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

junior, Shultz, Jerry Komes and four other senior company officials. Some committee members were concerned that meeting Mohammad’s terms could violate Saudi law and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. However, “The choice was clear-cut,” a Bechtel vicepresident explained afterward. “Either give in or get out; and the executive committee decided to approve giving Mohammad a 10 percent interest.” (A year 211

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later, according to Bechtel, the company obtained an opinion letter from an outside law firm stating that the arrangement did not violate the Act.) According to Olayan’s associates, Suliman was furious when he found out. He hadn’t even been consulted about what was going on.11

For all of Olayan’s outrage, there was nothing he could do, and in late 1978, the well-connected, avaricious prince became a legitimate shareholder in Arabian Bechtel Company, Ltd. Five months later, on April 7, 1979, the Bechtel Corporation announced that Arabian Bechtel Company, Ltd. had been awarded the contract to manage the construction of the Riyadh International Airport.

The decision to give in to Mohammad Fahd’s demands embittered many Bechtel executives, including Caspar Weinberger. For all of his faults, Cap had scruples about this sort of business. He especially didn’t like paying princes in the Middle East, an area he had visited frequently on Bechtel business and on which he considered himself an expert. But what seemed to nettle Cap most was the fact that the decision had been reached without any input from him. Like the hapless Suliman Olayan, he had not been consulted.

The slight was one of many suffered by Weinberger, whose career at Bechtel had not been going well. On several occasions, legal advice he had provided on important cases had been ignored or overridden. One such instance involved a 1977 suit that had been filed against Bechtel by the U.S. Labor Department, seeking, in the words of the complaint, “to enjoin the firm from violating the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act and to recover unpaid back wages for Alaska pipeline workers.” The suit had grown out of a complaint filed with the department by a thousand qualitycontrol engineers, who claimed that Bechtel had failed to pay them overtime for their work on the pipeline in 1974 and 1975. Most company executives, including Shultz, wanted to settle, if only to avoid bad publicity. Bechtel had already been embarrassed by its connection with the pipeline, which was substantially over budget and from which the company had been fired. Weinberger, however, was in a fighting mood. Arguing that Bechtel had a strong legal case, he claimed that he could beat the Labor Department’s complaint, provided management backed him up. This management, in the person of Shultz, was unwilling to do. Instead, at Shultz’ recom-212

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mendation, Bechtel agreed to settle with the government for $3 million-the largest such settlement in U.S. labor history.

Cap was overruled again, six months later, in connection with the sex-discrimination suit brought by Bechtel’s female employees. Once more, Weinberger wanted to fight, just as much as Shultz wanted to settle. The argument climaxed in the spring of 1979 when Shultz ultimately overruled Bechtel’s