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| Iraq
building-company backed by Bin Laden |
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when Americans were still debating whether
there was just cause for a preëmptive
strike against Iraq, few arguments were
scrutinized more closely than the Bush
Administration’s contention that there
were covert links between Al Qaeda and Iraq.
At the C.I.A., analysts pored over aerial
satellite photographs. At the Treasury
Department, experts sifted through financial
records. At the National Security Agency,
Arab-speaking linguists eavesdropped on
phone conversations. But, even after
Secretary of State Colin Powell put his
credibility on the line, in a damning,
dot-connecting speech before the United
Nations last February, questions persisted
about the solidity of the alleged links
between Saddam and Osama.
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Now there is a new and demonstrable connection,
but it is not the kind that the Bush
Administration had in mind. In fact, it is more
likely to fuel the speculations of conspiracy
theorists than it is to put their fears to rest.
It turns out that a money trail runs—albeit
rather circuitously—from the lucrative business
of rebuilding Iraq to the fortune behind Osama bin
Laden. Bin Laden’s estranged family, a
sprawling, extraordinarily wealthy Saudi Arabian
dynasty, is a substantial investor in a private
equity firm founded by the Bechtel Group of San
Francisco. Bechtel is also the global construction
and engineering company to which the U.S.
government recently awarded the first major
multimillion-dollar contract to reconstruct
war-ravaged Iraq. In a closed competitive bidding
process, the United States Agency for
International Development chose Bechtel to rebuild
the major elements of Iraq’s infrastructure,
including its roads, railroads, airports,
hospitals, and schools, and its water and
electrical systems. In the first phase of the
contract, the U.S. government will pay Bechtel
nearly thirty-five million dollars, but experts
say that the cost is likely to reach six hundred
and eighty million during the next year and a
half.
When the contract was awarded, two weeks ago,
the Administration did not mention that the bin
Laden family has an ongoing relationship with
Bechtel. The bin Ladens have a ten-million-dollar
stake in the Fremont Group, a San Francisco-based
company formerly called Bechtel Investments, which
was until 1986 a subsidiary of Bechtel. The
Fremont Group’s Web site, which makes no mention
of the bin Ladens, notes that “though now
independent, Fremont enjoys a close relationship
with Bechtel.” A spokeswoman for the company
confirmed that Fremont’s “majority ownership
is the Bechtel family.” And a list of the
corporate board of directors shows substantial
overlap. Five of Fremont’s eight directors are
also directors of Bechtel. One Fremont director,
Riley Bechtel, is the chairman and chief executive
officer of the Bechtel Group, and is a member of
the Bush Administration: he was appointed this
year to serve on the President’s Export Council.
In addition, George Shultz, the Secretary of State
in the Reagan Administration, serves as a director
both of Fremont and of the Bechtel Group, where he
once was president and still is listed as senior
counsellor.
Rick Kopf, the general counsel of the Fremont
Group, which manages some eleven billion dollars
in assets, confirms that the bin Laden family
invested about ten million dollars in one of
Fremont’s private funds before September 11,
2001. He noted that the bin Laden family has not
enlarged its stake since then, but he declined to
provide additional details about its association
with the firm. He also chose not to discuss the
origin or the nature of the relationship between
the bin Laden and Bechtel families, both of which
made fortunes in huge construction projects in the
Arab world. The Fremont Group evidently does not
go in for connecting the dots. As Kopf said,
“Ownership is private and is not disclosed.”
ORIGINAL
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