Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer - by Edward Jay Epstein
Stefan Lemieszewski
Among other things, Armand Hammer is also known for delivering out of
the Soviet Union, the KGB-forged Trawniki identification card used in
the
John Demjanjuk case. Armand Hammer was a philanthopist, KGB agent,
money launderer, executive at Occidental Petroleum, and "great
pretender."
Armand Hammer's father, Julius Hammer, was a co-founder of the
Communist Party - USA.
"Hammer not only lived a lie; he died one."
Below is a book review by Tony Allen-Mills of "Dossier: The Secret
History
of Armand Hammer" written by Edward Jay Epstein.
Stefan Lemieszewski
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March 15 1998
The Sunday Times
BOOK REVIEWS
The great pretender
Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer
by Edward Jay Epstein
Onion business £14.99 pp 418
By Tony Allen-Mills
In May 1977, the Prince of Wales attended the opening in
London of an exhibition of Sir Winston Churchill's paintings and
watercolours. He was introduced to the gallery's owner, a
formidable American business tycoon, art collector and
philanthropist named Armand Hammer, then 79 years old.
Hammer promptly offered the Prince one of his Churchill
paintings as a gift for the Queen's Silver Jubilee fund. It was the
beginning of an unusual friendship between the heir to the
British throne and a man who would later be exposed as one of
the great frauds of the 20th century.
As soon as Hammer learnt that one of Charles's hobbies was
painting watercolours, he arranged for the prince to take lessons
from a well-known American artist. The multi-millionaire oilman,
head of Occidental Petroleum, began to make large donations
to charitable causes supported by Charles. He proudly
described their relationship as "a deeply cherished and
wide-ranging friendship".
When, two years later, Charles's beloved Uncle Dickie - his
great-uncle, Earl Mountbatten - was murdered by the IRA,
Hammer stepped in to help the prince realise one of the earl's
last unfulfilled dreams. Both Charles and Mountbatten had been
avid supporters of the United World Colleges, the international
campuses that combine academic study with
outward-bound-style physical training. Mountbatten had long
been trying to raise enough money to open a new campus in
the United States. Now Hammer opened his wallet to assist the
grieving prince. In September 1982, Charles boarded Hammer's
private jet to fly to Montezuma, New Mexico for the grand
opening of the Armand Hammer United World College of the
American West. It had cost Hammer nearly $5m to complete
the project, but his reward was beyond price. He had become a
close friend of the future King of England and his new bride,
Diana. There was even talk of Hammer becoming a godfather to
the couple's first child.
What Charles could not have known was that much of the
money for the school he called his "impossible dream" came
from a slush fund established to pay bribes to the corrupt
middlemen who had arranged Occidental's oil concessions in
Libya. Nor can the prince have been aware that his wealthy
American friend was a KGB stooge, whose art and business
empires had long provided a convenient conduit for the
laundering of Kremlin funds used to finance Soviet espionage
activities.
All this and much more is laid bare in Dossier: The Secret
History of Armand Hammer, by Edward Jay Epstein. Hammer
died of cancer aged 92 in 1990, fondly imagining that the sordid
details of his astonishing life of myth, fakery and deceit would
be buried with him in his family mausoleum in Los Angeles. He
reckoned without Epstein's audacious sleuthing through almost
a century's worth of family papers, government archives, court
files and secret tapes, not to mention the bitter recollections of
some of the mistresses and illegitimate children Hammer
discarded along the way.
The result is one of the great demolition jobs of modern
biography: a jaw-dropping exposé of a ruthless charlatan who
bullied and betrayed his way to an imposing reputation as a
billionaire patron of the arts with a long list of powerful friends.
Epstein's painstaking research strips layer after layer of criminal
sham and pretence from a bogus tycoon's self-aggrandising
perfidy. If it is any consolation to Buckingham Palace, the
Prince of Wales was far from alone in being played by Hammer
as a sucker.
Hammer first became known in American business circles as
the Soviet Union's "First Capitalist". His father, Julius Hammer,
was born in the Jewish ghetto of Odessa. Moving from Czarist
Russia to New York in 1892, Julius grew up a radical socialist
and named his first son Armand after the arm-and-hammer
symbol of the American Socialist Labour Party. Attending a
socialist gathering in Stuttgart in 1907, Julius met the man who
would later play a key role in Armand's business career:
Vladimir Illyich Lenin.
Four years after the Russian revolution, Armand Hammer paid
his first visit to Moscow at just the moment that Lenin was
seeking western business investment in the struggling
communist economy. The new communist regime was also
looking for means of channelling funds to its undercover
networks in America. Armed with evidence exhumed from the
Kremlin's newly accessible archives, Epstein claims that
Hammer effectively sold his soul to communism. In return for
the first mining concession to be awarded an American
businessman in Russia, Hammer allowed his family company,
then called Allied Drug, to be exploited for espionage purposes.
"He had crossed a line into a land of intrigue, from which there
was no return," Epstein writes.
The deal with Lenin secured Hammer a unique place in cold war
history. Although he was a prominent public figure who
industriously courted the media, he would always be viewed
with suspicion by western intelligence agencies - indeed, even
before he reached Moscow on his first trip in 1921, he was
detained and questioned by MI5 on board the SS Aquitania. But
he always stuck to his story that he was no more than a
business "ambassador" whose contacts were useful to both
sides.
James Angleton, former head of counter-intelligence for the CIA,
told Epstein he long suspected Hammer of being a Soviet agent
of influence whom a defector had identified as "the capitalist
prince". But Hammer was secure in the knowledge that the only
serious evidence against him was locked up in Kremlin
archives. He died never imagining that Epstein would one day
be handed his Russian file.
Whether Hammer's antics inflicted any lasting damage on
American security interests is not spelled out by Epstein, and it
may well be that the tycoon was not so much a dedicated
traitor as an opportunistic profiteer who cared mainly about
taking his cut. Indeed, Hammer was much taken in later years
with the image of himself as a cold war conciliator who helped
bring east and west together.
Determined that his efforts should be recognised, he mounted
an immodest campaign to have himself awarded the Nobel
peace prize. Epstein portrays Hammer's relationship with Prince
Charles as part of a calculated - and ultimately unsuccessful -
effort to impress the Swedish academy with his humanitarian
credentials.
As for the rest of this perfunctorily written but utterly engrossing
biography, barely a page goes by without some monstrous
revelation about Hammer's appetite for deceit. Immeasurably
assisted by the access he was given to tapes that Hammer
himself secretly recorded - sometimes using a cuff-link for a
microphone - Epstein lays bare the startling network of bribery
and corruption that secured Occidental multi-billion-dollar oil
concessions in Libya and Venezuela.
He also details the brazen forgery that helped build Hammer's
extensive art collection. One benefit of the tycoon's Russian
connection was an official Fabergé stamp, given to him in
Moscow, which he used to authenticate fake Imperial jewelled
eggs.
Nor were Hammer's relations with women any less malign. In
one of the most bizarre episodes of a lifetime's dedicated
womanising, he persuaded Martha Wade Kaufman, his art
adviser and mistress, to wear a blonde wig and change her
name to Hilary Gibson. This was in order to deceive his
long-suffering wife, Frances, who had become suspicious about
his relationship with Kaufman, and who apparently never
realised that Gibson was Kaufman in disguise.
Although Hammer was routinely generous to former mistresses
and illegitimate offspring, he cut several of them out of his will
just before his death, sparking an avalanche of lawsuits against
his estate and, in turn, providing Epstein, a former Harvard
academic turned prodigious literary inquisitor, with another rich
source of material.
On his deathbed Hammer engineered one last fraud: having
contributed a small fortune to the search for a cure for cancer,
he did not wish it to be known that bone marrow cancer was
killing him. So he briskly ordered his doctors to put something
else on his death certificate. Hammer not only lived a lie; he
died one.