The New Marco Polos

Now that U.S. trade with the Soviet Union and most other Communist nations is running at the highest level since World War II, many well-known companies are getting into the act: Occidental Petroleum, Boeing, ITT, Tenneco, Texas Eastern Transmission and dozens of others. But there are smaller, independent toilers in Eastern vineyards who so far have remained relatively obscure. Sometimes acting as middlemen for big deals, sometimes hunting up products and processes to sell on their own, these new Marco Polos have perhaps done more to expand the frontiers of East-West trade than the emissaries of giant corporations. Familiar with the workings of Sojuzchimexport, Stankoimport, and other mystifyingly complicated Soviet state enterprises, they have been putting together some of the most imaginative deals since William Henry Seward made Alaska a Russian export. Among them:

ROBERT ROSS has sold $11 million worth of products from Communist countries in the U.S. since his first trip to Moscow in 1970. As head of East-Europe Import Export, Inc., based in Manhattan, he has another $100 million worth of contracts under discussion. Acting mostly as a buyer, Ross represents 65 American firms in Russia and Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, he is sole sales agent in the U.S. for the Soviet auto and electronics industries and Rumanian auto and petroleum exports. This year he introduced a $3,195 Jeep-like Rumanian vehicle into the U.S. He is talking with executives of Westinghouse and General Electric about distributing Soviet vacuum tubes in the U.S., and he plans to import 7,000,000 gallons of Rumanian gasoline in December. Most of his deals are financed by U.S. banks and the Government's Export-Import Bank. Because of the Communists' shortage of hard currency, Ross thinks that there is a better future in barter arrangements. He is trying to put together a swap between Scott Research, an American producer of automobile antipollution equipment, and the Rumanian auto industry, which must equip its U.S.-bound vehicles to meet 1975 emission standards.

DONALD WEBSTER, MICHAEL JOHNSON and CHRISTOPHER STOWELL are former U.S. trade officials who left the Nixon Administration last fall to form Webster, Johnson and Stowell, Inc., Washington-based brokers of trade deals between U.S. companies and Communist state-owned enterprises. The trio are negotiating a dozen industrial and heavy-construction projects in Eastern Europe, ranging in size from $3,000,000 to $40 million. U.S. firms, the names of which the partners refuse to disclose, would supply technology for the undertakings. Last week Stowell was in Moscow, trying to arrange the sale of U.S. petroleum-testing equipment to the Soviets and the construction of a bearing plant at the Kama River truck factory. "We feel that we are in a good position to learn about which of the five-year projects in Eastern Europe has reached an economic or political bottleneck," says Johnson. "At that stage, we take the problem to U.S. firms."

CURTIS HAYWORTH, president of Manhattan's World Patent Development Corp., trades in technology. At first the firm specialized in acquiring rights to Eastern European technology and offering them to U.S. customers; for example, Hayworth is making available to U.S. libraries a Czech method for preserving old books. "Then we started to know the Eastern Europeans, and they started to trust us," says Hayworth. "So now they come to us for U.S. technology." Czech pharmaceutical officials, to cite an instance, want to buy American machinery for making plastic pill bottles. World Patent intends to export to Eastern Europe an American technique for cutting textiles by computer. Hayworth is also trying to find an American firm to use a Hungarian process for making motor oil that he claims "can clean an engine in 15 minutes."

HENRY SHUR, a Washington patent lawyer, sells Soviet expertise in the U.S. His firm, Patent Management, Inc., started acquiring rights to Soviet processes in 1969 and holds rights to 15 of them in metallurgy, metalworking and welding. Patent Management recently licensed Kaiser Aluminum to use a Russian alumina smelting process for castings. The firm has also arranged for Carpenter Technology Corp. and the Wolverine Tube division of Universal Oil Products Co. to turn out high quality zirconium and stainless steel tubing under a Soviet process. At the moment. Patent Management is offering rights to a Russian electroslag refining process that is used to produce high-quality alloy steels. Noting that the Russians are usually eager to acquire American expertise for their industries, Patent Management's General Manager Clifton Hilderley admits that peddling Soviet patents in the U.S. is "something of a switcheroo." Though the Soviets want to sell in the West in order to acquire currency, they are reluctant to part with some of their more advanced technology. The secret of doing business with the Russians, says Hilderley, "is to be very patient with them." Certainly, in East-West trade, patience can pay well.

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