Hunt Oil Company

Hunt Oil Company is the privately held exploration and production company of the Hunt family of Dallas. In 2011 it described itself as having "successfully conducted worldwide petroleum operations for over 74 years."¹ H.L. Hunt, who in 1930 bought the discovery well of the East Texas Oil Field from Columbus Marion "Dad" Joiner, owned the company and founded Placid Oil Company.²

The Family Firm

Hunt Oil's staff and the family overlapped. Margaret Hunt Hill married a company accountant, Albert Galatyn Hill, in 1938, and employees called her "the big boss"; Hassie Hunt drilled as the Hassie Hunt Production Company from an office in the building; Ruth Ray, a legal secretary who came to the company with Claude O'Quinn when he left her law firm for its main client, bore Hunt four children from 1943 while he kept her in a house two minutes' drive from the family home, and married him in November 1957.⁴² The former FBI agent Paul Rothermel wrote to J. Edgar Hoover on Hunt Oil letterhead on February 22, 1955, that he was "now associated with the Hunt Oil Company at Dallas"; the bureau described him as Hunt's administrative assistant and the press as his chief of security.⁵

Hunt Oil put about 45 million dollars into Hunt's food company, HLH Products, and in 1969 his nephew Tom Hunt, a company executive, found it losing heavily; investigators described six separate schemes against it. On February 3, 1970, the FBI's Cartha DeLoach reported that Hunt's sons had told Senator James Eastland they were trying to have their father declared incompetent and that Hunt Oil had lost about 80 million dollars over several years.²⁶ Private detectives hired by Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt then tapped the telephones of four Hunt Oil executives, Rothermel among them.⁷ Indicted in 1975 for obstructing the resulting grand jury, the brothers said that more than 50 million dollars had been embezzled from Hunt Oil by employees who "were secret Government agents," after they had refused a CIA request to place officers in Hunt International Petroleum; the United States attorney acknowledged that "the CIA contacted the Hunts in the mid-1960s."⁷

On March 4, 1977, the company's spokesman, James C. Oberwetter, issued a statement denying that Hunt "knew, ever communicated with or ever received communication from Lee Harvey Oswald," after the Dallas Morning News asked whether a handwritten "Dear Mr. Hunt" note attributed to Oswald was addressed to him.⁸ A former Hunt Oil official recalled seeing Eugene Hale Brading in the company's reception office on November 21, 1963, waiting to see Nelson Bunker Hunt.¹⁰

Hunt died in 1974, leaving all his Hunt Oil stock to Ruth Hunt and naming her son Ray Hunt sole executor. In a 1975 division with the sons of the first family, Bunker, Herbert and Lamar Hunt took Hunt Energy, Placid Oil and Penrod Drilling, and Ray kept Hunt Oil.³

Under Ray Hunt

Hunt Oil found the Alif field near Marib in 1984, the first oil discovered in North Yemen; on April 12, 1986, Vice President George H.W. Bush flew to Marib and dedicated the field's refinery. Yemen took back the block on November 15, 2005, and Hunt Oil and ExxonMobil filed for arbitration in Paris.¹¹ Ray Hunt sat on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 2001, and two Hunt Oil executives became ambassadors: Jeanne L. Phillips, a senior vice president and Bush fundraiser, to the OECD from August 2001 to June 2003, after which she returned to the company, and Oberwetter to Saudi Arabia, sworn in on January 8, 2004.⁹

On September 8, 2007, Hunt Oil and the Kurdistan Regional Government announced a production-sharing contract for a block in the Dohuk area under a regional oil law that Baghdad did not recognize; three days before the signing the company's regional manager, David McDonald, told the State Department's reconstruction team in Erbil that it was interested in districts of northern Nineveh disputed between Erbil and Baghdad.¹² On July 2, 2008, Representative Henry Waxman released documents and wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that "contrary to the denials of Administration officials, advisors to the President and officials in the State and Commerce Departments knew about Hunt Oil's interest in the Kurdish region months before the contract was executed," quoting an internal Hunt Oil message: "This is really good for us."¹³