The Profiteers
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“full of virtue”: Ibid., 1.
“Everything followed”: Ibid., ii.
“who had some sort”: Ibid., 39.
“actor in” . . . “interpreter of”: Ibid., 60.
“a rather Machiavellian scheme” . . . “At this point” . . . “It was rough”: Ibid., 39–40.
“making history”: Ibid., 60.
“saving the world”: Ibid., 63.
“An intelligence agency”: Allen Dulles, The Secret Surrender (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 9.
“major politics, finance”: Ingram, A Builder and His Family, 77.
“Fast friends” . . . “shanking irons”: Jeffrey St. Clair, “Straight to Bechtel,” Counterpunch, May 9, 2005.
“America’s unadvertised”: Burton Hersh, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992), 2.
“those lucrative thickets”: Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (New York: Times Books, 2013), 33.
“forward-looking monarch” . . . “a tight circle”: www.bechtel.com/BAC-Chapter-3.html.
“globe-girdling behemoth”: Alexander Taylor, “A Secretive Construction Giant Enters the Limelight,” Time, June 12, 1982.
“the rise of the notoriously potent”: McCartney, Friends in High Places, 12.
“In the Middle East program”: Ingram, Builder and His Family, 95.
CHAPTER SEVEN: THE LARGEST AMERICAN COLONY
“Bechtel Corporation, which is”: Rebecca Solnit, “Dry Lands,” London Review of Books, December 3, 2009.
“modernize this ancient region”: Finnie, Bechtel in Arab Lands, 7.
“even a Bedouin camp” . . . “This thirty-inch”: www.bechtel.com/BAC-Chapter-3.html.
“Europe’s back door” . . . “the largest American colony”: Ingram, Builder and His Family, 96.
“one of the most extraordinary”: Finnie, Bechtel in Arab Lands, 88.
“For all their obvious differences”: McCartney, Friends in High Places, 85.
“possess any plant, firm, or branch”: July 18, 1974, agreement between International Bechtel Incorporated and the Egyptian government, quoted in McCartney, Friends in High Places, 185. McCartney writes: “The exclusion of Jews from Bechtel projects was quietly sanctioned by the State Department, which at the time did not employ Jews in Saudi Arabia either. Nor were any Jews employed by Aramco.” McCartney, Friends in High Places, 87.
“part of the corporate-intelligence”: John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 244.
“everything from pipelines”: Finnie, Bechtel in Arab Lands, 39.
“STEPHEN BECHTEL INFORMED ME TODAY”: US minister J. Rives Childs cable to Sec. of State, 2/17/47, quoted in McCartney, Friends in High Places, 86.
“Camel Legionnaires”: Ingram, Builder and His Family, 99.
“a payment or bribe”: Dispatch, Francis E. Meloy to Division of Near Eastern Affairs, 9/29/48, quoted in McCartney, Friends in High Places, 86.
“The king and his advisers”: Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 40.
“came down to take a look”: Steve Bechtel, quoted in McCartney, Friends in High Places, 96.
“city-state that existed”: Finnie, Bechtel in Arab Lands, 119.
“gangs of Arabs”: Ibid., 117.
“may have been descendants”: Ibid., 119.
“apart from a few brackish wells”: Ibid., 91.
“life easier” . . . “As one well”: Ibid., 87.
“In this business”: Steve Bechtel, quoted in McCartney, Friends in High Places, 96.
“was of such volume”: Finnie, Bechtel in Arab Lands, 43.
“As oil flowed”: Coll, Bin Ladens, 48.
“an elite East Coast Ivy League”: Hersh, Old Boys, book jacket.
“weakness for old-boy”: Ibid., 155.
“threats to corporate interests”: Adam LeBor, “Overt and Covert,” review of The Brothers, by Stephen Kinzer, New York Times, November 8, 2013.
“a great political force”: Kennan, quoted in Kinzer, Brothers, 81.
“multinational corporation”: McCartney, Friends in High Places, 115.
“I have talked this over with Steve”: Simpson to Dulles, December 15, 1952, quoted in McCartney, 116.
“political forces”: Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), photographic insert between 512–13.
“Persia’s oil petroleum”: Roger Morris, “Robert Gates: The Specialist” (Part One), TomDispatch.com, June 19, 2007, www.tomdispatch.com/dialogs/print/?id=174812.
“Bechtel’s 12-volume”: Dowie, “Bechtel File,” 38.
CHAPTER EIGHT: GOING NUCLEAR
“New ‘Cold War’ Plan”: Boston Globe, quoted in Kinzer, Brothers, 89.
“favored his friends”: Background Investigation of John Alex McCone. US Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation. May 5, 1954.
“which put planes”: Nies, Unreal City, 195.
“The strong-willed, stern-looking”: Wise and Ross, Invisible Government, 192.
“We are the inheritors”: Swanberg.
“men of great mental vigor”: Ibid., 317.
“It was only after”: Denton, The Pink Lady: The Many Lives of Helen Gahagan Douglas (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), 95.
“Mr. President”: Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Vintage, 2006), 332.
“the impossibility of any defense”: Ibid., 324.
“two permanently opposed”: Ibid., 424.
“More horrific”: Ibid., 418.
“I do not know how the Third World War”: Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 489.
“Your statement is obviously designed”: “Nomination of John A. McCone to Be a Member of the Atomic Energy Commission.” 15.
“conservative who believes”: Arthur Lack, “McCone Unlikely to Change AEC’s Nuclear Power Policies Significantly,” Wall Street Journal, June 9, 1958.
“Going nuclear” . . . “Nuclear power was a mechanism” . . . “was a considered move”: Davis, quoted in McCartney, Friends in High Places, 102.
“will not bring undue”: Davis, quoted in Ronald Brownstein and Nina Easton, Reagan’s Ruling Class: Portraits of the President’s Top 100 Officials (Washington, DC: Presidential Accountability Group, 1982), 150.
“helped finance”: Dowie, “Bechtel File,” 35.
“the largest, most efficient”: Ibid., 32.
“ignored the legal opinion”: Pearson, April 28, 1959.
“pattern of business links”: Ibid., January 17, 1962.
“merely on leave of absence”: Drew Pearson, quoted in McCartney, Friends in High Places, 108.
“so incestuous”: Ibid., 104.
“McCone said he had done”: Pearson, January 17, 1962.
“big bomb”: Pearson, December 3, 1961.
“telling the public one thing”: Ibid., July 3, 1960.
“world’s last chance”: Ibid., March 28, 1960.
“McCone was positively rabid”: McCartney, Friends in High Places, 111.
CHAPTER NINE: MCCONEY ISLAND
“discuss implications”: Memorandum for the Record.
“Steve Bechtel is the kind of American”: Eisenhower to Bechtel, November 5, 1958, quoted in McCartney, Friends in High Places, 112.
“There were many chores”: Ibid.
“two oil men” . . . “Soviet economic warfare” . . . “very bad”: Memorandum for the Files.
“the intelligence structure”: Memorandum of Meeting With the President.
“roll back the dark forces”: http://coldwarradios.blogspot.com/2013/03/march-12-1951-original-radio-free-asia.html.
“the unof
ficial board of directors”: G. William Domhoff, quoted in Paretsky, 32.
“dashing figure”: McCartney, Friends in High Places, 119.
“in charge of all affairs”: Bechtel to Suleiman, October 1, 1950, quoted in McCartney, Friends in High Places, 121.
“With the assistance of Snodgrass”: Ibid., 124.
“inequitable modernization”: Roger Morris, “Robert Gates: The Specialist” (Part 2), June 21, 2007, http://www.tomdispatch.com/dialogs/print/?id=174813.
“MY FRIENDS REPORT”: Dulles cable to Simpson, July 20, 1958, quoted in McCartney, Friends in High Places, 117.
“buried in a common grave”: Bishop, 57. For the account of Colley’s death, see also Stan Carter, “How Iraq Mob Slew Americans,” Associated Press, July 22, 1958. Colley’s life had been risked in a Bechtel venture seventeen years earlier, in 1941, when Bechtel was building installations on the Philippines’ Manila Bay. When enemy forces attacked, Colley, his wife, Marjorie, and another Bechtel couple made a run for it in a small boat heading for Australia, according to official Bechtel accounts. They were caught near Borneo, imprisoned at nearby Kuching where ten prisoners were executed, and held for four years before Australians rescued them.
“The Agency and the company”: St. Clair, “Straight to Bechtel.”
“hard-nosed executive”: Wise and Ross, Invisible Government, 243.
“splinter the CIA”: New York Times, April 21, 1966. See also Tom Wicker et al., “C.I.A.: Maker of Policy, or Tool?” New York Times, April 25, 1966.
“With his paper-thin mandate”: Tuchman, 286.
“at a time when the agency was expanding”: Dowie, “Bechtel File.”
“He shuns the press” . . . “tauter, more efficient”: Jack Anderson, “John McCone: Secrecy Is His Business,” Boston Globe, December 16, 1962.
“disciple of massive retaliation”: Tuchman, 286.
“all-out” . . . “wrapped in an armor” . . . “disseminating false”: Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 40–41.
“to occupy the country”: McCone, quoted in Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997), 349.
“Central Intrigue Agency”: Pearson, June 17, 1962.
“a damned Murder Inc.”: LBJ quoted by Leo Janos, “The Last Days of the President: LBJ in Retirement,” Atlantic Monthly 232, no. 1 (July 1973): 35–41.
“twenty-six-year-old Tikriti”: Roger Morris, “The Undertaker’s Tally: Sharp Elbows” (Part One), TomDispatch.com, February 13, 2007, www.tomdispatch.com/post/165669.
“Make sure we had no one”: Helms, quoted in Jefferson Morley, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2008), 206. See also “Memorandum for the Record: Discussion with President Johnson,” November 25, 1963. John McCone Memoranda.
“McCone’s agency had been trying”: Jack Anderson with Daryl Gibson, Peace, War, and Politics: An Eyewitness Account (New York: Forge, 1999), 115. Jack Anderson would contend that his sources told him that McCone “anguished with Bobby over the terrible possibility that the assassination plots sanctioned” by Bobby may have backfired.
Seymour Hersh wrote that there was no evidence that McCone knew about the plots against Castro. “The murder attempts, prodded by Bobby Kennedy, probably went on behind his back.” Hersh, Dark Side of Camelot, 278. See also Nies, Unreal City, n. 197: “In an oral interview at the Kennedy Library, the interviewer did not ask McCone about Oxcart because the project was still secret information. He also claimed no knowledge of Operation Mongoose, the secret plot to destabilize the Cuban government and assassinate Castro. The operation was organized during the Kennedy administration and involved the CIA’s recruitment of American gangsters such as Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante.”
LBJ feared the assassination would force him to wage war on Cuba or the Soviet Union if Oswald’s connections to the Communists were exposed. He pushed McCone to find everything possible about Oswald’s contacts with the Communists in Mexico City. “[LBJ] might be facing a communist dirty trick or a right-wing provocation from those who hated Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs fiasco.” (See Morley, Our Man in Mexico, 216.) According to Morley, both Bobby and Jackie Kennedy knew “that Castro’s charge that the assassination was a provocation by Kennedy’s rightwing foes was all too plausible.” Ibid., 227.
“walked back and forth”: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Journals: 1952–2000 (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), 288.
“Did you kill my brother?”: Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 557n. See also Bryan Bender and Neil Swidey, “Robert F. Kennedy Saw Conspiracy in JFK’s Assassination,” Boston Globe, November 24, 2013.
“Castro was behind the assassination”: Anderson and Gibson, Peace, War, and Politics, 116.
“had also gone to the Cuban consulate”: Morley, Our Man in Mexico, 216.
Six days after the assassination, McCone told LBJ about Oswald’s visit to the Soviet embassy and Cuban consulate in Mexico City and shared an intelligence report that an agent of the Nicaraguan Secret Police had infiltrated the Cuban embassy and had seen an embassy employee give $6,500 to Oswald to “kill the president” (Peter Kornbluh). Just hours later, McCone notified the president that the intelligence report was bogus. The informant had confessed to making up the story, claiming that it was “a fabrication designed to provoke the U.S. into kicking Castro out of Cuba” (Kornbluh). “Kennedy’s Last Act/Reaching Out to Cuba,” National Security Archive, November 20, 2013.
“McCone thought there were two people”: Moyers, quoted in Schlesinger, Journals, 184.
“to dispel the swirling allegations”: Kornbluh, “Kennedy’s Last Act.”
“a Machiavellian plot” . . . “immediately an aggressive policy”: Castro, ibid.
“mission of peace” . . . “This is terrible” . . . “There goes”: Declassified CIA files, quoted in ibid.
“most limited Washington discussions”: McCone in secret memo to White House, May 1, 1963, ibid.
“tighten the tourniquet”: From CIA Director John McCone to President Lyndon Johnson, April 28, 1965.
“The two firms built” . . . “had billed the government”: Nies, Unreal City, 200.
“the greatest organizer”: Anderson, “John McCone.”
CHAPTER TEN: WEAVING SPIDERS
“In the councils of government”: Eisenhower speech, televised farewell address to the nation, January 17, 1961.
“Rarely does a big Pentagon construction project surface”: St. Clair, “Straight to Bechtel.”
“possible consequences of the loss”: Eisenhower, quoted in Wiley and Gottlieb, Empires in the Sun, 37.
“powerhouse gateway”: Wolfe, “BART: Bechtel’s Baby.”
“the Co-ordination of Motives”: Weldon B. Gibson, SRI, the Founding Years: A Significant Step at the Golden Time (Los Altos, CA: Publishing Services Center, 1981), 117.
Stephen Bechtel’s relationship with SRI as a “founding director” can be found in Gibson, SRI, 156.
“SRI’s Pacific Rim strategy” . . . “war in Vietnam”: Wiley and Gottlieb, Empires in the Sun, 37–38.
“ ‘doubled and doubled’ ”: Gibson, SRI, 156.
“Among its many programs”: McCartney, Friends in High Places, 78n.
“hobnobbing with kings”: Church, “Stephen Bechtel.”
“In his overseas dealings” . . . “to buzz a group”: John van der Zee, The Greatest Men’s Party on Earth: Inside the Bohemian Grove (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 98.
“more relaxed” . . . “would fly to London”: Bechtel vice president Jerome Komes, quoted on company website, www.bechtel.com/BAC-Chapter-3.html.
“If you want me to take over” . . . “began working on” . . . “Energy use”: www.bechtel.com/BAC-Stephen-D-Bechtel-Jr.html.
“hush-hush” . . . “alleged socialist” . . . “With all the secrec
y” . . . “ ‘gratuities’ to Mexican aviation” . . . “would have made the uninformed”: Anderson, February 19, 1966.
“The world’s most prestigious”: Newsweek, August 2, 1982.
“the greatest men’s party”: Peter Martin Phillips, “A Relative Advantage: Sociology of the San Francisco Bohemian Club” (dissertation, Office of Graduate Studies, University of California, Davis, 1994), 2.
“that swinging Bohemian”: William G. Domhoff, The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats: A Study in Ruling-Class Cohesiveness (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 57.
“virtual personification”: Didion, Where I Was From, 86.
“Here, shielded from intrusion”: McCartney, Friends in High Places, 13.
“The all-maleness of the Club”: Phillips, “Relative Advantage,” 152.
“I knew that I was in Bohemia”: Van der Zee, Greatest Men’s Party, 82.
“Nixon declared that most”: Wiley and Gottlieb, Empires in the Sun, 38.
For the agreement between Reagan and Nixon, see Phillips, “Relative Advantage,” 95. See also Domhoff, Bohemian Grove, 42. Domhoff’s 1974 study revealed that more than 90 percent of Bohemians’ political contributions went to Republicans (Phillips, “Relative Advantage,” 99).
“faltered”: Larry Kramer, “Bohemian Grove: Where Big Shots Go to Camp,” New York Times, August 14, 1977.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: COVERT CORPORATE COLLABORATION
“The biggest challenge”: Jones.
“It’s very unusual”: Brechin, quoted in David Streitfeld, “A Quiet Ambition at Work; Bechtel Prides Itself on Discretion, But Its Projects, Such as the $680 Million Contract to Rebuild Iraq, Give It a High Profile,” Los Angeles Times, June 8, 2005.
“He was in a terribly difficult position”: McCartney, Friends in High Places, 140.
“permits common men”: Julie Pitta, “Building a New World,” World Trade 16, no. 8 (August 2003).
“steady at the helm” . . . “function well” . . . “scout oath and laws” . . . “value of a dollar” . . . stake puncher: Bechtel, 148.
“everything a Bechtel wife”: McCartney, Friends in High Places, 131.