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

Bechtel sympathized with Minckler’s perplexity: there was all that oil, seemingly there for the taking, and no way to transport it to where it was really needed-not with tanker companies charging their extor-77

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

tionate rates. A pipeline was indeed the solution. As the waiters cleared away the dishes, Bechtel pulled a pen from his pocket and began sketching lines on the tablecloth. Minckler pulled out his own pen and started jotting figures. By the end of the meal, it was decided: perhaps Steve Bechtel could help.

On his return to San Francisco, Bechtel dispatched a team of engineers to reconnoiter the Canadian Rockies by jeep and plane. At the company headquarters, meanwhile, draftsmen began preparing “scope books”-hundreds of pages of data and drawings of the projected pipeline. As that work continued, Bechtel commissioned a study of the potential for oil usage in the Pacific Northwest from the Stanford Research Institute of Palo Alto. That the study would produce a favorable conclusion Bechtel was more than reasonably certain: he had been one of SRI’s principal founders and had bankrolled its operations heavily.

Sure enough, SRI turned in a study fairly glowing with promising predictions for northwestern oil, and armed with it, Bechtel began calling on banks and lining up underwriting. He then summoned to a meeting at the Links Club in New York Mickler and representatives from six other oil companies to finalize the deal. The last detail-assuaging the sensitivities of the Canadian government, across whose

Founded in 1946 by a group of West Coast businessmen, including Steve Bechtel and Henry J. Kaiser, and originally affiliated with Stanford University, the Stanford Research Institute eventually grew to become the second-largest corporate-government

“think tank” in the country. Its business was supplying government and industry with the latest in applied research, economic analysis and management techniques. Among its many programs, SRI evaluated the U.S. strategic force; conducted laser radar studies in the upper atmosphere; analyzed ballistic missile defenses; drew up studies for improving Air Force reconaissance and surveillance systems and played a leading role in developing the U.S. response to the launching of the Soviet Sputnik satellite. Its multimillion-dollar involvement in defense work, combined with its work for the Defense Department during the Vietnam War, provoked violent student demonstrations on the Stanford University campus, and led the university to sever its connections with the institute in 1969.

Since SRI’s founding, Bechtel has been one of the institute’s major clients and supporters. SRI has conducted numerous studies for the company, including evaluating the development potential of Jubail, Saudi Arabia, and drawing up a blueprint for Bechtel’s industrialization of Indonesia during the Sukarno regime. Over the years, the Bechtel family has donated millions to SRI and was principally responsible for the funds used to build SRI’s 4 2, 000-square-foot headquarters which opened in 1969.

At the time, SRI listed 68 individuals and companies-among them, such corporate heavyweights as IBM, the Wells Fargo Bank and Standard Oil of California-as permanently affiliated with it. Included in this list of “associate members” are no fewer than six Bechtel entities. No other company or family matches this total.

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national territory the pipeline would be built-Bechtel handled personally.

His first move was to camouflage American interests by creating a Canadian company to oversee the pipeline. Dubbed “Transmountain Pipeline Company of Canada,” it was supported by the companies that had attended the Links Club meeting and featured none other than Stephen Davison Bechtel as its chairman and major stockholder. To dilute the American