Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story : The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the Wo Laton Mccartney (surface ebook reader .TXT) 📖

influence by assigning the case not to Caspar Weinberger but to Lee Loevinger, a lead counsel with the well-connected Washington firm of Hogan and Hartson. A former chief of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, Loevinger in turn had met with Levi in early January, in a last-ditch attempt to head off the filing. The meeting had been friendly-at one point, Levi had even offered to remove himself from the suit if Bechtel thought his Jewishness made him biased-but it had produced no alteration of Levi’s position. However, Levi had told Loevinger that Justice was not so much interested in punishing Bechtel as it was in ending the boycott. Indeed, Levi went on, Bechtel could avoid a court appearance altogether if the company agreed to sign a consent decree promising to ignore the Arab Boycott in the future. To sweeten his offer further, Levi invited Bechtel to help draw up the terms of the decree, which, he made clear, would be applied to other companies just as soon as the Bechtel case was resolved.

W hile Loevinger mulled Levi’s offer, the company launched a pub-189

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

lie relations campaign to defend itself. In a statement released to the press, Bechtel did not dispute that it had complied with the boycott, but stressed that “at no time in history has the Sherman Antitrust Act been held to apply to foreign, politically inspired boycotts.” The company also contended that the Justice Department was unjustly persecuting it for activities that had been sanctioned-and in some cases, actively pursued-by various agencies of the U.S. government. As evidence, Bechtel noted that for the previous ten years the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had operated within the constraints of the boycott provisions, under a 1965 treaty with the Saudis which gave the Arabs the right to reject any contractor used by the corps on the basis of the blacklist. Bechtel complained that it was being unfairly targeted for prosecution. “Why the hell should we be singled out?” John O’Connell groused to a reporter. “We obey the laws of Saudi Arabia and other countries in which we do business just like everyone else.”

In fact, Bechtel appeared to have a strong case, as even members of the Justice Department were privately ready to concede. Trying to win the case, however, would subject the company to a long, embarrassing legal proceeding, one that would put its operations, and those of its publicity-shy Arab clients, under unwelcome scrutiny. Moreover, the company was chary of antagonizing the Ford administration, with which it continued to enjoy warm relations (Steve junior continued to receive invitations to the White House), and from which it was still seeking a number of important business favors, most notably help on its various nuclear-energy projects. But what weighed perhaps most heavily against deciding to fight was the fact that at that moment, the company was under siege from several other quarters.

There was, first of all, the press, which, in the person of the Washington Star, had in October 1975 been running a series of articles questioning how it was that Bechtel had been able to secure without competitive bidding a $413,000 contract from the Energy Research and Development Administration to study the economics of coal-slurry technology at the same time the company was lobbying Congress for approval to build a $750 million coal-slurry pipeline. The articles had further revealed that the contract had been