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

Among them, the government was to: ensure that its financial guarantees would remain in effect until the plant had been in operation for a year; grant UEA access to the government’s stockpile of enriched uranium to meet its contracts, in the event the plant was unfinished or working below capacity during the first five years of its operation; purchase up to two-thirds of the plant’s output during the first five years of operation, if UEA couldn’t sell it elsewhere; agree to buy the domestic 204

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owners’ interest in the plant and assume all their liabilities if the plant failed -and finally, in what was the most attractive assurance from UEA’s standpoint, guarantee the domestic participants in UEA a 25 percent profit on their investment in case the Dothan plant went bankrupt. The total potential liability in this deal to UEA was a small fraction of the potential $8 billion liability to the U.S. taxpayers.

In laying out NFAA to Congress, Ford never mentioned any of these concessions, noting only that “contract authority in the amount of $8

billion will be needed.” To take the sting out of that figure-the largest-ever federal commitment for any private project of any kind-he hastened to add, “We expect almost no actual government expenditures to be involved. In fact, creation of a private enrichment industry will generate substantial revenues for the United States Treasury through pay ment of federal income taxes and compensation of use of government -owned technology. “14

Ford was similarly upbeat in describing the role foreigners would play. While acknowledging that “under the proposed arrangements there will be an opportunity for foreign investments in these plants”

(indeed, Bechtel had already lined up tentative participation from Japan as well as West Germany, France and Iran), Ford assured the lawmakers that “the plants will remain firmly under U.S. control.

There will be no sharing of technology,” the president went on. “Foreign investors and customers will not have access to sensitive, classified technology.”15 In fact, the United States, under Nixon, had already entered into an enrichment-technology agreement with one of UEA’s proposed investors: namely, Japan.

This too Ford failed to mention. Instead, he urged Congress to pass NFAA with all possible speed, so that, as he put it, the United States could count on “continued availability of reliable energy.”

Given Ford’s timing, the bill’s whopping concessions and not least, Congress’ worries over nuclear proliferation, the chances of authorization were at best remote. They diminished even further when, one day after the president’s message, West Germany announced its intention to sell enrichment technology to the Brazilians, despite U.S. efforts to block the sale. When the State Department demanded an explanation, the Germans said they were merely countering an offer from a U.S.

firm, Bechtel Power Corporation, to build an enrichment plant in Brazil.

Confronted with the West Germans’ revelation, the State Department professed both ignorance and righteous indignation. Various de-205

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

partment officials told the press that Bechtel’s Brazilian gambit was

“totally unauthorized” and “way out of line.” In San Francisco, meanwhile, a Bechtel spokesperson asserted that the offer to build the multibillion-dollar plant had been made by an “overzealous salesman”

without authorization from headquarters. The company maintained that Bechtel’s senior management, including Shultz and the Bechtels themselves, had been totally unaware of what had been going on.

Such, at least, was the corporate line. Not long afterward, though, an unnamed senior Bechtel executive told a reporter from Science magazine that Bechtel wasn’t as ignorant as it claimed. “These guys aren’t selling used cars, you know,” said the executive. “They’re