Bechtel Factsheet
For August 6 Coalition
Arms Trade Resource Center, prepared by Frida Berrigan, based on research by Dena Montague

June 19, 2006

“We are not in the construction and engineering business. We are in the business of making money.”

As one of the largest construction and engineering companies in the world, Bechtel Group develops, manages, engineers, builds and operates telecommunications projects, water systems, petroleum and chemical plants, pipelines, nuclear power plants, mining and metal projects, and civil infrastructure projects.

Bechtel has been involved in some of the world’s largest and most ambitious construction projects-- the Hoover Dam, the first oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia, the Alaskan oil pipeline, and our first nuclear power plants. Bechtel has successfully solidified its position as the preeminent company for building all things nuclear: the company helped design and/or constructed 45 nuclear power plants in 22 states. Bechtel was involved in the decommissioning the Connecticut Yankee nuclear power plant, managed ExxonMobil’s Singapore Chemical Complex, built an oil pipeline in Mexico, the Meizhou Wan power plant in China and the Boyne Island aluminum smelter in Australia—just to name a few.

Even with these ambitious and problematic projects under their collective belt, the company is most known- or most infamous- for their work in Iraq. In the last few years, Bechtel’s share of Pentagon contracts has risen sharply. In 2005, Bechtel was the 22nd largest recipient of Pentagon contracts, clocking in $1.48 billion. Just two years ago, they received $910 million. IN 2000, they pulled in $694 million, 2001 621 million, before jumping over the Billion dollar mark in 2002.

Iraq
One of the keys to their war time success was a series of very lucrative rebuilding contracts from the Pentagon. The company has reaped tens of millions of dollars in contracts to repair Iraq's schools, for example, but an independent report found that many of the schools Bechtel claimed to have completed, “haven't been touched,” and a number of schools remained “in shambles.” One "repaired" school was overflowing with “unflushed sewage.”

Bechtel also has a $1.03 billion contract to oversee important aspects of Iraq's infrastructure reconstruction, including water and sewage. Despite many promises, Iraqi families continue to lack access to clean water, according to information gathered by independent journalist Dahr Jamail. The company made providing Southern Iraq potable water one of its top priorities, promising delivery within the first 60 days of the program. One year later, rising epidemics of water-borne illnesses like cholera, kidney stones and diarrhea point to the failure of Bechtel's mission.

Nuclear Bechtel
In December 2005, construction giant Bechtel (as part of a consortium) won a $553 million seven-year management contract to run the Los Alamos National Laboratory-- the birthplace of Fat Man and Little Boy, the two nuclear bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The Lab employs more than 13,000 people and has an estimated $2.2 billion annual budget. That might have been the first time many Americans thought the two words “Bechtel” and “nuclear” in the same sentence, but the company has been profiting from nuclear weapons and power for generations.

In 1951, Bechtel built the “world’s first nuclear reactor designed to generate electrical power” in Idaho. And far away from America’s heartland, the company planted the seeds for today’s South Asia arms race, building India’s first nuclear plant at Tarapur. The nuclear plant produced the plutonium used in India’s 1998 atomic bomb test.

Not only did Bechtel’s activities help catalyze the nuclear arms race in South Asia, their plant didn’t work—it experienced major leaks, causing severe radiation exposure in the area. This toxic phenomenon affected many of Bechtel’s nuclear power stations. In fact, by the 1970s, the entire generation of reactor plants Bechtel began building in the late 1950s were not in compliance with minimum Atomic Energy Commission safety requirements. Although Bechtel employees complained that Bechtel was using “substandard building techniques and faulty welding techniques in the construction of nuclear power plants,” Bechtel chose to ignore such complaints and silence employees who have spoken out the company’s safety violations.

In the face of these challenges, Bechtel transferred its business emphasis from nuclear construction to nuclear cleanup—a lucrative switch. The company has been awarded numerous contracts for clean up in past decades at some of DOE’s largest former weapons productions sites. In 1997 Bechtel earned over half-billion dollars in revenues from nuclear cleanup; more revenue than any other company involved in nuclear cleanup. More here

Bechtel helped build a missile defense site in the South Pacific, is the “environmental manager” at the Oak Ridge National Lab which stores Highly Enriched Uranium, and is carrying out design work at the Yucca Mountain repository for 77,000 tons of nuclear waste. At the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant, Bechtel is working on technology to turn nuclear waste into glass. But, the estimated costs of the plant doubled in one year to about $10 billion while the completion date slipped from 2011 to 2017. Members of Congress have proposed that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission take over Bechtel’s management because of these cost overruns and delays.

The company runs the Nevada Test Site where the United States performed hundreds of above-and under-ground nuclear weapons tests, and through Bechtel Bettis, manages and operates the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy.

Privatization of Water
When Bechtel got involved, water became an economically, socially and politically destabilizing force for communities in the third and first world. The company took advantage of the push-pull dynamic in public infrastructure—namely, third world countries are pushed into privatizing their water systems by World Bank structural adjustment policies, and in the first world, municipalities are pulled into water privatization as a way of avoiding responsibility for restoring antiquated systems.

The privatization of water systems inevitably results in increased prices for consumers forcing poor people to choose whether or not water takes precedence over food, clothing, or shelter. Privatizing water systems means a steady income for corporations that secure water monopolies.

Bechtel’s efforts to privatize water systems in San Francisco and Bolivia spawned major protests against the company. In February 2000, Bolivia’s third largest city, Cochabamba erupted into a battle over water after the public water system was sold to Bechtel. Subsequently, the price of water in Cochabamba skyrocketed creating panic among Bolivians and forcing them onto the streets in protest. In the protests, a 17-year-old boy was killed and hundreds were injured and arrested.

Although the citizen unrest was directed at Bechtel’s opportunistic venture, the company masked their interest in Bolivia with a humanitarian sheen-- “Currently more than 40% of the region’s citizens have no direct access to water resources. We were invited by the government to participate in a privatization program to develop long-term solutions to provide safe and affordable water and wastewater services.”

A Bolivian protest leader countered, “The blood spilled in Cochabamba carries the fingerprints of Bechtel.”

Bechtel finally agreed to leave Bolivia, but only after La Paz paid the corporation between $12 and $40 million in compensation.

Back on Bechtel’s home turf of San Francisco, the company won a $45 million contract to repair and manage the city’s water system. Many San Franciscans are frustrated that a corporation that has questionable human rights and environmental record will manage the city’s water system. Additionally, many are skeptical that Bechtel can provide cost efficient service, particularly considering its current performance on the ‘Big Dig’ in Boston, where Bechtel is charge of the reconstruction of Interstate 93 beneath the city. In 1985 the price tag for the project was about $2.5 billion. Now it is a whopping $14.6 billion (or $1.8 billion a mile), making it the world's most expensive highway.

Making the World Safe for…. Dictator Profit
In 1997, Bechtel established a strong relationship with Congolese rebel leader Larent Kabila, and went one step further than many of its Western competitors in the Congo by offering to prepare a “master development plan and inventory” of the country’s mineral resources to Kabila free of charge. The company compiled “the most complete mineralogical and geographical data of the former Zaire ever assembled, information worth a fortune to any prospective mining or oil firm.” Bechtel also “commissioned and paid for U.S. National Aeronautics and Space administration satellite studies of the country for infrared maps of its mineral potential.” Robert Stewart, an executive, representing Bechtel International, became “a trusted advisor to Kabila and traveled the country with the Congolese leader “to help him deal with ethnic uprisings as well as with problems across the river in Brazzaville.”

Corporate Connections
“In this business, you get to know people, sit on their boards and one day when something comes up, they ask you to take on a project. One thing leads to another.” Steve Bechtel

Bechtel’s success in the nuclear industry was fostered by the close relationship between Steve Bechtel and John McCone. McCone, a former partner and classmate of Steve Bechtel at U.C. Berkeley, became chairman of President Eisenhower’s Atomic Energy Commission, allowing Bechtel a front row seat in the nuclear revolution. McCone went on to be CIA director under Kennedy and Johnson. Even before McCone’s influence was brought to bear, Bechtel cemented several key nuclear deals—the company built the storage plants for the Manhattan Project, the Doomsday Town in Nevada to measure the damage a nuclear weapon would have on a typical American town, and finally constructed the facility for the Material Testing Accelerator project which eventually became Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.

Other key Bechtel alumni include:
Casper Weinburger, Reagan Secretary of Defense, a former Bechtel general counsel
George Schultz, Reagan Secretary of State, former Bechtel President, and current Bechtel board member
W. Kenneth Davis, Reagan’s deputy secretary of Energy and head of the Atomic Energy Commission under Reagan, former vice-president for nuclear development at Bechtel
William Casey, chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission under Nixon, head of the Export-Import bank under Ford, Reagan campaign manger and head of the CIA under Reagan, Bechtel consultant.

Additionally, numerous friends of Bechtel, too long to list, many working in the Atomic Energy Commission eventually ended up with Bechtel. The close collaboration between the AEC and Bechtel was “so incestuous it is impossible to tell where the public sector begins and the private one leaves off.”

McCartney, Laton Friends in High Places The Bechtel Story: The Most Secret Corporation and how it Engineered the World Simon &Schuster, 1998 p. 80
Riccio, Jim “Incompetence, Wheeling and Dealing: The Real Bechtel” Multinational Monitor October, 1989.
“100 Companies Receiving the Largest Dollar Volume of Prime Contract Awards,” fiscal year 2003 and 2005.
Chatterjee, Pratap “The Earth Wrecker: The Company That Won The Contract To Oversee the Rebuilding of S.F.’s Water System has a Disastrous Record Worldwide,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 31,2000.
McCartney, Laton Friends in High Places p. 203
ibid, 201.
ibid, 201
“Good Things Might Come to Those Who Wait in Nuclear Waste Cleanup” Engineering News Record July 14, 1997.
Bechtel Global Report 2000.
Shultz, Jim “While Bolivia Says Bechtel Agreement is Broken Bechtel Says its Staying” The Democracy Center April 11, 2000.
Shultz, Jim “Blame the Bechtel Corp. Not Narcotraffickers for Bolivia Uprising” The Democracy Center April 12, 2000.
Ibid.
ibid
ibid
ibid 96
ibid 104