Early Soviet ventures First trip to Russia After leaving
Columbia Medical School, Hammer extended earlier
entrepreneurial ventures with a successful business importing many goods from and exporting
pharmaceuticals to the newly formed Soviet Union, together with his younger brother
Victor. The blockade of Soviet Russia had ended for most items in February 1921, and on July 5, 1921, he departed New York on his first trip to Soviet Russia as Allied Drug's representative in Soviet Russia. Prior to his departure, he visited Charles Recht, Lenin's United States attorney that supported Soviet Russia's best interests in the United States and whose law office was in the same building that the former Soviet Russian Government Bureau had occupied, and Recht gave Hammer a package to deliver to Ludwig Martens in Moscow. During this first visit, Armand Hammer allowed the
Cheka, the Soviet secret police who later became known as the
KGB, to take control of Allied Drug and Chemical.
Asbestos concession During his time in Soviet Russia and later the Soviet Union, he perfected bribery and money-laundering techniques, which were exposed later in the 1960s and 1970s during which he tape-recorded his payoffs. After returning to the United States, Hammer stated that Lenin had granted him an
asbestos concession for 25 years to mine asbestos from the Urals in Soviet Russia. According to Hammer, on his initial trip, he took $60,000 in medical supplies to aid in a
typhus epidemic and made a deal with Lenin for furs,
caviar, and jewelry expropriated by the Soviet state in exchange for a million bushels (27,216 tons) shipment of surplus American wheat. Before Lenin's death, Hammer negotiated the import of
Fordson tractors into the USSR, which served a major role in agricultural mechanization in the country. According to
Alexander Barmine, who was assigned by the Central Committee to run the
Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga company to compete with Hammer, the stationery concession to produce such items in the Soviet Union was actually granted to Julius Hammer. Barmine states the party spent five million gold rubles on stationery supplies made in factories controlled by Julius Hammer and other concessionaires, making them rich. Barmine further contends that the Soviets were eventually able to duplicate certain items such as typewriter parts and pens, and end those concessions, but were never able to match the quality of Hammer's pencils, so that concession became permanent. Armand Hammer remained in the Soviet Union until 1930. The authenticity of the artifacts was questioned. According to
Géza von Habsburg, Armand's brother
Victor Hammer stated Stalin's trade commissar
Anastas Mikoyan provided
Fabergé hallmarking tools to Armand to sell fakes, In
Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer,
Edward Jay Epstein called Hammer "a virtual spy" for the Soviet Union.
Oil company, Libya deals, and return to Soviet negotiation After returning to the US, Hammer entered into a diverse array of business, art, cultural, and humanitarian endeavors, including investing in various U.S. oil-production efforts. He gained enormous wealth through his United Distillers of America, which was a 1933 established firm known as the A. Hammer Cooperage Corporation until 1946, when it changed its name to United Distillers of America Ltd. In early 1944, Hammer purchased American Distilling Co. and a former
New Market, New Hampshire, rum distillery at which his American Distilling employee, Dr. Hanns G. Maister, began producing the first United States-made potato-based spirit, which was a
vodka, and also produced a
blended whiskey that was retailed through the cooperage's account with West Shore. His oil investments were later parlayed into control of
Occidental Petroleum (Oxy) which he obtained in 1956. In 1973, Libya nationalized 51% of Oxy's holdings in Libya. In 1974, Armand Hammer announced a 35-year oil exploration agreement with Libya, the first such agreement signed by Libya after
Muammar Gaddafi came to power in September 1969. By the 1974 deal, 81% of the oil extracted by Occidental Petroleum was going to the Libyan government, with only 19% retained by Occidental Petroleum. At the time, Oxy was the second largest producer of oil in Libya, and Libya was the company's only major source of crude. The Libyan government continually threatened the assets of the company, who would usually give in to Gaddafi's demands. Throughout his life Hammer continued personal and business dealings with the Soviet Union, despite the
Cold War. In later years, he lobbied and traveled extensively at a great personal expense, working for peace between the United States and the
Communist countries of the world, including ferrying physicians and supplies into the Soviet Union to help
Chernobyl survivors. In his book
The Prize,
Daniel Yergin writes that Hammer "ended up as a go-between for five Soviet
General Secretaries and seven U.S. Presidents."
Détente Through Hammer's closeness to
Yuri Andropov, Andropov assigned Mikhail Ilyich Bruk (; 1923
Moscow – 2009
Jurmala) also called Mike or Michael Brook or Brooke, who was an English-Russian translator, as Hammer's personal ambassador and expediter and was present as Hammer's translator at all meetings between Armand Hammer and Soviet leaders in the Soviet Union beginning in 1964. Bruk had been a technical translator at the first
Pugwash conference called the
Thinkers' Lodge held in July 1957. According to Armand Hammer, "Mike's
KGB." In early 1969, Armand Hammer obtained control of
Eaton's Tower International through which Hammer would have a controlling majority stake in Tower International in exchange for Hammer's
Occidental Petroleum assuming the debts of Tower International and Eaton receiving 45% of any profits from Tower International's future projects.
Trade deals between Nixon and Brezhnev After
Richard Nixon, as the first United States President to visit the Soviet Union, traveled to Moscow for a summit that ended on June 1, 1972, Hammer traveled to Moscow arriving July 14, 1972, and, with
Sargent Shriver as his legal advisor, negotiated the first trade agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union following Nixon's summit. Six weeks prior to Nixon's departure, Hammer personally gave
Maurice Stans, the finance chairman of Nixon's
campaign fund, $46,000 in cash from a numbered bank account in Switzerland which Hammer used as his slush fund money. Later, in September 1972 Hammer gave Nixon's campaign fund an additional $54,000 from the same Swiss bank account amounting to a total of $100,000 that Hammer donated to Nixon's campaign fund. On July 18, 1972, Hammer returned to the United States through London and called
Tim Babcock, Hammer's lobbyist for the Nixon administration, to have him arrange a meeting with Nixon through
H. R. Haldeman, who was Nixon's chief of staff, in order to debrief the President about Hammer's trade deal which occurred on July 20, 1972. During
détente in July 1972, Armand Hammer negotiated a twenty-year agreement through
Leonid Kostandov, who was a close friend of Hammer and was the Minister of the Chemical Industry in the USSR from October 1965 to 1980, with
Leonid Brezhnev of the
Soviet Union that was signed by Hammer in April 1973 in which the Hammer-controlled firms
Occidental Petroleum and
Tower International would export to the Soviet Union, and later Russia,
phosphate, which Occidental mined in northern Florida, in return for the Soviet Union, and later Russia, exporting from
Odessa through Hammer's firms
natural gas that would be converted into
ammonia,
potash, and
urea. This
fertilizer deal was to continue until Hammer's 100th birthday in 1998.
JaxPort at the
Port of Jacksonville in
Jacksonville, Florida, was the United States port through which this trade occurred. Nixon encouraged the
Export–Import Bank to finance in part the deal, valued at $20 billion over 20 years, and fund the Soviet construction of four ammonia plants in the greater
Volga region, and a pipeline connecting them to the port at Odessa. Pivdenny is located at the
Small Adzhalyk Estuary west of the 1974 established
Yuzhne. The Port of Pivdenny was known as "Grigorievsky" () until 1978 and as the Port of Yuzhne from 1978 until April 17, 2019, when the port was renamed from the Russian word to the Ukrainian word for
southern.
Illegal financial support of Nixon's Watergate fund Politically, Hammer was a Democrat; but according to the memoir of his lawyer Louis Nizer, he was also one of "many executives who contribute to both political parties [and] preferred no publicity about his dual gifts." In 1972, "under pressure" from various sources, Hammer donated an unusual amount to Nixon's second campaign: "He wished his substantial contribution to Nixon to be anonymous because he himself was a Democrat." Hammer anonymously gave $46,000 to support Nixon before a 1971 law took effect on April 7, 1972, which banned political contributions both anonymous and through another person. Later, in September 1972, Armand Hammer made an additional three illegal contributions totaling $54,000 to
Richard Nixon's
Watergate fund through friends of former
Montana Governor Tim Babcock, who was Hammer's vice president of Occidental Petroleum, after which both Hammer and Babcock pleaded guilty to charges involving illegal contributions. Hammer received probation and a $3,000 fine.
Association with the Gore family A 2003 interview with
Aleksey Mitrofanov erroneously places the Hammer and Gore families close to each other in Europe. Occidental's coal interests were represented for many years by attorney and former
U.S. Senator Al Gore Sr., among others. Gore, who had a longtime close friendship with Hammer, became the head of the subsidiary Island Creek Coal Company, upon his election loss in the
Senate in November 1970. Much of Occidental's coal and phosphate production was in
Tennessee, the state Gore represented in the Senate, and Gore owned shares in the company. Former
Vice President Al Gore Jr. received much criticism from environmentalists, when the shares passed to the estate after the death of Gore Sr., and Gore Jr. was a son and the executor of the estate. Gore Jr. did not exercise control over the shares, which were eventually sold when the estate closed. Hammer was very fond of Gore Jr. and, in 1984, under Hammer's guidance, Gore Jr. sought Tennessee's Senate office previously held by
Howard Baker. Hammer supposedly promised Gore Sr. that he could make his son the president of the United States. It was under Hammer's encouragement and support that Gore Jr. sought the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 1988.
Stake in Arm & Hammer In the 1980s Hammer owned a considerable amount of stock in
Church & Dwight, the company that manufactures
Arm & Hammer products; he also served on its board of directors. However, the Arm & Hammer company's brand name did not originate with Armand Hammer. It was in use 31 years before Hammer was born. While Hammer and Occidental said that the Church & Dwight investment was a coincidence, Hammer acknowledged previously trying to buy the Arm & Hammer brand as a result of often being asked about it.
President's Cancer Panel In 1981, Hammer was appointed by US President
Ronald Reagan to serve on the three-member
President's Cancer Panel and he later served as chairman of the panel from 1984 to 1989. As chairman of the panel, he announced a campaign to raise $1 billion a year to fight cancer. ==Other activities and pursuits==