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

By then, Socal had concluded that it couldn’t penetrate the European market on its own and had agreed to sell half its interest in the Saudi concession to the Texas Oil Company (Texaco), which was both well heeled-it paidSocal $50 million for its interest-and well connected in Europe. The new partners called their joint venture Caltex; but in 1948, after Standard Oil of New Jersey and the Mobil Oil Corporation bought into the company, it was rechristened the Arabian American Oil Company -Aramco, for short.

While the oil giants were working out their deal, the U.S. government was not paying Saudi Arabia much heed. The country was regarded as a diplomatic backwater, and U.S. interests, such as they were, were represented by a lowly minister, who routinely deferred to the oil companies for guidance. The result, according to J. B. Kelly, a British historian and diplomat who spent much of his career in the Middle East, was that “conduct of American relations with Saudi Arabia [fell] into the company’s keeping. Naturally,” Kelly added, “Aramco saw this as only logical and fitting, since its management firmly believed there was a broad coincidence of interests between Aramco and Saudi Arabia, between Saudi Arabia and the United States and between the U.S. government and American oil companies operating in the Middle East.” Aramco, Kelly noted, “was far from being alone in holding that view. “2

World War II, however, changed

Worried that U.S. oil

supplies were dwindling, Ickes ordered

develop its Saudi

fields posthaste. Shortly thereafter, the call went out to Steve Bechtel.

The meeting at the Socal headquarters did not last long. The com’pany’s needs were as succinct as they were urgent: the immediate construction of additional refinery facilities and storage tanks at Bahrain, ment with MI-6, the British equivalent of the CIA. Eventually, he rose to become chief of MI�6 counterintelligence-one of the most sensitive positions in the whole of Western intelligence. Unbeknownst to his superiors, Kim Philby was also an agent for the Soviet KGB. His treachery was discovered in 1963, but before he could be arrested , he fled to Moscow, where he was decorated as a hero of the Soviet Union and still lives.

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FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

then the laying of an underwater pipeline 23 miles across the strait of Bahrain to the Saudi port of Ras Tanura. Though Bechtel’s resources already were being strained by its other wartime commitments, Steve was not about to say no to his friends at Socal.

He immediately dispatched crews to begin the refinery and underwater pipeline work and would soon begin building a big refinery at Ras Tanura as well.

In undertaking the work in Saudi Arabia, Steve sensed the makings of an opportunity. That sense grew in 1944 with the visit to San Francisco of Prince Amir Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister and ibn Saud’s second son. Upon Faisal’s arrival, Steve conducted the prince, who would one day become the Saudi monarch, on a tour of Marinship, the showcase of Bechtel’s wartime efforts. Faisal proved no less susceptible to Steve’s amiable, low-key salesmanship than Bechtel’s other clients and returned home with glowing reports of the American builder and his accomplishments: Three years later, having emerged from self-imposed “retirement,”

Bechtel created a new division, International Bechtel, Inc., that was to focus exclusively on the Middle East. Van Rosendahl, a Bechtel veteran and one of its top pipeliners, was put in charge of