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

was defying his father, and he was doing it in a way that no one could miss. He wasn’t asking for approval, and he didn’t need it. Junior was the boss.

When the building was finished, in 1968, it provided a home for virtually all of Bechtel’s operations. Steve senior, however, remained behind in his old office at the former headquarters on Sansome Street.

The break with his father didn’t trouble Steve junior. T here was a saying at the Bechtel Corporation he liked to repeat: “A builder is measured by the length of his shadow.” Steve Bechtel, Jr., had begun to cast his. With the help of a curious man named Armand Hammer in a curious place called Libya, it would lengthen even further.

142

CHAPTER

1 3

LIBYA

0 f all the business relationships the Bechtel Corporation entered into over the years, none was stranger-and a few more lucrative-than its alliance in Libya with the international entrepreneur who shared his name with a baking soda.

Armand Hammer was unique: a multimillionaire capitalist who had made a fortune doing business with the Russians (among his best friends, he claimed, was Lenin, whom he had met in October 1922

and had struck deals with); a New York Jew who wheeled and dealt with (and was beloved by) Israel’s bitterest enemies; a financial genius who looked, talked and acted like the cartoon character Mr. Magoo.

Yet this improbable, walnut-faced man, would, over the years, bring the Bechtel Corporation billions.

The means by which he would do it was, perhaps, the most improbable thing of all: through oil, and in, of all places, Libya.

The saga had its beginnings during the winter of 1957-58, when Hammer, who until then had made his money by importing and exporting items like cattle, Russian furs and art, invested $120,000 in a little-known, nearly bankrupt California oil company called Occidental 143

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

Petroleum. Hammer didn’t claim to know much about oil-“I wouldn’t have known a barrel of oil if I fell in it,” he said later-but Occidental seemed promising, if only as a tax shelter. It turned out to be considerably more than that.

With Hammer’s cash, Occidental began drilling wildcat wells in an abandoned Socal field in the San Joaquin Valley, east of San Francisco. Three years and more than a million dollars in additional Hammer money showed no notable results. Then, in 1961, the company made a major gas strike. Oxy and Armand Hammer were on their way.

The same year as the gas discovery, Hammer visited Libya as a member of a quasi-official trade delegation for the Kennedy administration. The trip didn’t produce much commerce, but the sight of all those oil companies, pumping the Sahara, inspired Hammer. On his return to California, he dispatched a team of Occidental engineers to begin scouting for a supply of his own.

The search was prolonged and painstaking, and nearly five years went by before Hammer’s engineers found a promising site. Before drilling could begin, however, Hammer had to secure a concession from the Libyan government, which, in turn, necessitated making certain financial arrangements with wellplaced members of King Idris al Sanussi’s entourage. In due course, a facilitator appeared: a self-styled Spanish “general” and international con man named Pegulu de Rovin.

For $400,000, a fourth of which was to be placed in advance in a Swiss bank, de Rovin told Hammer, the fields could be his. Hammer paid. 1

With financing from Allen and Co., a Wall Street investment bank, Hammer agreed as well to pay a group of Libyan officials, led by court