by Sally Denton
(17) American soldiers seized Saddam Hussein’s opulent Republican Palace in Baghdad during some of the fiercest fighting of the entire Iraq War. Under a turquoise dome considered an architectural wonder of the world, the palace would become the American Embassy on a 104-acre campus known as the Green Zone.
(18) A defiant and downcast Saddam Hussein appeared before an Iraqi court in the summer of 2004. The former dictator faced seven charges of crimes against humanity that included the use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war. The mustard gas used against the Kurds was manufactured at a pesticide plant north of Baghdad. He would be found guilty, sentenced to death, and hanged two years later.
(19) The Bohemian Grove is a 2,700-acre retreat located in a private redwood forest, seventy-five miles north of San Francisco. Once described by President Herbert Hoover as “the greatest men’s party on earth,” the all-male Grove has hosted the nation’s corporate, political, and military elite every summer since 1880 in the privacy of 127 primitive camps. The most esteemed of these camps is Mandalay, where five generations of Bechtel men have been members for their entire adult life.
(20) Bechtel sought to build a $2 billion oil pipeline from Kirkuk, Iraq, to the port of Aqaba on the Red Sea in Jordan—a clandestine mission that would remain secret for years. This Aqaba castle was built in the 14th century and made famous to a modern audience by the film Lawrence of Arabia set against the backdrop of the decline of the Ottoman Empire.
(21) Stephen D. Bechtel Sr. (right) and Stephen D. Bechtel Jr. (left) at the International Industrial Development Conference on October 1, 1957.
(22) Riley P. Bechtel, chairman and chief executive officer of Bechtel Group, Inc., until 2015, listens to a question during a news conference at the opening of the Business Council in Boca Raton, Florida, on February 19, 2003.
(23) Jeff Grubler as Saddam Hussein is watched over by Jason Hammer (left) and Allen Schlossman, who were portraying CIA agents during the Stop the Corporate Invasion of Iraq protest in front of Bechtel corporate headquarters, February 24, 2004, in San Francisco. Activists sought to bring attention to what they saw as profiteering in Iraq by Bechtel and Halliburton, companies with close ties to the George W. Bush administration.
(24) An Israeli right-wing demonstrator holds a picture of Jonathan Pollard, a Jewish American who was jailed for life in 1987 on charges of spying on the United States, during a demonstration in Jerusalem on May 12, 2008. Pollard is a convicted Israeli spy and a former US naval civilian intelligence analyst. The Israeli government has made numerous requests for Pollard’s release, all of them declined by US authorities until he was finally paroled in November 2015.
(25) Donald Rumsfeld (left) and Iraq president Saddam Hussein shake hands on December 20, 1983, in Baghdad, Iraq. Rumsfeld’s top-secret visit to Saddam to press for a Bechtel-built oil pipeline would remain classified for the next twenty years. Acting as a special White House envoy for former president Ronald Reagan, Rumsfeld was dispatched on the mission by George Shultz’s State Department to ask the Iraqi dictator to allow Bechtel access to Iraq’s gigantic oil fields—the second largest reserve in the world.
(26) The Bechtel corporate headquarters at the corner of Beale and Mission Streets in San Francisco has long been a commanding presence. Seen here in the summer of 2015.
(27) In large white block script, Warren “Dad” Bechtel painted “W.A. BECHTEL CO.” onto the residential boxcar that held his family. He named their makeshift home WaaTeeKaa for the combination of their three toddlers’ baby names—“Waa-Waa” for Warren, “Tee-Tee” for Steve, and “Kaa-Kaa” for Kenneth. This miniature replica of the train car is seen here at the entrance to the WaaTeeKaa Bechtel History Museum at the company’s San Francisco headquarters.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not exist if not for the incomparable Donald S. Lamm, consummate editor and literary agent. Its genesis was spawned by Lamm, who saw behind the opacity of Bechtel to envision one of the great, untold stories of American history and invention. That he saw me as Bechtel’s natural and long-needed chronicler—a perfect union of author and subject—was my personal good fortune. But he didn’t stop there. He shepherded the book through the process of pairing me with the skilled and enthusiastic Ben Loehnen at Simon & Schuster. And then continued as the book’s unofficial steward through its years of research and writing. I am profoundly grateful for his belief and commitment, and for the team he and his fellow agent, Christy Fletcher, mustered to bring it forth.
Many archivists, librarians, academics, policy advisors, activists, and colleagues contributed to my research and understanding of Bechtel and its relationship with the US government and its role in the world. I wish to thank Scott Armstrong, Stephen Bates, Sid Blumenthal, Matthew Brunwasser, Tom Carpenter, Phillip Coyle, Matt Davis, Mark Feldstein, Peyton George, Hugh Gusterson, Gary Gwilliam, Todd Edward Holmes, Todd Jacobson, Walter Kirn, John Mankiewicz, Jonathan Marshall, Laton McCartney, Greg and Trish Mello, Bob Moss, Judith Nies, Virginia Scharff, Tick Segerblom, Elisa Rivlin, Jeff Smith, Russ Wellen, and Valerie Plame Wilson.
Once again, I am thankful to the many friends who continually sustain me through the long, often grueling process of writing a book. The usual suspects who pepper the acknowledgment pages of my previous seven books are here once again. Charmay Allred, Shaune Bazner, Sandy Blakeslee, Maxine Champion, Nancy Cook, Frankie Sue Del Papa, Dan Flores, Bonnie Goldstein and Jim Grady, Felice Gonzales, Michael Green and Deborah Young, Joanna Hurley, Judy Illes, Don and Jean Lamm, Roger Morris, Jim and Julie Anne Overton, Ellen Reiben, Bob Samuel, Tick Segerblom, Sam Smith, Jamey Stillings, and Greg and Barbara Wierzynski. I am sorry that my dear friend Phil Smith—one of the most eminent science policy experts in America—did not live to see this book come to fruition. He was an early and stalwart champion of the project and lent his insight and expertise to me, as well as providing introductions to key sources.
In the friendship category, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Mike and Terri Jerry, who essentially adopted my dog, Fremont, for months at a time during my peripatetic research schedule. And to Kathy Kinsella and Ed James, who welcomed me into their stunning Cleveland Park, DC, home for an entire four months while I conducted intensive research at the Library of Congress. Famous for their hospitality, Ed and Kathy host a steady stream of writers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, labor leaders, artists, activists, and journalists, all the while plying everyone with gourmet meals and fine wine and ongoing, enlightening conversation, all unpretentiously reminiscent of the historic Washington salons of earlier eras.
I am grateful for my four months of research at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress—an opportunity that not only enhanced my life in unexpected ways but also deepened my understanding of the world Bechtel made, while broadening my scope into previously unimagined territories. Librarians Thomas Mann and Janice Herd were indefatigable in their pursuit of documents and databases, primary sources and obscure archives. Gulnar Nagashybayeva, the library’s Business Reference Specialist, taught me how to navigate the inscrutable ocean of the “Deep” or “Hidden” web, which opened a whole new world to me—a world where Bechtel operated that didn’t crop up on a Google search. My intern, Mary Ahearn, was thorough and resourceful. Mary Lou Reker, Travis Hensley, and Jason Steinhauer made a daunting task manageable. They provided the community of scholars at Kluge with a social and intellectual vibrancy that was infectious. I am thankful for the support I encountered at that extraordinary venue during my Kluge/Black Mountain Institute fellowship.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, literally made this book possible. The BMI dream team, under the helm of Carol Harter and Richard Wiley, fostered a magical haven of creativity and academic excellence. The collegial and sustaining environment of BMI was unlike anything I had previously experienced in my twenty-five years of book writing. Many thanks go to Carol and Richard for helping make the past couple o
f years the best of my life. Thanks also to my BMI colleagues: Maile Chapman, Joe Langdon, and Maritza White. Special appreciation as well to Chris Hudgins, the Dean of UNLV’s College of Liberal Arts, for his unwavering support of the institute, and to Beverly Rogers, whose recent $30 million gift to the newly rechristened Beverly Rogers and Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute guarantees that it will remain among the preeminent literary establishments in America for years to come.
Once again, I owe the world to my mother, Sara Denton, and my three sons, Ralph, Grant, and Carson Samuel. I wish with all my heart that my father, Ralph Denton, had lived to read this book. He never wavered in his pride about me, but this particular endeavor touches on many aspects of American life, culture, and politics that were of utmost concern to him.
Finally, thanks to John Smith, the ever-witty and patient journalist, who was there in the trenches to watch my back.
Sally Denton
November 27, 2015
© AARON MAYES
SALLY DENTON is an investigative reporter, author, and historian who writes about the subjects others ignore—from a drug conspiracy in Kentucky to organized crime in Las Vegas; from corruption within the Mormon Church to the hidden history of Manifest Destiny; from one of America’s bitterest political campaigns to the powerful forces against Franklin D. Roosevelt. She has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson Public Scholar Fellowship, and the Black Mountain Institute / Kluge Fellowship. She is the author of The Money and the Power, American Massacre, and The Bluegrass Conspiracy, among others.
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NOTES
Although I didn’t know it, the inspiration for this book began five decades ago. As a fourth-generation Nevadan—raised in the Boulder City home built by one of the engineers on the Hoover Dam—I have been fascinated by Bechtel all of my life. To me, the company has always embodied the best and worst of American capitalism. Riddled as the company has been with the influence peddling and cronyism endemic to such multinational empires, it has always intrigued me as a very human story of entrepreneurship, of American homegrown ingenuity and technological genius.
My reporting on Bechtel began formally in 2011, when Americans seemed to be reaching an apex of concern about corporate accountability and responsibility. Because of the historic and public nature of some of the subjects of this book, there exists a wealth of information in various collections and locales. I relied extensively on primary and secondary sources in institutions such as the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The vast collections at the Library of Congress were by far the most all-encompassing and enlightening—from the various libraries within (the Jefferson, the Madison, and the Adams), to the incomparable worldwide databases and periodicals to which the Library subscribes.
This book is based on thousands of pages of confidential and public government and corporate records, as well as dozens of interviews with government officials and corporate players. Unfortunately, I was denied access to Caspar Weinberger’s papers, which, though housed at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, are controlled by Weinberger’s son, Caspar Weinberger Jr., who personally rejected my inquiry. Likewise, the Hoover Institution Journalism Program denied my request for a journalism fellowship because my area of reporting did not include “overlap with Hoover Institution scholars’ area of research and expertise.” The Hoover-affiliated scholars whom I identified as of interest to me, and who are seminal to my book, included Stephen Bechtel Jr., along with the “four horsemen of the apocalypse,” George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, and Sam Nunn.
Because of the private corporate status of the company, combined with Bechtel’s long-standing tradition of privacy and secrecy, information that would be in the public domain for a publicly traded company was not available. Neither the Department of Energy nor NNSA was helpful or forthcoming. My freedom of information requests to DOE and NNSA regarding Bechtel contracts were denied in their entirety. Still, despite being handicapped by the secrecy and privacy of Bechtel, I was able to shine a light on many of its opaque activities in order to present a balanced picture of the company.
Bechtel’s media relations department responded to my request to submit questions in writing regarding the company’s history and current projects by directing me to the company’s online press kit. And in fact, their website along with corporate histories provided a wealth of information. The company’s website is brimming with financial and technical details about its worldwide megaprojects throughout history. The three corporate-sponsored company histories—The Bechtel Story, A Builder and His Family, and Bechtel in Arab Lands—were a veritable treasure trove of family and company history. John Simpson’s obscure, privately printed autobiography, Random Notes: Recollections of My Early Life, was starkly revealing of the milieu of the Cold War intrigues of the Bechtel-McCone era. I was fortunate to have worked for Jack Anderson, the legendary investigative reporter, on the heels of his famous exposés of John McCone and ITT, the assassination of Salvador Allende, and McCone’s role in the CIA investigation of the John F. Kennedy assassination. Anderson’s files, as well as those of his predecessor, the equally legendary Drew Pearson, added wonderful context and color to an opaque subject.
I also drew on a wide range of private documents and conducted dozens of interviews with well-placed informants in Washington, California, and abroad. I have relied on published histories and stories by first-rate journalists working in the United States, Europe, Central and South America, and throughout the Middle East. I have culled and analyzed dozens of congressional hearings, court documents, conference papers, graduate theses, white papers, think-tank analyses, declassified State Department and CIA cables, and memoranda, as well as congressional and inspector general investigations.
I reviewed the papers of numerous individuals who appear in these pages, including Allen Dulles, John Foster Dulles, James Forrestal, John Simpson, John McCone, Richard Nixon, Edwin Meese, Donald Rumsfeld, Ronald Reagan, among many other public and private figures.
Some of my interviews were conducted on “background,” meaning I could rely upon the information they provided in order to independently verify it but I agreed not to identify them. There are no anonymous quotations in the book.
All direct quotations come from either primary sources, including historical and legal documents; firsthand accounts; audiovisual transcripts; scholarly papers; and especially government cables, memoranda, reports, and legal or congressional hearings; or secondary sources used to analyze the primary sources. The vast number of secondary sources came from numerous libraries and repositories in California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Washington, DC. Those sources include published works, articles from books and journals, documentaries, dissertations, reports, blogs, and manuscripts.
“These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece
the people”: Abraham Lincoln. Speech in the Illinois Legislature. Jan. 11, 1837. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln1/1:92?rgn=div1;view=fulltext.
“If you can’t trust a man’s word”: Robert L. Ingram, The Bechtel Story: Seventy Years of Accomplishment in Engineering and Construction (San Francisco: Ingram, 1968), 33.
“We’re more about making money than making things”: Bechtel, quoted in Jeffrey St. Clair, “Bechtel, More Powerful Than the U.S. Army,” Axis of Logic, May 15, 2005, 7. http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_17669.shtml.
“There’s no reason for people to hear of us. We’re not selling to the public”: Jim Riccio, “Incompetence, Wheeling & Dealing: The Real Bechtel,” Multinational Monitor 10, no. 10 (October 1989).
“We will never be a conglomerate”: www.bechtel.com/BAC-Chapter-7.html.
“The company’s goal has always been to be the best”: www.bechtel.com.
PREFACE: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The account of the major combat operations in Iraq—and Bechtel’s role in it—draws on extensive American and international contemporaneous newspaper accounts. The facts about the rise of Bechtel were gleaned primarily from the company website, the company’s three officially sponsored histories and news stories written by California authors.