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) 📕

for former Texas governor Allen Shivers when Shivers, the advisory committee’s chairman, couldn’t make a quarterly meeting. Everobliging Steve senior also helped Kearns fill vacancies on the bank’s advisory committee, with the result that before long it was dominated by Bechtel friends and customers, including investment banker and former FMC corporation head Paul Davies.

There was nothing, apparently, that Steve Bechtel, Sr., wouldn’t do for Henry Kearns and his bank, including Hying to Washington to testify before Congress in their behalf-and doing so with such effectiveness that Congress increased Eximbank’s lending authority to $20

billion, double what Nixon had requested. In turn, there was very little, if anything, that Walter Kearns wouldn’t do for the Bechtel Corporation.

That became clear in 1970, when Kearns stepped in to assist Bechtel with a project that was having troubles in Indonesia. The project .in question was the mining of a 586-foot-tall mountain of copper ore, high in the remote and rugged jungles of Irian Jaya. The job, which was being undertaken for a company called Freeport Minerals, had not been going well, a source of considerable distress for Texaco, a major stockholder in the venture, and its chairman, Gus Long, Steve senior’s oldest and closest friend in the oil industry. At one point, when it appeared that the entire project would collapse, Freeport’s president, Forbes Wilson, stormed into Steve junior’s office, charging that Bechtel had vastly underestimated the complexity of the mining. Either Bechtel allocate its full resources to the project and replace the project manager, or, Wilson threatened, Freeport was going to bring in another construction company. 3

Steve junior immediately sent one of his best men to Irian Jaya and gave the project his top priority. He also assured Wilson that his father would guarantee the project’s proposed $20 million funding, which was then before the ExportImport Bank. What Steve junior didn’t foresee was the recalcitrance of Eximbank’s chief engineer, who, after reviewing the loan application, refused to believe that high-grade copper ore could be extracted from such a remote site at a commercially viable price. With that, the loan was dead.

It was, that is, until Steve senior put in a complaining call to Henry Kearns, who thereupon overrode his own engineer and personally cleared the loan. 4

Under Kearns’s direction, Eximbank was even more generous in financing Bechtel’s dealings with Pertamina, the Indonesian govern-157

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

ment’s corruption-riddled oil company, for which Bechtel was building a number of refineries and pipelines.

The Pertamina work was especially important to Bechtel not only because of the size of the contracts involved (they totaled in the billions), but because of the lengths to which the company had gone to get them. In some cases, Bechtel had been nurturing friendships for years. One such relationship was with Julius Tahija, a famed Indonesian war hero (during one World War II battle, Tahija was said to have killed 250 Japanese single-handedly), who when Steve senior met him for the first time in 1952 was a middle manager for Caltex. By the 1960s, Tahi ja was managing director of Caltex in Indonesia, and sufficiently wired with the government that he was able to operate Caltex (and to award Bechtel contracts) even after Sukarno expropriated most foreign interests in 196 3. Another crucial Bechtel contract in Indonesia was lbnu Sutowo, a flamboyant, golf-playing army general and onetime surgeon who was serving as minister of Mining and Petroleum when Steve senior began dealing