The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea
by Steve Levine · 23 Oct 2007 · 568pp · 162,366 words
independent nations. There they gained the confidence of the region’s autocratic rulers, who asked them to protect the interests of the newly independent republics. John Deuss, a Dutch oil trader with keen and ruthless instincts, was one such operator. He hobnobbed with Arab sheikhs and flew in a Gulfstream jet, often
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his influence in the Kremlin, but he reemerged in Kazakhstan as the president’s chief oil adviser. It wasn’t long before he helped expel John Deuss. Suddenly, Giffen was the last middleman standing, both envied and feared by other power brokers. For a time, he controlled every major oil deal in
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Later Soviet period 1968 James Giffen hired by Soviet trader Ara Oztemel 1969 Détente begins; Nixon liberalizes trade with Soviets 1972 Oztemel fires Giffen 1973 John Deuss launches first oil trading venture U.S.-USSR Trade and Economic Council formed (June 22) Arab nations start oil embargo (October 17) Saudi Arabia cuts
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off oil shipments to United States (October 20) 1979 Iranian Revolution; new Arab oil embargo begins John Deuss ships oil to South Africa against U.N. embargo Soviets invade Afghanistan (December 27) 1984 Giffen forms Mercator; becomes president of U.S.-USSR Trade
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whose ingenuity sparked Baku’s emergence as a global oil capital The Dealmakers James Giffen: Bold American who became the Caspian’s most successful middleman John Deuss: Dutch oil trader and Giffen’s suave challenger Jack Grynberg: Denver oilman in search of one more big deal Viktor Kozeny: Czech-born investment adviser
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way. So it seemed only natural that the Oman Oil Company be formed in 1991, jointly owned by the country and the company’s chairman, John Deuss. In the autumn of that year, Deuss sent three aides to scout oil-related opportunities in Malaysia, Indonesia, Algeria, and, finally, the Soviet Union. In
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the Black Sea to Maine. It made no sense. Satra executives tipped off Soviet investigators, who learned to their embarrassment that the “mystery buyer”—actually John Deuss—had duped them. Deuss had bought the oil using a bank-issued letter of credit, good for ninety days. He then sold the oil and
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Deuss was not home. “Leave your business card on the gate,” it said with finality. Guests invited to one or another of his residences found John Deuss to be a supremely hospitable host, although not exactly garrulous. He often flew them in, aboard a pair of luxury Gulfstream jets, or ferried them
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The Wall Street Journal reported that “Mr. Deuss…is described as a ‘statesman’ of world oil by acquaintances.” After all the years in the trenches, John Deuss had begun to cherish the idea of being above the fray, grooming his horses while powerful oilmen, financiers, and government officials sought him out. In
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two remarkable individualists: the brash American Jim Giffen, whose 1987 brainstorm set in motion the events that led Chevron to Tengiz, and the suave Dutchman John Deuss, without whom the negotiations might well have foundered. After everything they had been through, the Chevron executives decided they respected Deuss. He “was not a
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agreement. But Chevron’s most senior executives did not agree. For the moment, such concerns seemed academic. Several months before the final agreement was signed, John Deuss had moved to seize control of the pipeline project. The Kazakhs had awarded Oman Oil—the company jointly owned by Deuss and Omani royalty—exclusive
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ahead of them, “taking the cargo we thought we were going to get.” It was loading crude for a European well-known to the industry—John Deuss. Years later, Wooddy recalled that after the signing of the final agreement, Derr had turned to him and said, “I’ll bet you’re glad
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government announced that its new chief negotiator would be a “very literate” man “with an analytical mind,” and a westerner as well. His name was John Deuss. At the same time that the cunning Dutchman was courting the Kazakhs, across the Caspian, he had been prowling Baku in search of oil deals
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official was scheduled for June 30 in London, attended by Azeri president Elchibey, who would be in Britain on a state visit. Along the way, John Deuss had been removed from his role as an Azeri negotiator. But the wily Dutchman was still very much a player. In a ceremony at his
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point. But now that the Azeris were independent, they shuddered at the prospect of Russia wielding a potential chokehold over their economic lifeline. Dutch dealmaker John Deuss had been truly prescient when he forecast the life-or-death role that export pipelines would play in the Caspian oil rush. Ominous though these
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immediate signs of distress when the Kazakhs entered into a pact with a new entity called the Caspian Pipeline Consortium. It was the creation of John Deuss, the Dutch oil trader who had deduced that whoever controlled the flow of crude out of Tengiz could make some real money. The Dutchman had
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one of the most prolonged and bitter confrontations of the era. The clash would soon become a contest of wills between two implacable men, dealmaker John Deuss and Chevron boss Ken Derr. Neither man would ever understand the other. Both would amass powerful allies on the Caspian and in foreign capitals. The
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in export profits would soon fatten the state treasury. Nursultan Nazarbayev was frustrated. In a conversation with visiting American diplomats, the Kazakh president complained about John Deuss, who was “tricky” and “afraid to meet with me because I will tell him to his face what he is.” Fingering worry beads, Nazarbayev wondered
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had an ally in Nazarbayev, who had easily navigated the new political landscape and settled in as president of the country. In mid-1992, as John Deuss’s Tengiz pipeline consortium was taking shape, Giffen made his move. He came to the defense of Kazakhstan after U.S. officials accused it of
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petroleum reserves three times the size of Tengiz. In August, he called with inside information on an offshore deal in the making and bad-mouthed John Deuss, who “wanted to control” the pipeline from Tengiz. During a four-week period in autumn, he phoned her twelve times. In December, Forsythe accompanied Vice
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deal. And Giffen would earn his pay. He would prove the tough bargainer that the Kazakhs wanted in the stubborn pipeline dispute between Chevron and John Deuss. He would shape a disciplined strategy to protect Kazakhstan’s interests, and his creative thinking and inexhaustible energy would galvanize the powerful forces already stirring
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reached an important turning point. He had left the meeting in a fury, vowing never again to speak to the Omanis or the now-despised John Deuss. But simply breaking off talks with them would not be a real solution, he came to see. The real solution would be somehow to marginalize
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it was signed?” Still, Ken Derr kept trying to enlist Russia’s sympathies. The Chevron boss thought its leaders would see that they were backing John Deuss against their own best interests. “Most of the pipeline was going to go through Russia,” he said. “They would be an equity owner and receive
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ship its crude oil to market. Courtesy of Chevron Ken Derr, Keller’s successor as Chevron chairman. Derr finally signed the Tengiz deal and outlasted John Deuss in a contest of wills over the construction of an export pipeline. Courtesy of Chevron Dick Matzke, Silcox’s successor as head of Chevron Overseas
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Giffen in 1989, near the peak of his influence in Moscow, when he was a regular in Mikhail Gorbachev’s Kremlin. Photograph by Andy Freeberg John Deuss, the Dutch oil trader worth hundreds of millions of dollars who finally closed the Tengiz deal for Chevron. A standoff with the company followed when
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you. Live your own life.’” The Kazakhs ought to be grateful that he had resisted the angrier impulses of others in the Kremlin, he thought. John Deuss was left to ponder ways he might blunt Kazakhstan’s intrusion into what had been his exclusive domain. Russia’s continued allegiance would be critical
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dealmaking days on the Caspian hung by a thread. CHAPTER 16 * * * An Accidental Pipeline EVEN BEFORE THE HIGHWAY CRASH that killed his powerful Omani patron, John Deuss’s support within the sultanate had shown serious signs of slippage. Now, with Deputy Prime Minister Qais al-Zawawi dead, the government officials who had
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why you should sell me [a share]. That’s also why you aren’t getting anywhere—because there is insufficient Russian involvement.’” In December 1995, John Deuss’s luck ran out. Oman’s new ministers informed him that it was time to go. “Omanization” of the sultanate’s oil enterprises would proceed
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Russian buyers were gangsters; Mobil wrote off the loss after hearing of their violent reputation.) As the bargaining was wrapping up in Kazakhstan, the vanquished John Deuss summoned the key members of his team to his secluded family estate in the Netherlands. There to say their farewells were the Harvard man Mack
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him. None of the monuments raised to Niyazov’s glory was immediately removed, but large portraits of Berdymukhamedov started to go up in public places. John Deuss After his defeat by the combined forces of the U.S. government and Chevron, the Dutch oil trader left Kazakhstan far behind and retreated to
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bankers. What else was on Moscow’s mind was not clear. The situation felt like a replay of the company’s war with the Dutchman John Deuss, whose insistence on a $3.25-per-barrel tariff plus a throughput guarantee for his version of the Tengiz pipeline had been thought outrageous at
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president, obtain an offshore drilling contract with Ukraine, in addition to deals in Ghana and the Ivory Coast. Ken Derr, whose epic standoff with middleman John Deuss stalled the Tengiz pipeline project, retired as chairman of Chevron in 1999. He briefly served as chairman of Calpine, a large power generator, and was
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moment; I also relied on memoirs and journalistic books for these chapters. Chapters 14 through 16, on the Caspian Pipeline Consortium and the oil trader John Deuss, are unique in that they rely on a number of unidentified sources. Many of the people involved in the CPC deal, accustomed to staying behind
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Akezhan Kazhegeldin sat for numerous interviews over the years, as did Rinat Akhmetshin, his Washington representative. Ed Smith and Mack Fowler helped me to understand John Deuss in many interviews. Tom Hamilton, Dave Henderson, Frank Verrastro and Rondo Fehlberg of Pennzoil submitted to many face-to-face, telephone, and e-mail interviews
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and was released in a confidential June 1984 report to the country’s parliament. “sailed alongside the partly”: Ibid., p. 4B. Since the South Africans: “John Deuss / Transworld Oil,” January 1985 report by the Shipping Research Bureau, Amsterdam. The Shipping Bureau’s report included a cargo-by-cargo list of Deuss’s
The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources
by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy · 25 Feb 2021 · 565pp · 134,138 words
to the Sultan of Oman. He gambled on the price of oil with abandon, making and losing hundreds of millions of dollars at a time. ‘John Deuss is a mythical character,’ says Bill Emmitt, a former executive at oil brokerage PVM, who dealt with him on numerous occasions. ‘He always tried to
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him, he replied: ‘Don’t you understand that it’s a question of power, and money means power. It’s as simple as that.’ 61 John Deuss personified a shift in the oil market’s centre of gravity, away from the Seven Sisters and towards the traders. By the late 1970s, the
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he felt any guilt about buying Iranian oil during the hostage crisis. 64 And so, it was nothing unusual for Rich when, in spring 1980, John Deuss stepped into his Manhattan office with an offer to buy some Iranian oil. 65 Deuss and Rich were the two oil-trading titans of the
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Connecticut to jetting from one African country to another. He turned his nose up at the trading styles of the likes of Marc Rich and John Deuss, who had made a killing through their networks of relationships in oil-rich nations. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the world of energy
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trading pits erupted in frenzied shouting matches, and traders had a reputation for sleazy behaviour. In the 1970s, while traders such as Marc Rich and John Deuss were making a killing buying and selling oil, the traders on the Nymex were obsessed with potato futures. The tuber was by far the exchange
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traders of the 1960s and 1970s, who had learnt the business in the mailroom and grown up imitating the buccaneering ways of Marc Rich and John Deuss, were now joined by a new generation of maths whizz-kids fluent in the language of Wall Street. Trading houses were increasingly divided between those
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oil trade that went wrong. None of the collapses marked the end of an era more than that of Transworld Oil, the company owned by John Deuss, who along with Marc Rich was one of the poster boys of the 1970s. Between 1987 and 1988, the Dutchman tried to pull off one
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many in the commodity trading industry. Markets were tough, the US tipped into recession, and the industry became known for its spectacular collapses – such as John Deuss’s disastrous attempt to corner the Brent oil market. Marc Rich + Co, thanks to its oil deals with South Africa, its aluminium trading and its
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of the available supply. Weiss had done it to great effect in aluminium in 1988. But there were many ways the tactic could backfire, as John Deuss had discovered in the Brent market. By artificially pushing up prices, a trader who cornered a market risked encouraging consumers to defer their buying and
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in Russia in those days; what was unusual was that Chernoy had come to apologise. Reuben’s company, Trans-World (which had no connection to John Deuss’s Transworld Oil), was already an established player in the small clique of metal traders. With a round, open face and a manner that led
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war-torn Benghazi to strike a deal with Libya’s rebels. But he was smoother and more politically adept than traders like Marc Rich and John Deuss. Even as he led Vitol to all corners of the earth in search of oil to trade, he ensured that its name would be smiled
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bubble, Enron was the darling of Wall Street. It had no need to compete in the oil market with the likes of Marc Rich and John Deuss, or even Andy Hall – it would just invent new markets. After it had mastered gas and electricity, it would start buying and selling access to
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, ‘the hopeless continent’. 5 The commodity traders made money in Africa even during the bad years: this was the period in which Marc Rich and John Deuss defied the UN embargo to supply South Africa with fuel. But, generally, the trading houses focused their attention elsewhere. With commodity production falling through the
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, and so the profits for those who found ways to do business with them were proportionately higher. That’s what had allowed Marc Rich and John Deuss to make astronomical profits from subverting the oil embargo against apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. It was possible because the embargoes were poorly enforced
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military, has managed to continue buying from Iran. Its maverick leader, Yang Qinglong, who died in 2014, was a Chinese version of Marc Rich or John Deuss: a hard-drinking trader famous for his hospitality who went by the nickname ‘Crazy Yang’. He turned Zhuhai Zhenrong into the world’s largest trader
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characters at the heart of our story are no longer active. Marc Rich died in 2013; Claude Dauphin in 2015; and Ian Taylor in 2020. John Deuss has retired into obscurity at his base in Bermuda; Andy Hall is enjoying his art collection; even Ivan Glasenberg, the most relentless and driven trader
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B, vol. 25, Deposition of Theodore G. Shackley, pp. 20–23 and 377–383. The name of Transworld Oil is misspelled as Trans-World, and John Deuss is misspelled several times as ‘John Dois’, accessed: https://ia902906.us.archive.org/25/items/reportofcongress25unit/reportofcongress25unit.pdf . 61 ‘Deuss: From Second-Hand Car Dealer
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Van Vuuren, Hennie, op. cit., p. 103. 54 Quoted in Shipping Research Bureau, op. cit., p. 149. The BBC didn’t broadcast the interview with John Deuss, but the tape resurfaced years later when it was used by the Dutch television investigative programme Gouden Bergen , on 10 September 1989. 55 Ammann, Daniel
Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century
by Tom Bower · 1 Jan 2009 · 554pp · 168,114 words
/Rex Features) Oil pollution in Nigeria. (AP/Press Association Images) Ken Saro-Wiwa. (© Tim Lambon/Greenpeace) Marc Rich. (Photograph by Jim Berry, Camera Press London) John Deuss. (Photo by David Skinner) President Heydar Aliyev of Azerbaijan with the Queen at Buckingham Palace. (Press Association Images) President Boris Yeltsin with leading Russian bankers
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success also aroused the interest of two independent oil traders: Oscar Wyatt, an American famous for running over anyone who got in his way, and John Deuss, alias “the Alligator,” a scarred buccaneer based in Bermuda, born 200 years too late. The son of a Ford plant manager in Amsterdam, Deuss’s
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contract” and beyond regulation. The oil companies could administer their own “justice,” especially when they fell victim to a squeeze of Brent oil orchestrated by John Deuss, the sole owner of Transworld. Transworld was based in Bermuda, with trading offices in London and Houston, and Deuss’s micromanagement stimulated the sentiment among
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was stymieing Western oil companies across Russia, and even Chevron’s ambitions in Kazakhstan. Chevron’s fraught negotiations to develop Tengiz had been stabilized by John Deuss. The trader famous for Brent squeezes was representing the government of the oil-rich Gulf state of Oman. Seeking investment opportunities, Deuss, flying his Gulfstream
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the oilfield had been due to a combination of risk and dubious practices during excruciating negotiations that were saved from stalemate by James Giffen and John Deuss. The two maverick traders were consulted by Chevron to fashion a deal with Kazakh and Russian politicians. Giffen, a 62-year-old New Yorker acting
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’s existing network. Ken Derr’s trust in Russian assurances was dashed. The fate of the $1.4 billion pipeline appeared to be controlled by John Deuss, a man loathed by Derr, representing the ruler of Oman, a desert state at the entrance of the Persian Gulf. In the battle to decide
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occupying the shadows: Marc Rich, among the most infamous oil traders, avoided prosecution for tax evasion and sanctions-busting but was pardoned by President Clinton. John Deuss is infamous for “squeezing” North Sea oil supplies. Even the Queen was asked in 1998 to help BP secure sympathy from President Heydar Aliyev of
The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World
by Daniel Yergin · 14 May 2011 · 1,373pp · 300,577 words
the Persian Gulf oilproducing nation of Oman. Improbably, at the center of it all, at least for a time, was a flamboyant Dutch oil trader, John Deuss, whose penchant for high living included stables with champion jumping horses, two Gulfstream jets, yachts, ski resorts, and a variety of homes. His involvement in
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complicated, was now part of Ukraine. Once again, it seemed back to the nineteenth century in terms of logistics. And that just would not do. John Deuss had a particular patron in Oman, the deputy prime minister. But then this minister was mysteriously killed in an auto collision in the middle of
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of the Soviet Union. Without the oil pipeline, this particular “newly independent” state was certainly going to be less independent. Having a freebooter—oil trader John Deuss—ending up with control of something so strategic and significant for global energy security as the major export route for Kazakh’s future oil was
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would be key to whether Deuss’s plan would go ahead. It became clear that Western loans were never going to be available to finance John Deuss to become the pipeline arbiter of Kazakh oil. With that, Deuss faded out of the picture. But Moscow still needed to agree to a pipeline
The Secret World of Oil
by Ken Silverstein · 30 Apr 2014 · 233pp · 73,772 words
year in prison in 2007 in connection with the UN oil-for-food scandal. One of the more colorful of that era’s fixers was John Deuss, who once owned his own tanker fleet, and who during the 1980s smuggled vast quantities of oil to South Africa’s apartheid regime, then under
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than one hundred million barrels of crude to South Africa over the next four years. “Guests invited to one or another of his residences found John Deuss to be a supremely hospitable host,” writes Steve LeVine, author of The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian