Post-Soviet States: People, Power, and Assets Oral History Archive
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Post-Soviet States: People, Power, and Assets Oral History Archive Interviewee: James C. Langdon, Jr. Interviewer: Rebecca Adeline Johnston Date: July 2, 2018 Location: Austin, TX Abstract James Calhoun Langdon, Jr. is Partner Emeritus at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, LLP. A leading legal specialist in the energy sector, he has represented governments and oil and gas companies in the United States, Latin America, Europe, and numerous countries of the former Soviet Union. His government service has included positions at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, Federal Energy Administration, and the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which he chaired in 2005. He is a co-creator and founding board member of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law and an alum of the University of Texas-Austin as well as its School of Law. This interview provides an overview of Mr. Langdon’s experience working in Azerbaijan, Russia, and Kazakhstan throughout the 1990s. This transcript is lightly edited for clarity and partially redacted. Unedited remarks are available in the embedded audio recording and can be located with the aid of timestamps bracketed in the transcript text. Portions marked as redacted are not available in the audio. Redacted portions may be made available at a later time. Interviewer questions and remarks are presented in bold. Interview Transcript Just to get started, why don’t you talk a little bit about how you became interested in the post-Soviet space in general? I can’t say that I ever had a vision that I would be doing this stuff. My expertise and my experience has all been just in the energy sphere. That meant wherever there was something that was an oil and gas matter, that was of interest to me. I knew nothing about Russia, really, I mean hardly anything. I think at the time we had two guys in our Houston office that had done some international stuff, probably a decent amount, Todd Gremillion and Jack Langlois. They had been in our firm for a very long time and they knew the [BP] guys, kind of. [BP] had an interest in one or more of the fields in Azerbaijan, the Gunashli [oil]field. I think there was a consortium of companies that were British Gas, [BP]; I can’t remember who else. Agip, maybe; an Italian company. Two or three more. [BP's international guy was Rondo Fehlberg,] he was a friend of Todd’s and Jack’s, from Houston. He’s long since gone from [BP] and became the athletic director at Brigham Young [University] or some place. He’s had an interesting career. He’s a really good guy. This [BP] fellow had pretty much been living in Baku trying to sort this thing out, and rapidly came to the conclusion that, “Look, we’ll never get a deal done that will meet international standards without SOCAR [State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic]”—the state-owned oil company of Azerbaijan—“having legal representation. We need to get somebody to represent them, and the other international companies will support that.” [BP] called me and said, “What do you think, would you guys, Jack, Todd, would the firm do this?” And I said, “I don’t know why not, let’s try it.” Then the three of us began making these trips to Baku. Then our ethics people went through a process where they confirmed that it is possible for a lawyer to represent another party and then have the opposing party pay your legal expenses. But you have to maintain a wall; you have to do this; you have to do that. And you can’t submit bills to them that would detail exactly what you’re doing. There was a lot of stuff we had to do. We worked that out and our ethics council signed off on it. So we represented SOCAR with [BP] and, I think, the rest of that consortium paying our legal bills. We spent a lot of time there, and you didn’t have to be there a long time before that culture began to impact you, and before you began to understand that this was a very interesting historical place. It was the Silk Road. That’s what this was. And it was a very complicated place. The [BP] guy once said, “At [BP], we try to hire people that can do two things at one time, maybe three things at one time. There’s no one in this society that can’t do fifteen things at one time.” These people are smart, bright, and just a cab driver on the street has got to be thinking in three dimensions just to get through his day. And everybody has to live like that. Fifty percent of the heritage of Azerbaijan is out of Iran. It was a fascinating place to watch the way people struggled with their life. Azerbaijan was run by, for lack of a better term, about six big families, or clans. There was a flower clan. [0:05:00] Azerbaijan grew flowers that they sent all through Europe and every other place, and those people had a monopoly on all that. All the distribution to Europe, to Russia, to everywhere. And then there was an oil clan. And then there were other clans. And they were responsible for paying all the employees in their area. They, in turn, made a lot of money doing all that. It was pretty interesting to figure out who actually is going to sign these contracts for oil and gas things—some non-elected person that runs a clan that actually controls it? There were tons of legal challenges. And we met with the president from time to time President [Heydar Alirza oglu] Aliyev, and his son, now.1 His son in those days spent a lot of his time gambling in Turkey, and he was a playboy, twenty years old, living the life or whatever. Anyway, when we were in town, they took care of us. And somebody from the president’s entourage would pick us up at the airport, have a guarded escort back into town, some place where we’d stay. That’s how I got interested in all this. James C. Langdon, Jr., interview by Rebecca Adeline Johnston, July 2, 2018, transcript, Post-Soviet States Oral History 2 Collection, Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, Austin, TX, available online at: https://www.strausscenter.org/interview/james-langdon You may remember that in those days that the conflict in the Nagorno-Karabakh was going full blast. To even get to Baku you flew to Istanbul, and then you got on some Turkish airway. It’s just a little jump over to Baku, but you couldn’t go over Nagorno-Karabakh. You would have to fly down the length of the Black Sea, six or seven hundred miles, then cross over to the coast of the Caspian [Sea], and then go back up to Baku. What would have been a short flight was three times longer. And then you would land and there were no lights at the airport and everybody on the plane looked like a terrorist. You’re the only person that didn’t. Although, I soon learned to look like a terrorist too. You get off the plane, there were no lights at the airport, there was no BA [British Airways] counter, there was no known Western airline there. And you walk through a darkened terminal and if you didn’t have somebody to pick you up, cab people in the street would pick you up. You just get in somebody’s car. Those were very, very interesting days. We stayed at some old KGB housing, in an apartment. It was a big three-story apartment that looked out over the Caspian. It was beautiful in one sense, but it was completely dilapidated in another. And it was questionable whether the elevator was ever going to work or not. If you had an earthquake, that whole thing had a good chance of tumbling down. One of the bankers we began working with at some point was there, they were with Credit Suisse [Group AG] I think. I said, “You know, if you just imagine what it was, this place is as beautiful as Paris, it’s like Paris. Paris left to rot for seventy years.” And that was a pretty good description of what it was, at that time. We’re talking the early ‘90s. Today it’s a modern American city. Anyway, that’s how we got started. Every aspect of what you did had the romance and all that stuff. We were doing all of that about the time that [Robert S.] Strauss was appointed to be ambassador to the Soviet Union. We were already in Baku when that happened, in the last years of the Bush 41 administration. And before he could get there—he’d already had his confirmation hearings and all that, but had not yet left, and then the wall fell.2 Then he had to go back and do it all again because he was now going to be the ambassador to Russia. And then when Strauss left, the first thing he said to us is, “I know you guys are going to try to be selling me by the pound, but do not come over here and try to practice law, okay? I don’t want to have to deal with some congressional investigation because you guys are trying to make money when I’m ambassador.” We absolutely paid no attention [0:10:00] to that, needless to say.