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

contractors, that would be fine, but only if Bechtel wanted them, and only on the condition that IBI itself approved of them. In the interim, the government wanted to start the training program immediately.

Borman was relieved it appeared that the crisis had passed. Now that his beloved railroad was complete, even ibn Saud was in good spiritsdelighting in the electrification of Riyadh, finished in 1949, and even more so in an X-ray machine the Americans had given him as a gift.

The X-ray pictures so amused him that he had them taken of his harem and the entire royal family.

But despite ibn Saud’s mood, Borman was not completely in the clear. A Palestinian Arab, Badr Fahuum, who had been assigned by the king to act as a liaison between Suleiman and IBI, was proving uncooperative; like Suleiman, he was also dipping into the Bechtel till.

Childs and others who knew the man concluded that he was trying to ingratiate himself with the Saudis at IBI’s expense. A different view was taken by Borman’s rival John Rogers, who had the full beaucratic backing of IBI’s president, Van Rosendahl, and who was now spending most of his time in Saudi Arabia. The problem, said Rogers, wasn’t the Palestinian: it was Borman.

Rogers himself was making new friends in the kingdom. He publicly quarreled with U.S. officials, most notably General Richard O’Keefe, the commander of the Dhahran airfield-and was openly critical of Borman, 14 who did his best to ignore the attacks. It particularly seemed to gall Rogers that Suleiman kept him waiting for a week for an appointment, while the nonconfrontational Borman could walk into the finance minister’s office at any time.

The hostilities finally came to a head just before Christmas 1949

when, with the backing of Rosendahl, Rogers announced that Borman was being removed from his post. The change, Rogers asserted, represented nothing more than a routine transfer of Bechtel managers; but there was no doubt that Borman was being fired. Rogers had ordered him out of Jeddah in three days.

Childs had seen the dismissal coming, but was nonetheless shocked and extremely upset. “WHEN NEWS OF BORMAN’S REMOVAL BECAME

KNOWN … HIS MANY FRIENDS WERE OUTRAGED,” he cabled Secretary of State Dean Acheson. “BORMAN’S REPUTATION FOR ABSOLUTE INTEGRITY AND FAIR DEALING HAS EARNED HIM THE HIGHEST RESPECT OF THE

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FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

SAUDI OFFICIALDOM AND THE FOREIGN BUSINESS COMMUNI1Y IN ]EDDAH.”15

When they learned of Borman’s dismissal, the Bechtel crew working on the huge Jeddah pier threatened to resign en masse in protest. They were dissuaded only when Borman told them to stick it out. He reflected, Childs noted, “A REMARKABLE LACK OF BIITERNESS …

CONSIDERING WHAT HE HAD TO CONTEND WITH. “16

Suleiman was also unhappy with Borman’s dismissal and wired Steve Bechtel asking that he be allowed to stay on. Childs followed with a letter making the same entreaty and stating that “Tom holds an almost unique position of confidence with the Saudi Arabian Government, with the American and foreign community in Jeddah and with the United States Air Force in Dhahran.” But there was no reprieve.

In the end, Childs attributed Borman’s demise to Rogers’ extreme jealousy. Rogers, he said, was a ruthlessly unprincipled executive. According to Childs, Rogers’ charges, notably that Borman was more concerned with Arab needs than with those of IBI, were grossly unjust, and merely a smoke screen for his own overweening ambition. Before leaving Saudi Arabia himself a few years later, Childs noted that under Rogers, Bechtel’s policies had come to mirror those of Aramco, which saw itself as an extension of the U.S. government and was viewed as