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

of foreign operations for the Petroleum Administration for Defense. One of his first assignments was to go to Teheran to confer secretly with Mossadeq. According to Snodgrass’ diary notes of October 26, 19 51, the socialist prime minister did not appear to bear the oil companies any particular grudge. The British, he said, could continue pumping and distributing Iranian oil, as long as Iran maintained control over the operation. As for the United States, Snodgrass quoted Mossadeq as calling it “the world leader in maintaining peace.”

Mossadeq’s good wishes were apparently not sufficient for Snodgrass’

superiors, and shortly thereafter, the CIA’s Operation Ajax got off the drawing board.

Snodgrass himself soon returned to Washington, where he helped undercut Mossadeq’s position by developing alternative sources of oil and was a frequent participant in National Security Council meetings and CI A briefings. He also kept in continuing touch with Bechtel, to whom he relayed such helpful items as U .S. government projections on Middle East oil reserves, and tips on upcoming refinery projects, 123

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

such as one in Puerto Rico that Bechtel later built. At the same time, Snodgrass continued to provide the company with an ongoing stream of classified political intelligence, including information-contained in a confidential letter to IBI vicepresident Van Rosendahl, December 31, 1952-that a last-ditch attempt by Mossadeq to make peace with the United States was expected to fail.

In 1952, Snodgrass wound up his work as Bechtel’s unofficial man in Washington, and went back to work for the company as a consultant. From this vantage point, he was able to feed intelligence about Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing countries in which Bechtel did business back to the intelligence community, even while lobbying for the Saudis in Washington. In 1954, Secretary of the Interior McKay appointed Snodgrass to a twenty -one-member military petroleum board that was to advise the United States on oil and gas matters which related to national security and defense. Subsequently, Snodgrass formed several Washington-based international consulting firms which counted Bechtel among their clients.

Snodgrass’ new career took him all over the globe. He popped up in Pakistan in the early 1960s, advising the government on the development of its naturalgas reserves; emerged in Iran as a paid “energy consultant” to the Shah; spent time in Syria, New Zealand and Australia reviewing oil and copper production there and in 1972 was named petroleum advisor to the Sultan of Oman, while simultaneously serving as natural-resources advisor to Jordan’s King Hussein-all the while passing information to the CIA and to Bechtel.

W ith the assistance of Snodgrass and his similarly well-connected successors (including former CIA director Richard Helms, who joined the company as an “international consultant” in 1978), Bechtel’s operations increasingly mimicked those of the CIA. The company drew up its plans and plotted its business operations with the same devotion to secrecy and clandestine intelligence-gathering as its governmental associate, much of them based on reports furnished by friends at the CIA and the Departments of State, Commerce and Defense. These reports in turn were compiled into confidential weekly summaries, broken into political, military, economic and technological categories. Ty pical of the intelligence flavor of the documents was an October 1, 1976 report on Africa entitled, “Objective: Develop new and expanded business throughout the African continent.” “Rhodesia will go black in the very near future,” the report began.

124

THE COMPANY AN D THE COMPANY

Major strife for black factional control will commence and continue … South African whites will retain power with continuing guerilla action and civil strife. Look for