Dossier

...In 1923, 11 arminer left Sing Sing for Russia...

...Brown House quickly became an "unofficial embassy" for foreign VIPs...

...Like his father, Armand attended Columbia Medical School, and it was during his first year there that his father was arrested and sentenced to hard labor at Sing Sing prison for performing an illegal abortion that led to a young woman's death...

...Iii order to evade the onerous provisions of the Versailles Treaty, Cerrnaiiy had concluded a secret agreement with the Soviet Union whcrcby Moscow agreed to help Berlin build an air force in return for tcehinical assistance...

...The next day he was back at his office at Occidental...

...Its guests included H.G...

...Along with his art business, Hammer acquired a new identity...

...government was growing a bit wary of Ham mer...

...He assumed "Allied American mushroomed into a multinational company with scores of employees...

...I n 1962, a Soviet defector named Anatoly Golytsin told the CIA's chief of counterintelligence, James Angleton, about a mysterious "agent of influence" working for Moscow...

...Of course, Hammer's marriage did nothing to dampen his extra-marital life...

...According to Epstein: The key to this remarkable success story is not classic capitalism, in which one produces and brings to market some commodity more efficiently than one's competitors...

...The few glimpses of Perot at home reveal a man who genuinely Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer Edward Jay Epstein Random House /418 pages 1$3o REVIEWED BY Joseph Shattan...

...Almost overnight," writes Epstein, had 44 As Hammer toldhis mistress thirtyyears later, he wasthe surgeon who hadperformed the fatalabortion...

...Some articles," wrote Hammer, "found their way to little shops where their acquisition was relatively simple, while others were in the hands of private individuals who would part with them only after considerable negotiating...

...Rockne: All-American, but the real hero, as Ronald Reagan fans know, wasn't Rockne but George Gipp...

...Through a combination of relentless drive, shrewd business sense, and "skillful hype," he became an oil tycoon...

...Two doctors attached dozens of wires to him so that they could monitor his heart in the other room...

...To redeem himself, Armand set aside a promising internship at New York's Bellevue hospital and went off to Moscow...

...Deemed a Coil-III nu1iist `martyr' by Lenin because of hisAnicrican ordeal," Epstein writes, "Julius Hammer [was} provided with a palatial thirty-room mansion in the heart of Moscow known as Brown House...

...Did he think that his secret relationship with Moscow gave him a leg up on his competitors...

...And on that point Posner is absolutely clear...

...He dropped society names as if he had always been part of the gentry...

...thanks to his acquisition of valuable oil-leases in Libya (to help win the Libyan contract, he abandoned Judaism 84 November 1996 . The American Spectator...

...Hammer quickly negotiated "a massive swap of U.S...

...Armand Hammer was born in 1898, the first son of Dr...

...He was aced out of the 1989 Prize by the Dalai Lama...

...He ordered his foreign trade commissar, Ludwig Martens, to draft a contract for the young man he called the son of "the American millionaire Hammer...

...When the day for him to be sentenced finally came, writes Epstein, "Hammer arrived in federal court in a wheelchair...

...It was the height of the Cold War, and J. Edgar Hoover, now running the FBI, quietly let it be known that Hammer was not to be trusted...

...American art collectors, eager to lay their hands on what they assumed were priceless Russian "treasures" (many of which, Epstein reveals, were actually fakes), were not inclined to scrutinize Hammer's cover story too closely...

...Epstein, a widely published journalist and former professor, has drawn on documents from Soviet archives and...

...When she tried to remind him of some of their mutual acquaintances in Moscow, he looked at her blankly, as if she were addressing the wrong person...

...In Moscow, Julius 1-Ianuner quickly ioincd the new ruling class...

...Within six months, Hammer was a wealthy man...

...His achievement did not go unnoticed in the Soviet Union...

...Whatever the answer, Dossier is a genuine tour de force, one of those rare books that helps explain how the world really works...

...Export-Import Bank approved an unprecedented $180 million loan to the Soviet government...

...He followed that deal up with a contract to build an International Trade Center in Moscow...

...markets might be a "carrot" with which he could influence Soviet foreign policy...

...Hammer immediately fell in with Khrushchev's scheme, and began systematically transforming Occidental "from a California oil and gas company to a producer of fertilizers that could be exported...

...Yet it would have been wholly out of character for Bryant to use a hokey story about Trammell's death to inspire his team...

...Bear thought "Win-one-for-the-Gipper" pep talks were so much blather-he used an earthier term-because they produced, writes Dunnavant, "only a momentary burst of adrenaline that soon evaporates...

...When she remet him at Shadow Isle, he was dressed in a dinner jacket, spoke in a refined, almost mid 44 Tensions over Vietnam forced Hammer to put the plan to export fertil izer technology to Russia on hold-until Richard Nixon was inaugurated...

...His face, usually tan, was ashen...

...In his spare time, meanwhile, he began collecting Faberge eggs, icons, and paintings...

...The old fox, however, managed to avoid serious punishment...

...Communist Party who came to Moscow to attend party congresses...

...A wildly misleading exercise in selfpromotion, it was praised by Hammer's friends in the most unqualified terms...

...Hammer, who prior to his Moscow trip hadn't traveled more than loo miles outside New York, was now living the perilous double life of a Soviet agent...

...instead, it is the version in which one is granted an exclusive privilege by the state that makes it difficult, if not impossible, for others to compete...

...He is also good to some of his employees, and spontaneously generous to selected strangers...

...Epstein reports that in r9:4 a young Justice Department employee named J. Edgar 1-louver received information from a source "identified only by the code name Finger...that Hammer had been given 575,000 in Moscow to pay underground derground Coinintern agents in the United States...

...In the 195o's, however, the U.S...

...Prior to his arrest, his father had planned to go to Russia to help break the unofficial blockade that American corporations had imposed on the Soviet regime...

...Lenin had appealed to him to help the struggling regime survive by taking on an asbestos concession, and the young doctor, out of the goodness of his heart, agreed...

...To finance the fertilizer deal, the U.S...

...One such comrade, Jay Lovestone, who later became a prominent antiConmmunist trade unionist, "strongly suspected that Hammer was involved with the OGPU, tile Soviet police organization...

...True, there was Knute...

...A letter to Ross Jr...

...Wells, John Dewey, Douglas Fairbanks, Gene Tunney, and Will for Unitarianism, then had his minister write a letter to the Libyans attesting to his non-Jewishness), was ready to exploit detente to the full...

...Young Armand was unusually devoted to his father, sometimes refusing to speak to other family members when Julius was away on business...

...In Sing Sing, Julius Hammier learned that his son was on the verge of a nenvoiis breakdown...

...Aside from those in Moscow, New York, London and Berlin, it had bustling offices in Riga, Kiev and Pctrograd...

...He had no idea that the money was being used to pay for the Watergate cover-up, and when his illegal contribution was eventually exposed, Hammer at first denied everything, rendering him liable to a jail sentence for obstructing justice...

...They made a movie of the late Paul "Bear" Bryant's life about a dozen years ago and it failed, one of the few projects associated with the man to suffer that fate...

...Unfortunately Posner never gives us much of a feeling for the private Perot, making Posner's decision to stick almost exclusively to Perot's public life seem almost unfair...

...phosphate for Soviet ammonia, potash and urea...

...Precisely what kept Hammer loyal to the Soviets over so many years is a matter of conjecture...

...The consensus might have stood, had Edward Jay Epstein not spent the last fifteen years or so tracking down the real Armand Hammer: A master manipulator who used money, art, fraud, and a seemingly endless series of lies (what Hammer called his "razzmatazz") to penetrate the American establishment, while simultaneously maintaining his allegiance to the Soviet establishment...

...One of "the most discreet and able of `Lenin's men of confidence,"' as the eminent historian Bertram Wolfe characterized him, Julius Hammer helped found the American Communist Party in 1919...

...To better handle potential opposition to his move, Hammer had his son, Julian, plant bugs on his associates at Occidental Petroleum...

...Hammer turned out to have quite a knack for the oil business...

...Armand had his own apartment there, and back among his family he was restored to health...

...Armand Hammer was therefore ordered to return to the United States and help raise much needed foreign currency for his Soviet masters by selling art objects confiscated by the regime from monasteries, museums, and private collectors...

...He therefore did not take personally Julius Hammer's sudden coldness to his fonncr comrades...

...alcohol was going to help produce munitions, this was practically a license to print money...

...Was he, perhaps, being blackmailed by the KGB...

...To finance the International Trade Center, the Bank lent the Soviet Union another $36 million...

...JOSEPH SHATTAN is consulting editor of The American Spectator...

...Never hire "social climbers," fancy business school types, or "people who drink every day," advises Perot...

...The one group Perot has not treated well, however, is the American public, whom he attempts to manipulate and lies to compulsively...

...Armand Hammer & Sickle: Soviet ent Fxtraordinaire 82 November r 9 9 6 •The American Spectator had made a killing in the Soviet market, and was busily raging his fellow capitalists to do likewise...

...The plan was for the Soviets to award a business concession to Julius Hammer's company, Allied Drug and Chemical, thereby proving that, ideology notwithstanding, it was possible for American capitalists to do business with the Bolsheviks...

...Did he retain, despite his wealth, his youthful commitment to socialism...

...I collect Old Masters and young mistresses," was how he liked to put it...

...Now his son would go as his father's proxy...

...Remarkably, his request was granted...

...To explain how he had acquired his art collection in the first place, Hammer collaborated with Walter Duranty, the notorious Soviet apologist, on a book called The Quest o f the Romano ff Treasure...

...Attendants stood by with an oxygen tent and other emergency paraphernalia...

...By 1972, [he] had all his pieces in place...

...His life is a shining example of what resourcefulness, energy, intelligence, determination and sheer stamina can accomplish," raved Senator Edward Kennedy...

...He immediately sent a letter to his parole board explaining that the future of Allied American was at risk, since Armand "was not equal to the concession, being only z years of age and a student all his life...

...but Nixon believed that access to U.S...

...Hammer's FBI file, on interviews with Hammer's family, mistresses and associates, and on tapes made clandestinely by Hammer himself (how Epstein acquired these tapes goes unexplained) to produce a riveting portrait of one of the greatest con-artists of our time...

...Although his political allies succeeded in blunting the impact of the FBI's reports, Hammer decided that it was time to get into another line of business...

...83 The American Spectator . November r 9 9 6 it was part of the Soviet effort to build [a] fire wall...

...administrations had taken a dim view of East-West trade...

...Gary Busey, an unlikely choice, played Bryant fairly well, even managing the coach's rumbling growl as he walked the sidelines...

...He divorced his Russian wife, Olga, and married an American socialite, Angela Carey Zevely of Shadow Isle, New Jersey...

...Golytsin could not supply Angleton with a name, but revealed that in KGB circles this agent was known as the "Capitalist Prince...

...Coach: The Life of Paul "Bear" Bryant Keith Dunnavant Simon & Schuster /367 pages / $24 REVIEWED BY Victor Gold...

...Martens duly awarded Allied Drug a concession in some asbestos mines in the Urals...

...Hammer, who by then had transformed Occidental into the fourteenth largest industrial company in the U.S...

...He argued that it was in the national interest that his company, which employed "large numbers of American workmen," remain in business, and he requested permission to go to Russia and take over from his inexperienced son...

...7 The strain of running such a vast enterprise proved too much for Armand Hammer...

...Hammer," writes Epstein, "had been preparing Occidental for detente for nearly a decade...

...It is his insatiable desire to be of help to others that makes Hammer come alive," opined Vice President George Bush...

...But the movie had only a short run because the lives of football coaches, for all the superficial "drama" of the game, simply don't play well on the screen...

...Let it be a concession, even if a fictitious one," Lenin ordered...

...VICTOR GOLD is The American Spectator's national correspondent...

...Before Nixon's detente changed Soviet-American relations, successive U.S...

...What made the arrest of his beloved father especially hard to bear was Armand's guilty knowledge that Julius had taken the blame for his son's crime: As Armand Hammer told his mistress, Bettye Murphy, thirty years later (when he thought he was dying), he was the surgeon who had performed the fatal abortion while his father was occupied with political matters...

...Of course, not all of President Nixon's advisers looked kindly on Hammer's Soviet dealings...

...There was a Gipp-like character in Bryant's career as well -Pat Trammell, the quarterback who led the Alabama team to a national championship in 1961, went on to become a doctor, then died of cancer at age z8...

...Hammer's family firm, now renamed the Allied American Corporation, was designated by Soviet intelligence to help coordinate this complicated transaction...

...This appeared to be a straightforward business transaction, but in agreeing to serve as Moscow's "path" to U.S...

...To prevent them from interfering with his plans, Hammer became a major contributor to Nixon's campaign...

...In 1961, he was back in Moscow, where Khrushchev, trying to cure the always-ailing Soviet agricultural sector, proposed that Occidental Petroleum become "the vehicle through which the various parts of [a] vast fertilizer project would be assembled...

...Malcolm Forbes, Linus Pauling, and Barbara Walters also weighed in...

...The Capitalist Prince would live another fourteen years, working to the very end to preserve detente, rescue the Soviets from their Afghan quagmire -he offered to develop a major oil industry in Pakistan if its president, Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, would stop supporting the Afghan rebels-and win the Nobel Peace Prize...

...business, Hammer had ceded control of his family's firm to Soviet intelligence services- and they would use Allied Drug, in Epstein's words, "as a financial conduit for Soviet activities in the United States at a time when funding such activities was illegal...

...Julius Hammer was also a leading figure in the radical Socialist Labor Party (which he helped finance through his successful business ventures), and he named his son after the Party's symbol -an arm and hammer signifying the forthcoming revolution...

...at college graduation time, partly reprinted here, is remarkable for its affection and sensible advice...

...But just as Occidental's metamorphosis was nearly complete, Khrushchev was deposed by his Politburo colleagues, and by the time Brezhnev was ready to resume the project, Soviet-American tensions over Vietnam forced Hammer to put the plan to export fertilizer technology to Russia on hold-until Richard Nixon was inaugurated in 1969...

...At a time when nearly all U.S...

...is that the Americans have gone in for concessions...

...The son of an American millionaire, this person had entered the Soviet Union in the 192o's and was recruited by Soviet intelligence...

...Hammer's friends," Epstein reports, were struck by his rapid transformation...

...In 1931 he set up L'Ermitage Galleries in New York...

...Trammell was Bear Bryant's kind of competitor, probably his favorite among all the players he coached in a career touching four decades...

...In 1944, Hammer's society connections, his outspoken support for the New Deal, and his knack-developed at Brown House-for cultivating the high and the mighty, led to his first great business coup...

...Julius Hammer, a Russian Jew who came to America at the age of 16, worked his way through Columbia medical school, and made a fortune in the pharmaceutical business...

...He claimed that he had gone to Russia for purely humanitarian reasons, and had met Lenin quite by accident...

...The advantage came not from a Horatio Alger work ethic but from providing government leaders with desired services or emoluments...

...Hammer had been initiated into this latter form of enterprise by Lenin...

...his body quivered...

...Nor did Hammer confine his activities to American-related ii atters...

...Or was his pro-Sovietism a peculiar manifestation of filial piety-something Hammer felt he owed Papa Julius...

...So when he was asked, in 1972, to make an anonymous $54,000 donation in laundered hundred-dollar bills, Hammer was only too glad to oblige...

...It must have...

...This is a small path leading to the American 'business' world, and it should be made use of in every way...

...How else could Perot have lost the debate...

...Grin and Bear It: He Made Alabama Win 85 The American Spectator . November 1996 Rogers, along with a host of visiting congressmen and businessmen...

...adores his children and stays faithful to his wife...

...between Soviet intelligence operatives and national Communist Party officials...

...What we want to show and have in print...

...Luba Elianoff, for example, who had given the Hammer family Russian lessons in Moscow, knew Hammer as a crude youth lacking in manners...

...The only foreigners conspicuously absent," Epstein notes, "were Julius Hammer's old cornrades in the U.S...

...The ever-loyal Hammer agreed to fence the stolen art...

...He returned to the United States in the early 1930's, and was reactivated by the Soviets in the late 1950's...

...Secretly, however, he was helping launder funds for [lie Soviet espionage network in the United States...

...It is Edward Jay Epstein's contention in Dossier that the Capitalist Prince was Armand Hammer, "the noted philanthropist and art collector," as the New York Times described him in its 199o obituary...

...In 1987, he published his autobiography, Hammer...

...Hammer's arrival in Moscow in 1921 was duly noted by Lenin himself...

...The Roosevelt administration approved Hammer's application to produce beverage alcohol...

...Even then it wasn't Gipp's on-field exploits that gave the film what drama it had, but his death at an early age...

...A nutty explanation, true, but Perot is adamant that it happened that way...

...By 1930, Stalin had nationalized all foreign concessions, and Allied American was no longer useful to him...

...To all outward appearances, he was a fabulously successful young capitalist who...

...1~ western voice, and displayed perfect table manners...

...So he divorced his second wife, married Frances Barrett Tolman, a fabulously wealthy widow, and in 1956 used her money to purchase a nearly bankrupt oil company named Occidental Petroleum...

...Half a century after Lenin had granted him an asbestos connection, Hammer had succeeded in opening a path to the world of American business...

...He checked out of the hospital, discarding, like the props they were, his wheelchair, electrocardiograph, and emergency oxygen tent...

...In view of his "terminal" condition, the court mercifully sentenced the 78-yearold Hammer to one year's probation: On leaving the courtroom, Hammer had, as his lawyer delicately put it, "a miraculous recovery...