From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Thu Dec 03 2009 - 00:26:51 EST
Big Oil’s Heart of Darkness
The conviction of arms dealers and former top government officials in
France could help to shed light on Dick Cheney's Halliburton years.
By Christopher Dickey | Newsweek Web Exclusive
Oct 28, 2009
The convictions handed down by a French court this week against arms
dealers, influence peddlers, and former government officials, including a
son of the late president François Mitterrand, expose a vivid picture of
the world in which Dick Cheney used to do business when he was the head of
Halliburton in the 1990s. The case did not touch on the former vice
president's activities directly, and he is not implicated in any alleged
wrongdoing. But now that a verdict has been reached in this nine-year-old
French case, I expect the door will be open to investigations touching many
corners of this fetid world of corruption. (Click here to follow
Christopher Dickey)
The central character in the French case is Pierre Falcone, 55, who was
convicted on arms trafficking and other counts for his role supplying some
170,000 land mines, 450 tanks, and other weapons to the Angolan government
despite a United Nations-decreed embargo. And Falcone has some interesting
American connections.
Before he was first thrown in jail in France in December 2000, he and his
wife, Sonia, a former Miss Bolivia, were making quite a name for themselves
in Paradise Valley, Ariz. This wealthiest of Phoenix suburbs has a lot of
opulent homes, but the Falcones were building what was then the most
expensive in the history of the state: a $10.5 million mansion. They were
big donors to fashionable philanthropies, and Sonia liked to give money to
the Republican Party. According to Federal Elections Commission records
from the time, a little-known cosmetics company she owned contributed
$100,000 to the Republican National Committee, and she forked over the
maximum allowable $1,000 to both John McCain and George W. Bush. If Falcone
hadn't been in Paris's La Santé Prison on Jan. 20, 2001, he might well
have been gripping and grinning at the Bush inaugural balls in Washington
that night.
This French merchant of arms and oil who "could sell sand to a Saharan," in
the words of one lawyer, was selling himself to the American political
establishment, and trying to parlay his supposed influence into lucrative
contracts. According to French sources familiar with the case, notes seized
in the office of Falcone's secretary at the height of the 2000 political
campaign in the United States had him promising Angolan President José
Eduardo Dos Santos a special introduction to the new U.S.
president—whether George W. Bush or Al Gore.
Dos Santos, who has taken his southern African country from independence
through civil war to vast and intimate relations with some of the world's
most powerful oil companies, had come to expect such favors from his
friends. In a surreal encounter with the newly appointed French ambassador
a few months after Falcone's arrest, Dos Santos personally pleaded
Falcone's case. "Thanks to his support, democracy and the rule of law still
prevail in Angola," said Dos Santos. "Millions of people were saved from an
imminent genocide." In 2003, as the case against Falcone continued its slog
through the courts, Dos Santos gave the French businessman an Angolan
diplomatic passport and made him an envoy to UNESCO in Paris. The court
rejected Falcone's subsequent claim of diplomatic immunity.
In the already shady world of big oil, Angola truly is the heart of
darkness, and the sleazy details of its dealings, while easy to conceal,
are hard for anyone doing business with it to escape. Back in the 1990s,
Dick Cheney was among those people. Cheney had moved from his position as
secretary of defense in the George H.W. Bush administration to head up
Halliburton, with its vast oilfield operations and its growing number of
Pentagon contracts. In 1998 Cheney went to Angola himself to promote his
company's interests. State Department documents publicized during the 2000
election campaign revealed that U.S. Embassy officials in the capital,
Luanda, had "camped out" at local government offices to help the former
cabinet member and his company secure a $68 million contract.
Maybe everything was on the up and up for that deal. But as multiple
investigations by nongovernmental organizations have established, Dos
Santos's government was so corrupt that even the "official" commissions
paid by oil companies for concessions were never recorded in any official
books, and it appears few people have done business in Luanda without
adapting to its system of graft and payoffs. And Falcone became a kind of
gatekeeper. By the late 1990s, according to one of the defendants in the
French case, who spoke to me privately so as not prejudice his case, "the
man you had to see was Pierre Falcone."
So who is this guy? Born in French Algiers to a Colombian mother and
Neapolitan father, for most of his career Falcone moved in the overlapping
worlds of French quasi-state enterprises, covert operations, global oil
corporations, and Third World payoffs. After he was collared on Dec. 1,
2000, French investigators hoped his case would give them a key to expose
the deeply ingrained system of political corruption that links France to
several oil-rich African countries. Over the years, millions of dollars
were channeled through friendly African dictatorships to what was then
France's state-owned oil company, Elf Aquitaine, and ultimately back into
the coffers of both the leading French political parties. (Elf subsequently
was taken over by Total.) Those convicted this week for influence peddling
in what's become known as "Angola-gate" include Jean-Christophe Mitterrand,
who headed his father's secretive "Africa cell," and former French interior
minister Charles Pasqua.
In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union broke apart, Falcone signed up as
one of his partners the former KGB man and Russian tycoon Arcadi Gaydamak,
who was also convicted in absentia in Paris this week for arms trafficking
and other crimes, and is the object of an international arrest warrant.
Another important Falcone associate was Thierry Imbot, the son of a former
head of the French intelligence service, who mysteriously fell to his death
from his Paris apartment's fourth-floor window a few weeks before Falcone's
arrest in 2000.
But the most important of all Falcone's friends was and remains the Angolan
dictator Dos Santos. His country has two great sources of wealth: oil and
diamonds. And two enormous sources of poverty: war and corruption. After
the pretense of ideology dropped out of the equation at the end of the Cold
War, Angola became the scene of ferocious competition among international
oil corporations, some of which claimed to be representing their national
interests. At the center of this rivalry, France's Elf and Total were
pitted against Chevron and Exxon.
Falcone appears to have been France's not-so-secret point man backing Dos
Santos. Remember that in 1992, the CIA was losing patience with Dos
Santos's rival, Jonas Savimbi and his UNITA rebels, who were once ranked
among the most prominent of the Reagan administration's "freedom fighters."
Savimbi had not adapted to the end of the Cold War and was increasingly
regarded, even by the Americans, as an obstacle to peaceful development of
the Angolan oilfields. U.N.-sponsored elections were held with Washington's
blessing and Savimbi lost. But Savimbi didn't stop fighting. Indeed, within
a few months, Savimbi had Dos Santos's government under siege in Luanda.
It was at this juncture that Falcone and the Russian wheeler-dealer
Gaydamak arranged to ship Dos Santos hundreds of millions of dollars' worth
of weapons from Russia and the former Soviet bloc. After that, Dos Santos
treated them as his special friends. In one spectacular deal that may
qualify as the single largest money-laundering transaction in history,
Gaydamak bought the entire Angolan national debt for a fraction of its
worth, then sold it to Moscow for a profit of several hundred million
dollars.
Jean-Charles Marchiani, formerly a high-ranking French intelligence
operative, a hostage negotiator in Lebanon and Bosnia, and a close
associate of key Gaullist leaders, told a television interviewer after
Falcone's arrest that in Angola, Falcone "defended French interests,
keeping the Americans from taking our place. He acted as a French patriot."
Of course. We can be sure that the Americans and everyone else trying to
get a piece of that market had the same noble intentions—or at least that
they'll say they did.
Christopher Dickey is also the author of The Sleeper: A Novel and Summer of
Deliverance: A Memoir of Father and Son.
Find this article at
http://www.newsweek.com/id/220008
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