Bechtel Corp. won the first major Iraq reconstruction contract after the American invasion.
Senior vice president and retired Marine, Jack Sheehan, both manages Bechtel's petroleum and chemical operations, and sits on the Defense Policy Board formed to advise Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who himself once lobbied for a Bechtel project.
President Bush appointed Bechtel's chairman, Riley Bechtel, in February to the Export Council, which advises the president on international trade matters.
In the fiscal year ended in September 2002, the Department of Defense paid Bechtel $1.03 billion, making it the 17th largest military contractor in the country.
Bechtel's revenue from all contracts totaled $11.6 billion in 2002, a 13 percent decline from $13.4 billion in the previous year. The company signed new contracts worth $12.7 billion, a 37 percent increase from $9.3 billion in 2001.
The Iraq contract is just the latest example of Bechtel winning a big government job from a friendly administration.
After serving as treasury secretary in the Nixon administration, George Shultz was Bechtel's president for seven years before he left in 1981 to become secretary of state in the Reagan administration.
And Casper Weinberger was its general counsel and served on the company's board from 1975-81 before becoming secretary of defense under Reagan.
While Shultz was America's top diplomat, the U.S. government tried unsuccessfully to persuade Saddam Hussein to let Bechtel build a pipeline to carry Iraqi crude oil through Jordan to the Red Sea port of Aqaba.
In 1983, Rumsfeld, while working as a special U.S. envoy in the Middle East, traveled to Baghdad to discuss the pipeline with Saddam and Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, according to memos in the National Archives.
From The Boston Globe, April 22, 2003:
Bechtel co-managed Boston’s “Big Dig” traffic engineering project. The projected price of $2.5 billion dollars turned out to be inaccurate, with the cost of the ongoing project now at $14.6 billion dollars 15 years after it commenced.
From The Toronto Star, April 27, 2003:
In 1971, Bechtel won the contract to build Quebec's James Bay hydroelectric project for $6 billion, a figure that doubled, then tripled, quadrupled over time, leaving then-premier Robert Bourassa with a political mess on his hands and impending loss to the separatist Parti Québécois in 1976.
Return to Table of Contents