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FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES
On all his trips, including the one he was making this morning, the route was planned by a former U.S. Army antiterrorism expert, who varied it every time.
While there was some good reason for the caution and secrecy-in the early 1970s, Bechtel’s name had shown up on a Symbionese Liberation Army “hit list”1-to an even larger extent, this was Bechtel’s style and a reflection of the values of the remarkable company he commanded.
Founded by his grandfather seventy-five years before, and owned and operated by the Bechtel family ever since, the Bechtel Group* was the largest engineering and construction company in the world, with interests and political connections stretching from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia and back again. It had built pipelines in Peru, copper mines in South Africa, synthetic-fuel plants in New Zealand, nuclear power stations in India, a subway system in Washington, factories in California, hospitals, hotels, airports and industrial structures the world over.
In the Middle East, its refineries and pipelines had made the rise of OPEC possible. In Libya, where Bechtel had been among the last American companies to depart, its creations inadvertently had generated the revenues that would help finance the regime of Muhammar Qaddafi. In the United States, where it had been influencing presidents since Herbert Hoover, it had built many of the roads and bridges that had opened the West, and the dams, such as Boulder, that had brought it life. And the list �tretched on, seemingly endless.
This year alone, Bechtel and its 42,000 employees were engaged in building in 20 countries a total of 101 megaprojects, each with a value of at least $50 million, including one-the Saudi Arabian industrial city of Jubail-with a larger budget than the entire U.S. space program. When the balance sheet for 1982 was finally figured, Bechtel would report revenues of $13.6 billion-sufficient, had the company been listed in the Fortune 500, to place it as the 20th largest corporation in America, above far more familiar names like Standard Oil, Western Electric, Eastman Kodak and Xerox.
But Bechtel was not listed in the Fortune 500 or on any public exchange. It was a private company, one of the largest in the world; and that too was the way Steve Bechtel, Jr. preferred it. He had no patience for troublesome stockholders or filings with the SEC, and
In 1979, the Bechtel Corporation changed its name to the Bechtel Group as part of a company reorganization.
12
THE GROVE
even less for the prying scrutiny of the public and the press. “There’s no reason for the public to hear of us,” he had once told a reporter.
“We’re not selling anything to the public.”
Instead, Bechtel did its selling to companies and to governments, quietly and out of view: in boardrooms, on golf courses, in kings’ palaces and prime ministers’ residences, or at the site to which Steve Bechtel’s chauffeur was now ferrying him-a secluded, 2, 700-acre stand of redwoods 75 miles east of San Francisco. It was named the Bohemian Grove.
For Steve Bechtel and the power brokers like him, the Bohemian Grove, which is owned and operated by the Bohemian Club in San Francisco, was the grown-up equivalent of a summer camp, a retreat where, for a three-day weekend every July, the country’s corporate, political and military elite could gather, immune from care (it was burned in effigy at the start of
