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

who for the last 20 years had been head of Bechtel’s nuclear-developmental operations. Davis’ association with Reagan had begun during the 1980 presidential campaign, when the

When Davis left Bechtel to become Reagan’s deputy secretary of Energy, he was compelled by government regulations to file a financial-disclosure statement. The data he provided are a vivid demonstration of Bechtel’s generosity and a prime reason why the company is able to recruit extraordinary executive talent.

During his last fourteen months at Bechtel, Davis, then vicepresident for planning 225

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then-candidate appointed him a member of his energy advisory committee, a group that included James Quenon, president of the partly Bechtelowned Peabody Coal, and Harold Haynes, soon to be appointed a Bechtel director, and then chairman of Bechtel’s oldest and best customer, Standard Oil of California. In its forty-one-page report, the committee recommended that the government move to revitalize the anemic U.S. coal industry-a direct benefit to Bechtel-and that it streamline nuclear regulatory procedures, another benefit for Bechtel that Davis and the other committee members deemed “absolutely essential.”

By the time of the committees’ recommendations, Davis was in an excellent position to implement them; in January 1981, he had been appointed by Reagan as deputy secretary of Energy. Though the department was nominally under the control of James Edwards, a former South Carolina governor and ex-dentist, around Washington it was an open secret that Davis actually called the shots-and call them he did.

In 1981, for instance, Davis led a high-level U.S. delegation to Mexico in an effort to win contracts for U.S. firms-Bechtel among them-to build the first two of twenty nuclear plants Mexico planned to erect by the end of the decade. That same autumn, in a move that Davis supported, the White House ordered the U.S. ExportImport Bank, which had recently provided an additional $1.1 billion in financing for U.S.-built nuclear plants overseas, to offer Taiwan especially generous financing for the construction of two nuclear plants, both of which were eventually built by a Bechtel joint venture for $340

million.

During the same period, Reagan-again on Davis’ recommendations-directed the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, as the president put it, to “take steps to facilitate the licensing of [nuclear] plants under construction.” Of the 3 5 plants that fell under Reagan’s order, 15 had been or were being built by Bechtel. A month later, the administration and advanced development, received a salary of $240,000. Through stock option plans, Davis also owned a minimum of $250,000 in each of four separate Bechtel stocks.

Additionally, he had between $100,000 and $250,000 in the Bechtel savings plan and was owed another $120,000 in deferred company bonuses. When everything was totaled together, Davis, a high-ranking middle-manager, was receiving more than $500,000 annually in salary, bonuses and stock benefits-well beyond what a manager in his position would have been paid at one of Bechtel’s competitors.

Like Henry Keams, his predecessor as the bank’s chairman, John L. Moore would wind up working for Bechtel. He joined the firm in 1982 as vicepresident for financial development.

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helped Bechtel’s nuclear efforts overseas by lifting U.S. restrictions against the sale of nuclear fuel to South Africa and by informing Brazil, which, like South Africa, had not signed the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty, that it was now free to acquire nuclear fuel from U.S.

sources.

In January 1982, there was still more good news for Bechtel when the Energy Department secretly authorized the export to Argentina of a sophisticated computer sy stem needed to operate a “heavy water ” plant capable of manufacturing nuclear-weapons-grade materials. Davis, who talked