PRIVATE EMPIRE

In Private Empire, Steve Coll goes deep inside the notoriously secretive ExxonMobil Corp. Heir to the legendary Gilded Age power of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, ExxonMobil is a corporation unlike any other. Its profit-making, operating and safety record are the envy of its corporate peers its annual revenues are larger than the economic activity in the great majority of countries in the world, equivalent to the GDP of Norway. Private Empire is a penetrating, colorful, brisk, news-breaking portrait of the corporation, its leaders and its power at home and abroad.

In many of the countries where it pumps oil and gas, ExxonMobil's influence over politics and security is greater than that of the United States Embassy. In Washington, ExxonMobil spends more money lobbying Congress and the White House than any other corporation. In Irving, Texas, where the corporation is headquartered, executives oversee an extraordinary corporate culture of secrecy and discipline, enforcing their priorities with uncompromising lawsuits. It is a black box, famously opaque even to competitors and industry analysts. A tour de force of reportage, Private Empire will reveal for the first time the true extent of ExxonMobil's power and influence. The narrative opens with the Exxon Valdez accident in the Prince William Sound in 1989 and closes around the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Set in Moscow, impoverished African capitals, Indonesia and elsewhere, Private Empire covers kidnapping cases, raging civil wars, and high-stakes struggles at the Kremlin. Its American action will take readers inside ExxonMobil's K Street office to chronicle lobbying struggles over consumer chemicals, climate and campaign funding, and inside the "God Pod" (as it is known to employees) where top executives work at the Irving, Texas headquarters. Major characters include the corporate legend Lee Raymond, ExxonMobil's chief executive until 2005, whose nickname was "Iron Ass," a close friend of Dick Cheney who was both the most successful and effective oil executive of his era and a unabashed skeptic about climate change and government in all its aspects. Private Empire will also follow his successor, Rex Tillerson, a small-town Texan raised as a devout Christian and lifelong Boy Scout, who tried to reset ExxonMobil's public image and cultivate ties to ascendant Democrats in Washington, and by doing so opened up a rift with his former mentor. Plutocrats, dictators, guerrillas, corporate scientists and security officers are among the plethora of supporting characters who will pass through the book's episodes. The depth of the investigation is staggering--The narrative is based on well over 250 interviews; the author's field reporting from the halls of Congress to the gas fields of Indonesia to the oil-laden swamps of the Niger Delta; more than one thousand pages of previously classified U.S. documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act; previously unexamined court records; and many other sources.

STEVE COLL is most recently the author of the New York Times bestseller Private Empire. He is the president of the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy institute headquartered in Washington, D.C., and a staff writer for the New Yorker. Previously he worked for twenty years at the Washington Post, where he received a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 1990. He is the author of six other books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Ghost Wars.