Richard Fuisz

Richard Carl Fuisz (born December 12, 1939) is an American physician, inventor, and entrepreneur, with connections to the United States military and intelligence community.

He holds more than two hundred patents worldwide, in such diverse fields as drug delivery, interactive media, and cryptography, and has lectured on these topics internationally.

Fuisz is a member of the Board of Regents of Georgetown University, where he and his brother created an annual scholarship honoring their deceased elder sibling, and established the first endowed professorship at the Georgetown University School of Medicine.

Fuisz was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to Anton Fujs, a Slovenian immigrant from Murska Sobota and Margaret Matuš, a Slovenian-American whose parents had migrated from Prekmurje.

Fuisz and his older brother Robert graduated from Bethlehem Catholic High School before attending Georgetown University, where they both studied biology and eventually completed medical school.

After finishing his internship and residency at the Harvard Medical School Cambridge Hospital campus, Fuisz served as a general physician and lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, and was stationed at the White House under the Johnson administration.

Fuisz and his family hold dual citizenship in the United States and Slovenia, and Fuisz endowed the Richard and Lorraine Fuisz Library and the Zoltan Fuisz Scholarship Fund at the Moravian Academy for children of Slovenian ancestry.

In the 1970s, Fuisz and his brother co-founded Medcom, Inc., a New York-based firm producing educational and training materials for health-care providers and consumers; Fuisz himself played the role of a physician in government-subsidized public health films.

In 1971, Medcom acquired California-based Trainex Corporation, which supplied medical personnel training materials to the Middle East and north Africa.

Fuisz learned Arabic so that he could better supervise Medcom's new division, and during this period Medcom became a top supplier of medical training to Middle Eastern militaries.

Fuisz served as president and chief executive officer of Medcom from 1975 until 1982, when the company was purchased by Baxter International, the world's larger supplier of hospital equipment, for $52 million.

Fuisz initially offered to stay on for a three-year transition period to introduce the new ownership to his clients, but he was instead fired by Baxter chief executive Vernon Loucks.

After Medcom's sale and Fuisz's removal, business declined dramatically in the company's two biggest markets, the United States and Saudi Arabia, and profits plummeted.

In the 1980s, Fuisz was involved in a number of business ventures in the Soviet Union through Leopoldina Import-Export Inc., an international business consulting firm, and Folkon, Ltd., an oil exploration company.

Working with a young Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then the head of the Young Communist League, Fuisz exported computers and other electronics to the Soviet Union through the Center for Scientific and Technical Creativity of the Youth, and he would later claim that his business helped to supply computers to the KGB.

Then, in 1985 Fuisz sued Baxter over his termination.

When Fuisz arrived at the Baxter offices in Deerfield, Illinois, to sign the settlement and collect his financial compensation of $800,000, Baxter CEO Loucks refused to meet with him; Fuisz later said that he realized at that moment "there was only one way this would end."

Fuisz, who had been involved in business in the Middle East for many years, was representing a Saudi family interested in purchasing a heavy equipment company when he was given a tour of the Terex plant in Motherwell, Scotland in September 1987.

During the tour, Fuisz noticed two large armor-plated vehicles painted in desert camouflage with specially attached steel backs; the plant manager allegedly told Fuisz that the vehicles were Scud missile launchers being manufactured for the Iraqi military, and that they were being smuggled by modifying their serial numbers to disguise them as civilian mining vehicles.

When Fuisz questioned Terex Vice President David Langevin about the vehicles, he claims he was told that the shipments had been requested by the CIA, with the cooperation of British intelligence.

Fuisz's allegations were corroborated by a former Terex employee also interviewed by the House Committee, who had been fired after raising questions about the company's bookkeeping.

Scud missiles were used extensively by Iraq during the Gulf War to strike coalition forces in Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Fuisz claimed that he had attempted to bring Terex's arms deals to the attention of the United States House Energy Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations in 1987, but committee chairman John Dingell had refused to act.

Terex was (at the time) owned by General Motors (GM), a major political constituent in Dingell's home state of Michigan, and Dingell's wife was the granddaughter of a GM founder and a senior officer in the company's governmental relations department.

In 1988, Fuisz was approached by Yuri Dubinin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, to set up a modeling agency that would prepare young Soviet models for American markets.

The first model Fuisz was to oversee was Yulia Sukhanova, the first-ever Miss USSR, but hard-liners in the Moscow City Council obstructed Fuisz's efforts to secure Sukhanova's visa.

With Khodorkovsky's assistance, he was able to smuggle Sukhanova out of the country, though upon reaching the U.S. she cut ties with Fuisz after a dispute over his commissions.

In the first of two depositions regarding Fuisz's knowledge of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, held in December 2000, Fuisz was prohibited from answering questions regarding the relationship between his Russian businesses and the Central Intelligence Agency – when asked if Folkon did any work for the CIA, whether it received any money from the CIA, or whether there were any links between the CIA and any of the companies operated by Fuisz, U.S. Attorney (DOJ) Anthony Coppolino raised objections precluding Fuisz's testimony on the grounds of state secrets privilege.

He claimed to have then spent $35,000 to obtain secret government documents describing Baxter's dealings with Syria, and he sent a 20-page memorandum to Baxter board members outlining his findings: he alleged that Baxter had sold their Ashdod facility to Teva Pharmaceutical Industries while simultaneously negotiating the construction of a similar plant in Syria, and that, for this reason, they had been removed from the Arab League blacklist in 1989.

With the help of the American Jewish Congress, he brought the anti-boycott charges to the United States Department of Commerce Office of Anti-Boycott Compliance (OAC).

Fuisz did not press the issue again until Charlie Rose of the Agriculture Committee asked him for an affidavit; the Scud launchers were suspected of being funded with ear-marked agriculture money through the Atlanta branch of the Italian Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) – documents obtained in a 1989 raid on the bank revealed that Terex, through its independent British distributor, had sold dump truck chassis in 1988 to the Iraqi "Technical Corps for Special Projects, Project 395," a code name for Saddam Hussein's missile program.

Fuisz speculated that the Terex production was covered up out of fear of backlash from the patriotic demographic of American truck drivers, who drove vehicles manufactured almost exclusively by Fruehauf Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of Terex.

In 1991, the OAC referred the case to the Justice Department, resulting in the first-ever criminal prosecution of a company for violating anti-boycott laws in the U.S. In 1993, though the prosecution was unable to prove Fuisz's allegations, Baxter pleaded guilty to illegal delivery of information about its Israeli business to Arab officials (prohibited under export control provisions of the EAA) and was assessed $6.5 million in fines and penalties.

In January 1992, The New York Times published an article by journalist Seymour Hersh alleging that U.S. intelligence had helped to arm the Iraqi military during the Gulf War, naming Fuisz as its primary source.

The article described an affidavit Fuisz had submitted to the United States House Agriculture Subcommittee on Nutrition, Oversight, and Department Operations, which was investigating American heavy equipment manufacturer Terex Corp.

Both Terex and the CIA immediately denied any military relationship with Iraq, and in April 1992, Terex filed a $15 million libel suit against Hersh and Fuisz, claiming that Fuisz fabricated the story as retaliation against the company for declining to enter into a business deal.

In March 1993, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a Statement of Interest in the trial and invoked the state secrets privilege to bar Fuisz from testifying in his own defense.

The gag order claimed that the information Fuisz possessed was vital to the "nation's security or diplomatic relations", and could not be revealed "no matter how compelling the need for, and relevance of, the information", while empowering the government to "protect its interests in this case in the future" (effectively gagging Fuisz permanently).

In October 1994, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia upheld the Justice Department's claim of state secrets privilege and by 1996 the suit had been dismissed.

In the second deposition, held in January 2001, when asked to describe his interactions with high-level Soviet officials, Fuisz claimed to have difficulty separating information gained in his capacity as director of the modeling agency from information gained in "his employment by the government", and that he was "prohibited by a contract with the government" from providing further clarification.