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

flavor of the venture still further, he also farmed out most of the actual construction work to Canadian firms, restricting Bechtel participation to the role of project manager. Finally, Bechtel representatives paid a call on acting Canadian prime minister C. D.

Howe to outline the benefits building the pipeline would bring Canada. To no one’s astonishment, least of all Bechtel’s, Howe conferred his government’s blessings. 12

Stretching across the Canadian Rockies from Edmonton, Alberta, to Vancouver, British Columbia, and from there south across the border into the United States, the 718-mile, 24-inch-diameter pipeline was finished in 1954. It had been built at a cost of $93 million and would bring oil into the United States at a rate of some 150,000 barrels a day.

For Bechtel, the job-the first time his companies had been involved in a pipelining project from inception to completion-was especially satisfying. “There was never,” he told the press, “a tougher … pipeline job.”13 Nor had one produced such financial rewards. By the end of the pipeline’s first year of operation, Bechtel had received a total of $200

million in revenues, both from the pipeline and from the number of refineries he had built along its route. The contracts were coming thick and fast now, including one from the Canadian government, which, delighted with Bechtel’s work, wanted him to build another pipeline, this one east from Alberta to Montreal.

Not every Bechtel pipeline project moved so smoothly, and there were several that were cancelled because of government or political pressure. One was a 2, 500-mile line that was to have run from Kirkuk, Iraqi, to Paris. W ith 300 additional miles of branch lines, it would have supplied Iraqi gas to most of Eastern and Western Europe. The project was killed for a number of reasons, not least of which was the 1958 Iraqi revolution that resulted in the death of George Cooley. Another petroleum project that died aborning was a refinery Bechtel was to have built for British Petroleum in Haifa, Palestine, in 1948. Thirty days after the contract for the job was signed, Israel declared itself a state and war commenced with the Arabs. As a result, the refinery was never built. The loss was a bitter one for Bechtel, which had to forgo millions in potential profits, and according to several company executives it was a major factor in the company’s growing anti-Semitism.

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FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

Proud as he was, though, Bechtel never lost sight of the larger goal.

“Remember,” he told his senior executives, “we are not in the construction and engineering business. We are in the business of making money.” Nowhere would the truth of that statement be more fully realized than in a vast stretch of sand called Saudi Arabia.

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CHAPTER

7

SAUDI ARABIA

T he deal

the

that would

company that forever

bore

alter

his

the

name fortunes

had its

of Steve Bechtel

beginnings in a

and

phone

call one otherwise uneventful morning in the spring of 1943. On the other end of the line was R. G. Follis, a senior executive with the Standard Oil Company of California, Bechtel’s largest nongovernmental customer. Politely but urgently, Follis asked Bechtel if he could drop by Socal’s offices that afternoon. Something had come up that required Bechtel’s assistance.

Follis, who would soon be named president of Socal, hadn’t specified what that something was, but as he rode the elevator that afternoon to the eighteenth floor of the oil giant’s headquarters at 225 Bush Street, Bechtel knew two things: it had to involve oil, and it would