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Throughout the furor, Hammer steadfastly
denied that he had ever authorized or had any knowledge,
of efforts to bribe individuals in Venezuela. He explained
that the money that he had sent Askew was a legitimate payment
for part of the share in the service contract that Askew
had earned through the consulting work he had performed
for Occidental. as a consultant (and to buy back an interest
he had in the service contracts.) And, at the time, there
was no way to prove the contrary. Askew kept silent about
the payoffs (he died in Arkansas in 1994). Hammer's buffer
held. He then boldly took the offensive. He was not without
influence in Washington, where he claimed to known every
President since FDR and where, through his Occidental International
subsidiary, he retained an extensive staff of well-connected
former officials to help him with government-relations.
In 1977, he asked the State Department to intervene, claiming
that Venezuela had deprived his company of its rightful
compensation on the pretext that it engaged in bribery.
During the next ten years, while Venezuelan courts reviewed
the case, American diplomats put "enormous pressure,"
as one Venezuelan Ambassador to Washington termed it, on
Venezuela to settle Occidental's claim, and finally, in
1989, Venezuela agreed to pay Occidental $42.2 million in
compensation.
Since the State Department had not of
course known of Hammer's contemporaneous discussion of the
bribes, I brought the relevant tapes to a well-known diplomat,
who had served at a high level in the State Department,
and who had been involved in the American intervention on
Hammer's behalf in the late 1970s. He agreed to listen to
them on the condition that I not divulge his identity. At
the outset, he told me that while he had not had a high
opinion of Hammer's integrity, he believed that in this
case he was getting a "bum rap." He took the position
that unless Venezuela could produce credible evidence that
Hammer or Occidental was involved in bribery, it should
pay Occidental for the properties it nationalized. For him,
it was an issue of protecting American interests abroad
from arbitrary confiscation.
When I began laying the tape, his demeanor
changed. He took notes, and he seemed particularly interested
in a portion that concerned the then Minister of Finance,
Pedro Tinoco. In it, Hammer asks who is being paid off:
"One Million is divided to Pedro
and his bunch..." Askew responded.
"That's Tinoco, He gets a Million?"
"Yeah," Askew confirms.
The diplomat explained that Tinoco had
been, before his death in 1992, one of the most powerful
men in Caracas. His father had served as Minister of the
Interior in a dictatorship. A heavy man, with a square face
and bald head, he had his own law firm, which specialized
in international business, and one of the leading banks,
the Banco Latino. He spoke calculatedly and tended to impress
people as, as Hammer described him on the tape, "a
tough guy [who] could go in and see the President."
After serving as finance minister, he went on to become
head of Venezuela central bank. In this latter role, the
U.S. supported his policies on controlling inflation and
considered him "America's man in Caracas."
Now, the tapes now showed him in a very
different light. Hammer, who was on a first name basis with
him, apparently considered him his man in Venezuela. He
had authorized paying him $1 million in cash and believed
that he could influence Caldera.
"My guess is that when this becomes
public, they will try to hang the whole thing on Tinoco
since he is dead," the diplomat predicted.
Would the American Government have intervened
on Hammer's behalf if this tape had been available, I asked.
"I certainly wouldn't have been
part of it," he answered.
I next went to see the Venezuelan Ambassador
to the United Nations, Enrique Tejera Paris. I understood
that Ambassador Tejera, who had served as Foreign Minister,
was a close friend of President Caldera. He was also a highly-regarded
lawyer who had just helped write the U.N. resolution condemning
corporate bribery of public officials. As I prepared to
play the tape in his office, he joked, "I hope I'm
not on the tape."
He then recounted that when he first
had Hammer in Caracas in 1969, Hammer had insisted on showing
him a video tape of a ceremony in which he stood with King
Idris of Libya. He assumed it was Hammer's way of making
the point that he had had obtained his oil concession in
Libya through his connections to the King. He had also,
as I pointed ut, delivered a multi-million dollar pay-off
to one of Idris' inner circle.
The ambassador shot back, "Venezuela
is not Libya. We take corruption very seriously. We have
strictly enforced anti-bribery laws for since 1936 and we
have put two Presidents in prison for it."
I then played the tape. It took about
20 minutes. When it concluded, he walked to his desk and
placed a call to President Caldera. A few moments later,
Caldera called him back and, in my presence, he described
in Spanish the contents of the tape. Caldera then asked
for a transcript, which I agreed to supply.
After the President hung up, Ambassador
Tejera placed a call to Maurice Vallery who, in 1971, had
headed the Venezuelan National Petroleum Company (CVP) in
1971 which had awarded Occidental the three service contracts.
He reached him in Caracas on his cellular phone and, after
summarizing the situation, handed me the phone.
On the tape, Askew, in accounting for
the disbursement of the $3 million in cash, explains:
"Then I come back and had to give
Vallery. I swung him a half a million dollars. I gave him
250,000 and he said, 'Now I'm going to work this out.' I
said O.K. He said he got some other people in with him...."
" You gave Vallery a half million,"
Hammer summed up.
"He is a 100 percent with us...."
Askew answered.
I repeated this portion of the tape
to Vallery . "Voices from the grave," he said.
He seemed shocked and dismayed that Hammer could have had
talked about him in this way. "I had little to do with
Hammer. I saw him at the ceremony in which the contracts
were signed and I had dinner with Hammer him once and he
told me about his meeting with Lenin. The only thing he
ever gave me was a catalogue for his art collection."
As for Askew, he recalled meeting hm only once at a large
social function.
I asked about the putative half-million
dollar payoff.
"That's pure invention," he
answered.
"Probably Askew cheated Hammer out
of the money."
But Hammer got his concessions.
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