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

the operation, while George Cooley was named second in command. The IBI executives had barely ordered their new business cards when Steve informed them he was off to Saudi Arabia.

The chief purpose of Bechtel’s visit was to meet with the Aramco people, who were then keen on building a pipeline from the Persian Gulf fields to the Mediterranean. Shortly after his arrival, though, Bechtel was told by Earl English, his principal Middle East troubleshooter, that the Arabs were eager for the company’s services as well.

Suddenly flush with oil revenues-in 1946 alone Aramco had paid $10 million in royalties-ibn Saud was in a spending mood, and with his finance minister, Abdul Suleiman, had drawn up a plan for building a railway from the capital of Riyadh to the port of Damman, 375

miles away. English had already tried to dissuade the Arabs, pointing out the difficulties of laying track across nearly 400 miles of desert.

Suleiman, however, had brushed aside his concerns. There had not been a working railroad in Saudi Arabia since T. E. Lawrence’s guerrillas had knocked out the Hejoz line during World War I, Suleiman told him, and ibn Saud was determined to see one built.

The king’s insistence put Bechtel in the awkward position of having to choose between two masters, the king and Aramco. Aramco, how-84

SAUDI ARABIA

ever, would have to come first. Without oil, ibn Saud would have no money, and to get the oil to the European market, the company had to rely on tankers which made a twenty-day, 7, 000-mile round trip down the Persian Gulf, across the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal, where the British were charging a toll of 13 to 17 cents a barrel. Though it would be a vast and enormously expensive undertaking, costing no less than $100 million and requiring that 550,000

tons of pipe and other material be shipped in from the outside, an 850-mile pipeline from Saudi Arabia through Syria and on to the Mediterranean would eliminate that journey. Better yet, it would quickly pay for itself in saved Suez tolls.

Aramco had wanted to build the pipeline for the Saudis since 1944, but had been stymied both by the war and by Arab anger over U.S.

support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Indeed, at one point ibn Saud had become so furious about Palestine that he threatened to cancel the American oil concessions altogether. Whether or not the king was bluffing, the Americans had been sufficiently concerned that they had mollified him with $6 million a year in LendLease aid during the war. Since the halt of those payments, the king’s temper had again begun to fray, and he was once more charging the United States with “betrayal.” Aramco had tried to soothe him by lining up financing for the pipeline in the form of a $100 million U.S.

loan to Saudi Arabia. Nonetheless, it was far from certain whether the king would give the pipeline his approval. The question hung, Aramco said, on how he got on with Bechtel.

There turned out to be no cause for alarm. Predisposed to like Bechtel by the reports of his son, the king took to the American businessman quickly, and the American to him. For all their obvious differences, the warrior king and the builder shared a pragmatic, unsentimental understanding of how the world