The Gore family had close, personal ties to oil magnate, Armand Hammer. After his defeat as Senator, Al Gore, Sr. was given a $500,000 a year job to head up theOccidental Petroleum’s coal division. Hammer, however, was a longtime Soviet agent, a personal friend of Lenin and the only American to receive the Order of Lenin from the then Soviet government. Today, Al Gore, Jr. serves as co-chairman of the US-Russian Joint Commission on Economic and Technical Cooperation, better known as the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission.