Alma Ata. He called Giffen, whose office in New York took care of all the arrangements, from travel to meetings to security. Giffen also arranged to do all the legal work and lobbying through his white-shoe law firm, Shearman and Sterling. Nazarbayev poured millions of dollars into the firm, even though no one seemed to know where the money ultimately ended up.

In Washington, Giffen’s preferred point of contact was Assistant Secretary of State Toby Trister Gati, the head of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. With a contact like Giffen, Gati quickly stopped calling up her own bureau or the CIA for anything on Kazak-stan. She could get everything she wanted from Giffen. For instance, when the CIA found out that Nazarbayev was selling sophisticated arms to North Korea and Iran, including the S-300, one of Russia’s most advanced surface-to-air defense weapons, Gati made the problem quietly disappear with a couple of phone calls to Giffen. (In the spirit of international cooperation, the North Koreans and Iranians simply found a new arms dealer.) It was all very chummy. Everybody walked away from the table a winner. The only unpleasantness was when Ambassador Jones found out that Gati had shown Giffen a top-secret CIA report on corruption in Kazakstan. He might have been the de facto ambassador, but he didn’t have a security clearance. A nasty exchange of cables followed between Jones and Gati, but the State Department dropped the matter. Gati was a protected citizen, and the potential embarrassment in Foggy Bottom wasn’t worth it.

I myself found how deep Gati was into the oil business when I was called down to the NSC in December 1995 for an unscheduled emergency meeting on Georgia. When I walked into the NSC’s stately conference room, I found the usual downtown nomenklatura: Dr. Coit Blacker, Sheila Heslin’s boss; Rand Beers, head of intelligence programs for the NSC; and Jennifer Sims, who worked for Toby Gati at the State Department and was married to the dean of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. A few other people from Defense and State were there for decoration.

Sims didn’t waste any time making her pitch: We absolutely had to give Georgia president Eduard Shevardnadze a Matador air-defense system to protect his planes and helicopters. (The Matador detects things like radar lock-ons and approaching missiles.) Shevardnadze was the only Caucuses leader who had committed to the main oil-export pipeline; America could not afford to lose him.

I vaguely wondered why, if he was so important, the oil companies didn’t pay to protect his life. But I wasn’t about to get into that one, and continued to doodle until Sims dropped her bomb: The money for the Matador would come from the CIA. At first I thought I’d fallen asleep and was dreaming. The State Department couldn’t have forgotten already that after Fred Woodruff was murdered just outside of the Georgian capital, Eduard Shevardnadze had stonewalled the investigation at every turn. Now the CIA was being asked to reward Shevardnadze for his complicity by ponying up $2 million plus to protect his life - all so Amoco, Exxon, and Mobil could have some extra reserves for their yearly financial statement. Had the inmates finally taken complete control of the asylum?

At least I knew exactly how to drive a stake in this deal.

‘Can’t be done,’ I said, interrupting.

Everyone in the room stopped talking, surprised I’d said anything.

‘Bob, what seems to be the problem?’ Beers said, bracing himself for the worst.

‘The man Ms. Sims proposes turning the Matador system over to is a murderer.’

Dr. Blacker shoved back his chair. There was a big, gaping hole where his mouth had been. For a minute I thought he was going to come around the conference table and strangle me.

‘Sorry, Bob, I’m not sure we all understand what you’re getting at,’ Beers said.

‘The head of the Georgian KGB - the head of Shevardnadze’s security, the same man who is supposed to operate the Matador system - is a murderer. We have a video of him shooting six handcuffed prisoners in the back of the head. It’s rather gruesome, but I’d be happy to go back to Langley and bring you back a copy. In any case, he’s violated human rights. As much as we’d like to, there’s nothing the CIA can do for you.’

I wasn’t making up the story, either - we really did have the video. No one asked to see it, and that was the last I heard about the Matador.

All of these side stories continued to stoke my curiosity about Sheila Heslin and the oil lobby, so I began calling around Washington to see what the deal was. Heslin’s sole job, it seemed, was to carry water for an exclusive club known as the Foreign Oil Companies Group, a cover for a cartel of major petroleum companies doing business in the Caspian. It was the same cartel that had wanted dirt on Tamraz and the others. The group particularly hated Tamraz because he was a lot more agile than they were. He had an absolute genius for getting to the best properties first and flipping them for huge profit, which drove up the majors’ operating costs. As evidence, they cited Roger’s purchase of Block I in Turkmenistan. He hadn’t invested a nickel to develop it. His only interest was in reselling the field to one of them for a huge premium. There’s nothing the majors hate more than buying off a middleman they don’t have to.

Another thing I learned was that Heslin wasn’t soloing. Her boss, Deputy National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, headed the inter-agency committee on Caspian oil policy, which made him in effect the government’s ambassador to the cartel, and Berger wasn’t a disinterested player. He held $90, 000 worth of stock in Amoco, probably the most influential member in the cartel and the one with the greatest reason to be wary of Tamraz. Another big oil alliance led by Chevron had lost serious time and money getting rid of a spoiler named John Deuss in a similar Caspian oil deal. Nobody intended to let Roger play the same role this time.

The deeper I got, the more Caspian oil money I found sloshing all around Washington. The Caspian Sea embassy fax lines were burning up with proposals from lobbying and law firms to sell access to the White House. Probably the most aggressive was Berger’s old firm, Hogan Hartson, which put out the word that it could guarantee entree into the White House. Anytime. Turkmenistan opted for the Israeli connection, hiring a firm called Merhav, which had good relations with the American-Israeli Public Affairs committee.