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

very, very cautious. Bechtel headquarters was kept fully informed.” The executive added: “The State Department knew what we were doing every step of the way. My impression is that Dixie Lee Ray [AEC chairperson and a former member of Steve junior’s World Energy Conference organizing committee] was [also] kept apprised, totally.”16

Though Bechtel continued to maintain its innocence, the executive’s assertions were largely borne out by a confidential Bechtel working paper obtained by California Public Utilities commissioner Leonard Ross in August 1976. The documents, not made public until now, indicate that Bechtel based its offer to Brazil on a statement made by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to the Washington Energy Conference on February 11, 1974. “Within a framework of broad cooperation,” Kissinger told the Energy Conference delegates, “the United States is prepared to examine the sharing of enrichment technology, diffusion and centrifuge.”

With the explosion of the Indian nuclear device in May, however, the plans Kissinger spoke of were shelved. Apparently less concerned by the policies of its own government than it was by competition from the Germans, Bechtel nonetheless pressed on, and in February 1975, offered to build Brazil an enrichment plant. According to the documents obtained by Ross, the offer was “authorized” by Bechtel’s corporate chiefs, and included a promise to build the plant whether or not the U. S. government endorsed the proposal. The papers further reveal that the State Department was informed of Bechtel’s proposal some time in late February of early March 1975-four months before the Germans’ disclosures. According to the papers, the State Department raised no objections.

Despite this evidence, Bechtel continued to protest its innocence, as did Shultz, who, in his 1982 confirmation hearings for secretary of 206

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State, told the Senate F oreign Relations Committee that he had “heard about the incident long after the fact.” As for the offer itself, Shultz dismissed it as the unauthorized act of “an over-enthusiastic business development person. “17

By then, however, the damage was long since done. Infuriated by the revelation that Bechtel was casually marketing the most dangerous technology in the world, Congress failed to pass NFAA, and the dream of producing a profit from nuclear fuel was dead.

In its press releases, and in the pronouncements of executives, Bechtel would remain optimistic about the value of nuclear power, both to the world and to the company’s bottom line. All the same, an era had come to an end. Once confident it could build anything anywhere, the company was hunkering down, turning inward, growing more cautious. It was an appropriate posture, for there were more problems still ahead.

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0 n a sweltering day in March 1977, at a tiny Saudi Arabian fishing village on the shores of the Red Sea, Bechtel began work on the largest project in construction history: the creation of the industrial city of Jubail.

It was a daunting undertaking by any standard, from its cost-an estimated $30 billion-to the number of men involved in its construction-41,000 laborers from thirty-nine countries, plus 1,600 Bechtel project managers, civil and mechanical engineers, architects and draftsmen-to the sheer amount of sand to be moved-370 million cubic meters of it, and that merely to prepare the ground for Jubail’s industrial park. Surveying the site where a city with the population of Minneapolis would rise, Time magazine enthused: “In their shortsleeved shirts and wide ties, toting clip boards and pocket calculators, the Bechtel brigade seems the very embodiment of American technological know-how. In all the expansive sweep of civil