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

grateful to you. Your concern and your action as a private citizen surely reflect the spirit of initiative and the sense of firm conviction that are essential to our democratic life itself.” He added: “Steve Bechtel is the kind of American you want to have on your side,” Ike advised Richard Nixon when the vicepresident was preparing to make a White House run of his own. “He’d make an excellent cabinet member.” Taking the counsel, Nixon penciled Bechtel in as a potential secretary of Commerce.

There were many chores Steve Bechtel and his company would perform for presidents, many favors they would do-and had done-for the organs of government, including·, though few knew it, the Central Intelligence Agency.

112

CHAPTER

I 0

THE COMPANY

AND THE COMPANY

I t seemed a small

Corporation did

thing

for

at

U.S.

first, these

intelligence; assorted

and so,

favors

at least the

in

Bechtel

the beginning, they were.

The process had started, as did so much else for Bechtel, in Saudi Arabia shortly after the conclusion of World War II. At the time, the United States had two principal concerns in the Middle East: the Soviets, who were already beginning to put pressure on the northern provinces of neighboring Iran, which itself would shortly be torn by civil war and a CIA-sponsored coup; and the Jews, thousands of whom were streaming into what was then British-controlled Palestine, in hopes of creating their own state. Both developments were potentially explosive, and beginning in 194 7, Bechtel started lending the U.S.

government a hand.

That year, the company approved the assignment by the Navy of several nonuniformed officers to the Bechtel-built Saudi Arabian refinery at Ras Tanura. The officers’ nominal task was looking out for saboteurs; but it became apparent as time went on that their larger mission was gathering intelligence. This in turn was transmitted through a secret Bechtel-built naval communications center at Ras Tanura. 1

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FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

As tensions in the region continued to worsen, Bechtel began doing more, including making its personnel available for intelligence debriefings. One such occasion was in mid-July 1948, when Buzz Clarke, the IBI personnel director, led Dan Catlin, an intelligence officer with the U.S. legation in Dhahran, out to meet an IBI truck convoy that had arrived after a six-week crossing of the desert. Israeli planes had been bombing oil-storage tanks, much needed by the Arabs, who were preparing to mount an offensive against the fledgling Jewish state. Catlin debriefed each of the drivers, obtaining extensive information on troop movements and the bombing damage they had witnessed. Subsequently, he passed along a report to Colonel Francis E. Meloy, the American vice-consul in Jeddah. Said Catlin: “The Jews bombed the large gas reserve on the Trans-Jordan frontier and completely destroyed one large storage tank and one small reserve tank. A conservative estimate would be 200,000 American gallons [destroyed].”2 The Saudi king, Catlin added, apparently on the basis of what Bechtel executives had told him, “is trying to again build up a reserve on the frontier …

so it would be hard for the Zionists to locate and destroy the Trans-Jordan mobile fuel units … The King has again asked IBI to lay 30” pipe filled with gas along a new route of transport for the Saudi Army. So far nothing has been done by IBI. “3

Bechtel’s Saudi boss, Tom Borman, himself passed along intelligence when he happened on something important. On October 14, 194 7, for instance, he notified Francis Meloy of pending trouble on the Palestine border. Reported Borman: “Yesterday we were told by a very intelligent Arab here [Jeddah], who speaks English fluently, that the