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

build a refinery in Aden, Simpson met with his friend and briefed him on what Bechtel had learned about developments in Iran. A year later, after the ap-115

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

It might just happen that in this connection, or with regard to some particular matter, we could furnish information or be of assistance to your organization. Occasionally a private concern can perform a function or develop certain aspects of a problem with greater facility than a government agency.

Three days later, Dulles wrote back thanking Simpson for his offer and promising to “remember it if the occasion arises .”

The occasion arose quickly, and by the early 1950s, according to an Aramco governmental-affairs executive named William Mulligan, the Saudi Arabian operations of both Aramco and Bechtel were “loaded with CIA …. The agency didn’t have to ask them [Bechtel and Aramco] to place its agents,” Mulligan said in a 1987 interview. “Bechtel was delighted to take them on and give them whatever assistance they needed.” After a time, so many CIA men were working for Bechtel and Aramco that Frank Jungers, then an Aramco executive in Saudi Arabia, later to become the company’s chairman, complained to the CIA that too much information was being generated, much of it contradictory or wrong. “We told them, ‘We’ll help you and open up whatever areas you need, but you must work through one central source,”’

Jungers recalled in an interview.11 Eager to oblige, the CIA appointed a chief liaison officer for both Bechtel and Aramco.

As Bechtel’s business expanded through the area, the CIA moved with it. According to published reports, denied by Bechtel but independently confirmed with former Bechtel employees, the company was especially accommodating to the agency in Libya, where between 1963

and 1970, “cover” employment was provided to two CIA men in Bechtel’s employee-relations department.

Usually, such cover arrangements were made quite discreetly. But not always. The Allen Dulles papers on file at Princeton University contain a letter from Dulles to Simpson in January 196212 casually asking if Simpson would provide covert employment for a CIA agent named Jens Jebsen whose cover position as an executive with the London office of Manufacturers Hanover bank was being eliminated in a corporate consolidation. Simpson cheerfully replied that he would try to arrange it with Lynn Coughham, an executive with Bechtel’s London office.

The approval for CIA covers came directly from Steve Bechtel, who had his own ties to the agency. In March 1951, while his company’s Middle East crews were pushing toward Tapline’s Mediterranean terminus, Bechtel became a charter member of the National Committee ll8

THE COMPANY AND THE COMPANY

for a Free Asia, an organization devoted to fighting Communism and promoting free enterprise. The brainchild of Allen Dulles, NCFA, which later changed its name to the Asia Foundation, included in its membership such Bechtel friends and associates as Henry Kaiser, Socal chairman Gwin Ferris and Pan Am chairman Juan Trippe. Together, the members of the Asia Foundation sponsored a number of propaganda activities, most notably “Radio Free Asia,” a Far Eastern counterpart of Radio Free Europe. In 1967,13 after press reports identified the Asia Foundation as a CIA front, the group’s trustees admitted that funding for RFA and its other activities had come from the CIA. Subsequently, the Asia Foundation was banned in India, Thailand and most of the other countries in which it had operated.

According to Simpson’s papers, the Asia Foundation membership was only one of a number of links Bechtel had with