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

The problem was a serious one for U.S. nuclear exporters, including Bechtel, made all the more so by the Carter administration’s refusal to sell the Indians parts needed for the plant’s repair, because of the Indian government’s unwillingness to abide by the provisions of the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty. While on a May 1983 visit to New Delhi, however, Shultz quietly assured the Indians that treaty signature or no, the United States would soon authorize the sale of the needed parts.

Taken together, the efforts of Shultz, Weinberger, Davis and the other members of the Reagan administration were cause for good cheer at Bechtel, which, despite having given them up, appeared to be booming. “We’re preeminent in the field now,” a company executive boasted, referring to Bechtel’s nuclear operations. “When people get in trouble, they come to us.”15

They were coming, and thanks to them, profits were up. For the moment, at least, Steve junior’s ride as the Lone Ranger had been a smooth, untroubled one. The question was how long it could last.

228

CHAPTER

2 l

THE NEXT GENERATION

T he course

bold and Steve Bechtel,

single-minded Jr., had

one. It charted

rested

for

on a his company

belief that

was a

nuclear

energy was the power source of the future and that in the meantime oil would continue to command the same high prices as in the last decade. The strategy was high-risk, higher than anything the Bechtel organization had attempted in the last half-century, and for it to succeed, the world economy had to keep churning along, undisturbed, undiminished. Buoyed by the billions in contracts that had flowed in from places like Saudi Arabia and Algeria, Indonesia and Mexico, Steve junior was confident that that would be the case. As events soon demonstrated, his assumption was mistaken; nearly fatally so.

The problem, in a nutshell, was that the world economy, contrary to his expectations, headed into deep recession. As oil prices plunged and Third World debt mounted, American construction companies, already burdened by a strong U.S. dollar, which made it possible for foreign competitors to undercut their prices, began to feel the pinch. It grew more painful as the number of cancelled projects multiplied, until by 1984, the industry, once seemingly invulnerable, was in its worst economic straits since the Great Depression.

229

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

As the biggest company, and the one with the heaviest foreign exposure and commitment to energy, Bechtel was particularly hard hit. The first blow landed in January 1984, when Bechtel received word that the owners of the troubled Zimmer nuclear plant in Ohio-a long-delayed facility Bechtel had hoped to finish building-had, despite eighteen months of intense pressure from Bechtel and the Reagan administration, decided to convert to coal. The news staggered Bechtel, which had been so confident of winning the $700 million job that it had already assigned nearly five hundred engineers to begin planning the project.

Two months later, the company was rocked again, when Saudi Oil Minister Ahmed Yamani, alarmed by his country ‘s sharply dwindling oil revenues, abruptly cancelled a $1 billion oil refinery Bechtel had been building at Qasim. With the loss of the project, hundreds more engineers were thrown out of work. “It happened literally overnight,”

shuddered one Bechtel executive. “We came in one morning and they were gone. Their desks were clean. A billion dollars had gone out the window just like that. “1 Nor were Bechtel’s troubles over. Four months after the