Sally Denton - The Profiteers: Bechtel and the Men Who Built the World

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Copyright 2016 by Sally Denton

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition February 2016

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Interior design by Joy OMeara

Jacket design by Alison Forner

Jacket photo by Jamey Stillings Photography

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4767-0646-7

ISBN 978-1-4767-0648-1 (ebook)

Photo Credits: Insert One: ) Photo Courtesy: Grant Samuel.

For John L. Smith, let me count the ways.

And for Kathy Kinsella and Ed James, whose generosity knows no bounds.

The author wishes to thank the Black Mountain Institute for making this book possible.

These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people .

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

If you cant trust a mans word, you cant trust his signature.

WARREN A. BECHTEL

Were more about making money than making things .

STEPHEN D. BECHTEL

Theres no reason for people to hear of us. Were not selling to the public .

STEVEN BECHTEL JR.

We will never be a conglomerate. At least not on my watch.

RILEY P. BECHTEL

The companys goal has always been to be the best .

BRENDAN BECHTEL

APRIL 2003

American soldiers had seized Saddam Husseins opulent Republican Palace in some of the fiercest fighting of the entire Iraq War. Iraq was smoldering in ruins, conquered by President George W. Bush. Its cities bombed out. Baghdads museums and shopping centers, villas and military bases, looted, its hospitals torched. Aerial bombardment of the colossal royal palacethe official headquarters of the Iraqi presidencywas tactical as well as symbolic. Under a turquoise dome considered an architectural wonder of the world, the palace held valuable Iraqi government documents in addition to priceless art and furnishings.

Overlooking the Tigris River, the palace had been built in 1958 by the US-sponsored monarch King Faisal II, who was assassinated in a bloody coup before he could take up residence. Its capture by US-led troops, forty-five years later, was emblematic of the victorious return of American influence in the Persian empirean oil-rich region that had eluded the West since its puppet Faisal was overthrown.

Joining American Special Forces as they sorted through the rubble of the fortressonce the sex and porn parlor of one of Saddams two sadistic sons, Udaywas a select group of employees of the San Franciscobased construction company Bechtel. This place is surreal, Bechtels Thor Christiansen said of the sumptuousness of the grounds now occupied by the Bechtelians, who were overseeing the US governments $3 billion job to rebuild war-torn Iraq.

Saddam, Uday, and his other son, Qusay, had fled during the final air strikes on the palace, but evidence of the debauchery remained, from gold-plated Russian Kalashnikovs, to mirrored beds, to photos of Uday beating naked women. Uday called one room that served as a torture chamber his Tower of Babylon. Saddams Im-on-crack decorating style had been left untouched, is how a State Department official described the scene. Strewn throughout the sprawling complex were pornography, designer wardrobes, fine wines, liquor, Cuban cigars, heroin, swords and submachine guns, and boxes of handguns amid piles of Guns & Ammo magazines. Hundreds of photos of nude Playboy magazine Playmates donned the bedroom walls, along with portraits of President Bushs twin twenty-one-year-old daughters, Jenna and Barbara, and posters of Iraqi university coeds whom Saddams sons trolled for sexual encounters.

Outside bronze gilded gates and white marble colonnades was a network of manmade lakes and the remnants of Udays personal zoo. Abandoned and starving lions and cheetahs paced in cages as American soldiers fed them whole live donkeys and sheep from adjacent pens. The luxurious presidential compound encompassed some 1.7 square miles of the wealthy Karada district of Baghdad. A small city, it had six-lane avenues, swimming pools, a hospital, a gymnasium, a fleet of hundreds of European sports cars, and a cloistered dormitory that housed the Hussein mens harem. Peacocks and gazelles roamed the pine and eucalyptus forest surrounding swan-laden ponds. An American diplomat found it reminiscent of Sinatras Vegas for all the red velvet and brass.

An ironic shrine to American culture and excessfrom the stockpile of Kentucky bourbon to the Playboy Mansioninspired pleasure palaceSaddams headquarters was an emulation of Western greed and imperialism. Most mocking of all was that Bechtelthe privately held, secretive American corporation that epitomized the extreme and unfettered capitalism that Saddam claimed to loathewas now rooted in the heart of his kingdom.

A month earlier, on March 19, 2003, Americans had awakened to learn that the United States had invaded Iraq. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Bush administration determined to wage war against Saddam, claiming he was harboring Al Qaeda terrorists and hiding weapons of mass destructionallegations that turned out to be false. Iraqis, who would rush in to overthrow their tyrannical dictator, as Bush officials described the projected bombardment, would welcome the so-called shock and awe campaign. The thousands of American soldiers would be greeted as liberators. The assault, called Operation Iraqi Freedom, would cost $50 billion, Bush assured the public, and would end with Iraq a democratic jewel and strategic US ally in the turbulent Middle East. The script, as a US foreign service officer on the ground later described it, imagined Americans being greeted as liberators like in post D-day France, with cheerful natives rushing out to offer our spunky troops bottles of wine and frisky daughters.