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) 📕

3. Play our hand cautiously in Libya and be most circumspect in our acts and associations.

4. Consider some local publicity as the project progresses. Take advantage of the fact that we were urged by the oil companies into this joint venture and tie the oil companies into the picture as much as possible so that we may look to them for help in the future.

Whatever reservations Steve junior may have had about Komes’s recommendations disappeared a few months later when, on a flight to Libya, he found himself sitting next to William Crane Eveland, a veteran Middle East CIA agent, then being given “cover” employment by the Vinnell Corporation, an Alhambra, California-based company that did petroleum-related construction work in Saudi Arabia and Iran as well as Libya. Eveland, who was about to leave the agency to join Vinnell full time, was well acquainted with Halim, and he gave Steve junior a blunt piece of advice: if he wanted to work in Libya, his company had better play ball. “The formula,” he said, “is straightforward and simple . Ben Halim or one of his brothers shares in the contract, and the payments for their ‘services’ are made in a foreign bank account.” That was the way the oil companies did business in Libya, Eveland counseled;3 if the Bechtel Corporation wanted to join them, it should get on board.

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Bechtel did, and wound up going Vinnell and the other oil companies one better. Not only did it agree to Halim’s participation in the construction of the Oasis pipeline-and later, one for Mobil as wellit became, in time, Halim’s principal intermediary with the oil companies. Whatever the companies problems-from engineering services to importing fuel to building refineries and roads-Bechtel took care of them, and in the process, ensured that Halim and other local businessmen got their cut. In exchange for these services, Bechtel tacked a fee of up to 18 percent onto its operating charges. Freed from the bother of dealing with Libeco or other local businesses, the oil companies were happy to pay.

And as it turned out, so was Armand Hammer.

Bechtel was well aware of Hammer’s operations in Libya, as well as how desperately he required a pipeline. It had also learned that the contract for the Occidental pipeline job was about to go to another American contractor, Williams Brothers. However, the deal had not yet been sealed, largely because Hammer was still lining up the necessary financing. Hammer’s apparent lack of cash troubled Bechtel’s executives, who were further worried that doing business with Occidental would offend the company’s longtime clients among the oil majors, none of whom were fans of Occidental. Steve junior possessed some doubts as well. “Watch out for Hammer,” he warned. “We don’t want him to cross ways with our regular clients.” Steve senior, however, saw only opportunity in dealing with Hammer, and ignoring the counsel of the Bechtel executive suite, he dispatched one of the company’s top emissaries, Raphael Dorman, to Paris, where Hammer was then laying over while on a European business trip. 4

Meeting in Hammer’s suite at the George V, Dorman laid out a proposal hard to resist: Bechtel would build the Occidental pipeline on a cash basis for $49 million plus bonus incentives-an all-or-nothing gamble, since $48 million at the time was Oxy’s total net worth. Moreover, Bechtel would agree to defer all payments until the line was in operation and Occidental began pumping crude. After forty-eight hours of marathon negotiation,