-Caveat Lector- Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer - by Edward Jay Epstein ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- >From Stefan Lemieszewski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date Wed, 18 Mar 1998 11:13:25 GMT Newsgroups soc.culture.ukrainian,soc.culture.usa,soc.culture.europe Message-ID <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 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 expos� 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 Faberg� 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. DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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