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

arrogant and overbearing by many of the State Department officials stationed in Saudi Arabia. Only Bechtel had taken what it had learned from the oilmen one step further. At just about the time Borman was being ordered to leave Jeddah, for instance, Bechtel hired a high-powered Washington lobbyist named A. J. Shaw. T hough he was nominally in the employ of Bechtel, Shaw’s actual job was representing the Arabs in their dealings with the U.S. government. While Socal and Aramco had served as the surrogate representatives of the United States in Saudi Arabia, it was Steve Bechtel’s company that took the lead in representing the Arabs in the United States.

Bechtel’s lobbying activities on behalf of the Arabs were summarized in an April 1949 report provided to the State Department by A. J. Shaw. Shaw’s report stated that Bechtel “personally aids and assists the Saudi Arab Embassy and Government in many ways.” According to Shaw, these services included: Personally representing the Saudi Arab Government before the various divisions of the International Emergency Food Committee of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations as both representative and technical advisor; Personally representing the Saudi Arab Government in contacts with all the United States Government departments …

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SAUDI ARABIA

Personally representing the Saudi Arab Government as alternative delegate to the International W heat Conference;

Completely handling many matters which the Commercial Department of an embassy would normally handle;

Executing the purchasing and shipment of many and diverse personal items for members of the royal family in Saudi Arabia, as well as for the Washington Ambassador and his staff.

In an addendum to the report, a senior State Department official added that Shaw’s office had “acted as a commercial attache of the Saudi Arab Embassy. The Saudi Arab Ambassador, Sheik Asad AI Faqih, depends on Mr. Shaw for his commercial contacts, dealings and negotiations.”

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CHAPTER

8

LUCKY MAN

I t was

mess the

hall fifth

in of November

Dhahran, Saudi 1950, and

Arabia,

in the

Steve

Bechtel

Bechtel; his Corporation

wife, Laura,

and Steve’s oldest friend, George Cooley, had just finished dinner.

Suddenly, the lights went out. Steve grimaced: the Bechtel-built power plant appeared to be on the blink. Seconds later, his features softened into smiling surprise: there, being borne into the room on a silver tray, was a birthday cake, ablaze with fifty-one candles-one for each year of Steve Bechtel’s life and one more to wish on.

Laura, who had conspired all day with the kitchen help to make the cake in secret, beamed at her husband’s response. They had been married twenty-seven-y ears now, and however remote the jobsite, she was almost always at his side. Her husband squeezed her hand and kissed her on the cheek. Then, after blowing out the candles and hearing the staff sing a raucous chorus of “Happy Birthday,” Steve got up to speak.

“My friends,” he said, “I am unquestionably the luckiest man in the world.”

Certainly, he was one of the most successful. In the coming y ear alone, some thirty new projects would be brought into the Bechtel 94

LUCKY MAN

fold. Among them: l, 200 miles of pipeline; three refinery jobs; four chemical plants; four steam-powered electric plants and ten industrial plants. The company’s interests now stretched from California, where it was in the process of building the largest electric plant in the state, to Indonesia, where, on the island of Sumatra, it was beginning construction of an oil-processing complex that when finished would be the largest such facility in Southeast Asia. The San Francisco-based construction and engineering firm was now a corporate power around