By  Sol W. Sanders

“Authorities investigating the death of Andrew Getty, an heir to the Getty oil fortune, are trying to determine whether foul play was involved.” (Los Angeles Times, March 31, 2015).  Jean-Paul Getty’s Tokyo representative and Andrew Getty’ cousin, Jean Paul Getty III (infamous for a celebrated kidnapping a generation earlier) are featured in this excerpt from a forthcoming memoir, ‘People! Vignettes gathered along the way through a long life’, by Sol Sanders.

A howling, violent group of young students and hangers-on burst into the skyscraper office of China Resources, one of the principal if unofficial representatives of the Beijing Communist government in the then British Colony of Hong Kong. They were shouting Maoist slogans and waving copies of The Little Red Book of the Leader’s quotations in the faces of two businessmen, interrupting their conversation.

As my friend Fletch described it later, he and the Chinese Communist Party chief of the office had been having a quiet tête-à-tête on a variety of issues, but aimed at talking about the possibility of exploring for and exploiting oil in China. After about fifteen minutes, in which the China Resources Chief remained silent and Fletch remained puzzled and apprehensive, but both continuing to sit in their chairs, the mob withdrew, closing the door behind them, with the two businessmen picking up their conversation just where it had left off without any acknowledgement whatsoever of what had happened.

That sort of thing was happening all over Hong Kong in the 1967 Cultural Revolution crisis. But even more threatening, the New Territories’ border with Mainland China was under attack. And it was clear if the British police and their Gurkha mercenaries did not hold the fort, the essence of Hong Kong’s remarkable postwar development, carefully controlled immigration from China, would go. British resolve, old fashioned-colonial resolve, won the day. And Hong Kong continued to prosper mightily for another three decades before “The Handover,” “the return” to China took place.

Fletch’s rendition of the episode marked just one more chapter in a remarkably adventurous life. And several times his and my paths crossed, in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Washington. We met first in Tokyo where the quintessential WASP American, six-foot three or four, brown hair, and sparkling blue eyes, and his wife, equally striking and of similar stature, were prominent members of the Foreign Correspondents Club, the main gathering place for gaijin (foreigners, literally “outside people,” so symptomatic of Japanese regard for non-Japanese). They seemed the model couple, although in later years, they became estranged, Fletch told me, because she had become “a Bible thumper.”

Fletch’s reputation was enhanced by the fact that in World War II he had been in the Navy and worked in a very specialized field, underwater demolition. And it didn’t hurt that his Old English family name had the same pronunciation as one of the major American banks, if different orthography. The couple were stars in our very segregated foreign community which got only a superficial look-in at Japanese society.

Fletch and I also had a professional relationship. As head of the McGraw-Hill Bureau in Asia, I reported to the publishing house’s several petroleum publications back in New York City And in those days, Fletch represented Jean-Paul Getty’s minority interest in Mitsubishi Oil Co., one of the several Japanese companies which had – along with a highly cooperative Ministry of Trade and Industry, the all-powerful MITI – adroitly used Japan’s rapidly growing market to play one company off against another to overcome Japanese industry’s virtual total dependency on imported fuel.

Fletch and I exchanged gossip about the local market, and I reported back to Daily Oilgram in New York, a publication so useful to the oil industry that contracts were more often than not directly linked to its published prices on a specific day. There wasn’t much going on in the oil business in Japan that the two of us didn’t know about, and it served our mutual interest to exchange information. We had a third partner, Phil, the economic minister at the U.S. Embassy, who often shared my Oilgram reporting, fed back to him from the State Department in Washington with “secret” marked on it to our mutual amusement.

Our paths crossed again in Hong Kong a few years later where I spent a year heading up the journalism program at Chinese University. Fletch again was representing Getty who was trying to stick his nose into China, then the apotheosis of the closed society with an autarkical economy. Fletch, whatever his other accomplishments, was not much of a politician. And I had to persuade him that his pitch to the Chinese should not be, as he initially drove it, his knowledge and accommodation to the then rigid Maoist view of the world. Instead, I persuaded him that the Chinese Communists were hardheaded enough to want to know that Getty was successful because he was one of the toughest if craftiest in a notoriously complex and competitive industry, rather than hearing Fletch echo Communist propaganda in order to appear sympathetic to the Beijing regime. …

But [before] Fletch’s efforts reached fruition because another bizarre and dramatic happening was taking place in Italy. Getty’s grandson, something of a wastrel, organized a mock kidnapping with Italian mafia to swindle his grandfather. Getty held tough, refused to pay ransom. And at that point, the Mafia took over and it became a genuine kidnapping. Getty called Fletch to come and negotiate a deal. When Fletch held out, the kidnappers sent him one of the grandson’s ears to prove their bona fides. The story then hit the tabloids. Fletch finally arranged for the return of the prodigal, the amount of the payment and to whom it was paid never quite identified.

Years later we were to meet when Fletch turned up in Vietnam. As a reserve naval intelligence officer, he had been given the assignment of seeing what could be done about economic warfare – this in the days before the big American buildup and Washington’s taking over the war directly after the U.S.-assisted assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother. What I knew and everyone else who were veterans by this time (circa 1965) was that many Saigon companies, particularly old relics of the French colonial period, were trafficking with the Vietcong, the southern front group acting for Hanoi’s Communist regime after the bifurcation of the country in 1954.

With the help of some Vietnamese friends and my own knowledge of the country – I had spent a year earlier in Hanoi covering the French war – Fletch completed a pretty fat dossier on a number of operations. These included the supplies reaching the VC guerrillas from the French-owned rubber plantations in the Cambodian border areas. There the rubber tappers were North Vietnamese shanghaied in the early part of the century and therefore friendly to the Communists from the North. We even dug out that the Americans had built an airfield near Danang with a female Vietnamese contractor who was the wife of one of the three French generals in an early scandal involving their selling war plans to the Communists during their war in the North which had ended in the debacle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. She had been operating a Chinese restaurant in Copenhagen but came back for the new loot.

No matter how much pride Fletch took in his findings, as in so many things, Washington vetoed any action, particularly against the French firms, protected throughout the early years of the American engagement by David Bruce, then head of the France desk in the State Department, later to play a significant role as chief dove in the arguments of John F. Kennedy’s 1952 Cuban Missiles Crisis.

Briefly I encountered Fletch again in Washington when I returned from Asia in the early 70s when he had retired from Getty’s service. Plagued by lung complaints arising from his wartime activities, he moved to warmer climes, last heard of in Charleston but moving on to the Caribbean where we lost touch.

  Andrew Getty, Jean-Paul Getty, Jean-Paul Getty III, Superwasp: The life and times of Jean-Paul Getty’s man in the Far East