Roger Tamraz, an ambitious oil financier caught in the Clinton campaign finance mess, explained to a Senate committee that his donations were an attempt to get White House access “like the big boys” in his industry.
Ultimately, he got to President Clinton. But he never got the government support he sought for a pipeline project in the Caspian Sea. Last week, one got a better sense as to why.
It came during an A-list private dinner at the Metropolitan Club, the top old-line businessmen’s social club here. It was a revealing affair, the sort journalists rarely see, and it offered a reality check as to what’s important, and what’s not, in a town where a permanent elite rules.
“This is big time,” said Peter Bijur, my tablemate and the boss of Texaco Inc., alluding to the guests and the matters at hand: oil and money.
The dinner’s host was Robert Strauss, a remarkable Texan and capital elder statesman, who symbolizes the nexus of government, business, law and lobbying. He’s a shrewd, funny, profane, extraordinarily connected former Democratic National Committee chairman and U.S. trade representative who served as ambassador to Moscow for a Republican, George Bush.
His purpose was to fete a short, stocky man named Nursultan Nazarbayev, a longtime authoritarian communist who is now an authoritarian democrat, namely the duly elected president of the former Soviet republic of Kazakstan. Strauss was most effective.
Nazarbayev’s visit received scant notice here last week, perhaps because most reporters can’t tell one ex-Soviet republic from another. When it comes to the old Soviet Union, they think mostly about Russia and Boris Yeltsin.
Nazarbayev has the stocky, square-shouldered bearing and finely tailored threads (black, double-breasted suit with thin orange stripe) and spread collars of a preprison John Gotti. Indeed, he had the aura of a mob don–powerful folks seek his approval and protection.
The reason was apparent at the front of the cozy oak-paneled room in which cocktails were initially served. Inadvertently, that area served as a reminder of how reporters often are immersed in minutiae and miss bigger stories.
At the front you could study several large charts, assuming you navigated past the early hobnobbers who included:
Clinton chum and power lobbyist Vernon Jordan, ABC’s Sam Donaldson and CBS’ Bob Schieffer, Energy Secretary Federico Pena, former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, columnist William Safire of The New York Times, assorted major oil executives and investment bankers, Katharine Graham’s free-lance journalist daughter Lally Weymouth and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt.
“USA PROJECTED CONSUMPTION: 20 Million Barrels Per Day. KAZAKHSTAN POTENTIAL PRODUCTION: 10 Million Barrels Per Day.”
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Then there was a chart on “RECOVERABLE RESERVES (Billion Barrels).” Bar graphs made clear that Kazakstan, with its 100 billion barrels, trails only Saudi Arabia’s 250 billion barrels. That puts the republic on a par with Iraq, ahead of Kuwait and Iran.
There was a third chart, in fact a map with lots of squiggly red lines. It would not be until later that I understood the significance of the red lines.
Soon, we were seated at tables for eight. The numero uno tabled featured Nazarbayev. On either side of him were Strauss and Pena, with a translator hovering behind. The others included Donaldson, Safire, Eagleburger and one of Nazarbayev’s three daughters.
One looked around and one discerned something really important that few have grasped.
“That room was about the post-Cold War world. It was about the global landscape transformed overnight,” guest Daniel Yergin, an energy expert and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning, “The Prize,” told me Friday.
“An area that was invisible will now have great impact on the global economy. It’s the new prize, and part of Washington has awoken to realize it, that something amazing has happened,” said Yergin, who runs Cambridge Energy Research Associates.
Strauss, 79, ambled to a microphone to introduce Pena, who thanked Nazarbayev for inviting corporations to invest in the republic. Soon after he concluded, Donaldson was leading a toast to the president at their table.
Bijur, who confided that he dislikes the phoniness and craven ways of Washington (“I just hate coming here”), was kind enough to offer me a primer on what this was all about. He got out of his chair and took me to the charts.
“This really is big time,” he underscored, looking at a map of the region and explaining how Texaco was sending an oil rig into one field with a conservative potential of 7 billion barrels of oil.
He explained the squiggly lines. They were the theoretical pipeline routes by which one would take oil from Kazakstan and to big markets.
Getting the oil and gas out of the ground is one thing. Getting them to markets is another. The most efficient route, Bijur explained, goes southwest down through Iran and into the Persian Gulf.
But the U.S., for obvious political reasons, is against that option and prefers a longer, more expensive route through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey and into the Mediterranean. Bijur suspects that business interests will win out and the Iran route will be operable.
In the meantime, Texaco and other big U.S. and European oil companies aren’t messing around. The next day Bijur signed a $7 billion, 40-year deal to develop a field in northwestern Kazakstan. Mobil Corp. signed a deal, too.
Soon, singers and musicians from Kazakstan were serenading us. Fine wine flowed. Then, Strauss returned, stating that he represented neither the republic nor oil companies doing business there. He recalled how he first met Nazarbayev and even shared a sauna with him.
He proclaimed that the assembled group “represents much of the power structure and opinion makers of this country.” It was puffery, adroitly executed.
“As a former American politician,” Strauss said, “I watched you work this room tonight, and it was a damn outrage!” The crowd laughed, though the translator was confused and Strauss whispered the line into his ear one more time.
Poker-faced Nazarbayev followed. “In 1990,” he said, “it became clear that the Soviet Union was disintegrating. It was then that I met Bob Strauss.”
He recited good times they’d shared, then took out a techie toy–a pocket laser pointer. He aimed at the map, giving a tour of his nation (population: 17 million) and its oil, gas and gold.
The depth of Bijur’s field is 7 kilometers, he said. More important, “in the 21st Century, we become one of the major suppliers of energy to the world. And we’re not part of OPEC (the Arab oil consortium that has been king of the hill) and not part of Russia.”
The overall value of contracts he would sign in one field alone is $600 billion over 40 years. Overall, the republic stands to make $35 billion a year for 40 years.
“I think that’s sufficient commentary,” he said, so matter-of-factly.
It seemed to be, certainly to Strauss, oil executives, the investment bankers and lobbyists.
I left thinking of Roger Tamraz and his grasping attempts to be a player. He gave money to the Clinton-Gore re-election campaign, he said, “so I wouldn’t be some Joe Doe.”
He’s got a way to go. Big boys still rule.