Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story : The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the Wo by Laton Mccartney (readict .txt) 📗

Realizing that more controversy was the last thing the company needed, Steves senior and junior reluctantly decided to settle the boycott suit, and in the spring of 1976 they instructed Loevinger to open negotiations with Justice on the wording of a consent decree.

While Loevinger and company officials worked out peace terms in Washington, Steve junior and Shultz flew to the Middle East to secure the approval of the Arabs. They did not come away empty-handed.

“They urged the Arabs to ease the boycott restrictions,” said Aramco’s former chairman Frank Jungers of their mission. “And with the exception of Iraq and Syria, neither of which did any real trading with the West, most of the Arab League nations were agreeable to it. After all,

Dedicated by President Richard Nixon in September 1972, the $1.6 billion BART

system had from its very beginnings been a special project for Bechtel-and one of the most troublesome in the history of the company. The idea for a subway system linking San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland began with the Bay Area Council, a group of San Francisco-area businessmen, who as early as 1950 had begun plumping for the line as a means of helping make San Francisco the gateway to the Pacific Basin. BAC, in turn, was dominated by Bechtel family members, officials and friends, including company chairman Bill Waste, who served as BAC’s chairman, and Steve Bechtel, Sr., a member of BAC’s board of governors. In 1957, BAC hired the Stanford Research Institute to prepare a study detailing the benefits that would accrue to the region from mass transit. On the basis of this study, and a lavish public relations campaign heavily funded by Bechtel and its corporate allies, Bay Area residents narrowly approved a $792

million bond issue for the project in 1962. The project itself, however, did not get under way until 1966. With Bechtel as head of engineering construction (a chore for which it was paid $150 million), the job suffered numerous delays. There were more problems with BART’s railway cars (half of those delivered malfunctioned so severely they couldn’t be used even after extensive repairs); its state-of-the-art traffic-control system (often, cars wouldn’t start; equally often, cars that did start wouldn’t stop), and not least, with the Bechtel-constructed tunnel beneath San Francisco Bay, which the State of California refused to certify as safe. To complicate matters even further, there were also whopping cost overruns and numerous accusations of fraud, several of them directed against Bechtel.

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THE ARAB BOYCOTT

they needed us as much as we needed them. “15

By mid-1976, it appeared that Bechtel’s decision to cooperate was beginning to pay off. After weeks of intense line-by-line, word-by-word negotiations, Loevinger and Douglas E. Rosenthal, deputy chief of the Justice Department’s foreign-commerce division, had forged the first draft of an agreement that allowed Bechtel and other companies doing business in the Mideast considerable latitude in dealing with the boycott. Under the draft agreement’s terms, U.S. companies could, for instance, still sign contracts that contained boycott clauses, enforce boycott provisions against foreign companies on the Arab blacklist and allow the Arabs to reject individual subcontractors and suppliers recommended by companies like Bechtel, even if the subcontractors and suppliers were American-owned. So lenient were the terms that several Jewish groups, including the ADL and the American Jewish Congress, argued that the agreement should not be accepted by the court.

Of far larger concern to Bechtel were two pieces