Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story : The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the Wo by Laton Mccartney (books to read to be successful TXT) 📕

the CIA. At the invitation of Allen Dulles, Steve Bechtel also served as the agency’s liaison with the Business Council, and in that capacity provided regular reports on tidbits council members had picked up overseas. In addition, Steve and many of his colleagues on the council like John T.

Connor, chairman of the Allied Chemical Corporation, were debriefed by the agency after they ‘d made trips abroad.

. In reciprocity for their cooperation, the government often provided Steve senior and his colleagues with privileged information that could prove vital to their operations overseas. As an example, Council records indicate that on several occasions in 1964 and 196 5, CIA director John McCone and U.S. ambassador to Indonesia Howard Jones privately briefed Steve senior and other Business Council members on the rapidly deteriorating situation in Indonesia. Bechtel, Socal, Texaco and other companies headed by Council members had extensive dealings in that part of the world and were concerned because Indonesia’s President Sukarno was nationalizing U.S. business interests there. On behalf of the Business Council, Steve expressed his immense gratitude to McCone and Jones for these briefings and monitored developments in Indonisea closely. In October 1965, in what a number of CIA alumni have since charged was an Agency-backed coup, Sukarno was ousted and replaced by President Suharto, who proved far more receptive to U.S. business interests than his predecessor.

Steve senior and John Simpson were Bechtel’s liaisons with the intelligence community at the high levels, but in the field, Bechtel worked with Washington through one of its key executives, a dashing figure in Savile Row suits with the redoubtable name of C. Stribling Snodgrass.

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FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

A native of West Virginia, Snodgrass had attended Annapolis and seen combat action during World War I. In 1927 Snodgrass had resigned from the Navy and moved to London, where he found employment as a consultant to several major oil companies, among them Standard Oil of California, which subsequently introduced him to Bechtel. On trips home to the United States, Snodgrass met frequently with Bechtel, and a friendship took-one that was to be most useful to both men in the years ahead.

In 1939, with war in Europe imminent, Snodgrass had returned to the United States and duty with the Navy as a senior-level nonuniformed officer on the British desk of Naval Intelligence. He remained interested in oil, however, as did the Navy, which in 1942 detached him to work for Harold Ickes’ P etroleum Administration for War.

Snodgrass rose eventually to become head of the PAW’s foreign-operations division, and Ickes appointed him in that capacity to a top-secret delegation dispatched in 1943 to survey the world’s oil reserves and plan how they might be developed for the war effort.

Headed by Everette Degrolyer, assistant deputy administrator of the PAW, the Degrolyer Mission, as it came to be called, was stocked with men who would later play key roles in the U.S. oil industry. Besides Snodgrass, they included Ralph K. Davies, on leave from Socal, James Terry Duce, on leave from the Texas Oil Company and later to become Aramco’s chief contact with the State Department and CIA, and Earle E. Garde, former director of Union Oil of California and since 1938, director of process engineering for BechtelMcCone.

Garde, who was the PAW’s head of economic warfare, proved his worth when the Degrolyer Mission reached Mexico in late August 1942. They were met at the airport by U.S. Ambassador George S.

Messersmith, who arranged for them to meet with senior Mexican officials and