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

to relieve their food shortages by building several massive fertilizer plants. It was an idea that everyone liked: the Indians; the new American ambassador, Chester Bowles; the State Department and, not least, Bechtel, who saw the fertilizer plants generating hundreds of millions in additional business, not merely in India but across the Third World. Initially, the Indians had only one reservation: they wanted a feasibility study under-136

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taken to confirm that the outlook for fertilizer was as rosy as Bechtel claimed. Fine, replied Steve; he’d have the Stanford Research Institute produce one. The $400,000 study (paid for by the Indians) came back confirming Bechtel’s opinions, and then some: not only would one fertilizer plant be good for India, it said, but five-all to be built by Bechtel-would be even better.

From there on, things moved quickly. Returning to the United States, Bechtel rounded up support for the project from his friends at Texaco, Gulf, Hercules, Esso, Mobil, Shell, FMC, Allied Chemical and the investment-banking firm of Lehman Brothers, where Clay, who’d recently become a partner in the firm, promised to arrange the financing. He also stay ed in touch with the State Department and the U.S. embassy, both of which were lobbying furiously for the project in hopes that it would generate $1 billion in U.S. investments in the country. During a trip to the subcontinent, even Averell Harriman got an oar in, by urging Indian officials to give a prompt go-ahead. When the Indians, because of bureaucratic conflicts, began foot-dragging, State turned up the pressure a notch, by warning that unless approval was soon forthcoming, the United States might undertake a review of its aid policies toward India. That, in turn, produced a blast from the Financial Express of New Delhi, which editorialized: “What is so shocking is that U.S. officials should identify themselves so much with the Bechtel proposal as to even hold out a threat of change in American attitude towards aid in this country. “4

Nonetheless, the threats appeared to work, and by early September 1964, Bechtel and Clay were ready to return to India to close the deal.

They spent five day s in New Delhi haggling over details; all, however, seemed to be going well. Then, just before departing for the United States, Clay availed himself of an airport press conference to lecture the Indian government on its responsibility to approve the project, since he and Bechtel had gone to all the trouble of raising funds. That, alone, might have been enough to kill the deal. But there was more. In return for their participation in the fertilizer project, it developed, the American companies wanted certain concessions. Allied Chemical, for instance, made its commitment contingent on India’s granting the company rights to its potash reserves, while the oil companies were insisting on similar access to the country’s petrochemical resources.

Bechtel’s own demands were more modest: it wanted in on building a big refinery. Fed up, finally, with their high-handed treatment, the Indians told Bechtel to peddle his fertilizer elsewhere.

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W hich, as it happens, is precisely what he did, later selling a virtually identical plan to the government of Algeria.

Nothing, apparently, could stop him-not nettlesome governments (“to hell with both governments,” he said to a partner, when they were experiencing difficulties in getting U.S. and Soviet approval for a proposed pipeline in Siberia. “We’ll find a way to build this pipeline somehow”),5 not the vagaries of airlines (once, when engine trouble