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

and by all reports, doing quite well at it. In July 1942, they mentioned their interest to Somervell, 16 who promised to check with his friends in the Air Corps to see what projects were available. Somervell came back to report that while the Army had enough new planes in the works, the service was planning to erect the Willow Run modification facility, not far from Birmingham, Alabama, to modify newly built aircraft for specific climatic missions. A bomber destined for missions in North Africa, say, would be modified with one sort of equipment, while one destined for LendLease shipment to the Soviet Union would be fitted with another sort. Studies for the factory had already been requested, and a total of 66

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fifteen companies, including Kaiser’s, had submitted proposals. But if they moved quickly, Somervell said, he could ensure that a BechtelMcCone proposal would get a good hearing. Soon thereafter, McCone sent the Army an engineering study, attaching to it a bill for $25,000.17

Stunned-all the other companies had done studies at no cost-the Army at first refused to pay. McCone, however, had been counting on that, just as he had been counting on the fact that by entailing a bill, BechtelMcCone’s study would stand out from the rest. Both assumptions were correct. The Army paid, and-partly because it had paidawarded BechtelMcCone the contract.

The document was a builder’s dream. In it, the Army committed itself to pay all the company’s costs plus 5 percent on work estimates submitted every six months. Those estimates were to be made not by the Army, but by BechtelMcCone. The company was thus in the enviable position of deciding how much it wanted to profit. Moreover, the Army paid BechtelMcCone whether or not its estimated work was completed. 18 It was, as events would later demonstrate, an invitation to abuse.

Nonetheless, the Army went forward. In time, a 300-acre factory was duly built, and 8,000 employees hired to staff it. All that was missing was the airplanes, which, according to the Army’s original calculations, should have been pouring out at the rate of hundreds a month. By the summer of 1943, not one had shown itself in the skies.

“The planes are not even flying over the city, much less away from the city as finished products, ” a Birmingham News reporter named Marguerite Johnston wrote a friend in August that year. “Employees of the company [BechtelMcCone] both at the plant and at the downtown office will talk glibly of men being paid large … salaries for ‘waiting orders’ week after week; of stenographers hired by the score who cannot type or take shorthand.” Johnston added that she had also heard stories of “some sort of investigation about to be launched. “19

Some sort of investigation was indeed about to be launched, triggered by a conversation a Birmingham lawyer named Talbott Ellis had with a woman for whom he was handling a divorce. During the talk, the client told Ellis that she was working at Willow Run, and that the only thing being modified at the plant was the employees’ bank accounts, which were getting fatter and fatter. She herself went in every day at 9:00, punched the time clock, then went home, not to be seen again until 5:00, when she returned to punch out. She added that all her colleagues did the same.

Subsequently, Ellis repeated what he had heard to a local stock-67

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broker named George P. Alexander. Outraged at the tale, and helped along, perhaps, by a