agency a few years earlier after coming across one of its ads in the
classified pages of the Washington Post.
Fuisz’s work for the CIA involved setting up dummy corporations
throughout the Middle East that employed agency assets, giving them
a non-embassy cover to operate outside the scrutiny of local
intelligence services. One of the companies supplied oil-rig operators
to the national oil company of Syria, where he was particularly well
connected.
Fuisz suspected Baxter had gotten itself back in Arab countries’
good graces through chicanery and set out to prove it using his Syrian
connections. He sent a female operative he’d recruited to obtain a
memorandum kept on file in the offices of the Arab League committee
in Damascus that was in charge of enforcing the boycott. It showed
that Baxter had provided the committee detailed documentation about
its recent sale of an Israeli plant and promised it wouldn’t make new
investments in Israel or sell the country new technologies. This put
Baxter in violation of a U.S. anti-boycott law, enacted in 1977, that
forbade American companies from participating in any foreign boycott
or supplying blacklist officials any information that demonstrated
cooperation with the boycott.
Fuisz sent one copy of the explosive memo to Baxter’s board of
directors and another to the Wall Street Journal, which published a
front-page story about it. Fuisz didn’t let the matter rest there. He
subsequently obtained and leaked letters Baxter’s general counsel had
written to a general in the Syrian army that corroborated the memo.
The revelations led the Justice Department to open an investigation.
In March 1993, Baxter was forced to plead guilty to a felony charge of
violating the anti-boycott law and to pay $6.6 million in civil and
criminal fines. The company was suspended from new federal
contracts for four months and barred from doing business in Syria and
Saudi Arabia for two years. The reputational damage also cost it a $50
million contract with a big hospital group.
For most people, this would have been ample vindication. But not
for Fuisz. It irked him that Loucks had survived the scandal and
remained CEO of Baxter. So he decided to subject his foe to one last