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

Bechtel executives-and so was the White House, which announced its readiness to do everything in its power “to help U.S. firms crack the Soviet market.” With the signing of a trade agreement by Nixon and Soviet party chairman Leonid Brezhnev during a 1974 summit conference in Moscow, and the grant by Kearns of an initial $185 million in funding, it appeared that billions for Bechtel were in the offing. So confident was Steve senior of the company’s Soviet prospects that after a personal inspection tour of the Yakutsk fields, he ordered up a program to teach Bechtel’s engineers to speak Russian.

All that remained was persuading Congress to grant the Soviets most-favored-nation trading status-that is, offering them repayment terms equal to the best offered any nation. And that, it turned out, was the rub.

“You must be out of your cotton-pickin’ mind to dream up something like that,” an astonished Senator Henry Jackson told an administration official after he heard of the financing for the Russian deal.

With that, Jackson began drafting legislation-the “Jackson Amendment,” it came to be called-tying approval of most-favored-nation

Of Hammer’s $100,000 donation to the Nixon campaign, $54,000 was given after the new campaign-financing law requiring full disclosure went into effect. When the Watergate special counselor discovered Hammer’s contribution, he brought the matter before a grand jury. On March 4, 1976, Hammer was found guilty of a misdemeanor, fined $3,000 and given a year’s probation.

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trading status to Soviet willingness to allow Russian Jews to emigrate.

Jackson’s congressional colleagues, including a number of Nixon’s Republican allies, were also outraged by the “U.S. giveaway,” as several of them called it, and vowed to bottle up the trade legislation in committee. In March 1974, Bechtel received more bad news when the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, unexpectedly announced that $315 million in pending Eximbank loans and credits for the Russian projects were illegal, since the president had failed to stipulate that each of them was in the national interest. The result, until the Justice Department reviewed the GAO’s finding, was that the loans were held up. Despite these developments, the Bechtel Corporation announced it would go forward, congressional approval or no. “We are going ahead with the negotiations aspect [of the Yakutsk deal] so that when resolutions are reached, we will have made as much progress as possible,” a senior Bechtel executive, Raphael Dorman, told a reporter. “Although this development could seriously affect the use of goods and services from the U.S., it doesn’t affect our participation since we will probably be forced to use export credits from other sources of financing from countries other than the U.S.”8

Bechtel’s bravado served only to enrage the lawmakers all the more.

At a hearing called by the Senate subcommittee on multinational corporations to investigate the deal, chairman Frank Church of Idaho told his colleagues:

What bothers me about this process is how things germinate. We start with large multinational corporations that are looking for profitable investments abroad. They are the initiators of these proposed projects, and, having worked out an arrangement that is to their satisfaction, they come to the U.S. government and apply for a large federal subsidy through the ExportImport Bank or federal guarantees of private capital outlays. It is at this point that the government is asked to make a decision, and if the project is not already fait accompli, it is at