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

Sources of Supply Command, had already decided to build a major refinery at the Norman Wells oilfields in Canada’s Northwest Territories, and run a pipeline from there I, 200 miles southwest through the Yukon Territory into Alaska.

It was, to put it mildly, an ambitious proposal. The territory the pipeline would traverse was among the most remote wilderness areas in the world. Much of it had never been explored and was unrecorded on any map. In winter, temperatures dropped to 70 degrees below zero.

But it could be done. Somervell, who had been an Army engineer for thirty years, was sure of it. So confident was he of the project’s success that he had already committed several thousand Army Corps of Engineers troops-many of them blacks from the South-to do it. But the bulk of the work-the building of refineries, tank farms and the pipeline itself-would fall to a civilian contractor recommended to him by Standard Oil of California. That contractor was Steve Bechtel.

Initially, Bechtel was reluctant. W ith Calship and Marinship, he and McCone already had more work than they could handle. Somervell, though, was not an easy man to deny. A West Point graduate who had served under “Black Jack” Pershing in the punitive raids against Pancho Villa’s forces in northern Mexico, he had the swagger of a soldier and the mind of an engineer. There was an appealing forcefulness about him that even Bechtel found hard to resist. Also, the deal Somervell was offering was a sweet one: Bechtel was to be guaranteed a 10 percent profit on the project, and would have the right to select his own subcontractors, including, if he chose, the W A. Bechtel Company and BechtelMcCone. Any remaining doubts Bechtel may have had were banished when Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson called him into his office and in no uncertain terms, ordered him to take the job. Said Stimson: “This is what your country has decided you are going to do during the war. Now get out of here and get to work, goddammit. “8

So Bechtel would build Somervell’s pipeline. But Somervell had one more condition: the work on “Canol,” as it was called, after “Canadian oil,” had to be done in secret, with no contract and no one outside the War Department and Bechtel’s own organization knowing about it. It wasn’t so much the Japanese Somervell was worried about as the old curmudgeon Harold Ickes.

Just as the Interior secretary had been a thorn in Bechtel’s side at Boulder, Ickes was a longtime enemy of Somervell’s as well, repeatedly attacking the general since the days when Somervell was building La-62

THE WAR YEAR S

Guardia Airport and a host of other New York projects for the WPA.

Now, ih addition to his Interior post, Ickes was named head of the Petroleum Administration for War, a job that put him in charge of ensuring that the oil industry met the military’s needs, and which, in Somervell’s eyes, made him all the more dangerous. If Ickes got wind of the pipeline project, Somervell told Bechtel, 9 he would no doubt try to assume control of it or even attempt to cancel it. But Bechtel needn’t worry about the project’s funding. With the consent of Stimson-no friend of Ickes’ either-Somervell had already buried an initial $25

million10 for it in a massive war appropriations bill. All Bechtel had to do was keep his mouth shut.

The final approval for Canol came through in April 1942, and shortly thereafter, notices began appearing in employment offices in the United States and Canada.