WASHINGTON -- The wife of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who has no previous experience in trade promotion, has been hired at an undisclosed salary to help recruit businesses for a free-trade zone in Israel.
For the past few months, Marianne Gingrich has been quietly working as vice president for business development of the Israel Export Development Co. Ltd., whose investors include a number of American businessmen, such as CBS President Laurence Tisch, clothing magnate Sy Syms and real estate developer Robert V. Tishman.
Mrs. Gingrich, 43, is to make her first company trip to Israel Wednesday. She declined to make any public comment about her job.
The IEDC is trying to win Israeli government approval to run the new free-trade zone, a private, high-tech business park where companies will be able to operate free of most taxes and government bureaucracy.
Her appointment seems likely to raise questions about whether she is being used to help the company gain the favor of the Israeli government, which is heavily dependent on U.S. foreign aid.
"It doesn't hurt to have the speaker of the House's wife on your letterhead or on your board," said Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, an ethics watchdog group in Washington. "Foreign governments are not unaware of who Mrs. Gingrich is."
The company's chairman said he hired Mrs. Gingrich because of her interest in free-market concepts and her past work as a planner, not because she is the wife of the top Republican in the House.
Through most of her 14-year marriage to the Georgia congressman, Mrs. Gingrich has worked off and on in her husband's re-election campaigns and related political ventures. In 1981, she was employed briefly in the personnel office of the U.S. Secret Service in Washington and before that worked as a county government planner in eastern Ohio.
The House speaker has said in recent interviews that his wife has her "own business."
But he has never talked about the nature of her work, and neither of them has made any public announcement about her employment with the development company.
Mrs. Gingrich's interest in Israel's proposed free-trade zone -- a controversial initiative to help foreign investors tap that country's highly skilled work force -- was said to have been piqued during an eight-day trip she and her husband made to Israel in August 1993. The trip was paid for by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying group.
Since September 1994, Mrs. Gingrich has been paid a full-time salary by IEDC -- neither she nor the company will disclose the amount -- and she is also to earn commissions on any business she recruits for the company.
Mrs. Gingrich, employed by the firm's U.S.-based marketing unit, is IEDC's only employee in Washington; the company maintains U.S. offices in New York and Miami.
"We were looking for someone with her kind of experience and her excitement," said David Yerushalmi, chairman and CEO of the 2-year-old development company, which is based in Jerusalem and incorporated in the British Virgin Islands. "She has a lot of experience in urban development and urban design and also in managing information."
Mrs. Gingrich studied for two years at Kent State University, leaving without a degree. She later went back to school and obtained her bachelor's degree from Georgia State College in 1986.
TC She worked for several years at the Trumbull County (Ohio) planning commission, becoming director in 1978, and then worked for one year for a regional planning agency.
Mr. Yerushalmi notes that he offered her the job in September, two months before the Republican landslide that sent Mr. Gingrich into the speaker's seat. By that time, however, Mr. Gingrich was a sure bet to become the Republican leader in the new Congress.
"I'd call her Marianne G. if I could," said Mr. Yerushalmi, a former Los Angeles lawyer and real estate developer who immigrated to Israel four years ago. "We're not telling the world it's Marianne Gingrich."
However, the new vice president with the familiar name will be featured prominently in the February newsletter that IEDC sends to prospective clients, he said.
For the past two years, IEDC has been the chief catalyst behind the creation of an Israeli free-trade zone. Formally called the Free Export Processing Zone, it has been a hotly debated idea in Israel, favored by those who see it as a potential boon to the nation's economy, opposed by those who believe it will hurt existing Israeli companies.
As it attempts to secure Israeli government approval to manage the zone, IEDC is trying to recruit multinational businesses, many of them Fortune 500 companies, for the park. As IEDC vice president, Mrs. Gingrich is approaching American companies, generally high-tech firms, trying to interest them in the Israeli free-trade zone.
In an effort to avoid possible conflicts with her husband's official duties, Mrs. Gingrich has retained Jan Baran, the Washington lawyer who is also helping with her husband's controversial book contract, to go over the terms of her IEDC work.
Her job is to be structured so that her dealings are strictly "business to business" and do not include any dealings with the Israeli or U.S. governments, according to Mr. Baran.
During his career in Congress, Mr. Gingrich has been a vigorous supporter of U.S. aid to Israel, now running at more than $3 billion a year.
In an interview with an Israeli newspaper last month, the new speaker urged that, "for its own good," Israel should join the rest of the world in "privatizing and making more competitive, and making more export-oriented" its economy.
Not surprisingly, those who oppose the U.S. government's strong support of Israel are incensed by Mrs. Gingrich's employment.
"The way I see it, it's part of a complex network, a web in which Israel's interests are plugged into the economic-political system of the U.S.," said Hisham Sharabi, chairman of the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine. "Had she not been the speaker's wife, it's not very likely she'd be where she is now."
James Zogby, head of the Arab American Institute, believes Mrs. Gingrich's involvement helps explain what he views as a "militant" pro-Israel position on the part of the House speaker.
"Clearly, this indicates a possible conflict of interest," Mr. Zogby, a Democrat, said.
"It indicates the fact that the speaker can't separate himself from other interests. This clearly doesn't build trust" with the Arab-American community.