by Sally Denton
It would be Brendan—the fifth generation of Bechtel men—who led the company back to its desert beginnings where, once again, it was harnessing and distributing one of the nation’s most valuable resources. The gigantic flagship project that rose in California’s Mojave Desert was the largest solar plant in the world. There, in 2014 in the Ivanpah Valley, less than sixty miles from Hoover Dam—the project that made the Bechtel Corporation a household name in the West—Bechtel completed a $2.2 billion complex of three generating units. Located on a six-square-mile swath of remote desert landscape owned by the federal government, Ivanpah’s technology included 350,000 mirrors, each one the size of a garage door. With its groundbreaking thermal storage system, Ivanpah was expected to double the nation’s solar capacity, producing enough power for 140,000 homes.
Like all of Bechtel’s projects, the government underwrote Ivanpah generously, including a $1.6 billion loan guaranteed by the US Department of Energy and funded by the Federal Financing Bank. “If California Energy Commission estimates are correct, the power figures imply capital in play of between $15 billion and $500 billion,” wrote Nobel physicist and Stanford professor Robert B. Laughlin. Predictably, Bechtel was once again positioned to be the leading construction company in the privatizing of energy and natural resources.
The project’s physical conspicuousness belied the stealth and secrecy with which it came to fruition. Its forty-story “power tower” and 3,500-acre field of mirrors were in full view of a busy section of the interstate that connects Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Still, it was shrouded in mystery and controversy from the start. A long line of cars carrying day and night laborers snaked toward the facility, each vehicle inspected by a team of security guards. Considering the size and historic nature of the development—and that taxpayers footed close to 80 percent of the cost—Ivanpah received little publicity. Like dozens, if not hundreds, of the company’s high-profile projects that managed to remain cloaked in the privately held company’s bubble of secrecy, the geothermal colossus escaped much scrutiny.
Characteristically, Bechtel managed to override what little environmental opposition to the project arose. Called a “$2.2 billion bird-scorching solar project” by the Wall Street Journal, the massive solar farm became the site of scores of dead birds that flew through the intense heat surrounding the towers that reached 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Bechtel mowed down thousands of desert plants and displaced thirty animal species, and dozens of state and federal environmental reviews concluded that the Mojave Desert was irretrievably scarred. “Despite its behemoth footprint, the Ivanpah project has slipped easily into place, unencumbered by lasting legal opposition or public outcry from California’s boisterous environmental community,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “Away from public scrutiny,” a collaboration of solar developers, federal regulators, and a handful of environmentalists “sparked a wholesale remodeling of the American desert”—thanks to federal subsidies and allotments of public land.
It didn’t stop there. In addition to building the massive Ivanpah solar farm, Bechtel became an equity investor in three California solar plants contracted to provide power to Pacific Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison. The company had come full circle back to its roots.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
A Nasty Piece of Work
In 2015, Jonathan Pollard began serving the thirtieth year of his life sentence in a US prison for spying on behalf of Israel. The previous year, Israeli president Shimon Peres announced that the US government was considering a deal to release Pollard. Part of a three-way arrangement between Washington, Jerusalem, and Ramallah to release Palestinian prisoners and salvage US-brokered peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, Pollard’s release seemed imminent. Peres admitted that he had discussed Pollard’s case with President Obama, and that Obama promised that Attorney General Eric Holder would consider an “offer” Peres made to Obama. On his last official visit to Washington as president, in June 2014, Peres submitted an official request to the White House to advance Pollard’s cause. “I made a specific offer, but I won’t go into details,” Peres told reporters, adding that he had discussed the proposal with Pollard family members before presenting it to Obama. “If I give too many details, it will just ruin things,” Peres said. “I can’t say that he responded positively on the spot. I don’t want to add to what he said, which was that the US attorney general would become involved.”
Senior American legal scholars wrote a letter coinciding with the Peres offer, petitioning Obama to commute Pollard’s sentence. “Such commutation is more than warranted if the ends of justice are to be served, the rule of law respected, and simple humanity secured,” the scholars wrote. Signatories to the letter included six Harvard Law School professors, among them Alan Dershowitz, along with Canadian law professor emeritus and former minister of justice and attorney general of Canada Irwin Cotler. In the letter, the legal experts argued that Pollard’s life sentence is “excessive, grossly disproportionate, unfair, and unjust,” and noted the usual sentence for Pollard’s offense of conveying classified information to a foreign government is six to eight years, with the average actual jail time standing at a mere two to four years. It was just the latest in a long line of entreaties to all American presidents since Ronald Reagan.
“My wife and I over the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency asked him a number of times for a commutation or pardon,” Las Vegas casino magnate, billionaire, and fervent Zionist Sheldon Adelson recalled. “Each time he said he would consider it. The last time we asked him was in January 2009, at which point we thought he was sincere about seriously considering commuting the sentence, but something happened the next day in the media about [former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert boasting that he personally convinced President Bush to create a positive outcome for something . . . that benefitted Israel.” From that, Adelson inferred that Bush was no longer going to act on his request.
When Obama visited Jerusalem in 2013 he had been presented with a “Call for Clemency Campaign” petition containing 150,000 signatures. And upon his arrival at the Ben-Gurion Airport, two high-level government officials implored Obama to release the incarcerated spy.
At the time, Peres told the press that he intended to tell Obama “president to president” to release Pollard without delay on humanitarian grounds. Netanyahu weighed in as well, vowing to do whatever was necessary “to seek Jonathan’s immediate release and repatriation to Israel.” Since Pollard’s confinement “the Israel lobby, said to be omnipotent and irresistible by so many people, has done everything in its power to spring him,” according to an American journalist. And still, “he has rotted in jail. . . . The supposedly mighty and invincible ‘Israel Lobby’ is toothless when it comes to this case.”
Obama had promised to review the case then as well. At that time, the top US officials who had joined the “Free Jonathan Pollard Now” bandwagon read like a who’s who in American foreign policy. They included former president Jimmy Carter; former secretary of state Henry Kissinger; former CIA director R. James Woolsey, who reversed his original position; former and current senators Alan Simpson, Dennis DeConcini, John McCain, David Durenberger, and Charles Schumer Jr.; former national security advisor Robert McFarlane; and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel. Thirty-nine members of Congress signed a letter calling for his release, including Lee Hamilton, who served as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee at the time of Pollard’s sentencing.
“The roster of the renowned passionately advocating for Pollard’s release, or the overturn of his sentence, is nothing less than spectacular,” according to one account. Pollard’s cruel and excessive sentence outraged those who believed Pollard had simply passed to Israel intelligence that the United States should have shared in accordance with a memorandum of understanding between the two countries. In 1993 a thousand rabbis signed a full-page advertisement in the New York Times urging President Clinton to commute Pollard’s sentence. Defining himself as a non-Zion
ist “secular Jew,” apparently to remove any hint of bias in his reporting, venerable journalist Milton Viorst wrote that Pollard was imprisoned as “the result of a miscarriage of justice.”
During the 1998 Middle East talks, Netanyahu had made Pollard’s release a key bargaining point, telling Clinton he needed it in order to sell the peace agreement to the right wing of his coalition. “I could tell you for sure that I know that Bill Clinton was repeatedly asked by supporters of his to commute Jonathan Pollard’s sentence or to pardon him,” Adelson claimed. Clinton was apparently “impressed by the force of Netanyahu’s arguments” on Pollard’s behalf and was leaning toward fulfilling the request. But Clinton backed away from the incendiary issue when his CIA director, George Tenet, allegedly threatened to resign over the matter.
While Weinberger never relented in his spitefulness toward Pollard (Weinberger died in 2006), decades later Shultz softened his position toward the spy. “Dear Mr. President,” Shultz wrote to Obama on January 11, 2011. “I am writing to join with many others in urging you to consider that Jonathan Pollard has now paid a huge price for his espionage on behalf of Israel and should be released from prison. I am impressed that the people who are best informed about the classified material he passed to Israel, former CIA Director James Woolsey and former Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Dennis DeConcini, favor his release.” The Jerusalem Post commented on the gravity of Shultz’s reversal, given his seminal role in the case.
Citing anti-Semitism as a motivating force against Pollard, Woolsey gave numerous public statements and wrote formal requests for his release. “Forget that Pollard is a Jew,” he wrote. “Pretend he’s a Greek- or Korean- or Filipino-American and free him!”
Still, there are those who just as vehemently advocate that Pollard should die in jail for placing allegiance to Israel over loyalty to the United States. Such stalwarts include legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, longtime editor of the New Republic Martin Peretz, and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. Vice President Joe Biden has been particularly vocal on the subject. Responding in 2011 to a group of fifteen Florida rabbis who asked him why Pollard was still in jail, Biden said, “President Obama was considering clemency, but I told him, ‘Over my dead body are we going to let him out before his time.’ If it were up to me, he would stay in jail for life.”
Typical of the schism among government officials that has defined the Pollard affair since its inception, Biden’s resoluteness contrasted with Secretary of State John Kerry’s flexibility. Striving toward conciliation, in late 2013 Kerry raised the possibility of releasing Pollard as part of a prisoner swap with Israel. But it soon became clear that Kerry had spoken without Obama’s blessing.
The 2013 declassification of the CIA’s top secret 1987 “Damage Assessment of the Pollard Case” revealed that the evidence does not support Weinberger’s vitriolic assessment of the harm inflicted by Pollard’s spying, as conveyed by Weinberger in his top secret sentencing memorandum to the judge. The intelligence agency fought for nearly three decades to withhold the report from public inspection. But the documents were eventually obtained and released by the National Security Archive. The CIA declassified the files under orders from a federal panel that determined the agency had no basis for continuing to maintain their secrecy. The documents rekindled questions about Weinberger’s impulse to make sure that Pollard would never be released.
Though released to relatively little public notice, the declassified documents raised “doubts about whether the public was told the truth about Pollard, and the reasons he was prosecuted and given such a draconian prison term,” as one account put it. Contrary to Weinberger’s claims, the CIA report showed that the Israelis “never expressed interest in U.S. military activities, plans, capabilities, or equipment”—nor did Pollard procure any secrets about the United States.
Meanwhile, Weinberger’s twenty-eight-year-old secret sentencing memorandum remained classified until key sections of the forty-nine-page document filed in federal court in Washington, DC, were released to Pollard’s security-cleared legal counsel. “With little fanfare and no news media coverage, a dramatic, potentially game-changing development in the Jonathan Pollard spy case quietly occurred three months ago,” wrote journalist Aaron Klein in February 2015. “The recent disclosures . . . show that the [US] government has been dishonestly hiding behind the mask of ‘classified information’ to materially mischaracterize the nature and extent of the harm caused by Mr. Pollard,” Pollard’s pro bono New York attorneys, Eliot Lauer and Jacques Semmelman, wrote in an op-ed for WND—the internet website successor to WorldNetDaily. The newly revealed material showed that “any harm that may have been caused by Mr. Pollard was in the form of short-term disruption in foreign relations between the United States and certain Arab countries,” wrote the attorneys. “That is not at all the same thing as harm to US national security.”
Weinberger’s memorandum was seen as the basis for Pollard’s unprecedented life sentence for spying for an ally and for his continued incarceration. One of the central figures in the Iran-Contra affair, Weinberger’s hostility toward Pollard “was surely inspired in large part by his deeply held animus toward the state of Israel,” wrote former US national security advisor Robert C. “Bud” McFarlane in a letter in support of Pollard’s release. “His extreme bias against Israel was manifested in recurrent episodes of strong criticism and unbalanced reasoning when decisions involving Israel were being made.”
Many former Reagan administration officials who worked with Weinberger later came out in support of Pollard’s release, most notably George Shultz. If Shultz had once agreed with Weinberger’s loathing of Pollard, he later described Weinberger’s malicious sentencing memorandum as “a nasty piece of work.”
The pleas for clemency finally paid off, and on November 21, 2015, the sixty-one-year-old Pollard was finally paroled from his North Carolina prison. The following day marked the thirtieth anniversary of his arrest. The decision from the US Parole Commission to release Pollard came amid a sharp divide between the US and Israel over America’s nuclear deal with Iran. Government officials with both governments denied that Pollard’s release was an attempt to mollify Israel. Although Israel granted Pollard citizenship in the 1990s, his parole required that he remain in the US for five years—a constraint Pollard’s attorneys asked President Barack Obama to overturn and allow him to move to Israel. But the White House quickly refused, citing the seriousness of Pollard’s crimes.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The Kingdom of Bechtelistan
By the time Brendan Bechtel took over as president and COO in 2014, the company billed itself as the most respected engineering, procurement, and construction firm in the world. Its website boasted record revenues for ongoing projects worldwide. With forty permanent offices in fifty countries and nearly fifty-three thousand employees—and committed to remaining a privately held “family company”—Bechtel was as powerful and relevant in 2015 as at any time in its history. Claiming to have completed more than twenty-five thousand projects in 160 countries on all seven continents, Bechtel identified its areas of expertise as infrastructure; defense and security; environmental cleanup; oil, gas and chemicals; nuclear power; tanks; water; telecommunications; and mining and minerals.
Undertakings included “transforming” the infrastructure of the country of Gabon, including a soccer stadium for the Africa Cup of Nations; building a twenty-one-kilometer underground railway tunnel in London and expensive motorways in Romania, Croatia, and Albania; expanding a gigantic copper mine in Chile; erecting a $15 billion international airport and a $7 billion petrochemical plant in Qatar; new terminals in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Jeddah, and Muscat; a $7.2 billion port and industrial zone at Abu Dhabi; a $1.4 billion LNG processing plant in Angola; the world’s largest aluminum smelter in Saudi Arabia and another in Iceland; the Riyadh Metro; a dozen new gas pipelines in Thailand; one of the largest desalination plants in the world, located in Ch
ile; an oil refinery in India; a gas pipeline in Algeria; a $1.3 billion 2015 contract to destroy chemical weapons of mass destruction at the Pueblo Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant at Pueblo, Colorado; and on and on. In 2015 Bechtel was among the first companies granted permission by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for commercial use of drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles.
Riley Bechtel was among a number of high-profile directors on the board of a controversial biotech sensation called Theranos that once included George Schultz and Henry Kissinger. The $9 billion private company claimed to have developed a device that could detect hundreds of medical issues with a pinprick. But in October 2015, Theranos came under fire amid allegations that the company had made numerous false claims to gain FDA approval.
Among the more fantastic ventures was the $500 million Magic World Theme Park in Dubai—a full-scale Arab entertainment zone of fantasy-based villages within a crater, including Legend Lagoon, Dino Canyon, and Techtown. Bechtel’s concept for the park was based on a modern myth created for the project, in which a “fiery ball fell from the dark heavens.” The meteorite crashed into a forgotten region of the Dubaian desert. “After the ash had settled and many years passed, life began to spring from this once barren land,” as the marketing material described it.
C. David Welch, Bechtel’s president for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, told the press that at one point the company had forty thousand workers at the Doha airport construction site alone. A well-known figure in the region, Welch had been a US diplomat for more than thirty years—including assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs and US ambassador to Egypt. In 2008, prior to leaving the government and joining Bechtel the following year, Welch led negotiations under President George W. Bush to broker a deal to restore diplomatic relations between the United States and Libya’s Mu’ammar Qaddafi. Once at Bechtel, Welch lobbied Congress on behalf of Bechtel’s interests in Libya. In 2011 Welch brought unwanted attention to Bechtel when it was reported that he was advising Qaddafi’s regime on how to stay in power at a moment when the United States sought to depose the tyrant and while NATO air strikes were trying to oust him. Claiming to be acting as a go-between to the Obama administration and Congress, Welch met with senior Libyan officials at the Four Seasons Hotel in Cairo. He offered them assistance from Israeli intelligence and advised them to take advantage of the unrest in Syria. Welch’s advice was “a clear contradiction of public demands from the White House that Qaddafi must be removed,” according to Aljazeera news. The State Department claimed that Welch, a Bechtel employee, was not representing the US government, but was a private individual on a private mission. At the time, Bechtel had a contract to build power plants in Libya. Welch declined comment on the matter.