#Citizen Diplomacy
Esalen
Jim Hickman (1947 – 2025) was a ground-breaking, and highly unconventional pioneer in the citizen diplomacy movement of the 1980s. Born into a US Army family, he became an anti-war activist and conscientious objector. He began his professional life as a parapsychological researcher and became part of the Esalen Institute research on human potential. In that capacity, in 1979 he traveled throughout Central Asia meeting with shamans, ethnologists and psychologists, then attended the First International Congress of the Unconscious in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1979. Upon his return he helped inspire the Esalen Institute to create the Esalen Institute Soviet American Exchange Program (later Track Two) of which he was the executive director. Jim was the initiator of numerous exchange programs both through Esalen and outside it.
Together with US Astronaut Rusty Schweikert, he founded the Association of Space Explorers that included astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts. He was instrumental in establishing the first and second space bridges that were the first privately-sponsored, uncensored encounters of Soviet and American citizens. Hickman was initiator of exchanges through the Association for Humanistic Psychology and assisted in the creation of the US – USSR Youth Exchange Program. In the world of music, he brought John Denver, Billy Joel, Paul Winter and others to the Soviet Union.
Through Esalen, he created private exchange programs that included visits to the US by people like Abel Aganbegyan, one of Mihail Gorbachev’s chief economic advisors in 1988 and and Boris Yeltsin for his first trip to the US in 1989. In the years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Hickman worked closely with Gorbachev, including helping to launch his foundation in both Russia and the US.
With the breakup of the Soviet Union, Jim became involved with diverse private Russian-American business initiatives with, including a trading company, AJ Ventures, and a telecom joint venture, Rustel.
At the end of the 1990s he moved on from his work in Russia but remained active and involved in a variety of projects consistent with his lifetime passions until his passing.
This entry contains two separate interviews with him covering the broad range of his experience and activities.
This entry contains two separate interviews (March 3, 2021 and November 10, 2021) with him covering the broad range of his experience and activities.
Esalen
Jim Hickman (1947 – 2025) was a ground-breaking, and highly unconventional pioneer in the citizen diplomacy movement of the 1980s. Born into a US Army family, he became an anti-war activist and conscientious objector. He began his professional life as a parapsychological researcher and became part of the Esalen Institute research on human potential. In that capacity, in 1979 he traveled throughout Central Asia meeting with shamans, ethnologists and psychologists, then attended the First International Congress of the Unconscious in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1979. Upon his return he helped inspire the Esalen Institute to create the Esalen Institute Soviet American Exchange Program (later Track Two) of which he was the executive director. Jim was the initiator of numerous exchange programs both through Esalen and outside it.
Together with US Astronaut Rusty Schweikert, he founded the Association of Space Explorers that included astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts. He was instrumental in establishing the first and second space bridges that were the first privately-sponsored, uncensored encounters of Soviet and American citizens. Hickman was initiator of exchanges through the Association for Humanistic Psychology and assisted in the creation of the US – USSR Youth Exchange Program. In the world of music, he brought John Denver, Billy Joel, Paul Winter and others to the Soviet Union.
Through Esalen, he created private exchange programs that included visits to the US by people like Abel Aganbegyan, one of Mihail Gorbachev’s chief economic advisors in 1988 and and Boris Yeltsin for his first trip to the US in 1989. In the years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Hickman worked closely with Gorbachev, including helping to launch his foundation in both Russia and the US.
With the breakup of the Soviet Union, Jim became involved with diverse private Russian-American business initiatives with, including a trading company, AJ Ventures, and a telecom joint venture, Rustel.
At the end of the 1990s he moved on from his work in Russia but remained active and involved in a variety of projects consistent with his lifetime passions until his passing.
This entry contains two separate interviews with him covering the broad range of his experience and activities.
This entry contains two separate interviews (March 3, 2021 and November 10, 2021) with him covering the broad range of his experience and activities.
Daniel Satinsky: For the story I’m interested in, I’m interested in the pre-Soviet period, to a certain extent, and you’ve given me a lot of information, and I’ve talked to Joel Schatz and Evelyn Messinger, and Kim Spencer, so I’ve gotten a lot of information from them. What I’d like to focus on with you, if we can today, is the transition from citizen diplomat to businessman, and how that transpired, both with AJ Ventures and then later with Rustel IBCS. I have my own memories of what I was told by you guys about all that, but I’m not sure that that’s accurate.
And I think that you are emblematic or representative of others who did the same thing, making a transition from being involved in mutual understanding to being in business, or trying to find in business, and I think the link for me is that Russians always like to do things with people they know, and that you were a known quantity, and that that made you an attractive business partner. But you didn’t really have that much background in business. So, I’m just curious, how did you make that transition to AJ Ventures? What were the steps that led you to do that?
Jim Hickman: Well, let me start a little earlier. One of the things I like about what you’re doing is that when I read different people’s perspectives, memories of the history of everything that started with Esalen and the citizen diplomacy stuff, I find that it often differs from my memory. And I’ve seen several different—Birgit [Menzel] actually has sent me a couple of different publications that are coming out, a book or two that credit the Murphys with stuff that I did. And that’s okay. The Murphys deserve all the credit they can get.
But I have a particular perspective about history. History is not true. It’s only someone’s best recollection of what happened. And for me Jesus is the best example. And I’m not against the Christians and all that. But obviously we know now that when you tell a story to a group of people, by the 30th person it’s changed. And when we look at Jesus and know that nothing he ever said was written down until about 100 years after he died, then we can imagine that some of what eventually got put into the Bible is a little different than what happened.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah.
Jim Hickman: And that’s true for a lot of things, obviously. And then there is what we now know about memory. And as you may know, in neuroscience we’ve now shown that a memory is not actually what happened. And a part of what happens in the brain is when we take input in, like we have an experience, like what we’re doing right now. I see all the growth behind you, and I hear a few things in the background, and then I hear what I’m saying, and I hear what you’re saying, and I have a sort of sensation of the smell of a garden. I mean, that may be a false background, but I don’t know.
Daniel Satinsky: It’s my real garden, but it’s a photograph.
Jim Hickman: And so, I have a… So, my point being that all of our different senses register elements of an experience, okay? Then when it goes into the brain all of those sensory inputs go to different parts of the brain. A memory is not just imprinted and then we regurgitate it like a Xerox machine. It’s broken up and recorded in different aspects of the brain—the part of the brain that records smell, or sound, or sight, etc. Then when we recall it, we have to put all those pieces back together again. And mostly they never go back exactly the way they were brought in, you know what I mean?
So, then if we think about 35 years ago, I mean, our memories are focused on the most important parts that we recorded basically for ourselves. And so, when I read things about experiences that I remember I had, and they’re different from what I remember, I just always remember that that’s because memory is a flexible experience, and history. And so, what I like about what you’re doing, especially that you’re gathering lots of different memories, that that can create a kind of history that may be a little more accurate than one or two people’s memory of what happened.
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
Jim Hickman: So, that’s very important, because this is an important period in the history of the world, in a sense, and for us to learn well from it, we really need to understand the biggest possible picture of perceptions that we can.
And nowadays we’re a little more—well, we believe we’re a little more…we can be a little more accurate about history because we have all these videos and everything, and record everything. However, on the other hand, the U.S. is now in a period where our leaders can say one thing last week, and deny it the next week, and even if the video’s right there in front of them, they say oh, I didn’t say that. So, also history is about our preconceived belief systems, what we want to believe. And so, you know, it just—do you know Roger Macdonald?
Daniel Satinsky: That sounds familiar, but no.
Jim Hickman: He was very involved with us in the very beginning at Henry Dakin’s place, and he’s a longtime friend of mine, and the important thing about it is—and you might want to talk to him because what he transitioned into was the creator and principal manager of the Internet Archives. It’s the largest archive of internet data in the world. And it’s held there in San Francisco. And he and I have been talking recently about he’s doing his next version, and he’s wrestling with going back to some of his previous funders to get more money, and what’s the relevance of this today. And we were talking about how some of this isn’t relevant today, but it will be relevant 10 to 15 years from now when we want to understand—let’s just use Donald Trump as an example because he’s such a superstar of fake news. And we really want to understand what happened, we have all these videos of what happened that you can finally piece together as an objective observer, not as a supporter of the Republican Party, or the white supremacy, or any of the rest of that, which you could deny.
And so, what you’re doing fits into this. And you may want to have a conversation with Roger about all of what he’s done over the years to archive historical material. And as I say, he and I, we talk every week now because I’m trying to remember the things you’re asking me about, and so I ask Roger—Roger, do you remember what happened then? So, I’m trying to compare my memory with someone else’s memory I have some belief in, because it fades. And then the other part of this is—I may have mentioned this to you or sent you something about it—but I have my own project underway that’s built around what I experienced.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. You sent me a manuscript of like 400 pages.
Jim Hickman: Oh, yeah. That I call “A Life Worth Living.” And it isn’t just about here’s what actually happened. It’s more about, you know, the context for me is at a certain age you can look at your life, the arc of your life, and understand a lot of what you did in a way that you didn’t understand it then. It lays out a tapestry of things that bring meaning into small events.
And it’s what I teach in my neuroscience classes now, is that do the best you can in making a decision from your heart and your mind, but recognize that you may be a part of something bigger than all of that, and what you’re going to do right now, you might not understand the purpose of for 10 or 15 years, so leave yourself open to recognizing there are bigger—there’s, in a sense, a bigger awareness that enfolds us all that is moving life forward. That’s what evolution is. It’s just about life doing all kinds of things everywhere it can.
Daniel Satinsky: Right, yeah, yeah.
Jim Hickman: And I’ve secured a couple of things from the first US Festival recently. For example, I have read an essay by Kim in which he gives himself credit for creating the US festivals [the US-Soviet Space Bridges at the US Festivals]. And what I learned from that, which I didn’t know at the time, was that there was an experience Kim and maybe Evelyn together had at Esalen where they were in the hot tubs with people and they were talking about wouldn’t it be incredible if we could link the Soviet Union and the U.S. by satellite. And the way I look at it—and I didn’t know about that. I had no idea about it.
Daniel Satinsky: No, but they said you were in the same hot tub, and that that’s where the idea germinated, and it sort of circulated around in Esalen circles until you then called them and said we’re doing it.
Jim Hickman: And see that’s not… Okay, so that’s a memory.
Daniel Satinsky: I’m just talking about what they told me.
Jim Hickman: And that, you know, that isn’t not true. That’s a memory. But I may have—in other words, I may have been in the hot tub, but that wasn’t what created the idea, and it wasn’t an Esalen idea. What created the idea was the boyfriend of my ex-girlfriend. Do you remember Mary Payne at all? Mary Payne, she and I went together to the Soviet Union in ’79, and then we started, with the Murphys, the Esalen project out of our travels there. And she eventually became a board member of Esalen for a little while, but after we broke up, she got involved with a man named Rick Lukens, who I didn’t know. I had never met Rick Lukens.
When the US Festival planning was being done, which I had no involvement in at all, I didn’t know anything about it, Wozniak and Peter Ellis, who was the president of his company he had set up to do the US Festival, and then Peter Gerwe, who was the producer, in a sense, of it, and Rick Lukens, whom I didn’t know much at the time. I’d met him, but I had no idea he would be down there. They were talking about what to do with the US Festival. And one of them, and I don’t even know who—it could have been Peter Ellis or Peter Gerwe, or it could have been Woz, I don’t know—said wow, wouldn’t it be incredible if we could link this to Moscow.
The idea emerged out of their planning circle, not in a hot tub. However, it also emerged in the hot tub. See, and then what happened is Rick said I know someone who might be able to help us, he runs the Esalen program. Rick called me. And that was maybe two weeks before I was going to Moscow with Rusty [Schweickart] on the cosmonaut thing. And I said Rick, I have no idea—and see, here’s the thing for me. I had no understanding of satellite technology and communication. It was way beyond me. So, even if we were in a hot tub talking about it, I would have not understood what was going on. So, I said I’ll see if I can find out something when I go to Moscow with Rusty, okay? And you probably read some of this that I’ve written about it before. So, we go—
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I have. I’ve read it, yeah.
Jim Hickman: Yeah. We talk to Joseph [Goldin]1 2 3 4. And then the other piece of this that’s important is that Joseph, according to a number of people, had been talking to people in Russia about we ought to put big screens on the main streets of Moscow and beam in foreign content, and we could link up with the U.S. He was already doing this, like I don’t know, a couple of months before we thought about it. So, my point of this is that—well, to finish that—so then I asked Joseph, and he said I know the guy at radio and television who can tell us if it could be done. So, okay, well, let’s see if that’s later, because we’ve got all this astronaut/cosmonaut stuff to do. So, we went on to do this other stuff.
And like a day before we left, Rusty was finished, and so we said Joseph, what about this other thing? He said, oh, I’ll call [Henrikas] Yushkiavitshus. So, we went to see Yushkiavitshus, because Joseph introduced us, and his response was really interesting idea, but it’s August, or July, August, and everyone who could make a decision is on vacation, so it cannot be done the beginning of September because there’s nobody around who could decide. And then, so it was sort of like it’s not going to happen. And then he, as an aside, said to Rusty, so what are you doing here? And Rusty said well, you know, we’re doing this astronaut/cosmonaut thing, and Joseph may have told Yushkiavitshus about that ahead of time, I don’t know.
But I remember they started talking about it, and as it turned out, Rusty said and just this afternoon I met with the guy at the Central Committee who’s in charge of making a decision on stuff like this, and so it may be able to go forward, I don’t know, he’s looking at it. And Yushkiavitshus said you met with him? And Rusty said yeah. And he said just a minute, wait here. He went in the back room, and he called him. He came back and he said I think we can do this in September. Because that guy endorsed us, you see? It was the only way it could have happened.
And so, my point of this is that this is what I was saying in the beginning. The idea was surfacing around the planet. It wasn’t one person’s idea. It was a variety of people who brought the idea into this world, in a sense, and through a wide variety of sort of synchronistic events. I was going to leave later, Rusty was there, you know, blah-blah-blah. And then, so Yushkiavitshus said well, I don’t know, I’ll try, though. And then we heard nothing for the next three weeks. And during that period, I called Kim and said—and so it may have been stimulated by that hot tub conversation, I don’t know—but I called him and said the discussion…
Daniel Satinsky: [Conversation reconnecting] There you are. I lost you.
Jim Hickman: Yeah, yeah, my bandwidth sometimes suffers because since school is no longer in session because of COVID, then Dan is in person, and Dan is doing his classroom from home all day on the internet, Marcella does her work all day, and I do this, so the bandwidth sometimes… But anyway, if we just have patience, it will come back.
Daniel Satinsky: All right, so you said you contacted Kim about doing this if it went through. Is that what you were about to say when you froze?
Jim Hickman: So, here’s the thing, because this is related to your initial question about business. Again, you know, so I had no idea how you produce these things. I knew nothing about satellite communication. So, I called Kim and alerted him that it might happen. But we didn’t hear anything until about a week to ten days before the event was scheduled, nothing.
And just from my own personal stuff, that was a time in the summer when my father, brother, mother and I would always go rent a houseboat on Lake Powell in Arizona and go fishing for three or four days together. So, I never heard anything, so I went to Phoenix, and we got ready to go fishing. And literally, we were on the dock, about to get on the houseboat, and I said I need to make one more phone call. And I went to the pay phone, and I called the Embassy and said have you heard anything? And they said we’ve been trying to get in touch with you, they just sent your visas through, they want you in Moscow tomorrow.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, my god.
Jim Hickman: And so, I said to my father, you know, I’m not going fishing this year, Mom, can you drive me to the airport? And Rick and I then met in Washington and picked up our visas, got on the next flight to Moscow, and literally arrived I’d say five days before the event. And of course, I had told Kim it looks like it’s going to happen, and I’ll get you in touch with whoever it is on the Russian side, etc. And then we were there, and we were talking to people, and got Kim and Pavel, who was the main technical guy, who then he and Kim then went on to do a lot of other things, a lot of other Space Bridges as well together, so that was really nice. But it was the connecting.
And again, you know, and we were…and we wanted a musical group, and we wanted what they wanted, and we agreed we would go around Moscow and do a little travelogue for like ten minutes. And they assigned the host, which was the guy who was on the TV shows, and sort of a, you know, I mean, a propagandist of first degree, he was like boring. But that was their condition, you know, so you go with this because you want to try and make this one thing work. And we wanted Pozner, see, because we knew Vladimir Pozner.
But in that period Pozner was only on radio, he couldn’t be on television. But we worked with Pozner behind the scenes. We said okay. Let’s figure out what we can do about this. But we had to go with their moderator, who was a disaster, but still, you know. So, we did this thing. And then they demanded to have some input on the music, and blah-blah-blah. So, Rick and I got there like at 5:00 in the morning on the day of the show, and we went into the studio, and it was packed with probably 300 young people, all dressed in clothes that were sort of U.S. style, you know. You know none of them owned any of them, so the Soviets had put together a studio presentation that they thought would be appealing. And they had beach balls. They were bouncing beach balls back and forth like that, and there was a big flag, a Soviet and a U.S. flag, and sewn together within the background.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
Jim Hickman: And they did all that themselves. We didn’t have any input in it. We didn’t know it until we arrived. So, then we went live, and then the Soviets brought out their dancers, you know, and they were doing all of this stuff. And so, it’s happening, but…and it wasn’t anything sort of that people in San Bernardino cared about, you know. What was important was the first thing had happened.
And we had been told several times by both the CIA and the…and the CIA office had in the Embassy and other specialists at the Embassy that it wasn’t possible, this could never happen, we were wasting our time. So, this is what I say to people. Don’t always listen to the experts because they have an idea of what can and cannot be done, and I didn’t believe what could or could not be done. I was just following the energy. And what I say is I was just a midwife of the whole thing, you see? I was—
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, that makes sense.
Jim Hickman: —connecting the people, and the idea was surfacing. And so then, you know, 15 minutes in or so Bill Graham, who was producing the thing on the U.S. side, said this is propaganda, it’s being broadcast from the Soviet Embassy in Washington, this isn’t true, and he disconnected the feed.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
Jim Hickman: So, Pavel came to me and said Kim needs to talk to you. So, I talked to Kim, and—Bill Graham just disconnected the feed. And I said okay. Don’t tell the Russians. As far as they’re concerned, we’re still going. They can see the crowd and da-da-da-da-da. So, it finished, and a few people probably in San Bernardino knew what happened, but most everyone, you can imagine, whatever it was, 200,000 kids at a rock and roll festival, and all of a sudden a bunch of, you know, dancers, Russian dancers are up there and some, you know, so they weren’t paying attention. And Bill Graham thought it was disinformation. But—
Daniel Satinsky: Do you know there is a podcast about all this? Do you know this podcast about Space Bridge?
Jim Hickman: Oh, yeah. Well, there’s several. There’s one…there’s several. There’s one from the Russian side that’s a podcast.
Daniel Satinsky: No. This is a U.S. one by Charles Mayne, M-A-Y-N-E.
Jim Hickman: Yeah. I think I’ve got that one. I have a couple of them, and I’m not sure—
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, Evelyn sent it to me. So, you…you know, I can send it to you through the link because you might…you would be interested in comparing their version to what you’re telling.
Jim Hickman: Well, see, the thing is, here’s what’s important in history. History doesn’t record all of what it took to do the first thing. What the US Festival and histories look at is the second one, because the second one was the successful one, where we had crowds of people on both sides asking questions, and Rusty was there, and Sam Keen, and Vladimir, and we put it together, we designed it.
And nobody knows all of what went into making the second one happen, let alone the first, because the Russians, the Soviets demanded a million-dollar payment for the second one. They weren’t going to allow it to happen again. They said hey, this is Steve Wozniak, he’s a billionaire. You want to do it again? You’re going to pay to be in that thing. So, that’s just one of the little wrinkles that surfaced over the nine months or so that we then negotiated, including I want Pozner as the moderator this time. And Vladimir and I talked about it recently. He remembers that he and I were the ones who actually got him on that show, because he wasn’t on TV then. That was the launch of his TV career.
Daniel Satinsky: How did you know him?
Jim Hickman: He was a friend of the Murphys and ours in the Esalen program.
Daniel Satinsky: Ah, okay.
Jim Hickman: We met him primarily through his brother Paul, who became a good friend of the Murphys. And when the Murphys went and lived there for like three months one time Paul was essential in connecting them to everybody. And through Paul we met Vladimir. And so, I knew Vladimir a bit and knew that he was the one we wanted. But again, when we talk about history, these behind the scenes setting of the stage is rarely understood or recorded.
However, from my experience, it was something that, you know, and that’s why when somebody says I’m the one who did this, no. No one person did this. It was a collaborative effort of ideas around the planet that created an atmosphere that allowed it to emerge through a series of synchronicities in the first place, and then through a series of fairly serious negotiations in the second place.
Whereas, you know, like the documentary you’re talking about, the focus is usually on the second one as if that’s what started it all, and that isn’t. That could never have happened without the little, you know, stuff we did in the beginning with the TV guy who was a propagandist, and a bunch of Russian dancers nobody cared about, and Bill Graham disconnected it. Without that the second one would never have happened, you see? And then the other part of it that was interesting to me is that the Embassy said well, you know, yeah, you got it done, but no one in Russia will ever hear about it. That night on Vremya—do you remember Vremya?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah.
Jim Hickman: The No. 1 news. They spent three minutes, which was the longest segment of the news of any topic, they did three minutes on that hookup. When everybody said nobody will ever know about it. The entire country knew about it after that.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, wow.
And I think that you are emblematic or representative of others who did the same thing, making a transition from being involved in mutual understanding to being in business, or trying to find in business, and I think the link for me is that Russians always like to do things with people they know, and that you were a known quantity, and that that made you an attractive business partner. But you didn’t really have that much background in business. So, I’m just curious, how did you make that transition to AJ Ventures? What were the steps that led you to do that?
Jim Hickman: Well, let me start a little earlier. One of the things I like about what you’re doing is that when I read different people’s perspectives, memories of the history of everything that started with Esalen and the citizen diplomacy stuff, I find that it often differs from my memory. And I’ve seen several different—Birgit [Menzel] actually has sent me a couple of different publications that are coming out, a book or two that credit the Murphys with stuff that I did. And that’s okay. The Murphys deserve all the credit they can get.
But I have a particular perspective about history. History is not true. It’s only someone’s best recollection of what happened. And for me Jesus is the best example. And I’m not against the Christians and all that. But obviously we know now that when you tell a story to a group of people, by the 30th person it’s changed. And when we look at Jesus and know that nothing he ever said was written down until about 100 years after he died, then we can imagine that some of what eventually got put into the Bible is a little different than what happened.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah.
Jim Hickman: And that’s true for a lot of things, obviously. And then there is what we now know about memory. And as you may know, in neuroscience we’ve now shown that a memory is not actually what happened. And a part of what happens in the brain is when we take input in, like we have an experience, like what we’re doing right now. I see all the growth behind you, and I hear a few things in the background, and then I hear what I’m saying, and I hear what you’re saying, and I have a sort of sensation of the smell of a garden. I mean, that may be a false background, but I don’t know.
Daniel Satinsky: It’s my real garden, but it’s a photograph.
Jim Hickman: And so, I have a… So, my point being that all of our different senses register elements of an experience, okay? Then when it goes into the brain all of those sensory inputs go to different parts of the brain. A memory is not just imprinted and then we regurgitate it like a Xerox machine. It’s broken up and recorded in different aspects of the brain—the part of the brain that records smell, or sound, or sight, etc. Then when we recall it, we have to put all those pieces back together again. And mostly they never go back exactly the way they were brought in, you know what I mean?
So, then if we think about 35 years ago, I mean, our memories are focused on the most important parts that we recorded basically for ourselves. And so, when I read things about experiences that I remember I had, and they’re different from what I remember, I just always remember that that’s because memory is a flexible experience, and history. And so, what I like about what you’re doing, especially that you’re gathering lots of different memories, that that can create a kind of history that may be a little more accurate than one or two people’s memory of what happened.
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
Jim Hickman: So, that’s very important, because this is an important period in the history of the world, in a sense, and for us to learn well from it, we really need to understand the biggest possible picture of perceptions that we can.
And nowadays we’re a little more—well, we believe we’re a little more…we can be a little more accurate about history because we have all these videos and everything, and record everything. However, on the other hand, the U.S. is now in a period where our leaders can say one thing last week, and deny it the next week, and even if the video’s right there in front of them, they say oh, I didn’t say that. So, also history is about our preconceived belief systems, what we want to believe. And so, you know, it just—do you know Roger Macdonald?
Daniel Satinsky: That sounds familiar, but no.
Jim Hickman: He was very involved with us in the very beginning at Henry Dakin’s place, and he’s a longtime friend of mine, and the important thing about it is—and you might want to talk to him because what he transitioned into was the creator and principal manager of the Internet Archives. It’s the largest archive of internet data in the world. And it’s held there in San Francisco. And he and I have been talking recently about he’s doing his next version, and he’s wrestling with going back to some of his previous funders to get more money, and what’s the relevance of this today. And we were talking about how some of this isn’t relevant today, but it will be relevant 10 to 15 years from now when we want to understand—let’s just use Donald Trump as an example because he’s such a superstar of fake news. And we really want to understand what happened, we have all these videos of what happened that you can finally piece together as an objective observer, not as a supporter of the Republican Party, or the white supremacy, or any of the rest of that, which you could deny.
And so, what you’re doing fits into this. And you may want to have a conversation with Roger about all of what he’s done over the years to archive historical material. And as I say, he and I, we talk every week now because I’m trying to remember the things you’re asking me about, and so I ask Roger—Roger, do you remember what happened then? So, I’m trying to compare my memory with someone else’s memory I have some belief in, because it fades. And then the other part of this is—I may have mentioned this to you or sent you something about it—but I have my own project underway that’s built around what I experienced.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. You sent me a manuscript of like 400 pages.
Jim Hickman: Oh, yeah. That I call “A Life Worth Living.” And it isn’t just about here’s what actually happened. It’s more about, you know, the context for me is at a certain age you can look at your life, the arc of your life, and understand a lot of what you did in a way that you didn’t understand it then. It lays out a tapestry of things that bring meaning into small events.
And it’s what I teach in my neuroscience classes now, is that do the best you can in making a decision from your heart and your mind, but recognize that you may be a part of something bigger than all of that, and what you’re going to do right now, you might not understand the purpose of for 10 or 15 years, so leave yourself open to recognizing there are bigger—there’s, in a sense, a bigger awareness that enfolds us all that is moving life forward. That’s what evolution is. It’s just about life doing all kinds of things everywhere it can.
Daniel Satinsky: Right, yeah, yeah.
Jim Hickman: And I’ve secured a couple of things from the first US Festival recently. For example, I have read an essay by Kim in which he gives himself credit for creating the US festivals [the US-Soviet Space Bridges at the US Festivals]. And what I learned from that, which I didn’t know at the time, was that there was an experience Kim and maybe Evelyn together had at Esalen where they were in the hot tubs with people and they were talking about wouldn’t it be incredible if we could link the Soviet Union and the U.S. by satellite. And the way I look at it—and I didn’t know about that. I had no idea about it.
Daniel Satinsky: No, but they said you were in the same hot tub, and that that’s where the idea germinated, and it sort of circulated around in Esalen circles until you then called them and said we’re doing it.
Jim Hickman: And see that’s not… Okay, so that’s a memory.
Daniel Satinsky: I’m just talking about what they told me.
Jim Hickman: And that, you know, that isn’t not true. That’s a memory. But I may have—in other words, I may have been in the hot tub, but that wasn’t what created the idea, and it wasn’t an Esalen idea. What created the idea was the boyfriend of my ex-girlfriend. Do you remember Mary Payne at all? Mary Payne, she and I went together to the Soviet Union in ’79, and then we started, with the Murphys, the Esalen project out of our travels there. And she eventually became a board member of Esalen for a little while, but after we broke up, she got involved with a man named Rick Lukens, who I didn’t know. I had never met Rick Lukens.
When the US Festival planning was being done, which I had no involvement in at all, I didn’t know anything about it, Wozniak and Peter Ellis, who was the president of his company he had set up to do the US Festival, and then Peter Gerwe, who was the producer, in a sense, of it, and Rick Lukens, whom I didn’t know much at the time. I’d met him, but I had no idea he would be down there. They were talking about what to do with the US Festival. And one of them, and I don’t even know who—it could have been Peter Ellis or Peter Gerwe, or it could have been Woz, I don’t know—said wow, wouldn’t it be incredible if we could link this to Moscow.
The idea emerged out of their planning circle, not in a hot tub. However, it also emerged in the hot tub. See, and then what happened is Rick said I know someone who might be able to help us, he runs the Esalen program. Rick called me. And that was maybe two weeks before I was going to Moscow with Rusty [Schweickart] on the cosmonaut thing. And I said Rick, I have no idea—and see, here’s the thing for me. I had no understanding of satellite technology and communication. It was way beyond me. So, even if we were in a hot tub talking about it, I would have not understood what was going on. So, I said I’ll see if I can find out something when I go to Moscow with Rusty, okay? And you probably read some of this that I’ve written about it before. So, we go—
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I have. I’ve read it, yeah.
Jim Hickman: Yeah. We talk to Joseph [Goldin]1 2 3 4. And then the other piece of this that’s important is that Joseph, according to a number of people, had been talking to people in Russia about we ought to put big screens on the main streets of Moscow and beam in foreign content, and we could link up with the U.S. He was already doing this, like I don’t know, a couple of months before we thought about it. So, my point of this is that—well, to finish that—so then I asked Joseph, and he said I know the guy at radio and television who can tell us if it could be done. So, okay, well, let’s see if that’s later, because we’ve got all this astronaut/cosmonaut stuff to do. So, we went on to do this other stuff.
And like a day before we left, Rusty was finished, and so we said Joseph, what about this other thing? He said, oh, I’ll call [Henrikas] Yushkiavitshus. So, we went to see Yushkiavitshus, because Joseph introduced us, and his response was really interesting idea, but it’s August, or July, August, and everyone who could make a decision is on vacation, so it cannot be done the beginning of September because there’s nobody around who could decide. And then, so it was sort of like it’s not going to happen. And then he, as an aside, said to Rusty, so what are you doing here? And Rusty said well, you know, we’re doing this astronaut/cosmonaut thing, and Joseph may have told Yushkiavitshus about that ahead of time, I don’t know.
But I remember they started talking about it, and as it turned out, Rusty said and just this afternoon I met with the guy at the Central Committee who’s in charge of making a decision on stuff like this, and so it may be able to go forward, I don’t know, he’s looking at it. And Yushkiavitshus said you met with him? And Rusty said yeah. And he said just a minute, wait here. He went in the back room, and he called him. He came back and he said I think we can do this in September. Because that guy endorsed us, you see? It was the only way it could have happened.
And so, my point of this is that this is what I was saying in the beginning. The idea was surfacing around the planet. It wasn’t one person’s idea. It was a variety of people who brought the idea into this world, in a sense, and through a wide variety of sort of synchronistic events. I was going to leave later, Rusty was there, you know, blah-blah-blah. And then, so Yushkiavitshus said well, I don’t know, I’ll try, though. And then we heard nothing for the next three weeks. And during that period, I called Kim and said—and so it may have been stimulated by that hot tub conversation, I don’t know—but I called him and said the discussion…
Daniel Satinsky: [Conversation reconnecting] There you are. I lost you.
Jim Hickman: Yeah, yeah, my bandwidth sometimes suffers because since school is no longer in session because of COVID, then Dan is in person, and Dan is doing his classroom from home all day on the internet, Marcella does her work all day, and I do this, so the bandwidth sometimes… But anyway, if we just have patience, it will come back.
Daniel Satinsky: All right, so you said you contacted Kim about doing this if it went through. Is that what you were about to say when you froze?
Jim Hickman: So, here’s the thing, because this is related to your initial question about business. Again, you know, so I had no idea how you produce these things. I knew nothing about satellite communication. So, I called Kim and alerted him that it might happen. But we didn’t hear anything until about a week to ten days before the event was scheduled, nothing.
And just from my own personal stuff, that was a time in the summer when my father, brother, mother and I would always go rent a houseboat on Lake Powell in Arizona and go fishing for three or four days together. So, I never heard anything, so I went to Phoenix, and we got ready to go fishing. And literally, we were on the dock, about to get on the houseboat, and I said I need to make one more phone call. And I went to the pay phone, and I called the Embassy and said have you heard anything? And they said we’ve been trying to get in touch with you, they just sent your visas through, they want you in Moscow tomorrow.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, my god.
Jim Hickman: And so, I said to my father, you know, I’m not going fishing this year, Mom, can you drive me to the airport? And Rick and I then met in Washington and picked up our visas, got on the next flight to Moscow, and literally arrived I’d say five days before the event. And of course, I had told Kim it looks like it’s going to happen, and I’ll get you in touch with whoever it is on the Russian side, etc. And then we were there, and we were talking to people, and got Kim and Pavel, who was the main technical guy, who then he and Kim then went on to do a lot of other things, a lot of other Space Bridges as well together, so that was really nice. But it was the connecting.
And again, you know, and we were…and we wanted a musical group, and we wanted what they wanted, and we agreed we would go around Moscow and do a little travelogue for like ten minutes. And they assigned the host, which was the guy who was on the TV shows, and sort of a, you know, I mean, a propagandist of first degree, he was like boring. But that was their condition, you know, so you go with this because you want to try and make this one thing work. And we wanted Pozner, see, because we knew Vladimir Pozner.
But in that period Pozner was only on radio, he couldn’t be on television. But we worked with Pozner behind the scenes. We said okay. Let’s figure out what we can do about this. But we had to go with their moderator, who was a disaster, but still, you know. So, we did this thing. And then they demanded to have some input on the music, and blah-blah-blah. So, Rick and I got there like at 5:00 in the morning on the day of the show, and we went into the studio, and it was packed with probably 300 young people, all dressed in clothes that were sort of U.S. style, you know. You know none of them owned any of them, so the Soviets had put together a studio presentation that they thought would be appealing. And they had beach balls. They were bouncing beach balls back and forth like that, and there was a big flag, a Soviet and a U.S. flag, and sewn together within the background.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
Jim Hickman: And they did all that themselves. We didn’t have any input in it. We didn’t know it until we arrived. So, then we went live, and then the Soviets brought out their dancers, you know, and they were doing all of this stuff. And so, it’s happening, but…and it wasn’t anything sort of that people in San Bernardino cared about, you know. What was important was the first thing had happened.
And we had been told several times by both the CIA and the…and the CIA office had in the Embassy and other specialists at the Embassy that it wasn’t possible, this could never happen, we were wasting our time. So, this is what I say to people. Don’t always listen to the experts because they have an idea of what can and cannot be done, and I didn’t believe what could or could not be done. I was just following the energy. And what I say is I was just a midwife of the whole thing, you see? I was—
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, that makes sense.
Jim Hickman: —connecting the people, and the idea was surfacing. And so then, you know, 15 minutes in or so Bill Graham, who was producing the thing on the U.S. side, said this is propaganda, it’s being broadcast from the Soviet Embassy in Washington, this isn’t true, and he disconnected the feed.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
Jim Hickman: So, Pavel came to me and said Kim needs to talk to you. So, I talked to Kim, and—Bill Graham just disconnected the feed. And I said okay. Don’t tell the Russians. As far as they’re concerned, we’re still going. They can see the crowd and da-da-da-da-da. So, it finished, and a few people probably in San Bernardino knew what happened, but most everyone, you can imagine, whatever it was, 200,000 kids at a rock and roll festival, and all of a sudden a bunch of, you know, dancers, Russian dancers are up there and some, you know, so they weren’t paying attention. And Bill Graham thought it was disinformation. But—
Daniel Satinsky: Do you know there is a podcast about all this? Do you know this podcast about Space Bridge?
Jim Hickman: Oh, yeah. Well, there’s several. There’s one…there’s several. There’s one from the Russian side that’s a podcast.
Daniel Satinsky: No. This is a U.S. one by Charles Mayne, M-A-Y-N-E.
Jim Hickman: Yeah. I think I’ve got that one. I have a couple of them, and I’m not sure—
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, Evelyn sent it to me. So, you…you know, I can send it to you through the link because you might…you would be interested in comparing their version to what you’re telling.
Jim Hickman: Well, see, the thing is, here’s what’s important in history. History doesn’t record all of what it took to do the first thing. What the US Festival and histories look at is the second one, because the second one was the successful one, where we had crowds of people on both sides asking questions, and Rusty was there, and Sam Keen, and Vladimir, and we put it together, we designed it.
And nobody knows all of what went into making the second one happen, let alone the first, because the Russians, the Soviets demanded a million-dollar payment for the second one. They weren’t going to allow it to happen again. They said hey, this is Steve Wozniak, he’s a billionaire. You want to do it again? You’re going to pay to be in that thing. So, that’s just one of the little wrinkles that surfaced over the nine months or so that we then negotiated, including I want Pozner as the moderator this time. And Vladimir and I talked about it recently. He remembers that he and I were the ones who actually got him on that show, because he wasn’t on TV then. That was the launch of his TV career.
Daniel Satinsky: How did you know him?
Jim Hickman: He was a friend of the Murphys and ours in the Esalen program.
Daniel Satinsky: Ah, okay.
Jim Hickman: We met him primarily through his brother Paul, who became a good friend of the Murphys. And when the Murphys went and lived there for like three months one time Paul was essential in connecting them to everybody. And through Paul we met Vladimir. And so, I knew Vladimir a bit and knew that he was the one we wanted. But again, when we talk about history, these behind the scenes setting of the stage is rarely understood or recorded.
However, from my experience, it was something that, you know, and that’s why when somebody says I’m the one who did this, no. No one person did this. It was a collaborative effort of ideas around the planet that created an atmosphere that allowed it to emerge through a series of synchronicities in the first place, and then through a series of fairly serious negotiations in the second place.
Whereas, you know, like the documentary you’re talking about, the focus is usually on the second one as if that’s what started it all, and that isn’t. That could never have happened without the little, you know, stuff we did in the beginning with the TV guy who was a propagandist, and a bunch of Russian dancers nobody cared about, and Bill Graham disconnected it. Without that the second one would never have happened, you see? And then the other part of it that was interesting to me is that the Embassy said well, you know, yeah, you got it done, but no one in Russia will ever hear about it. That night on Vremya—do you remember Vremya?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah.
Jim Hickman: The No. 1 news. They spent three minutes, which was the longest segment of the news of any topic, they did three minutes on that hookup. When everybody said nobody will ever know about it. The entire country knew about it after that.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, wow.
Jim Hickman: But see, these are the little pieces of history. So, I tell you that because when you say okay, how did you transition into business, that has no…that is not what happened. That’s what it looks like when you go back, you see? So, Peter Gerwe and I then set up a company, StoryFirst Entertainment, and Peter was the business and entertainment guy, and I was the I’ll introduce you to all the people you need to know guy, and we did a couple of things together. We helped the Muppets get over there. We toured the sort of Russian version of the Muppets. It was a very famous puppeteer in Russia. And we brought him to the U.S. What?
Daniel Satinsky: A little pig?
Jim Hickman: Maybe. I don’t remember. I have an article on it. So, we did a couple of small things, and we were working on a bigger thing, the Dick Clark Show. We set up a Dick Clark Space Bridge. We were going to get Russian performers by satellite on the Dick Clark, you know, you remember that Dick Clark Show.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, yeah, sure.
Jim Hickman: And Clark was really into it. So was his producer. And they were going to pay, you know, because that’s a real commercial venture and stuff. And so maybe a month before the show was scheduled, they shot the Korean airliner down, and that shelved everything. That canceled the entire Dick Clark thing. Now, the next thing that happened was that Michael, through Michael and Dulce and my own experiences with Werner Erhard we had a relationship with EST. And one of Werner’s principal people was a good friend of John Denver, who you may recall was a big EST fan. You may not know that.
Daniel Satinsky: I did know that.
Jim Hickman: But John was a big participant in EST, and a supporter of EST, and etc. And so Raz Ingrasci, who was one of Werner’s right-hand people, through a mutual friend, came to me and said do you think you could tour John Denver over there. And so again it was like I have no idea how you do this. But the cultural exchange was gone, had been canceled after Afghanistan, and so I knew that Gosconcert* was the organization that had to be involved for a musical tour. So, again, I talked to Joseph Goldin and another friend I had over there who was more in the entertainment business, and they introduced me to the guy at Gosconcert. So, we then said John Denver, and of course they’re like, who?
And because again, because of, you know, what you sort of said earlier, I was someone who then had somewhat of a little reputation in that community, so they trusted me. And I don’t remember—oh, and the other one is that the principal money for John Denver came from Armand Hammer, because Armand was a big fan of John Denver’s. And so, Armand Hammer’s sort of imprimatur in the whole thing was, you know, I mean, you know what it’s like.
Like when I was first telling them about the first US Festival, I said it’s on Labor Day weekend. It’s all about labor. We’re going to have union leaders there. You know, you say what needs to be said for the Soviets to sell it internally. And so, we set up this thing with John Denver. And by that time—I don’t know if you ever read my things about the KGB and my relationship with the CIA and the KGB and the FBI and all that stuff.
Daniel Satinsky: I read it. Not recently, but I did read it, yeah.
Jim Hickman: But by that time, you know, there was a KGB guy who had been assigned to me so whenever I would come to Moscow, he would call me, and say come to room so-and-so and let’s talk. And then I’d tell him what I’m doing, you know, like we always did. We told everybody what we were doing. And so, John Denver. And we talked about how nobody knows who John Denver is. And I said, well, you know, this is an important thing because the cultural exchange is gone, and this could lead to other things like the US Festival did, and we need to have a couple of big concerts.
So, the first concert was at the…it was in one of the major hotel’s entertainment—I think the Rossiya. And about a day before or so there were hardly any tickets sold. It was going to be an empty theater. So, I went to Alex, and I said we’ve got to do something about this. So, what Alex did, the day of the concert he rounded up prostitutes from all over Moscow and sent them into the hall. Now, there were probably more than just prostitutes, but he was able to fill the hall way beyond what anyone could sell tickets. So, again, you know, the beginning of this stuff is things that nobody… Since I never wrote about it nobody ever understands, but that was the beginning of John Denver.
And then we did some other things with John because John wanted to fly in the space program. So, I got him involved with the astronaut/cosmonaut project and introduced him to some cosmonauts. And we had a serious, about nine months of serious negotiations with the Soviets on getting him sent to space. And in the end the Soviets said we’ll absolutely do it, it will cost $10 million. And both John and I said forget it; we’re not going to pay for a big propaganda thing for the Soviets. But Armand Hammer gave a little indication that he would be willing to help finance such a thing—not $10 million worth—but he might get involved. It never went anywhere. But that was happening.
John Denver’s, one of John Denver’s promoters was the promoter of a couple of Arnold Freedman’s artists, recording artists, and so he recommended to Arnold that Arnold get in touch with me, because Arnold wanted to tour. At that point it was—
Daniel Satinsky: Beaver Brown.
Jim Hickman: No, it was before that.
Daniel Satinsky: Before Beaver Brown.
Jim Hickman: The first was the guy who married Bob Dylan’s daughter. What was his name? I’ll think of it in a minute.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay.
Jim Hickman: But anyway, that got us together on a concert tour, okay? And that was an interesting one because he was Jewish and wouldn’t play on Friday night. And that’s a big night for concerts. So, that was one of the elements that, you see—and these are the things which interested me the most. Not can we do another US Festival, can we do another satellite link with so-and-so. I’m like Kim and others can do that now. That’s not for me. I’m like whoa, produce a concert tour of a guy who can’t sing on Friday night because he’s Jewish in the Soviet Union—that’s interesting to me. So, I’ve always been interested in the things that appear not possible, you see. And then once it begins, that sets the stage. Because as you know, with the Soviets it’s about once permission has been given once for something, then it opens up the opportunity for other things.
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
Jim Hickman: So, we did that, and then that gave, I think it was primarily Arnold’s initiative to do t-shirts. And I was involved with Michael Leavitt then, and Michael had been head of merchandising for the Star Wars film at Lucasfilm before he left there. He was a good friend of Peter Gerwe’s, and we seduced him into getting involved in the Soviets, and he was involved with some of our entertainment stuff. But then he and I became partners in a variety of other things over there, including the mass marketing of t-shirts. It had never been done before. So, that again was interesting to me. We talked to Gosconcert. So, one of the things we could do is we could merchandise t-shirts with the name of the artists. And they said well, I don’t think that would sell here. And we said I think that would sell here. And that opened up a merchandising industry for Gosconcert. They took it way beyond that.
But see, that, I wasn’t in it because I’m a businessman. I was in it because this hasn’t been done, and it’s a huge opportunity for Westerners as well as the Soviets. Let’s expand the whole culture in its relationship with these things. So, that’s how I got involved with Arnold, and then we decided to do some other things, tour some other people, etc., AJ Ventures.
And then one of the things that led us to was a young man in the Netherlands who had been in touch with the national telephone company of the Netherlands, and he came to us and said we’d like to set up a relationship with Gosteleradio* in way that we could joint venture in a telecommunications, private telecommunications company in the Soviet Union. Now, at that point I knew a little about it because I’d done the US Festival and I’d learned some stuff. So, we said okay. Let’s talk about it. So, we created, out of a series of events, the Dutch PTT ended up not being the principal partners. It ended up being the Deutsche PTT, the German telephone company, and we created—
Daniel Satinsky: All of that was after AJ Ventures.
Jim Hickman: Well, it was also a part of AJ Ventures. There’s no distinguishing boundaries here.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. I say that because I was involved with the rare earth oxides business—
Jim Hickman: Yeah, and that was AJ Ventures.
Daniel Satinsky: That was AJ Ventures. And then that collapsed because of the Chinese, and I left you guys. And then I got a phone call from Arnold and said we’re in the telecom business; we’re going to Tbilisi.
Jim Hickman: But see, here’s the thing. What happened with—I almost have his name—the first artist is that one of the ways we were able to get it done is to say we don’t need hard currency. You see, all of the performers who wanted to perform there had to be paid in hard currency, and so it couldn’t happen. And we said that’s okay, pay us in rubles, and we’ll set up a bank account, which we did, and we have rubles. And that’s then when Arnold and I, what we saw was that what you could do with rubles is use the Soviet airline to transport all your stuff to the West and you can pay rubles for that. So, see, how could you get rare earth oxides out of the Soviet Union without paying hard currency? You use a Soviet carrier.
So, we did—and we did the same thing. We bought rare earth oxides with rubles. We went into the ruble business. and it was a part of what we were calling the conversion, we’re converting rubles into foreign currency by buying in the Soviet Union with rubles, getting them to the West with rubles, and selling them in the West for dollars. So, that was the same with the jeans. We set up a manufacturing facility in the Far East to make jeans that we then exported. So, it was…while for Arnold, you know, because he’s the businessman in this venture, for me it was more about what can we do that’s never been done. Let’s turn rubles into dollars. And I know some people who can help us manufacture jeans, and blah-blah-blah.
Daniel Satinsky: But these were your initiatives, they weren’t the Atomic Energy Ministry coming to you and saying hey, we’ve got this opportunity.
Jim Hickman: No.
Daniel Satinsky: You saw this and went after it as entrepreneurs.
Jim Hickman: Yeah, yeah. It was, you know—
Daniel Satinsky: And trailblazers.
Jim Hickman: And often the idea would be Arnold’s—I’ve got an artist, let’s try and tour him. And then my job was the Soviet side—okay, I’ll figure out how to make this happen over here. And I remember, as you may recall, both Arnold and I were in our version of AA [Alcoholics Anonymous]. I was in AA and Arnold was in NA [Narcotics Anonymous], so we had this mutual agreement about not drinking in the biggest alcoholic country in the world.
And we went to the Telecom Ministry in Georgia because we were going to sell our services. Because what we had was a satellite based long distance carrier company. That’s what the beginning was. And we were gathering phone calls to common switches that then in the normal distribution would go into a national line for distribution. So, we were gathering customers, traffic, in a sense, at local switches and then turning it into our satellite carrier, you see? So, we were a private long-distance company.
And we were negotiating with the Ministry of Communications in Georgia, and we basically finished a deal. And we were in the last stage in the Minister’s office, and we had agreed on all the terms, and he brought out the vodka, and he said okay, let’s toast to our partnership. And Arnold looked at me and he said to him, my partner Jim doesn’t really drink alcohol anymore. And he looked at us and he said, “I never do a deal who won’t drink vodka with me.” And so, the deal was off.
Daniel Satinsky: Really?
Jim Hickman: Just like that it was gone. He wouldn’t do it with me because I wouldn’t drink. So, you know, there are all these little stories that fit into the bigger thing that looks like oh, Rustel, you got this big telecommunications company, you must be a businessman to have put all this… It’s not the way it worked.
Now, at the same time with Rustel, you know, Arnold helped raise a lot of money for it. He was then, by that time he had begun to be involved in the venture capital business, so he was building that company and raising money for—we were both raising money for Rustel. So, in a sense AJ Ventures led into that, and at that point it was Rustel. And the partnership in there was, I think it might have been AJ Ventures. I’ll look it up. Because it was the first Soviet-foreign joint venture in telecommunications.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, it was IBCS, probably, by that time.
Jim Hickman: By then we had IB—you’re right. We had then International Business Communication System. That would have made sense. And the German telecom was a partner. So, we had this thing. And raising money for it. And so, for example, one summer I lived in London for three months meeting with venture capitalists led by—I think we had hired… We had hired one of the big accounting firms to represent us at that point.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I remember that, yes.
Jim Hickman: And so, we ended up putting whatever we put together. And then, you know, and Arnold had relationships with most of the key people in the finance side. I mean, I knew them, but was more involved with Russia, because I was the general director by that time of Rustel, which meant that I worked with Soviets who knew much more about the business than I did. And we hired a couple of Westerners who came out of the telecommunications business to run the company.
Daniel Satinsky: You hired Chet [Walker] and then—
Jim Hickman: Yeah.
Daniel Satinsky: Chet and then you hired that guy from Coca-Cola who I never thought too much of, no offense.
Jim Hickman: Yeah. But they were the businesspeople. I again was on top dealing with all the politics, not—
Daniel Satinsky: All right, so I have two questions to ask you. So, did the mythology of this, in my mind was that part of it, this joint venture, came from the Russian side, from the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs not wanting the telecom market dominated all by foreign companies, so they wanted the joint venture to be access to Western technology, but have Russian kind of involvement and control of a satellite telecommunications company. Is that an incorrect memory?
Jim Hickman: Well, no. I mean, your memories are correct for what you experienced. But I’ll give you a different, I’ll give you another aspect of it. But what I always say to people, you know, like we’ve been doing these things on citizen diplomacy, and how did this ever happen. And the perspectives are from the Western side.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Jim Hickman: And as I always say to people, please understand that we have no idea what was going on inside the Soviet Union to make this happen. You talk to people who claim that they set up X, Y and Z, and that never happens without the Cyrillic X, Y and Z having figured out what they wanted and let it happen. But we never knew about that because that wasn’t, you know. Now, we had a little bit of access because Joseph Goldin knew stuff and would tell us, and then I had Ivan as my primary interpreter, and because we were friends it was something he used to say—people don’t understand that after the negotiation is over, I always tell you everything they said. And so, you know, we had our own little insight, but it wasn’t complete, because there’s obviously much more going on than an interpreter or Joseph Goldin can help with.
And so, what you’re saying is potentially true. My experience is that I was approached by a telecom company that expressed interest in setting up a telecom joint venture in the Soviet Union. So, I went to Boris and said this guy wants to do this, what do you think? And it moved on from there. Now, they may have already been thinking about it, just like you say. You see what I mean?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Jim Hickman: It wasn’t what happened in the sense of let’s go … , can you help us do this. But there again, like my original treatise, these ideas emerge more than out of one group of people, so it’s entirely possible that that kind of conversation was underway in the KGB and all those places—god, let’s see if we can get the technology stuff from the West. And then I come in with an opening and Boris goes—calls him and goes, hey guys, we’ve got the opening we’ve been waiting for, and this guy, he doesn’t know what he’s doing, we can use him in any way, let’s do this. So, see what I mean? We don’t know for sure.
But I would agree with your memory that that was potentially happening. It wasn’t like oh, guess what, guys, Deutsche Telecom wants to partner with us—isn’t that a good idea? That’s not what happens. I mean, you know, they’re conspiring, who knows, for years they’re conspiring about ways to get the technology.
And I don’t know if you remember Makarov at the Soviet embassy. He was the KGB resident at the Soviet embassy. And his particular assignment was getting technology from Silicon Valley. That was his primary assignment. And so, when we invited him to come and see Esalen it was like yeah, man, let’s go out there, and these guys are right on top of Silicon Valley, I can really use these guys. And partly I know this because then I told our FBI guy we’re bringing Makarov, and he said, he is not coming for you guys. This is the KGB resident, and his job is to steal our technology, we watch every step he takes everywhere in this country, so if you guys bring him out you’ve got to tell us your entire schedule, because we’re going to watch him the whole time. And they said believe me; he’s coming to steal stuff.
And he stayed in Zen Center, and so there was an FBI car outside of Zen Center, and they would get up at like 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning to do their walking meditation—and Barry used to tell me this—so the FBI guys were looking at all the monks to see if they could see if Makarov was trying to be a fugitive and escape and get down to—
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
Jim Hickman: And then I know some of this because I was writing about some of my experiences with Makarov recently and I did a Google search of him. And when the whole thing broke down, he became a professor of high technology at Moscow University.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
Jim Hickman: That’s exactly who he was, a specialist in technology. So, without a doubt they were thinking about it. And my point is, though, that at least from my view the world is about ideas emerging. It’s not one person does a breakthrough. That doesn’t happen. So, anyway, I was trying to answer your question. Next question, quick.
Daniel Satinsky: The next question, TUSRIF. Remember the U.S. funding agency, and the acronym TUSRIF, T… I think it was a $20 million—so the two fundings I remember was the first funding from Deutsche Bundespost Telecom of like $950,000, and then there was a big loan from TUSRIF, probably for 20 million that was a result of all that stuff you were doing with consultants. Do you remember that?
Jim Hickman: No. I don’t remember the acronym.
Daniel Satinsky: All right, okay.
Jim Hickman: And, you know, it’s sort of like when you ask about how do I transition to business. You see that this isn’t about me being a businessman and trying to figure out how to do business. And what I always said is [if you can] find anyone better than me who wants to be general director, I’m gone. I’m only here to make this thing happen, and once it’s operating, then somebody who knows how to do that needs to come in and do it, which we tried to do. And it could be that those people may have known more about that financing than I did. But I don’t remember the acronym.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay.
Jim Hickman: And I might not have paid attention to that. It was—
Daniel Satinsky: It’s The U.S. Russia Investment Fund. It was a special fund set up by Congress to invest in Russian ventures. If you don’t remember, you don’t remember. That’s fine.
Jim Hickman: No, I never had any involvement with U.S. government sponsored funds. So, that might have happened, but it wouldn’t have happened when I was there, or I would have known about it.
Daniel Satinsky: No, it happened when you were there. I remember the meeting in the conference room, in Sharon [Massachusetts], and…
Jim Hickman: Okay, good. But you know, you remember it, so I don’t need to remember it.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, that’s okay. I’m just trying to clean up my memory. And also, the rumor always about Boris [Kurakin] was that his job had been to collect technologies, that he was also a, I don’t know if spy is the right word, but he was an agent to collect technologies around the world, that that’s what he had been responsible for with Licensingtorg or whatever it was, yeah?
Jim Hickman: The thing about it is that anyone who’s in a position he was in does whatever he can for the intelligence services to contribute to the ultimate agenda of the Soviet state. And so, it’s not like a spy, a KGB officer going out, it is like the mandate for anyone to rise to that position is to do whatever you’re talking about.
That’s his job, is to collect as much data as possible all over the world about things that are important to the Soviet state. So, without a doubt it fit within his mandate. And where I think they were somewhat disappointed sometimes is they always thought they could use us to get what they wanted, and they had never met any group before that said anything you want to know, ask me the right question, I’ll give you all the answers. And that was the KGB, the FBI, the CIA.
And there was one time with the FBI, because I did two lie detector tests with the KGB and about seven or eight with the FBI in different parts of the world. I was in Berlin once and they gave me a call. I got a call in my hotel—come to so-and-so room because we want to do another lie detector test. So, the point was over time, Barry, the main guy at the FBI in San Francisco, he said to me, you know, from our tests, from the analysis of everything you’ve said, you haven’t lied to us at all, but we can also tell there’s things you’re not telling us. And I said Barry, I’ve been going to the Soviet Union for about ten years, I’ve been there over 100 times, and I have told you everything you’ve ever asked me a question about. How is it possible for me to tell you everything that ever happened to me if you don’t ask me about it?
So, you know. So, back to your point, yeah, I’m sure that was a part of Boris’s mandate, and we might have helped him, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think any technology was exchanged in relation to any of the stuff we did.
Daniel Satinsky: Do you agree with me that some of this was that they wanted to do business with people they knew and could trust rather than—
Jim Hickman: Yeah, yeah. No, you stated it well earlier in the conversation, that it was… Partly because they had spent so much time vetting me, and others. I mean, like Joel Schatz. He doesn’t know this. And I didn’t know Joel very well. I was not involved in helping him over there. He did everything himself, and he made incredible contributions. And there were two conversations I had with the KGB asking me about Joel Schatz. Not in-depth or anything, but it’s just what you said, just reaching out to people who they had some tentacle hold on to find out any other information.
And I wasn’t important in that. I’m just giving an example. That would have happened broadly all the time. And they would come to people who someone important would say you can trust this guy, at least. You ought to ask this guy what he knows, because he’ll—you know, because I’m sure they would say because he’s admitted to everybody, he’ll tell you everything he knows, so let’s find out what he knows.
Daniel Satinsky: So, let’s go ask him, yeah. Now, Schatz also had a relationship with Goldin. Goldin seemed to be important.
Jim Hickman: Oh, very important. And that was an introduction I made. Not personally, but I informed Joseph about what Joel was intending to do and encouraged them to get together, that’s all. It’s not like I was a network or anything. But there was very little Joseph did in the first several years we were together that he and I didn’t talk about ahead of time, because we were very good friends. But yes, then a big part of Joel’s success was based on what Joseph did with him. Very much like he did with me at the US Festival and Yushkiavitshus. Joseph knew who to get to around the internet and stuff.
And there was like Velikhov—remember Velikhov, vice president of the Academy of Sciences, who was important, I think, for Joel as well. But Velikhov and I were good friends, and we used to do stuff just, you know, social things together. And especially we used to get drunk together and wander around Moscow—stumble around Moscow together. And he would point stuff out to me and, you know. And it’s like cosmonaut, what was his name, the first guy to walk in space. The main cosmonaut of the whole thing. I’ll think of his name in a minute. But anyway, I remember one time out in Star City where, you know—and the astronauts and cosmonauts, they were the heaviest drinking group of people I have ever seen, and it didn’t affect them very much. I mean, you know, these are the early astronauts, who were really the edge of human development, you know. They were way out there on the edge doing stuff none of us could ever imagine. And like Sevastyanov—do you remember Sevastyanov?
Daniel Satinsky: No.
Jim Hickman: I have his picture right here. Do you remember that guy?
Daniel Satinsky: No.
Jim Hickman: That’s Sevastyanov. But anyway, Sevastyanov, one of the early cosmonauts. And he and I were at [unintelligible] one night, and drinking heavily, and I remember like 4:00 in the morning I was completely—I could hardly see, and Sevastyanov gets up and he says, well, I’ve got to test a new plane this morning at about 7:00, so I should go.
Daniel Satinsky: [Laughs.]
Jim Hickman: And I’m like unbelievable, you know. Leonov, that’s who I was trying to think of. Cosmonaut Leonov was the first guy to walk in space. And we were out at Star City at one point, you know, again celebrating whatever we were celebrating, and he was in his uniform with all of his medals. He took his coat off, his uniform off, and he gave it to me and said put this on. And he had somebody take a picture of the two of us with me wearing his cosmonaut uniform and our arms around each other. And I showed this to somebody in the CIA at some point and they’re like this is impossible, this could never have happened. You know, it’s that sort of thing.
What I was involved in was not, you know, serious business, this and that, but I just was, you know, people liked me, and they ended up trusting me, to the degree they were able. There’s always a limit. And so, it’s like with Gorbachev, when we brought Gorbachev back to the U.S.—I mean, back to the USSR—well, Russia at that point. We landed at Sheremetyevo, and we got off the plane, and they ushered us into the VIP lounge where there was going to be a little…a few friends to greet him. And around the table, it was very interesting, because you may remember that we used to watch how the Politburo positioned itself on Lenin’s tomb.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Jim Hickman: And so, we walked in, and every member of the former politburo was sitting around the table. And I’m like, Jesus, I know spies who would pay me a million dollars to sit in this. They were all there to greet Gorbachev and then some other people. And I said to Gorbachev, you know, I think I’m not sure I should really be here. He said no-no-no, you have to join us, sit right here next to me. Which I did. And he got up and said I want to introduce you to Jim Hickman. He’s a U.S. millionaire who has given his life to help us make all this happen. And I’m like, see, that’s the only way they could imagine it could be done, because that was their image. No young person like me could just take three weeks out and fly all over the place with Gorbachev and, you know, blah-blah-blah. And so… But it was that sort of thing. They all had an image of me. And there must have been other people, too. I’m not saying I was unique. But there had to have been an image of some degree of trust in that I would tell them the truth if they asked me a question. And so yeah.
And so, then Peter Gerwe is a good example. But that’s where the business thing moved, see? With Peter we had this StoryFirst Entertainment, we did a few things, and then Peter saw, as the businessman Peter, that there’s a huge opportunity here in the radio/TV business. And so, he decided I’m going to move to Moscow and start buying up radio stations. And I’m like that’s not my path, you know. I’m not going to live in Moscow and do this business stuff. So, he moved forward, largely based on people I had introduced him to, or he and I had worked with through my connections, etc.
And at one point—and then, you know, I don’t remember, I don’t know all the details, but as I understood it, he married the daughter of one of the rich guys over there who helped finance everything. And what I would say is there was, you know, the oligarch, which is synonymous with the Mob. I mean, you know, you can’t distinguish. It’s not that they’re all mobsters, but there isn’t any differentiation between being a billionaire and having all the friends in the Mob.
So, at a certain point, I don’t know, a couple years into his building his company he wrote me an email saying, you know, everything is going great, and I owe most of it to you, because you were the one who introduced me to everyone who has been essential to my building this company. And so, I wrote him back and said Peter, based on that, you think I could get a little bit of stock in your company? And he said, Jim, the people who own the company now I don’t think would agree to that. And I’m like okay. I don’t want to go any further with this. Those are not people I want to argue with, you know.
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
Daniel Satinsky: A little pig?
Jim Hickman: Maybe. I don’t remember. I have an article on it. So, we did a couple of small things, and we were working on a bigger thing, the Dick Clark Show. We set up a Dick Clark Space Bridge. We were going to get Russian performers by satellite on the Dick Clark, you know, you remember that Dick Clark Show.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, yeah, sure.
Jim Hickman: And Clark was really into it. So was his producer. And they were going to pay, you know, because that’s a real commercial venture and stuff. And so maybe a month before the show was scheduled, they shot the Korean airliner down, and that shelved everything. That canceled the entire Dick Clark thing. Now, the next thing that happened was that Michael, through Michael and Dulce and my own experiences with Werner Erhard we had a relationship with EST. And one of Werner’s principal people was a good friend of John Denver, who you may recall was a big EST fan. You may not know that.
Daniel Satinsky: I did know that.
Jim Hickman: But John was a big participant in EST, and a supporter of EST, and etc. And so Raz Ingrasci, who was one of Werner’s right-hand people, through a mutual friend, came to me and said do you think you could tour John Denver over there. And so again it was like I have no idea how you do this. But the cultural exchange was gone, had been canceled after Afghanistan, and so I knew that Gosconcert* was the organization that had to be involved for a musical tour. So, again, I talked to Joseph Goldin and another friend I had over there who was more in the entertainment business, and they introduced me to the guy at Gosconcert. So, we then said John Denver, and of course they’re like, who?
And because again, because of, you know, what you sort of said earlier, I was someone who then had somewhat of a little reputation in that community, so they trusted me. And I don’t remember—oh, and the other one is that the principal money for John Denver came from Armand Hammer, because Armand was a big fan of John Denver’s. And so, Armand Hammer’s sort of imprimatur in the whole thing was, you know, I mean, you know what it’s like.
Like when I was first telling them about the first US Festival, I said it’s on Labor Day weekend. It’s all about labor. We’re going to have union leaders there. You know, you say what needs to be said for the Soviets to sell it internally. And so, we set up this thing with John Denver. And by that time—I don’t know if you ever read my things about the KGB and my relationship with the CIA and the KGB and the FBI and all that stuff.
Daniel Satinsky: I read it. Not recently, but I did read it, yeah.
Jim Hickman: But by that time, you know, there was a KGB guy who had been assigned to me so whenever I would come to Moscow, he would call me, and say come to room so-and-so and let’s talk. And then I’d tell him what I’m doing, you know, like we always did. We told everybody what we were doing. And so, John Denver. And we talked about how nobody knows who John Denver is. And I said, well, you know, this is an important thing because the cultural exchange is gone, and this could lead to other things like the US Festival did, and we need to have a couple of big concerts.
So, the first concert was at the…it was in one of the major hotel’s entertainment—I think the Rossiya. And about a day before or so there were hardly any tickets sold. It was going to be an empty theater. So, I went to Alex, and I said we’ve got to do something about this. So, what Alex did, the day of the concert he rounded up prostitutes from all over Moscow and sent them into the hall. Now, there were probably more than just prostitutes, but he was able to fill the hall way beyond what anyone could sell tickets. So, again, you know, the beginning of this stuff is things that nobody… Since I never wrote about it nobody ever understands, but that was the beginning of John Denver.
And then we did some other things with John because John wanted to fly in the space program. So, I got him involved with the astronaut/cosmonaut project and introduced him to some cosmonauts. And we had a serious, about nine months of serious negotiations with the Soviets on getting him sent to space. And in the end the Soviets said we’ll absolutely do it, it will cost $10 million. And both John and I said forget it; we’re not going to pay for a big propaganda thing for the Soviets. But Armand Hammer gave a little indication that he would be willing to help finance such a thing—not $10 million worth—but he might get involved. It never went anywhere. But that was happening.
John Denver’s, one of John Denver’s promoters was the promoter of a couple of Arnold Freedman’s artists, recording artists, and so he recommended to Arnold that Arnold get in touch with me, because Arnold wanted to tour. At that point it was—
Daniel Satinsky: Beaver Brown.
Jim Hickman: No, it was before that.
Daniel Satinsky: Before Beaver Brown.
Jim Hickman: The first was the guy who married Bob Dylan’s daughter. What was his name? I’ll think of it in a minute.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay.
Jim Hickman: But anyway, that got us together on a concert tour, okay? And that was an interesting one because he was Jewish and wouldn’t play on Friday night. And that’s a big night for concerts. So, that was one of the elements that, you see—and these are the things which interested me the most. Not can we do another US Festival, can we do another satellite link with so-and-so. I’m like Kim and others can do that now. That’s not for me. I’m like whoa, produce a concert tour of a guy who can’t sing on Friday night because he’s Jewish in the Soviet Union—that’s interesting to me. So, I’ve always been interested in the things that appear not possible, you see. And then once it begins, that sets the stage. Because as you know, with the Soviets it’s about once permission has been given once for something, then it opens up the opportunity for other things.
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
Jim Hickman: So, we did that, and then that gave, I think it was primarily Arnold’s initiative to do t-shirts. And I was involved with Michael Leavitt then, and Michael had been head of merchandising for the Star Wars film at Lucasfilm before he left there. He was a good friend of Peter Gerwe’s, and we seduced him into getting involved in the Soviets, and he was involved with some of our entertainment stuff. But then he and I became partners in a variety of other things over there, including the mass marketing of t-shirts. It had never been done before. So, that again was interesting to me. We talked to Gosconcert. So, one of the things we could do is we could merchandise t-shirts with the name of the artists. And they said well, I don’t think that would sell here. And we said I think that would sell here. And that opened up a merchandising industry for Gosconcert. They took it way beyond that.
But see, that, I wasn’t in it because I’m a businessman. I was in it because this hasn’t been done, and it’s a huge opportunity for Westerners as well as the Soviets. Let’s expand the whole culture in its relationship with these things. So, that’s how I got involved with Arnold, and then we decided to do some other things, tour some other people, etc., AJ Ventures.
And then one of the things that led us to was a young man in the Netherlands who had been in touch with the national telephone company of the Netherlands, and he came to us and said we’d like to set up a relationship with Gosteleradio* in way that we could joint venture in a telecommunications, private telecommunications company in the Soviet Union. Now, at that point I knew a little about it because I’d done the US Festival and I’d learned some stuff. So, we said okay. Let’s talk about it. So, we created, out of a series of events, the Dutch PTT ended up not being the principal partners. It ended up being the Deutsche PTT, the German telephone company, and we created—
Daniel Satinsky: All of that was after AJ Ventures.
Jim Hickman: Well, it was also a part of AJ Ventures. There’s no distinguishing boundaries here.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. I say that because I was involved with the rare earth oxides business—
Jim Hickman: Yeah, and that was AJ Ventures.
Daniel Satinsky: That was AJ Ventures. And then that collapsed because of the Chinese, and I left you guys. And then I got a phone call from Arnold and said we’re in the telecom business; we’re going to Tbilisi.
Jim Hickman: But see, here’s the thing. What happened with—I almost have his name—the first artist is that one of the ways we were able to get it done is to say we don’t need hard currency. You see, all of the performers who wanted to perform there had to be paid in hard currency, and so it couldn’t happen. And we said that’s okay, pay us in rubles, and we’ll set up a bank account, which we did, and we have rubles. And that’s then when Arnold and I, what we saw was that what you could do with rubles is use the Soviet airline to transport all your stuff to the West and you can pay rubles for that. So, see, how could you get rare earth oxides out of the Soviet Union without paying hard currency? You use a Soviet carrier.
So, we did—and we did the same thing. We bought rare earth oxides with rubles. We went into the ruble business. and it was a part of what we were calling the conversion, we’re converting rubles into foreign currency by buying in the Soviet Union with rubles, getting them to the West with rubles, and selling them in the West for dollars. So, that was the same with the jeans. We set up a manufacturing facility in the Far East to make jeans that we then exported. So, it was…while for Arnold, you know, because he’s the businessman in this venture, for me it was more about what can we do that’s never been done. Let’s turn rubles into dollars. And I know some people who can help us manufacture jeans, and blah-blah-blah.
Daniel Satinsky: But these were your initiatives, they weren’t the Atomic Energy Ministry coming to you and saying hey, we’ve got this opportunity.
Jim Hickman: No.
Daniel Satinsky: You saw this and went after it as entrepreneurs.
Jim Hickman: Yeah, yeah. It was, you know—
Daniel Satinsky: And trailblazers.
Jim Hickman: And often the idea would be Arnold’s—I’ve got an artist, let’s try and tour him. And then my job was the Soviet side—okay, I’ll figure out how to make this happen over here. And I remember, as you may recall, both Arnold and I were in our version of AA [Alcoholics Anonymous]. I was in AA and Arnold was in NA [Narcotics Anonymous], so we had this mutual agreement about not drinking in the biggest alcoholic country in the world.
And we went to the Telecom Ministry in Georgia because we were going to sell our services. Because what we had was a satellite based long distance carrier company. That’s what the beginning was. And we were gathering phone calls to common switches that then in the normal distribution would go into a national line for distribution. So, we were gathering customers, traffic, in a sense, at local switches and then turning it into our satellite carrier, you see? So, we were a private long-distance company.
And we were negotiating with the Ministry of Communications in Georgia, and we basically finished a deal. And we were in the last stage in the Minister’s office, and we had agreed on all the terms, and he brought out the vodka, and he said okay, let’s toast to our partnership. And Arnold looked at me and he said to him, my partner Jim doesn’t really drink alcohol anymore. And he looked at us and he said, “I never do a deal who won’t drink vodka with me.” And so, the deal was off.
Daniel Satinsky: Really?
Jim Hickman: Just like that it was gone. He wouldn’t do it with me because I wouldn’t drink. So, you know, there are all these little stories that fit into the bigger thing that looks like oh, Rustel, you got this big telecommunications company, you must be a businessman to have put all this… It’s not the way it worked.
Now, at the same time with Rustel, you know, Arnold helped raise a lot of money for it. He was then, by that time he had begun to be involved in the venture capital business, so he was building that company and raising money for—we were both raising money for Rustel. So, in a sense AJ Ventures led into that, and at that point it was Rustel. And the partnership in there was, I think it might have been AJ Ventures. I’ll look it up. Because it was the first Soviet-foreign joint venture in telecommunications.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, it was IBCS, probably, by that time.
Jim Hickman: By then we had IB—you’re right. We had then International Business Communication System. That would have made sense. And the German telecom was a partner. So, we had this thing. And raising money for it. And so, for example, one summer I lived in London for three months meeting with venture capitalists led by—I think we had hired… We had hired one of the big accounting firms to represent us at that point.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I remember that, yes.
Jim Hickman: And so, we ended up putting whatever we put together. And then, you know, and Arnold had relationships with most of the key people in the finance side. I mean, I knew them, but was more involved with Russia, because I was the general director by that time of Rustel, which meant that I worked with Soviets who knew much more about the business than I did. And we hired a couple of Westerners who came out of the telecommunications business to run the company.
Daniel Satinsky: You hired Chet [Walker] and then—
Jim Hickman: Yeah.
Daniel Satinsky: Chet and then you hired that guy from Coca-Cola who I never thought too much of, no offense.
Jim Hickman: Yeah. But they were the businesspeople. I again was on top dealing with all the politics, not—
Daniel Satinsky: All right, so I have two questions to ask you. So, did the mythology of this, in my mind was that part of it, this joint venture, came from the Russian side, from the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs not wanting the telecom market dominated all by foreign companies, so they wanted the joint venture to be access to Western technology, but have Russian kind of involvement and control of a satellite telecommunications company. Is that an incorrect memory?
Jim Hickman: Well, no. I mean, your memories are correct for what you experienced. But I’ll give you a different, I’ll give you another aspect of it. But what I always say to people, you know, like we’ve been doing these things on citizen diplomacy, and how did this ever happen. And the perspectives are from the Western side.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Jim Hickman: And as I always say to people, please understand that we have no idea what was going on inside the Soviet Union to make this happen. You talk to people who claim that they set up X, Y and Z, and that never happens without the Cyrillic X, Y and Z having figured out what they wanted and let it happen. But we never knew about that because that wasn’t, you know. Now, we had a little bit of access because Joseph Goldin knew stuff and would tell us, and then I had Ivan as my primary interpreter, and because we were friends it was something he used to say—people don’t understand that after the negotiation is over, I always tell you everything they said. And so, you know, we had our own little insight, but it wasn’t complete, because there’s obviously much more going on than an interpreter or Joseph Goldin can help with.
And so, what you’re saying is potentially true. My experience is that I was approached by a telecom company that expressed interest in setting up a telecom joint venture in the Soviet Union. So, I went to Boris and said this guy wants to do this, what do you think? And it moved on from there. Now, they may have already been thinking about it, just like you say. You see what I mean?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Jim Hickman: It wasn’t what happened in the sense of let’s go … , can you help us do this. But there again, like my original treatise, these ideas emerge more than out of one group of people, so it’s entirely possible that that kind of conversation was underway in the KGB and all those places—god, let’s see if we can get the technology stuff from the West. And then I come in with an opening and Boris goes—calls him and goes, hey guys, we’ve got the opening we’ve been waiting for, and this guy, he doesn’t know what he’s doing, we can use him in any way, let’s do this. So, see what I mean? We don’t know for sure.
But I would agree with your memory that that was potentially happening. It wasn’t like oh, guess what, guys, Deutsche Telecom wants to partner with us—isn’t that a good idea? That’s not what happens. I mean, you know, they’re conspiring, who knows, for years they’re conspiring about ways to get the technology.
And I don’t know if you remember Makarov at the Soviet embassy. He was the KGB resident at the Soviet embassy. And his particular assignment was getting technology from Silicon Valley. That was his primary assignment. And so, when we invited him to come and see Esalen it was like yeah, man, let’s go out there, and these guys are right on top of Silicon Valley, I can really use these guys. And partly I know this because then I told our FBI guy we’re bringing Makarov, and he said, he is not coming for you guys. This is the KGB resident, and his job is to steal our technology, we watch every step he takes everywhere in this country, so if you guys bring him out you’ve got to tell us your entire schedule, because we’re going to watch him the whole time. And they said believe me; he’s coming to steal stuff.
And he stayed in Zen Center, and so there was an FBI car outside of Zen Center, and they would get up at like 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning to do their walking meditation—and Barry used to tell me this—so the FBI guys were looking at all the monks to see if they could see if Makarov was trying to be a fugitive and escape and get down to—
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
Jim Hickman: And then I know some of this because I was writing about some of my experiences with Makarov recently and I did a Google search of him. And when the whole thing broke down, he became a professor of high technology at Moscow University.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
Jim Hickman: That’s exactly who he was, a specialist in technology. So, without a doubt they were thinking about it. And my point is, though, that at least from my view the world is about ideas emerging. It’s not one person does a breakthrough. That doesn’t happen. So, anyway, I was trying to answer your question. Next question, quick.
Daniel Satinsky: The next question, TUSRIF. Remember the U.S. funding agency, and the acronym TUSRIF, T… I think it was a $20 million—so the two fundings I remember was the first funding from Deutsche Bundespost Telecom of like $950,000, and then there was a big loan from TUSRIF, probably for 20 million that was a result of all that stuff you were doing with consultants. Do you remember that?
Jim Hickman: No. I don’t remember the acronym.
Daniel Satinsky: All right, okay.
Jim Hickman: And, you know, it’s sort of like when you ask about how do I transition to business. You see that this isn’t about me being a businessman and trying to figure out how to do business. And what I always said is [if you can] find anyone better than me who wants to be general director, I’m gone. I’m only here to make this thing happen, and once it’s operating, then somebody who knows how to do that needs to come in and do it, which we tried to do. And it could be that those people may have known more about that financing than I did. But I don’t remember the acronym.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay.
Jim Hickman: And I might not have paid attention to that. It was—
Daniel Satinsky: It’s The U.S. Russia Investment Fund. It was a special fund set up by Congress to invest in Russian ventures. If you don’t remember, you don’t remember. That’s fine.
Jim Hickman: No, I never had any involvement with U.S. government sponsored funds. So, that might have happened, but it wouldn’t have happened when I was there, or I would have known about it.
Daniel Satinsky: No, it happened when you were there. I remember the meeting in the conference room, in Sharon [Massachusetts], and…
Jim Hickman: Okay, good. But you know, you remember it, so I don’t need to remember it.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, that’s okay. I’m just trying to clean up my memory. And also, the rumor always about Boris [Kurakin] was that his job had been to collect technologies, that he was also a, I don’t know if spy is the right word, but he was an agent to collect technologies around the world, that that’s what he had been responsible for with Licensingtorg or whatever it was, yeah?
Jim Hickman: The thing about it is that anyone who’s in a position he was in does whatever he can for the intelligence services to contribute to the ultimate agenda of the Soviet state. And so, it’s not like a spy, a KGB officer going out, it is like the mandate for anyone to rise to that position is to do whatever you’re talking about.
That’s his job, is to collect as much data as possible all over the world about things that are important to the Soviet state. So, without a doubt it fit within his mandate. And where I think they were somewhat disappointed sometimes is they always thought they could use us to get what they wanted, and they had never met any group before that said anything you want to know, ask me the right question, I’ll give you all the answers. And that was the KGB, the FBI, the CIA.
And there was one time with the FBI, because I did two lie detector tests with the KGB and about seven or eight with the FBI in different parts of the world. I was in Berlin once and they gave me a call. I got a call in my hotel—come to so-and-so room because we want to do another lie detector test. So, the point was over time, Barry, the main guy at the FBI in San Francisco, he said to me, you know, from our tests, from the analysis of everything you’ve said, you haven’t lied to us at all, but we can also tell there’s things you’re not telling us. And I said Barry, I’ve been going to the Soviet Union for about ten years, I’ve been there over 100 times, and I have told you everything you’ve ever asked me a question about. How is it possible for me to tell you everything that ever happened to me if you don’t ask me about it?
So, you know. So, back to your point, yeah, I’m sure that was a part of Boris’s mandate, and we might have helped him, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think any technology was exchanged in relation to any of the stuff we did.
Daniel Satinsky: Do you agree with me that some of this was that they wanted to do business with people they knew and could trust rather than—
Jim Hickman: Yeah, yeah. No, you stated it well earlier in the conversation, that it was… Partly because they had spent so much time vetting me, and others. I mean, like Joel Schatz. He doesn’t know this. And I didn’t know Joel very well. I was not involved in helping him over there. He did everything himself, and he made incredible contributions. And there were two conversations I had with the KGB asking me about Joel Schatz. Not in-depth or anything, but it’s just what you said, just reaching out to people who they had some tentacle hold on to find out any other information.
And I wasn’t important in that. I’m just giving an example. That would have happened broadly all the time. And they would come to people who someone important would say you can trust this guy, at least. You ought to ask this guy what he knows, because he’ll—you know, because I’m sure they would say because he’s admitted to everybody, he’ll tell you everything he knows, so let’s find out what he knows.
Daniel Satinsky: So, let’s go ask him, yeah. Now, Schatz also had a relationship with Goldin. Goldin seemed to be important.
Jim Hickman: Oh, very important. And that was an introduction I made. Not personally, but I informed Joseph about what Joel was intending to do and encouraged them to get together, that’s all. It’s not like I was a network or anything. But there was very little Joseph did in the first several years we were together that he and I didn’t talk about ahead of time, because we were very good friends. But yes, then a big part of Joel’s success was based on what Joseph did with him. Very much like he did with me at the US Festival and Yushkiavitshus. Joseph knew who to get to around the internet and stuff.
And there was like Velikhov—remember Velikhov, vice president of the Academy of Sciences, who was important, I think, for Joel as well. But Velikhov and I were good friends, and we used to do stuff just, you know, social things together. And especially we used to get drunk together and wander around Moscow—stumble around Moscow together. And he would point stuff out to me and, you know. And it’s like cosmonaut, what was his name, the first guy to walk in space. The main cosmonaut of the whole thing. I’ll think of his name in a minute. But anyway, I remember one time out in Star City where, you know—and the astronauts and cosmonauts, they were the heaviest drinking group of people I have ever seen, and it didn’t affect them very much. I mean, you know, these are the early astronauts, who were really the edge of human development, you know. They were way out there on the edge doing stuff none of us could ever imagine. And like Sevastyanov—do you remember Sevastyanov?
Daniel Satinsky: No.
Jim Hickman: I have his picture right here. Do you remember that guy?
Daniel Satinsky: No.
Jim Hickman: That’s Sevastyanov. But anyway, Sevastyanov, one of the early cosmonauts. And he and I were at [unintelligible] one night, and drinking heavily, and I remember like 4:00 in the morning I was completely—I could hardly see, and Sevastyanov gets up and he says, well, I’ve got to test a new plane this morning at about 7:00, so I should go.
Daniel Satinsky: [Laughs.]
Jim Hickman: And I’m like unbelievable, you know. Leonov, that’s who I was trying to think of. Cosmonaut Leonov was the first guy to walk in space. And we were out at Star City at one point, you know, again celebrating whatever we were celebrating, and he was in his uniform with all of his medals. He took his coat off, his uniform off, and he gave it to me and said put this on. And he had somebody take a picture of the two of us with me wearing his cosmonaut uniform and our arms around each other. And I showed this to somebody in the CIA at some point and they’re like this is impossible, this could never have happened. You know, it’s that sort of thing.
What I was involved in was not, you know, serious business, this and that, but I just was, you know, people liked me, and they ended up trusting me, to the degree they were able. There’s always a limit. And so, it’s like with Gorbachev, when we brought Gorbachev back to the U.S.—I mean, back to the USSR—well, Russia at that point. We landed at Sheremetyevo, and we got off the plane, and they ushered us into the VIP lounge where there was going to be a little…a few friends to greet him. And around the table, it was very interesting, because you may remember that we used to watch how the Politburo positioned itself on Lenin’s tomb.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Jim Hickman: And so, we walked in, and every member of the former politburo was sitting around the table. And I’m like, Jesus, I know spies who would pay me a million dollars to sit in this. They were all there to greet Gorbachev and then some other people. And I said to Gorbachev, you know, I think I’m not sure I should really be here. He said no-no-no, you have to join us, sit right here next to me. Which I did. And he got up and said I want to introduce you to Jim Hickman. He’s a U.S. millionaire who has given his life to help us make all this happen. And I’m like, see, that’s the only way they could imagine it could be done, because that was their image. No young person like me could just take three weeks out and fly all over the place with Gorbachev and, you know, blah-blah-blah. And so… But it was that sort of thing. They all had an image of me. And there must have been other people, too. I’m not saying I was unique. But there had to have been an image of some degree of trust in that I would tell them the truth if they asked me a question. And so yeah.
And so, then Peter Gerwe is a good example. But that’s where the business thing moved, see? With Peter we had this StoryFirst Entertainment, we did a few things, and then Peter saw, as the businessman Peter, that there’s a huge opportunity here in the radio/TV business. And so, he decided I’m going to move to Moscow and start buying up radio stations. And I’m like that’s not my path, you know. I’m not going to live in Moscow and do this business stuff. So, he moved forward, largely based on people I had introduced him to, or he and I had worked with through my connections, etc.
And at one point—and then, you know, I don’t remember, I don’t know all the details, but as I understood it, he married the daughter of one of the rich guys over there who helped finance everything. And what I would say is there was, you know, the oligarch, which is synonymous with the Mob. I mean, you know, you can’t distinguish. It’s not that they’re all mobsters, but there isn’t any differentiation between being a billionaire and having all the friends in the Mob.
So, at a certain point, I don’t know, a couple years into his building his company he wrote me an email saying, you know, everything is going great, and I owe most of it to you, because you were the one who introduced me to everyone who has been essential to my building this company. And so, I wrote him back and said Peter, based on that, you think I could get a little bit of stock in your company? And he said, Jim, the people who own the company now I don’t think would agree to that. And I’m like okay. I don’t want to go any further with this. Those are not people I want to argue with, you know.
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
Jim Hickman: But it’s that sort of thing. I was an introducer to people, and—
Daniel Satinsky: Right. So, you know there’s a Russian phrase which I think describes you, nash chelovek. Do you remember that? Do you remember any Russians—
Jim Hickman: What did you say?
Daniel Satinsky: Nash chelovek. Nash is our, and chelovek is guy.
Jim Hickman: Yeah, yeah, man, human.
Daniel Satinsky: I have been introduced in different circumstances—oh, he’s an American, but he’s nash chelovek, meaning he’s trustworthy, he understands us, he’s not going to give us lectures, you know, all of that complex of things. And you were that.
Jim Hickman: Well, and I think at a certain point it would be added that he does not represent the U.S. government and the intelligence services.
Daniel Satinsky: Absolutely right, yes. That’s another part of that.
Jim Hickman: They came to know that.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Jim Hickman: And that was useful, to a certain degree. But at a certain point, you know, well, now we need a professional. I understood. And it was fine with me. I was always ready to see if there was something else. Now, on the business side, however, there was a point at which, like when I was leaving Esalen, and then I was working with the Billy Joel tour—in fact it may have been, I think it was Billy Joel’s manager who introduced me to Arnold. I think it was Billy Joel’s manager or PR rep who also represented a couple of Arnold’s people.
Daniel Satinsky: I have a memory that Arnold told me that you met through Billy Joel’s concert.
Jim Hickman: Through Billy Joel, yeah. And was making—
Daniel Satinsky: You were talking about business and—
Jim Hickman: Oh, business, yeah. And at a certain point, like with Billy Joel. Billy Joel was a good example of he didn’t need to be paid. He was going to pay for it all himself. And in one conversation where someone asked him why are you doing this, he said when my daughter grows up and asks me what did you do in the Cold War, Daddy, I want to be able to tell her what I did. So, he was really motivated by a deep understanding that going over there and doing what no one had ever done before would open up things in a dramatic way. And that, of course, appealed to me. It was one reason we got along, because we were into that. Not, you know, they’re going to charge, and they want you to pay them this and all that other stuff.
And a part of what came to me during those sorts of activities was that what I did in the nonprofit world and citizen diplomacy gave me an opportunity to do these other things. And I wanted to pay the Soviets back in the business world for what they had given me in the nonprofit world, so I was interested in helping the businesses to move forward, and by doing that, enriching the Soviet business culture, and etc. But not designing some business that I wanted to make into something. But some of that has changed now as I’ve gotten older, and I’m now sort of more focused on working on a financial legacy for myself and the family and da-da-da-da-da-da. But that’s all substantively possible because of everything I’ve done up to now. And so—
Daniel Satinsky: So, how and when did you ease out of Rustel and out of Russia? How did you leave Rustel and when?
Jim Hickman: Well, a major turning point was that we had a meeting, I think it was in London, with several of our primary investors. We were raising another $25 million or something, and we had several of our primary investors. Boris was there. We had a couple of the Soviets, the partner representing the partnership. And we spent at least a day negotiating, and looking at everything, and seeing what the future was. And I remember then Arnold and I and whoever else, Mark Butz, probably, and the investors were talking about it, and they basically said, in whatever way it was said, that we’re making so much money now on our investments outside of the Soviet Union we don’t really think investing more inside the Soviet Union is a good business opportunity, so we’re not going to invest in this next stage.
And that changed the whole company. It moved into the Russian control. We couldn’t bring the money in anymore. And so that was the transition. I was no longer—I then left as general director because we weren’t financing it anymore at that point. And they did whatever they did. I stayed in touch with, you know—
Daniel Satinsky: Do you remember what year that was, Jim?
Jim Hickman: Well, I can look it up.
Daniel Satinsky: ’96, ’97?
Jim Hickman: I’d have to look it up. But have you interviewed Georgy Gluskin?
Daniel Satinsky: I haven’t interviewed Georgy. He knows about my project and I’ve kind of waited to talk to him about this.
Jim Hickman: Yeah, that’s good. And this is Mosaic Network. Okay, that was the next one. That was the undersea cable, so that’s what came next.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, okay.
Jim Hickman: Polarnet project. I have managing director 2002 to 2008 in my bio. And then we moved to—then at the same time we were working on Mosaic Network, which I was doing with Jim Garrison, and that was the undersea cable business where the Soviets wanted to put a cable under the polar ice cap and da-da-da-da. And that, I had an office in Washington, D.C. and was working with a number of other people, but some of the same Soviets. And Georgy was involved with both those things. And he’s kept me apprised a little bit about how Rustel is doing. Boris, his son, moved in and began to do something. And then as I recall—Georgy would know the details—his son got indicted for something, was doing something illegal, which of course is normal in Russia, in the Soviet Union. What’s abnormal is getting caught.
Daniel Satinsky: Is getting caught, right. Yeah. So, he bothered somebody, otherwise it wouldn’t—
Jim Hickman: Exactly, exactly. But Georgy knows this and had stayed in touch a little bit with some of those things, and would know more about the more recent years of both Rustel and the Polarnet project, because the Polarnet project was probably the thing I was most involved as a business in, because I was really running the U.S. side, raising the money, helping design the financial plan, etc., so in a sense it was the culmination of what I’d learned in developing a U.S.-Soviet joint venture business venture that I knew a lot more about at that point. I knew a lot about telecommunications, how to raise money, how to put a business plan together, how to sell it and all that stuff. So, that was probably the last…let me see what came after that, because that was Mosaic Networks, yeah, and then polar grid.
And then I moved to Wisdom University. And that was over in 2009. And during that period, I was working with Jim and Wisdom University. But that was sort of…see, this would have been 10, 15, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, because by then I had moved to Bolivia. And Danny is 15, and we were living here when he was born, so I’d been here a couple years before that. And that was—but I was—but then, you know, it’s like now. You can still run a lot of this over the internet. But by then I was on my way out, and I was no longer communicating much with people who were doing stuff in the Soviet Union.
And I remember there was a point at which I knew I was finished with the Soviet Union—Russia. It was Russia at that point. And I spent six or eight months looking around to see what part of the world I wanted to get involved in next, because I was done with Russia. And I think my last trip there was ’99 or 2000. And I crossed off Africa. Too much violence, too many guns, too many, you know, not a good idea. And then with Jim Garrison I was working with the State of the World Forum, through which I met Oscar Olivera, and got involved in the water issue. And through that I met his sister, and then we fell in love and got married and I moved down here.
Daniel Satinsky: Ah, okay. So, that all makes sense. So, given the state of U.S.-Russia relations now, what can we learn from or apply from the citizen diplomacy period to the present? I mean, in some ways I think the citizen diplomacy movement, along the lines of what you were saying, reflects a change of technology that was going on at the same time with satellites, and satellite communications, and then later internet. This huge technological change allowed for it. We’re kind of going through, you know, the conversation we’re having over Zoom is also a technological change. And I’m just wondering if you’ve thought about this in terms of people who are concerned about the degree of polarization between U.S. and Russia now, the information silos, the inability to actually communicate even on most basic facts. Any thoughts about that?
Jim Hickman: Well, yeah. The dilemma you just described is primarily a result of belief systems that drive our leaders. It has very little to do with the citizen diplomacy help or not, or technology. It’s about who we believe we are and who we believe they are. Now, what citizen diplomacy was about was changing all of that, and it did, and continues to do a great job by getting people together. But our countries are still run by people who are over 70 and who are victims of the old idea that the brain cannot be changed. And in fact, we now know the brain can change itself until we die. But you have to want it, and you have to do something about it. And so, can you imagine Donald Trump or Joe Biden saying wow, I never understood that, I think I’ll look at the world differently and restructure my brain so that I can relate to Putin in a different way?
Daniel Satinsky: Right. No.
Jim Hickman: No. It’s up to young people to do it. So, one thing is—and it’s one reason why I spend a lot of my teaching focus with young people, because they can affect who they are. And as we talk about in my classes, you can actually now participate in your own evolution, and it’s a responsibility you have as a human to create a new civilization in this new century. The problem we face is that all the people who make the big decisions are thinking the 20th century has the answers, and it doesn’t. But that’s all they know.
Now, that was similar to when we got started. We realized the government couldn’t do it, so it was about people. And a significant impact was made, without a doubt. When I sat…well, I didn’t sit much. But when I was at the lunch with Reagan and Gorbachev in Santa Barbara, and I always stood behind Gorbachev because we did this one fundraiser in Chicago, and people paid like $1,000 a head to come, and there were like 100 people who came just to say hi to Gorbachev, you know.
And I always stood behind him to protect him, in a sense, with his bodyguards. And there was one…there was this old woman, she must have been 70 or something, and she was just smashing us like this to just touch him, you know. And I’m like what do I do? It’s an older woman. I mean, the Russian bodyguard, no problem. He just took care of her. But I’m like, whoa!
So, at the Reagan-Gorbachev lunch I just watched them, and I had this deep sense of history that had called these two men to make the pact they made around nuclear weapons, and that it was unlikely any other two men could have done the same thing, because they both had the history, the position, the sentiment, etc. to make history together. And it’s not like Reagan did this stuff. It’s the two of them really changed history. And I had a sense of their energetic field when I was there that was very powerful. So, let’s see what happens when Biden meets with Putin in the next couple of weeks. There’s some meeting coming up.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, that will be in June, but it’ll be—
Jim Hickman: Well, the problem is they’re still both in power, you see, and so they have protection. And of course, Putin—you know, I’ve told people this before—I met Putin once at the U.S. Embassy. I didn’t know who he was. And I never even knew this. Someone from Ambassador Hartman’s group reminded me of this several years ago. He was just a…he was invited as an apparatchik* who was clearly a KGB guy coming up in power. But he came up, much like all the rest who’ve risen to that position, with a deep sense that Mother Russia should control the world and their biggest enemy is the U.S. So, until that belief system changes.
Now, how do we do that through citizen diplomacy experience? Well, it’s like I was listening to an interview with Vlad Pozner the other day and he said what a number of other people have said on Humanity Rising and the different discussions that are going on. He said what we need to do is get 100,000 U.S. students and exchange them for 100,000 Russian students, and they each need to spend a year in each other’s countries studying at each other’s universities, and that’s the beginning of the change. And that’s, of course, a citizen diplomacy learning. That’s what we did. But there doesn’t seem to be the impetus. Certainly, with the recovery and whatever is next from the Trump era that sort of thing could not happen.
And then it’s about when…we’ve got to stop electing people over 60. We need younger people who have a different view to move into the world, not just here, but on the other side as well. But that then argues, again out of citizen diplomacy, what we were doing with Kokoshin.
Kokoshin became the Minister of Defense at some point. And Kokoshin—I know you probably, if you’ve read any of my stuff you might have seen this, that Kokoshin was the one who recommended I call the FBI and tell them what we were doing. Because he said it’s ridiculous that you have all these FBI people asking you all the time. Ask for one guy to be in charge of everything and always tell them everything.
So, you know, we were able to get some of the younger people together who rose in positions of power. How effective that was in the longer-term is questionable now. But that’s a part of the strategy. We get the Kokoshins of the world with their counterparts over here who are open enough to look at opportunities.
And I think, from my own point of view, the kind of perspective that I’ve been giving to you is an important part of what people ought to understand. There’s something bigger than us that wants the species to survive and life to thrive, and if we give ourselves over to our heart and mind to the impulse to become more than who we are right now, it can have a huge impact. But it’s got to be done, it probably has to be done outside of government. Who in government is going to talk like that? And many of them might feel that way, but they’d never say it because they won’t get reelected again.It’s a strange world.
But I think there’s a lot to be learned from citizen diplomacy around getting people—you know, it’s like I was at the Pentagon once talking with someone, and I met this guy who was in charge of designing a missile that would penetrate when it hit the earth’s surface in Moscow, it would penetrate to the depth of the Moscow subway. And as you may remember, the Moscow subway was built—
Daniel Satinsky: That was a bomb shelter, right.
Jim Hickman: Yeah, it was a bomb shelter. So, this guy’s job was to figure out and to design a missile that would penetrate to the bomb shelter and kill all the people. And he said to me over lunch, but I love what you guys are doing. I want to know more about what’s going on with your conversations with ordinary Russians. So, if you get to the…there are lots of people who want this to happen, and it’s just building the cultural permission for some of this to surface more readily. And that’s a big job.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Well, it’s a job that has to be done by not our generation, but you know.
Jim Hickman: Exactly. The younger people who can do this. And so once again—
Daniel Satinsky: One of the reasons I want to write this book is to preserve pieces of things that this conversation and others, for other people to know they exist and to follow up with. Because if you don’t know that it ever happened, it’s very hard to—you think you’re reimagining the world, right?
Jim Hickman: Exactly. And I think to the degree you can, to write it in a way that when someone reads it, it isn’t just oh, they did that 40 years ago, but it describes principles of interaction that also offer solutions to today’s problems, and give us a pathway into a new kind of a global collaborative civilization instead of where we are today. Though we did, I think—I think the citizen diplomat and related political actions out of it—it’s like Ronald Reagan couldn’t have done what he did without public support. And so, there was an element that surfaced, that people wanted this thing to happen. And so that is crucial, that the citizenry has a say in this, not directly, but by the vastness of our numbers, and the expression of our sensitivity.
It’s sort of like the astronaut/cosmonaut meeting, you know. It was resisted by NASA because they were always afraid astronauts would give away secrets, and there was the militarization of space. And the initial discussions were always about this has nothing to do with our country’s policies, it has to do with how did our perceptions change when we went to space.
Because Rusty tells this story. The only place astronauts and cosmonauts regularly were able to talk together, even though they had minders with them, was at the Paris air show. And at the Paris air show one year, Rusty and [Aleksei] Yeliseyev were able to get into a two-seater experimental plane and close the cockpit. And I don’t know what was going on, but I can imagine the KGB guy was kind of nervous. And as Rusty tells the story, the first thing that happened was Yeliseyev turned to him and said, “Rusty, when you were in space, did you see God?” And Rusty says that’s what we want to talk about. That’s what it’s about.
And so, it’s like we’ve always done, the conversations are about becoming more fully human. They’re not about stealing your technology or blah-blah-blah. It’s about who can we be together in a significant way. And that’s not something Putin and Biden will ever talk about together because it’s not on their agenda. So, it’s up to people, and it’s up to young people to now do the same thing we did in much bigger numbers.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Jim Hickman: Okay, thank you very much.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, thank you. And I will use some of what you said, and I will clear it with you. But the fact that you said it gives me something to put in and help to tie the circle together at the end, so I appreciate that.
Jim Hickman: Yeah, and when you interview people and they claim they did X, Y and Z, you need to ask them, and do you have any idea what the Soviets were doing while you were doing this? Because that’s the whole thing. We forget that there was an underlying platform being developed over there. And we have no idea what it was.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah. So, it’s reflected in books like “Who Lost Russia.” And people will say, anyone who knows anything will say we never lost it because it was never ours. And I really believe that a lot of what drove U.S. experts and business people was the desire on the Russian side to get access to technology and knowledge that they absorbed very quickly, over a ten-year period, so they didn’t need foreigners anymore, and that our impact was much more subtle than we give ourselves credit for. It was there, but we weren’t driving the train, and we act as if we’re always driving the train.
Jim Hickman: Yeah, exactly. And it’s like I’ve seen written in a book about activism. People go and they demonstrate, like Black Lives Matter or whatever, they demonstrate for a while and then it goes out of fashion and it’s over. That never changes anything. Activism is a lifelong process. It takes a long, long time. You’ve got to keep going and expand slowly and recognize that’s how change occurs.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. So, you know there’s a Russian phrase which I think describes you, nash chelovek. Do you remember that? Do you remember any Russians—
Jim Hickman: What did you say?
Daniel Satinsky: Nash chelovek. Nash is our, and chelovek is guy.
Jim Hickman: Yeah, yeah, man, human.
Daniel Satinsky: I have been introduced in different circumstances—oh, he’s an American, but he’s nash chelovek, meaning he’s trustworthy, he understands us, he’s not going to give us lectures, you know, all of that complex of things. And you were that.
Jim Hickman: Well, and I think at a certain point it would be added that he does not represent the U.S. government and the intelligence services.
Daniel Satinsky: Absolutely right, yes. That’s another part of that.
Jim Hickman: They came to know that.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Jim Hickman: And that was useful, to a certain degree. But at a certain point, you know, well, now we need a professional. I understood. And it was fine with me. I was always ready to see if there was something else. Now, on the business side, however, there was a point at which, like when I was leaving Esalen, and then I was working with the Billy Joel tour—in fact it may have been, I think it was Billy Joel’s manager who introduced me to Arnold. I think it was Billy Joel’s manager or PR rep who also represented a couple of Arnold’s people.
Daniel Satinsky: I have a memory that Arnold told me that you met through Billy Joel’s concert.
Jim Hickman: Through Billy Joel, yeah. And was making—
Daniel Satinsky: You were talking about business and—
Jim Hickman: Oh, business, yeah. And at a certain point, like with Billy Joel. Billy Joel was a good example of he didn’t need to be paid. He was going to pay for it all himself. And in one conversation where someone asked him why are you doing this, he said when my daughter grows up and asks me what did you do in the Cold War, Daddy, I want to be able to tell her what I did. So, he was really motivated by a deep understanding that going over there and doing what no one had ever done before would open up things in a dramatic way. And that, of course, appealed to me. It was one reason we got along, because we were into that. Not, you know, they’re going to charge, and they want you to pay them this and all that other stuff.
And a part of what came to me during those sorts of activities was that what I did in the nonprofit world and citizen diplomacy gave me an opportunity to do these other things. And I wanted to pay the Soviets back in the business world for what they had given me in the nonprofit world, so I was interested in helping the businesses to move forward, and by doing that, enriching the Soviet business culture, and etc. But not designing some business that I wanted to make into something. But some of that has changed now as I’ve gotten older, and I’m now sort of more focused on working on a financial legacy for myself and the family and da-da-da-da-da-da. But that’s all substantively possible because of everything I’ve done up to now. And so—
Daniel Satinsky: So, how and when did you ease out of Rustel and out of Russia? How did you leave Rustel and when?
Jim Hickman: Well, a major turning point was that we had a meeting, I think it was in London, with several of our primary investors. We were raising another $25 million or something, and we had several of our primary investors. Boris was there. We had a couple of the Soviets, the partner representing the partnership. And we spent at least a day negotiating, and looking at everything, and seeing what the future was. And I remember then Arnold and I and whoever else, Mark Butz, probably, and the investors were talking about it, and they basically said, in whatever way it was said, that we’re making so much money now on our investments outside of the Soviet Union we don’t really think investing more inside the Soviet Union is a good business opportunity, so we’re not going to invest in this next stage.
And that changed the whole company. It moved into the Russian control. We couldn’t bring the money in anymore. And so that was the transition. I was no longer—I then left as general director because we weren’t financing it anymore at that point. And they did whatever they did. I stayed in touch with, you know—
Daniel Satinsky: Do you remember what year that was, Jim?
Jim Hickman: Well, I can look it up.
Daniel Satinsky: ’96, ’97?
Jim Hickman: I’d have to look it up. But have you interviewed Georgy Gluskin?
Daniel Satinsky: I haven’t interviewed Georgy. He knows about my project and I’ve kind of waited to talk to him about this.
Jim Hickman: Yeah, that’s good. And this is Mosaic Network. Okay, that was the next one. That was the undersea cable, so that’s what came next.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, okay.
Jim Hickman: Polarnet project. I have managing director 2002 to 2008 in my bio. And then we moved to—then at the same time we were working on Mosaic Network, which I was doing with Jim Garrison, and that was the undersea cable business where the Soviets wanted to put a cable under the polar ice cap and da-da-da-da. And that, I had an office in Washington, D.C. and was working with a number of other people, but some of the same Soviets. And Georgy was involved with both those things. And he’s kept me apprised a little bit about how Rustel is doing. Boris, his son, moved in and began to do something. And then as I recall—Georgy would know the details—his son got indicted for something, was doing something illegal, which of course is normal in Russia, in the Soviet Union. What’s abnormal is getting caught.
Daniel Satinsky: Is getting caught, right. Yeah. So, he bothered somebody, otherwise it wouldn’t—
Jim Hickman: Exactly, exactly. But Georgy knows this and had stayed in touch a little bit with some of those things, and would know more about the more recent years of both Rustel and the Polarnet project, because the Polarnet project was probably the thing I was most involved as a business in, because I was really running the U.S. side, raising the money, helping design the financial plan, etc., so in a sense it was the culmination of what I’d learned in developing a U.S.-Soviet joint venture business venture that I knew a lot more about at that point. I knew a lot about telecommunications, how to raise money, how to put a business plan together, how to sell it and all that stuff. So, that was probably the last…let me see what came after that, because that was Mosaic Networks, yeah, and then polar grid.
And then I moved to Wisdom University. And that was over in 2009. And during that period, I was working with Jim and Wisdom University. But that was sort of…see, this would have been 10, 15, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, because by then I had moved to Bolivia. And Danny is 15, and we were living here when he was born, so I’d been here a couple years before that. And that was—but I was—but then, you know, it’s like now. You can still run a lot of this over the internet. But by then I was on my way out, and I was no longer communicating much with people who were doing stuff in the Soviet Union.
And I remember there was a point at which I knew I was finished with the Soviet Union—Russia. It was Russia at that point. And I spent six or eight months looking around to see what part of the world I wanted to get involved in next, because I was done with Russia. And I think my last trip there was ’99 or 2000. And I crossed off Africa. Too much violence, too many guns, too many, you know, not a good idea. And then with Jim Garrison I was working with the State of the World Forum, through which I met Oscar Olivera, and got involved in the water issue. And through that I met his sister, and then we fell in love and got married and I moved down here.
Daniel Satinsky: Ah, okay. So, that all makes sense. So, given the state of U.S.-Russia relations now, what can we learn from or apply from the citizen diplomacy period to the present? I mean, in some ways I think the citizen diplomacy movement, along the lines of what you were saying, reflects a change of technology that was going on at the same time with satellites, and satellite communications, and then later internet. This huge technological change allowed for it. We’re kind of going through, you know, the conversation we’re having over Zoom is also a technological change. And I’m just wondering if you’ve thought about this in terms of people who are concerned about the degree of polarization between U.S. and Russia now, the information silos, the inability to actually communicate even on most basic facts. Any thoughts about that?
Jim Hickman: Well, yeah. The dilemma you just described is primarily a result of belief systems that drive our leaders. It has very little to do with the citizen diplomacy help or not, or technology. It’s about who we believe we are and who we believe they are. Now, what citizen diplomacy was about was changing all of that, and it did, and continues to do a great job by getting people together. But our countries are still run by people who are over 70 and who are victims of the old idea that the brain cannot be changed. And in fact, we now know the brain can change itself until we die. But you have to want it, and you have to do something about it. And so, can you imagine Donald Trump or Joe Biden saying wow, I never understood that, I think I’ll look at the world differently and restructure my brain so that I can relate to Putin in a different way?
Daniel Satinsky: Right. No.
Jim Hickman: No. It’s up to young people to do it. So, one thing is—and it’s one reason why I spend a lot of my teaching focus with young people, because they can affect who they are. And as we talk about in my classes, you can actually now participate in your own evolution, and it’s a responsibility you have as a human to create a new civilization in this new century. The problem we face is that all the people who make the big decisions are thinking the 20th century has the answers, and it doesn’t. But that’s all they know.
Now, that was similar to when we got started. We realized the government couldn’t do it, so it was about people. And a significant impact was made, without a doubt. When I sat…well, I didn’t sit much. But when I was at the lunch with Reagan and Gorbachev in Santa Barbara, and I always stood behind Gorbachev because we did this one fundraiser in Chicago, and people paid like $1,000 a head to come, and there were like 100 people who came just to say hi to Gorbachev, you know.
And I always stood behind him to protect him, in a sense, with his bodyguards. And there was one…there was this old woman, she must have been 70 or something, and she was just smashing us like this to just touch him, you know. And I’m like what do I do? It’s an older woman. I mean, the Russian bodyguard, no problem. He just took care of her. But I’m like, whoa!
So, at the Reagan-Gorbachev lunch I just watched them, and I had this deep sense of history that had called these two men to make the pact they made around nuclear weapons, and that it was unlikely any other two men could have done the same thing, because they both had the history, the position, the sentiment, etc. to make history together. And it’s not like Reagan did this stuff. It’s the two of them really changed history. And I had a sense of their energetic field when I was there that was very powerful. So, let’s see what happens when Biden meets with Putin in the next couple of weeks. There’s some meeting coming up.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, that will be in June, but it’ll be—
Jim Hickman: Well, the problem is they’re still both in power, you see, and so they have protection. And of course, Putin—you know, I’ve told people this before—I met Putin once at the U.S. Embassy. I didn’t know who he was. And I never even knew this. Someone from Ambassador Hartman’s group reminded me of this several years ago. He was just a…he was invited as an apparatchik* who was clearly a KGB guy coming up in power. But he came up, much like all the rest who’ve risen to that position, with a deep sense that Mother Russia should control the world and their biggest enemy is the U.S. So, until that belief system changes.
Now, how do we do that through citizen diplomacy experience? Well, it’s like I was listening to an interview with Vlad Pozner the other day and he said what a number of other people have said on Humanity Rising and the different discussions that are going on. He said what we need to do is get 100,000 U.S. students and exchange them for 100,000 Russian students, and they each need to spend a year in each other’s countries studying at each other’s universities, and that’s the beginning of the change. And that’s, of course, a citizen diplomacy learning. That’s what we did. But there doesn’t seem to be the impetus. Certainly, with the recovery and whatever is next from the Trump era that sort of thing could not happen.
And then it’s about when…we’ve got to stop electing people over 60. We need younger people who have a different view to move into the world, not just here, but on the other side as well. But that then argues, again out of citizen diplomacy, what we were doing with Kokoshin.
Kokoshin became the Minister of Defense at some point. And Kokoshin—I know you probably, if you’ve read any of my stuff you might have seen this, that Kokoshin was the one who recommended I call the FBI and tell them what we were doing. Because he said it’s ridiculous that you have all these FBI people asking you all the time. Ask for one guy to be in charge of everything and always tell them everything.
So, you know, we were able to get some of the younger people together who rose in positions of power. How effective that was in the longer-term is questionable now. But that’s a part of the strategy. We get the Kokoshins of the world with their counterparts over here who are open enough to look at opportunities.
And I think, from my own point of view, the kind of perspective that I’ve been giving to you is an important part of what people ought to understand. There’s something bigger than us that wants the species to survive and life to thrive, and if we give ourselves over to our heart and mind to the impulse to become more than who we are right now, it can have a huge impact. But it’s got to be done, it probably has to be done outside of government. Who in government is going to talk like that? And many of them might feel that way, but they’d never say it because they won’t get reelected again.It’s a strange world.
But I think there’s a lot to be learned from citizen diplomacy around getting people—you know, it’s like I was at the Pentagon once talking with someone, and I met this guy who was in charge of designing a missile that would penetrate when it hit the earth’s surface in Moscow, it would penetrate to the depth of the Moscow subway. And as you may remember, the Moscow subway was built—
Daniel Satinsky: That was a bomb shelter, right.
Jim Hickman: Yeah, it was a bomb shelter. So, this guy’s job was to figure out and to design a missile that would penetrate to the bomb shelter and kill all the people. And he said to me over lunch, but I love what you guys are doing. I want to know more about what’s going on with your conversations with ordinary Russians. So, if you get to the…there are lots of people who want this to happen, and it’s just building the cultural permission for some of this to surface more readily. And that’s a big job.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Well, it’s a job that has to be done by not our generation, but you know.
Jim Hickman: Exactly. The younger people who can do this. And so once again—
Daniel Satinsky: One of the reasons I want to write this book is to preserve pieces of things that this conversation and others, for other people to know they exist and to follow up with. Because if you don’t know that it ever happened, it’s very hard to—you think you’re reimagining the world, right?
Jim Hickman: Exactly. And I think to the degree you can, to write it in a way that when someone reads it, it isn’t just oh, they did that 40 years ago, but it describes principles of interaction that also offer solutions to today’s problems, and give us a pathway into a new kind of a global collaborative civilization instead of where we are today. Though we did, I think—I think the citizen diplomat and related political actions out of it—it’s like Ronald Reagan couldn’t have done what he did without public support. And so, there was an element that surfaced, that people wanted this thing to happen. And so that is crucial, that the citizenry has a say in this, not directly, but by the vastness of our numbers, and the expression of our sensitivity.
It’s sort of like the astronaut/cosmonaut meeting, you know. It was resisted by NASA because they were always afraid astronauts would give away secrets, and there was the militarization of space. And the initial discussions were always about this has nothing to do with our country’s policies, it has to do with how did our perceptions change when we went to space.
Because Rusty tells this story. The only place astronauts and cosmonauts regularly were able to talk together, even though they had minders with them, was at the Paris air show. And at the Paris air show one year, Rusty and [Aleksei] Yeliseyev were able to get into a two-seater experimental plane and close the cockpit. And I don’t know what was going on, but I can imagine the KGB guy was kind of nervous. And as Rusty tells the story, the first thing that happened was Yeliseyev turned to him and said, “Rusty, when you were in space, did you see God?” And Rusty says that’s what we want to talk about. That’s what it’s about.
And so, it’s like we’ve always done, the conversations are about becoming more fully human. They’re not about stealing your technology or blah-blah-blah. It’s about who can we be together in a significant way. And that’s not something Putin and Biden will ever talk about together because it’s not on their agenda. So, it’s up to people, and it’s up to young people to now do the same thing we did in much bigger numbers.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Jim Hickman: Okay, thank you very much.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, thank you. And I will use some of what you said, and I will clear it with you. But the fact that you said it gives me something to put in and help to tie the circle together at the end, so I appreciate that.
Jim Hickman: Yeah, and when you interview people and they claim they did X, Y and Z, you need to ask them, and do you have any idea what the Soviets were doing while you were doing this? Because that’s the whole thing. We forget that there was an underlying platform being developed over there. And we have no idea what it was.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah. So, it’s reflected in books like “Who Lost Russia.” And people will say, anyone who knows anything will say we never lost it because it was never ours. And I really believe that a lot of what drove U.S. experts and business people was the desire on the Russian side to get access to technology and knowledge that they absorbed very quickly, over a ten-year period, so they didn’t need foreigners anymore, and that our impact was much more subtle than we give ourselves credit for. It was there, but we weren’t driving the train, and we act as if we’re always driving the train.
Jim Hickman: Yeah, exactly. And it’s like I’ve seen written in a book about activism. People go and they demonstrate, like Black Lives Matter or whatever, they demonstrate for a while and then it goes out of fashion and it’s over. That never changes anything. Activism is a lifelong process. It takes a long, long time. You’ve got to keep going and expand slowly and recognize that’s how change occurs.
State Committee of Television and Radio Broadcasting
State Concert Association of the USSR
party official in the USSR
Square
Lane
Street
Small house
Commonwealth of Independent States
One of us, our guy
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