Daniel Satinsky: So, let’s just go to when did you first go to Russia and when did you start working there?
John Huhs: I started working in Russia, which was the first time I ever went there, in September of 1970.
Daniel Satinsky: Of 1970. And who sent you in 1970?
John Huhs: In June of 1970 I was graduated from law school and business school at Stanford, and I did real well. I was No. 4 in my class at law school, an officer on the law review, and about the same kind of stuff in the business school, so I could get a job anywhere. And I interviewed and interviewed, and I interviewed investment banks, law firms, corporations, and nothing really seemed to ring a bell. In a law firm I’d be in a library for the next three years doing research memoranda for senior associates.
In a corporation I interviewed IBM, and they already had the next 20, 30 years of my life all charted out. They said we’ll start you at Armonk, and you’ll be here around three years, and then we’ll move you out to one of our domestic subsidiaries, and if you’re lucky you’ll go to San Jose and you’ll serve there for a few years. And then, since you have an international interest, we’ll probably move you out to one of our foreign subsidiaries. If you’re lucky, maybe we’ll put you in our French subsidiary, and da da-da da-da, and we have a defined benefit pension program, and we have healthcare after you retire and before you retire, all of that stuff, and a competitive salary. They were willing to meet law firms’ salaries, which were $18,000 a year in those days.
Daniel Satinsky: Exorbitant amounts, yes.
John Huhs: Exorbitant amounts. Well, it was thought to be an exorbitant amount.
Daniel Satinsky: I know, I know, yeah.
John Huhs: But no, I mean, all I had to do was just put my hook in a cog at IBM and I’d be spit out 30, 40 years later with a nice pension and healthcare and, I don’t know, some other things that would make it easier in my dotage. So, I decided that wasn’t for me. So, I got together with one of my classmates, a fellow named Carl Longley—I can give you these names later if there are any… And we got together with a guy named Jim Giffen. You may have heard about him.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I remember that name.
John Huhs: He was the guy who had an FCPA [Foreign Corrupt Practices Act] prosecution against him. And his defense was I was working for the CIA. Well, he wasn’t working for the CIA. He was a source, and the CIA people would come and visit him periodically, usually pretty low-ranking people. That’s really a crappy job in the intelligence community, having to interview businessman. It doesn’t require much of anything. So you don’t have the best and the brightest such as there is in the intelligence community, but all right. But anyway, that was his defense. He was acquitted. And I guess he’s—
Daniel Satinsky: That was much later, right?
John Huhs: It was about ten years ago.
Daniel Satinsky: Did you meet him at school, at university?
John Huhs: I was introduced to him by my finance professor, James McDonald, who passed away a few years ago. And then Jim had a couple of guys he knew in the New York area. He was a California boy, UCLA law grad, born in…where the hell was he born? Somewhere in Los Angeles or in that area. So, he’s a California boy, but he’s living in New York at the time, and he was working for a company called Satra Corporation, S-A-T-R-A is the way you spell it. Ara Oztemel was the head of Satra, the founder of it. He was an Armenian Turk whose father was in the chromium ore business.
So, Turkey and the Soviet Union made chromium ore. There’s a big deposit of it in Turkey and in the western area of the Soviet Union, and some in the Caucasian republics. So, he was making an okay living at it. He moved to New York and continued his father’s business from New York rather than Istanbul. And nothing much going on. Then in 1965 the United Nations imposed a blockage on Rhodesia. Rhodesia, up until that time, was the world’s largest source of chromium ore. And Ara Oztemel would deal in Rhodesian ore, but he found that he could get it a little bit cheaper from the Soviets, who were trying to penetrate the market and be competitive with Rhodesian chrome.
So, all of a sudden, the price of chrome quintupled. Meanwhile, Ara had contracts, multiyear contracts, with the Sovs for chrome, so he was minting money hand over fist. And then he hired this kid Giffen, who was in his early 20s at the time. A nice boy. And Giffen talked to me. He said look, Ara, you have all this money, and you’re specializing now in Soviet chromium ore, why don’t we step out a bit and expand things, and why don’t we get into general international consulting and trade? General international, but probably with developing countries—the Turkeys of the world, the African countries of the world, the South Americas, those kinds of places. And the Sovs—yeah, sure. You have a good contact there in the chromium ore trading company, which was Soyuzpromexport at the time. And so, Ara said fine, and Jim said okay, I’d like to hire a few guys to help me. He said fine, fine, Ara said fine. He said I’d like to interview them first before you actually hire them, although you vet them, and I’m the last step.
So Giffen went to McDonald, among other people, and he said hey, this is what I’m doing, and do you have any people really interested in international work. And he said well, gee, I have two guys in the law business program who have been talking to me about international work and where they can get into it without having to spend time on low level work at law firms and corporations and consulting companies. And so fine, we were introduced, Longley and I. Giffen liked us, and so he asked us to come to New York, which we did, and met Oztemel, and he said fine.
And so Giffen said I’ll meet the salary of whatever law firm or business firm you’re thinking about joining. I said well, you know, Jim, after all of what I’ve been doing, I mean interviewing, I think I’m down to…if I go to a law firm it’s going to be the Cleary Gottlieb firm, which was at that time the most international firm on Wall Street. Cleary Gottlieb was right next to Cravath and Sullivan & Cromwell as being the leading law firms in New York. So Jim said well, okay, look, I’ll do two things for you: one, I’ll start you out at whatever Cleary is. I said well, it’s 18K. He said yeah, okay, we’ll pay you 18K. And also I need a pretty good bonus if I do well, and so let’s set up some metrics that will track whether I’m doing well or not, and whether I deserve a bonus, how much of a bonus, all that kind of thing. So, we did that.
Daniel Satinsky: And up to then you didn’t have any special interest in Russia, you didn’t have any Russian language?
John Huhs: The only thing I did is my freshman and sophomore years at the University of Washington I was required to take a foreign language. And if you remember—this is 1962-63—if you remember, this was, you know, the Sovs had sent up all the Sputniks, they had put people in space, and the movie “The Russians Are Coming” had been released, so I thought gee, if these guys are going to come over here and take us over, it might be useful to speak their language, and so I took Russian at the University of Washington my freshman and sophomore years. The only other contact with Russia, remotely, was I took Leon Lipson’s course in Soviet law at Stanford Law School. And I got an A plus in it. An A plus was good in Stanford Law School in those days.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. So, you were hired to be a lawyer or a trader?
John Huhs: I was hired to be a consultant, a legal, and financial and business consultant.
Daniel Satinsky: And you were completely inexperienced at this, but you had an education in business and law, right?
John Huhs: Yes. And Giffen was. I mean, we were all kids. And just by luck one of the guys who joined us was Paul O. Proehl, who at that time was a vice chancellor of the University of California at Los Angeles, UCLA, for external relations, i.e. fundraising. He knew most of the chief executives in California and many in the rest of the United States, and he happened to sit next to a guy on a plane, a guy named Zenon Hansen.
Zenon Hansen at that time was the chief executive of the Mack Truck Co. in Allentown, Pennsylvania. And during that period the Sovs were negotiating with Henry Ford to build a big truck plant, the Kamaz plant. And finally, Ford chickened out, i.e., just didn’t want to push the limits of the envelope in Washington. Nixon and Kissinger weren’t quite ready to go to Moscow yet. They were planning it, but they didn’t want to…they wanted to maintain a hostile attitude towards the Sovs until… That was part of their strategy.
So, Hansen said I can do this—my god, I’ve put in truck plants before around the world. But I don’t know anybody in Russia. And Proehl said we have one of the biggest U.S. traders in our company, Ara Oztemel, who does hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of chromium ore a year with them, and he’s the largest thing in the U.S.-Soviet commercial experience. So, Hansen said fine. He said the first thing is let’s go to Moscow and meet the guys.
And so, we set up meetings in Moscow, went to Moscow, met the guys, and it was a very positive meeting. And we invited the guys to then visit Hansen in the U.S. And meanwhile Hansen said gee, it’s going pretty well, why don’t we set up a project office in Moscow. And so, we rented rooms 425, 427, 429 and 431 in the Metropole Hotel on the fourth floor, right on the front, and turned them into offices—just had them take the beds and furniture, and we got office furniture scrounged around from various sources. So, we opened that office towards the end of 1970.
And I spent more time in that office in the next few years than did Longley, who was very rarely there, Giffen, Oztemel or really anybody else at Satra. I had identified, I said what do I have that these guys don’t—well, at least I have a little bit of Russian language that I can then, if people will tolerate me, I can do what Armand Hammer did, I’ll learn five words a day, and then be exposed to it—so I’ll go to Russian parties, I’ll accept invitations to socialize, I’ll do this kind of stuff. And so I spent most of 1970, 1971, 1972, a little bit of 1973 in Moscow.
Daniel Satinsky: And in those years were there other expats there?
John Huhs: A few. But mostly the Oztemels of the world, that is, the trading types. Some had made some money, like Oztemel, some hadn’t. And they were all sort of crazy kinds of characters. You know, there were real characters involved, because it wasn’t the thing to do in those days. And I wasn’t looking at doing the thing to do, I was looking for a way to have some fun, get some experience, do some interesting things. So fast forward, in June of 1971 the Russians came to the United States. Giffen invited Pierson—I don’t know, what was his first name, James?
Daniel Satinsky: Were they Canadian?
John Huhs: No, Pierson, he was the foreign reporter for
Business Week at the time.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, okay. No idea.
John Huhs: I forget the first name. Anyway. So, Pierson attached himself, or embedded himself in our delegation, with the Mack delegation and with the Soviet delegation. He attended all the meetings and everything. Zenon said fine, just let me know what you’re going to print before you print it, you’re under a code of silence, and NDA. So, we signed an agreement at the end of that visit that envisioned the design and construction of of the Kamaz plant in Naberezhnye Chelny, a greenfields facility in Tatarstan on the banks of the Kama River. And Pierson put it on the front page of
Business Week under the banner headline “The Billion Dollar Truck Project with the Russians.” Wow.
Daniel Satinsky: Whoa.
John Huhs: In other words, it was a billion dollars. And so, all of a sudden things were beginning to fall a bit in Washington. You could feel it. And of course, in 1972 Nixon and Kissinger went to China. They went to Russia. They signed all the commercial agreements with Russia, and the era of detente bloomed. And our phones lit up, and they’d been lighting up ever since the Mack deal, but they lit up, and there was no way we could handle all the business. It was just, it was bedlam. I mean, sometimes I’d be on four phone conversations at once, just putting one on hold, the other, the other. But it worked. It really worked. And we made good money, and we did good things.
And I was serving both as a lawyer and putting the deal documents together, because nobody else knew anything about how to put agreements together with Russians, and I didn’t, but I taught myself. And so, we did real well. Giffen got together with Najeeb Halaby, and Jeeb, as you remember, was Kennedy’s head of the the FAA. He was a big guy in aviation at the time.
So Giffen and Halaby were involved in trying to get some financial backers to buy the consulting part of Satra Corporation from Oztemel, but they didn’t tell Oztemel. They wanted everything all set up. And in this world leaks, leaks, leaks, you can’t keep anything secret. Oztemel heard about it from third parties, called Giffen into his office, and they had a knock down drag out, the result of which is Oztemel fired Giffen.
And following that Giffen, who had a good relationship with Bill Verity, the chief executive of Armco Steel—Armco was bought by some other steel company, I forget which—so when Giffen was fired Verity said well, come over and join me, and you can do this general international stuff with a Soviet orientation. Because Armco was real interested in doing steel in Russia. And so Giffen went over to Armco and formed Armco International, of which he was president, fully a subsidiary of Armco Steel. And meanwhile the conditions at Satra for myself, because I was identified as a Giffen guy—
Daniel Satinsky: That’s what I was going to ask you. You’re part of the offending guy here, yeah.
John Huhs: They really went south. And so, I thought, you know, there isn’t much of a future here for me. And I spoke with Oztemel about it very openly, and he said, well, you know, John, yeah, you’ve got to prove yourself to me; right now, it’s a question mark. He was, I mean, God bless him, he was open. Not like guys who would put a shiv in your back if you turned the other way. So, I began to be open to inquiries.
And in 1973 one of my clients, Roy Ash, was running for Treasury Secretary. The President said why don’t you come in and become an assistant to the President in the White House and take over the newly named Office of Management and Budget. And Roy was a big management guy, chief executive of Litton, and he had sterling career at Litton, and it was a great thing. Litton was one of the first real conglomerates.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I vaguely remember this.
John Huhs: Litton, Teledyne, and Textron were the three big conglomerates in the early ’70s and late ‘60s. So, then Roy started casting around for people to join him, and he remembered me, he remembered Russia. When Bill Simon was appointed Treasury Secretary rather than Roy, Roy stayed around for a few months and then he left.
Daniel Satinsky: You had moved out of Moscow. You were in D.C. You were what, 26, 27, something?
John Huhs: I was 29—28 when I got that job, almost 29. And so I began…I was sort of a smart guy, hardworking guy without portfolio, so I got involved with all kinds of things. So technically my portfolio was national security and international affairs, but defense is such a huge thing that I was pretty much involved in the intelligence and State Department things, and a little bit of the international activities at Commerce, a few things with defense, like foreign arms sales—foreign arms sales to Iran.
I began being more open to alternatives on the outside. I’d been introduced to Sam Pisar, a lawyer in Paris, and in 1974 he invited my wife at the time, Vivian, and myself to visit him at his chateau in the valley of the Loire. The chateau was right down the road from Giscard d’Estaing’s chateau. Of course, he had much more money than Pisar. But he was finance minister at the time, and then of course elected president of France, and now he’s dead.
And Sam and I got along pretty well, and so we kept in touch. And periodically he’d call, and he’d say well, how are things going? Geez, I’m not sure…is it really what you wanted it to be, and do you have a future, do you think? I said, you know, I just don’t think the President is going to be reelected, and maybe I should beat the rush. So, in 1976, or maybe it’s early to mid ’76 I resigned, got together with Pisar. We formed offices in New York and Washington that I headed. We called the firm Pisar & Huhs. And the office in Paris was called Cabinet Pisar because I’m not admitted to practice in France.
Daniel Satinsky: And so, this was consulting or legal work?
John Huhs: Legal. Sam was a lawyer, has an SJD from Harvard, and wrote a seminal book on legal relations between East and West called “Coexistence and Commerce.” And so, Sam and I got along pretty well. He invited me to all kinds of family affairs, and there I met his stepson, who’s now Secretary of State of the United States, Antony Blinken.
Daniel Satinsky: Whoa.
John Huhs: Yeah. Antony, he was just a beginning teenager at the time, but a precocious guy. I was very impressed with Antony. He was going to school in Paris. His father, Don Blinken, is a partner in Warburg Pincus, Warburg something, a Jewish investment banking firm, a top-drawer firm, and was also a philanthropist, made himself piles of money, served for 20 years in a philanthropy position as chairman of the State University of New York.
And so, we’d very often get together in family functions like that, and whereas my contacts with Antony were not all that substantive, you know, still I was impressed with the guy, but my real business was with Sam. Sam and I practiced law together until 1985, so for ten years we practiced law together. And we handled a lot of Soviet matters.
Daniel Satinsky: What kind of—I mean, you don’t—what kind of matters? Was it all trade?
John Huhs: Well, opening a McDonald’s restaurant in Moscow, where we ran up against Viktor Grishin, who was at that time party boss of Moscow. And after we had been years negotiating this thing, he put the kibosh on it saying no, this isn’t my view of how Moscow should look, with arches and all that. He didn’t buy the glitz. He was an old-line Soviet conservative. Others, Revlon for selling cosmetics, producing them there. Seagram, where my real client was Edgar Bronfman, Sr., who was chief executive at the time of Seagram. And he was importing Russian wines and spirits, wanted to import more. Particularly he wanted to get the Stolichnaya distribution for the United States away from Pepsi and Monsieur Henrie. And then a number of machinery companies for selling parts to the Kamaz project, which was still going on.
Ultimately Mack and the Soviets parted ways, and the Sovs did it pretty much themselves after getting whatever they wanted from Mack, and they opened a purchasing commission in Paris to buy the block machining line, the forge line, the stamping line, the paint shop. It was entirely, fully automated—I mean, fully integrated. So they did everything there, because in Soviet times you couldn’t rely on your suppliers to give you high quality stuff on time, so they did it all there. And so, I represented a lot of machinery companies selling things to the Kamaz project.
Daniel Satinsky: And they were paid in hard currency, and this was money from the sale of natural gas to Europe?
John Huhs: I don’t think they had the gas lines in at that time. [There were] lines that were just being constructed in the early ‘70s, and maybe a few gas lines, because I represented Cameron Ironworks, which was a manufacturer of ball valves for gas pipelines. And these pipelines were 60 inches, five feet tall, huge things. And the ball valves were really huge also. So, I guess what we did, yeah. So, we did some, yeah, on the gas line, too, we did some deals.
So, it was very good. We made good money. I was making more money than probably I would have in a New York law firm. And then as Sam got older—he was a concentration camp survivor. He wrote a book about it called “Le Sang de l’espoir” in French, “Of Blood and Hope” in English, about his experiences being born in Bialystok, Poland in 1928, at age 12 being deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz, where his mother and small sister were sent to the left, and he was sent to the right, ultimately to survive. But the reason he was a survivor is because he was able to focus. You only get one chance. One mistake in a camp, you’re dead. You had to make sure you didn’t make one mistake.
And that really gave Sam a good focus that enabled him to do things early in his career and in his life. But as he got older, he became, how would you say? The relationship between him and me frayed because we fought about too many small things, inconsequential things. Sam could never make a mistake. And I just got tired of backing up and giving up on small things. So sometimes I’d draw a line, or he’d draw a line—oh, we’d go on for months talking about $100 or something. It was really ridiculous.
So, we both agreed that yeah, okay, I’ll go do something else. And he was at that time thinking about retiring, and ultimately, he did in 1990, closed his office in Paris in ’92. When he and I broke up, we closed our offices in the States, and at that time I got together with the LeBoeuf, Lamb firm, a law firm in New York, to help form an international practice for them with the Russia practice or Soviet practice being one of the first elements of it. And in 1990 I established the first office for LeBoeuf, Lamb in Moscow.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. And you were one of the first in that period then, right?
John Huhs: Coudert preceded us by about a year. Coudert was accredited by UpDK first
*. Then a firm that doesn’t exist anymore, with Sarah Carey leading its Soviet practice.
Daniel Satinsky: Sarah Carey, yeah. She was at Arnold & Porter.
John Huhs: No, before that. She was with some other firm. I forget the name. Anyway, that firm was accredited.
Daniel Satinsky: So, Sarah Carey did the joint venture agreement for the first joint venture that I worked for in like 1991 or 1992.
John Huhs: Yeah, that could be. She had some good clients. She had a good gift of gab and was able to—and she had an instinct for the jugular. You could see her in a reception. She came into a reception already knowing which people she wanted to talk to, and she’d look around the room, spot a person, go and say whatever she had previously thought of saying to them, give them a card, leave a follow-up, or get a card from them, go on to the next one. Oh, she was a very good business developer.
We were accredited in 1990 or 1991, although we set up our office before being accredited. And we had a relationship with OKO Bank, the Finnish Bank, at that UpDK building on, oh, what is it Dobryninskaya. Yeah, big UpDK building there. And so, OKO Bank had some extra space. They wanted to lay off, we needed some space, so we set up an office there.
I hired the husband of the head of the political section of the U.S. embassy, a guy named Jim Mandel. His wife Judy Mandel was head of the political section. He was a lawyer by trade, and he had excellent Russian, and a good Russian education, much more than I ever had, not in Russian, but at U.S. universities he’d attended. So, he became the first head of our Moscow office. And then we began hiring people. And then in 1991 the IMF engaged us to help them set up in Moscow, and we negotiated space for them in the SEV building, you know that big thing that looks like a book that is located across from the White House.
Daniel Satinsky: I know that building very well, yes. I used to know…my first translator’s former wife ran the restaurant there, and so we used to go hang out. It was a place where you had to have a Russian passport, but I could get in, so yeah.
John Huhs: Okay. So anyway, through representing the IMF and dealing with the management of the SEV building we became acquainted with them. And at that time, remember the wall came down in ’89, and then SEV disintegrated. So, they moved everybody out, and then they began picking and choosing who would come in, like the IMF and some other people. And I said gee, you don’t have a law firm in there yet, you need a law firm. And so, we began negotiating, and end of ’92, beginning of ’93 they—we needed some new space by then, so we rented a wing of the SEV building, you know the open book, so the wing was ours, and we sublet part of that because we didn’t need it all. Ultimately, we did, but we just sublet it on a short-term basis to cover some of the rental. And so, we moved into the SEV building in ’93—