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) 📕

Bechtel had promised to build quickly, and build quickly it did, completing a job that normally would have taken a year in eleven months. Just as quickly, Occidental began pumping and shipping oil in prodigious amounts. By 1968, its daily crude total had reached 500,000 barrels, and what had once been a nearly bankrupt enterprise had become one of the ten largest oil companies in the world-thanks 148

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largely to Bechtel. “We made Hammer’s fortune for him in Libya,”

boasted Bechtel’s pipeline chief John L. “Jack” Lynch. 5

Hammer, understandably, was delighted-and not about to quibble when the Bechtel Corporation presented him with a bill for $153 million-the cost of the original pipeline plus an additional pipeline and terminal the company had built for Oxy. Nor were Halim and Libeco complaining. They too had made millions.

Not everyone in Libya, though, was happy. There were complaints that Occidental and other oil companies, in their haste to sell as much oil as possible before the expected overthrow of the Idris government, were posting prices for Libyan crude 10 to 15 percent below the international level-thus cutting into Libyan royalties. There were further complaints that the companies were habitually late in paying Libyan taxes, as there were also complaints that the companies, Occidental in particular, were overproducing and thus ruining the Libyan fields. The major bone of contention with Occidental, however, was over a promise Hammer had made in order to secure his original concessions. If the Libyans granted him the right to search for oil, Hammer had said, he would build the country a badly needed ammonia-fertilizer plant.

Since then, the world price of ammonia had collapsed, and largely as a result, Hammer had reneged on the commitment. He had tried to smooth things over by offering to build, with Bechtel, a major liquidnatural-gas plant, but feelings were still bruised. Thus far, however, the Libyans had done nothing about it.

Then, in August 1969, a Bechtel electrician named John Maguire went to Libyan under-secretary of petroleum Ibrahim Hangari with several startling accusations. In abetting Occidental’s efforts to get as much oil out of Libya as possible, Maguire maintained, Bechtel had taken a number of dangerous shortcuts. 6 Specifically, Maguire, whom Bechtel characterized as a disgruntled ex-employee it had fired, claimed that the Oxy pipeline had sprung numerous leaks because of corrosion, that a vent had ruptured in a poorly constructed storage tank and that the Bechtel-installed wiring and metering mechanisms in the fields were substandard. Safety precautions were so lax, Maguire went on, that a Palestinian welder had recently died in a fire after being sent into the fields without a protective gas “sniffer.” But Maguire’s most sensational charge was that Occidental, with Bechtel’s complicity, was moving unmetered oil out of the country-in effect stealing from Libya.

He had no documentable proof for his last claim, Maguire admitted, but he suggested that the Libyans stage a surprise raid on the fields to 149

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catch the Americans in the act. He added that he was in fear for his life: when he had gone to his Bechtel supervisor with his charges, the supervisor had told him to leave the country or he would be killed.

Hangari had special reasons for believing Maguire’s tale: it was to him that Hammer had made the promise to build the fertilizer plant.

The nonfulfillment of that pledge had caused Hangari to lose face and had stalled his career; it had also instilled a burning dislike of Armand Hammer.

After