THE HALLIBURTON AGENDA
The Politics of Oil and Money
By Dan Briody
8
The Politics of Oil and Money
By Dan Briody
8
Empty Pockets
In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, things started to
unravel for Brown & Root, as the company found itself besieged first by misfortune, then scandal, then tragedy, then the
bizarre, and finally the economy. Lyndon Johnson died in 1973
and George Brown retired in 1975, beginning a precipitous, if
somewhat delayed, decline for Brown & Root. Though the company had ramped up its business dramatically throughout and
subsequent to the Johnson presidency, it was not prepared to
lose its political power base and its best salesman in the space
of just two years. The decline in revenues that would result culminated in a truly dark decade during the 1980s for Brown &
Root, as well as its parent company Halliburton. In the first
five years of the 1980s, Brown & Root’s workforce was cut from
80,000 to 20,000, as it struggled with a lingering recession, a
bust cycle in the oil business, and a washout of its government
contracting business.
If anything, what happened in the 1980s taught the company that it needed to get back to its basic business model: win
government business and use political contacts to do it. With
so much of its political capital wrapped up in three men—
Herman and George Brown and Lyndon Johnson—it is easy to
see why the company experienced such a vacuum after all
three were removed from the business. The vacuum nearly
sucked the life out of the company during the 1980s. It wasn’t
until the early 1990s that Halliburton and Brown & Root
would master the game again by scoring one of the biggest military outsourcing contracts in American history.
•••
Brown & Root hadn’t planned on swearing off politicians, it
just happened that way. In fact, when Lyndon Johnson died
in 1973, Brown & Root was already working on their next move.
The company had staked a claim in a man who had come to
represent the next generation of Texas politics, a man that
had served as Johnson’s campaign director for decades, as governor of Texas for most of the 1960s, and had become Richard
Nixon’s most trusted advisor. In February 1969, months after
he had left the governorship of the state, Brown & Root named
John Connally to its board of directors. The man who had been
riding in the front seat of John F. Kennedy’s car in November
1963 and took a bullet in the chest, now represented Brown &
Root’s future in Washington.
Connally was working for Vinson & Elkins in the early 1970s
as well, the powerful law firm founded by James Elkins, a member of the Suite 8F crowd. Since Nixon’s narrow 1968 victory, he
served as an advisor and was eventually appointed secretary of
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Empty Pockets
the treasury in 1971. There was a great deal of talk about how
Connally would mount a run for the presidency in 1976, possibly even switching parties—up to that point, Texas had been a
one-party Democratic state, but Connally would change all of
that forever. It seemed for a time that Brown & Root would pick
up seamlessly from Johnson’s abrupt departure from the White
House in 1968. In 1972, Connally even arranged for President
Nixon to attend a barbecue at his ranch in Texas, at which all of
the usual Suite 8F suspects would have a chance to gain favor
with the president. Connally was growing in power by the day,
and although he could never be as dedicated to Brown & Root
as Lyndon Johnson, he was a man intimately familiar with the
company’s modus operandi, and would certainly be attentive to
the company’s needs.
On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested trying to bug the
offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate
Hotel in Washington, DC. At first it seemed the scandal that ensued over the next two years would have no impact on Brown &
Root, but when Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew announced
his resignation in 1973 amidst the growing scandal, Nixon let it
be known that Connally would be his choice to succeed Agnew
as vice president. For a moment, it looked like Brown & Root
would have another pet politician as the sitting vice president.
It wasn’t to be. Connally took heavy fire from Democrats on his
decision to switch to the Republican Party, and quickly became
a political liability for Nixon. Though he vowed to support a
run for president by Connally in 1976, Nixon chose Gerald
Ford to be vice president instead.
Ultimately, it was all academic. Nixon resigned in disgrace
the following year, sinking many of his political allies, including Connally, along with him. Though Connally would mount bids for the Republican nomination in both 1976 and 1980,
he was never again taken seriously after Watergate. Brown &
Root’s horse had exited the race, brought down by one of the
strangest political controversies in American history. Things
would become even worse, however, and stranger.
•••
At the time that George Brown officially resigned his chairmanship in 1975, Brown & Root was the top engineering
and construction firm in the nation, pulling down over $5 billion in contracts and accounting for, at times, as much as 75
percent of Halliburton’s overall revenues. After leaving Vietnam in 1972, the company was still enjoying some residual
contracts that George Brown had engineered before he left.
And with the guidance of its new parent company, an oil-field
services giant, Brown & Root ventured heavily into the world
of offshore drilling, building massive platforms and drilling
rigs for major oil and gas companies.
The workforce at the company increased from 10,000 in
1960 to 66,500 in 1975. The company’s growth and profitability were astounding, though, as it turns out, not entirely legitimate. The company came under fire for its offshore drilling
business practices in 1977 when a federal grand jury indicted
Brown & Root for collusion and price fixing with competitor
J. Ray McDermott. George Brown, by then retired, recalled little during his testimony. It was alleged that the companies
were parsing out the work to each other. The company that
had agreed not to get a specific job would submit an obscenely
high bid, which their partner would easily underbid (but still
submitting an exceedingly profitable bid). Both companies admitted no guilt, pleading no contest and were fined $1 million each by the Department of Justice. Brown & Root paid
some $90 million in civil suits as well. Halliburton’s CEO at the
time, John Harbin, said of the suits: “We’re still doing business
with these big customers, and our records don’t show any guilt.
There are three sides to everything—ours, theirs, and the government’s.” The fines and subsequent lawsuits were the beginning of a long slide from grace for Brown & Root, which over
the ensuing years would tumble from the top of the construction world into relative obscurity.
•••
Concurrent with the devastating criminal and civil suits over
price fixing, Brown & Root endured the tragic and bizarre
deaths of five of its top executives in just two years, all coming
immediately after the resignation of George Brown in 1975.
First, in January of 1976, a charter plane attempting to land
at an airport in Anchorage, Alaska, where Brown & Root had
been doing work on offshore drilling platforms, crashed,
killing Senior Group Vice President G.A. Dobelman; Warren
T. Moore and Wolf Pabst, president and vice president of subsidiary Alaska Constructors; and Vic Abadie Jr., a manager of
Brown & Root’s San Francisco offices. The plane had landed a
full mile and a half short of the runway. Two Brown & Root executives managed to survive the crash, including W. Bernard
Pieper, who walked away from the crash relatively unharmed
and later became president of the company.
Almost exactly a year later, the company endured the death
of its president, Foster Parker, in January 1977. On January 8,
Parker walked into a hardware store in downtown Houston and purchased a .357 Magnum and a box of ammunition. A
week later, Brown & Root was subpoenaed by the Federal Grand
Jury investigating the alleged J. Ray McDermott price-fixing
scheme. A week after that, Parker was found dead in his bedroom, a bullet wound to his right temple.
The apparent suicide of Brown & Root’s president, a man
hand-picked by George Brown himself, had the entire Houston
community dumbfounded. The case was riddled by unanswered questions. There had been death threats made against
company executives in the weeks preceding Parker’s death,
but police decided to rule the death a suicide after they
learned Parker had bought the gun himself weeks prior. But
the clerk at the store said that Parker had originally intended
to buy a shotgun for home protection, but later settled on the
magnum. A shotgun would have been strange choice for a man
intending to kill himself. In addition, company officials declined to say when exactly they had been informed of the
Federal subpoena, though they admitted that it was before January 14, when they announced it to the public. None of it made
sense. On one hand there seemed to be enough evidence to
pursue the case as a potential homicide, since there were
death threats and no suicide note. On the other hand, Parker
had likely known about the coming indictment, which at that
time, threatened to completely ruin the company. That would
support the case for suicide.
The police ultimately ruled the death a suicide, which left
those who knew Parker scratching their heads. Aside from
being troubled by the impending legal battle the company was
facing, no one could imagine why Parker would take his own
life. Regardless, the vacuum created by the plane crash,
Parker’s death, and Brown’s retirement left Brown & Root
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Empty Pockets
management in disarray. And Connally’s abrupt tumble out of
national politics sent the company into a new world without an
ally in Washington. Things worsened in 1978 when the price fixing suit was settled, exacting heavy penalties of nearly $100
million. It also resulted in six top executives pleading no contest to conspiracy and mail fraud. The outcome was a management team that had effectively been gutted and a company that
was temporarily without leadership or direction.
•••
By the end of the 1970s, Brown & Root was the largest engineering and construction firm in the nation, with more
than 80,000 employees, but nothing seemed to be going its
way. In 1977, the company had won an $800 million contract
with the Iranian government to build two naval bases along
the Gulf of Oman. The company had set up an Iranian office
to oversee the work, but in 1979, before construction had
begun in earnest, the Ayatollah Khomeini unseated the Shah
of Iran, and the United States ordered an evacuation of Americans in the area. Brown & Root had to walk away from the
project, one of the most lucrative it had won in years, and left
$23 million on the table. Combined with rising oil prices and
a severe reduction in offshore drilling due to growing environmental concerns, Brown & Root was in for a shaky decade
under the Reagan administration.
In just one year, from 1979 to 1980, Brown & Root’s revenues
plummeted by more than half. The company began a long and
painful process of restructuring, laying off thousands of employees each year until 1984, when Brown & Root was a shell of
the company it used to be, employing only 20,000 and closing up many of its offices around the world. Since George Brown’s
retirement in 1975, there had not been a chairman at Brown &
Root, and the position would not be filled again until 1982.
Without Brown, the company had trouble winning new construction projects, and it began to focus on smaller, less profitable projects.
The company started work on nuclear power plants, and
thought the emerging industry could return them to glory. But
disaster, and lawsuits once again undermined Brown & Root’s
progress. In the midst of $5.5 billion contract with the Houston Lighting & Power Company in the early 1980s, Brown &
Root was sued for mismanagement of the project. The Houston
utilities company was seeking a whopping $6.3 billion in damages, a sum that once again threatened the very existence of
the company. In 1985, Brown & Root settled the case with $750
million in cash, but between the bad publicity and the growing
public opposition to nuclear plants following the Three Mile
Island incident, yet another avenue of revenue was effectively
closed off for Brown & Root.
George Brown passed away in January 1983, leaving his company in dire straits. Brown & Root was under fire from unhappy
customers, and suffered from a dearth of quality leadership and
big projects. By 1986, when oil prices were dropping rapidly,
the company was losing money at the rate of $6 million a
month. Equipment went unused. New contracts remained unattainable. Although all heavy construction firms experienced
serious downturns in their business during the 1980s, no company was hurt as badly as Brown & Root. It slipped from first to
eighth in the rankings of engineering and construction firms.
It had very little government contract work to speak of and its
national profile was quickly disappearing.
Brown & Root’s parent company couldn’t help them either.
Halliburton was also experiencing a simultaneous downturn in
revenues throughout the 1980s, as the oil glut from OPEC reduced drilling in the United States from more than 4,000 rigs
to just over 600. Like its fiercely independent subsidiary, Brown
& Root, Halliburton reduced its head count from 115,000 in
1981, to 68,000 in 1984 as the price of oil plummeted from $32
a barrel to $12. The situation for Halliburton was as bad as it
had ever been, and there was only one thing that was going to
pull the company out of its seemingly endless decline: war.
•••
By the summer of 1990, Saddam Hussein had begun amassing Iraqi troops at the border of Iraq and Kuwait in anticipation of an invasion. His justification for the impending war
was that Kuwait was waging economic warfare against Iraq by
flooding the world markets with cheap oil. He also accused
the Kuwaitis of stealing Iraqi oil from the Rumaylah oil field
near the border and vowed to “annex” Kuwait as a result. By
August, the United States had embargoed all trade with Iraq
and warned that military action against Kuwait by Iraq would
result in U.S. action against Iraq. American workers were
ordered to leave the area, but a couple dozen Halliburton
workers were trapped inside Iraq. The workers in Kuwait and
Iraq were detained by Hussein’s forces, brought to Baghdad,
and not released for several months. Halliburton was in the
middle of another raging conflict, and this time its own employees were in danger. Hussein released the prisoners in
December 1990 in an attempt to discourage American participation in the conflict. It didn’t work.
On January 12, 1991, Congress authorized President Bush
to engage Iraq in war, and just five days later, Operation
Desert Storm commenced in Kuwait. As with the more recent
war in the Gulf, it didn’t take long for the United States to
claim victory—it was all over by the end of February—but the
clean up would last longer, and was far more expensive than
the military action itself. In a senseless act of desperation and
defeat, Iraqi troops set fire to more than 700 Kuwaiti oil wells
throughout the country, resulting in a constant fog of thick,
black smoke that turned the day into night and literally set the
countryside ablaze. Few will forget the images of the plumes of
smoke, anchored by jets of flame dotting the landscape. The
Iraqi troops had booby-trapped the wells with C4 explosives,
and detonated them upon their withdrawal from the country.
It was thought the mess would take no less than five years to
clean up, as lakes of oil surrounding each well blazed out of
control, making it nearly impossible to approach the burning
wells, let alone extinguish them.
With the Kuwaiti government in exile, the task of capping
the fires was an exercise in confusion. Seven million barrels
of oil a day were being wasted by the fires, and Kuwait was
blanketed by the smoke that created an 800-mile long plume.
Kuwaiti officials, exiled everywhere from Saudi Arabia to
the United States, scrambled to assemble a team to fight the
blazes. Four teams of wild well fighters emerged from the chaos:
Red Adair, Boots & Coots, and Wild Well Control (all from
Houston), and Safety Boss, a Canadian company. Bechtel was
contracted to provide logistical support for the operation.
Halliburton would take losses of $29 million associated with
its loss of work in the area due to the war, but with the fighting
now over, Halliburton would be right back in the thick of it, angling its way into the cleanup and rebuilding effort that was
expected to cost around $200 billion over the next 10 years.
The company got on board with the wild well fighting companies and sent 60 men to help. Meanwhile, Brown & Root
won an additional $3 million contract to assess the damage
that the invasion had done to Kuwait’s buildings, a contract
that was increased seven times over by the end of their involvement. A Texan was president of the United States, waged a war,
and Brown & Root was back in the government and defense
contracting business.
Regardless of the extent of Halliburton’s involvement, the
company had popped back onto the government’s radar
screen. Now back in the good graces of the federal government and the military, Halliburton was not going to squander
the opportunity. Brown & Root won contracts to extract army
troops from Saudi Arabia after their services were no longer
needed in the Gulf region and ship ammunition from the Middle East to locations around the world. The company was back
in the army logistics business in earnest for the first time since
Vietnam. The rebirth of the military outsourcing business
would blossom to unforeseen heights immediately following
the Gulf War.
9
The Big Score
Military outsourcing is nothing new. Private firms have been
aiding in war efforts since long before Brown & Root won
its first navy shipbuilding contract. The hiring of mercenary
forces literally dates back to the beginning of recorded history
when the Bible tells the story of how the Egyptians employed
the services of outside armies to drive out the Israelites.
Throughout time, where there has been war, there have been
soldiers for hire. But the nature of military outsourcing, now
more commonly known as privatization, has changed dramatically in just the last decade.
Here in the United States, privatization took on a whole new
meaning after the end of the Cold War, when Americans were
promised the famous “Peacetime Dividend” as a result of the
reduction in military spending. At first, the military was expected to do less with less. That resulted in the massive reduction in the number of active troops—reduced by a third since 1989—and severe cutbacks in government spending toward
the military. But since the end of the Cold War and since the
reduction in force, the United States has been engaged in a
succession of smaller, shorter, but fiercely contested wars
around the world. Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo,
Afghanistan, and Iraq are but a few of the conflicts that have
required the participation of war machines, ammunition, and
most importantly, troops.
The trend toward a smaller military, begun by President Reagan in the 1980s, and continued throughout the 1990s, put the
federal government in an awkward position. It appeared that
there was going to be just as much for the military to do, just
fewer people to do it. This combination of a reduced military
and continued conflict gave rise to an unprecedented new industry of private military firms. The firms would assist the military in everything from weapons procurement and training,
weapons maintenance, training of troops (both foreign and domestic), and logistics. On the surface, the trend appealed to
America’s capitalistic sensibilities. It seemed reasonable that a
privatized military would be more nimble, efficient, and cost effective if open competition was cultivated. Competition would
cut down on the burgeoning bureaucracy of the government and
create a growing new industry in the United States that would
even help fuel the economy. It had worked in other industries, to
varying degrees, so why not the military?
But the military is not like other industries. The distinction
between public and private markets is simple and stark. The
government, or the public sector, is expected to act on behalf
of its citizens, spending their tax money to better their lives.
The private sector is motivated solely by profit. In the case of
waging war, an action taken to ostensibly improve the lives of citizens, it would seem that the government should remain the
sole dispenser of funds, and the military should remain the sole
recipient. Peter Singer, author of the definitive work on the subject of military outsourcing, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the
Privatized Military Industry, puts it like this: “In fact, providing
for national, and hence their citizens’, security was one of the
most essential tasks of a government. Indeed it defined what a
government was supposed to be. The result is that the military
has been the one area where there has never been a question of
states outsourcing or privatizing. Even the most radical libertarian thinkers, who tend to think that everything should be
left to the market, made an exception of the military. All viewed
national defense as something best carried out by a tax financed government force.”
In the 11 years since the first Gulf War, the number of private
contractors used in and around the battlefield has increased
ten-fold. It has been estimated that for every 10 soldiers in Iraq,
there is one private contractor. The increase has been nothing
less than astounding, and it has caused the country to redefine
its beliefs about everything from free-market dynamics to war
profiteering. Though there are some highly controversial outfits, like Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI),
which offers training in warfare tactics and personnel, companies like Halliburton, which became the fifth largest defense
contractor in the nation during the 1990s, have played an even
more critical role in this trend.
•••
The story behind America’s Super Contract begins back in
1992, when in the wake of the first Gulf War, the Department of Defense, headed by Dick Cheney, was impressed with the
work Halliburton did during its time in Kuwait. Halliburton
and Brown & Root not only helped put out oil-well fires during the summer of 1992, but won large contracts to help rebuild Kuwait in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion. Sensing
the need to bolster its forces in the event of further conflicts
of a similar nature, the Pentagon asked private contractors to
bid on a $3.9 million contract to develop a classified report
demonstrating how a private firm could provide logistical
support to the army in the case of further military action.
The report was to look at 13 different “hot spots” around the
world, and detail how services as varied as building bases to
feeding the troops would be accomplished. The contractor
that would potentially provide the services detailed in the report would be required to support the deployment of 20,000
troops over 180 days. It was a massive contingency plan, the
first of its kind for the American military.
Thirty-seven companies solicited for the contract, and
Brown & Root beat them all out. The company was paid another $5 million later that same year to extend the plan to
other locations and increase the detail of the report. The report was a furthering of the Logistics Civil Augmentation
Program (LOGCAP), a program the army had been using
since the mid-1980s. But this time the Pentagon wanted to see
what it would look like if just one contractor handled all of
the contingencies, rather than spreading the wealth around
to different contractors in different locations. There was understandable doubt as to whether one private firm could absorb the myriad requests of the army around the world.
Hence, the need to produce Brown & Root’s report, which remains classified to this day.
The Brown & Root report convinced Cheney that it was indeed possible to create one umbrella LOGCAP contract and
award it to a single firm. The contract that was developed out
of Brown & Root’s report is now known simply as LOGCAP
and has been called the “mother of all service contracts.” It
has been used in every American deployment since its awarding in 1992, at a value of several billion dollars and counting.
And the lucky recipient of the first, five-year LOGCAP contract was the very same company hired to draw up the plan in
the first place: Brown & Root.
The LOGCAP contract pulled Brown & Root out of its late
1980s doldrums and boosted the bottom line of Halliburton
throughout the 1990s. The contract is structured as a cost-plus
contract, or in contract legalese, a cost-reimbursement, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract. Even a layman can
tell that means good things for the contractor. In cases
where the government and its contractor will have difficulty
estimating the resources needed in fulfillment of a particular contract, cost-plus provides the flexibility to continually
add on “task orders,” or additional services to the contract
on an ongoing basis. Basically, it’s a blank check from the
government. The contractor makes its money from a built-in
profit percentage, anywhere from 1 percent to 9 percent, depending on various incentive clauses. It seems reasonable
enough, until we remember Brown & Root’s history of ratcheting up costs on government projects. In the case of LOGCAP, as was the case with Brown & Root’s involvement in
Vietnam, the structure of the contract encourages the contractor to spend excessive amounts of money. When your
profit is a percentage of the cost, the more you spend, the
more you make.
Before the ink was dry on Brown & Root’s first LOGCAP
contract, the U.S. Army was deployed to Somalia in December
1992 as part of Operation Restore Hope. Brown & Root employees were there before the army even arrived, and they were
the last people to leave. At first, the task orders that Brown &
Root won through LOGCAP were substantial, but not outrageous. They made $109.7 million in Somalia. In August 1994,
they took in $6.3 million from Operation Support Hope in
Rwanda. In September of that same year, Operation Uphold
Democracy in Haiti netted the company $150 million. And in
October 1994, Operation Vigilant Warrior made them another
$5 million.
The contracts to that point were good revenue for Brown &
Root, but hardly the type of monster contracts they had been
used to in the LBJ days. Still, a far more important trend was developing: The army was growing dependent on Brown & Root.
In the spirit of “refuse no job,” the company was building the
base camps, supplying the troops with food and water, fuel and
munitions, cleaning latrines, even washing their clothes. They
attended the staff meetings and were kept up to speed on all the
activities related to a given mission. They were becoming another unit in the U.S. Army.
There was no question they were doing a quality job. Every
military officer, past or present, I spoke with was more than
satisfied with Brown & Root’s performance. They made life
better at the camps, and that made the troops happier. And as
many commanding officers told me, a happy army is a motivated army. Few of the army officers had any problem with the
fact that there was some waste involved. Bob Burroughs spent
32 years in the army as an aviator and ran the logistics from
the army side in Somalia. He worked hand-in-hand with Brown & Root and believed that the company occasionally took advantage of its preferred contractor status. But he didn’t mind.
“I had an unlimited budget because of what we were doing
there, and I’m sure they overcharged me on some things. But I
would have been in real trouble if they hadn’t been there.”
Brown & Root was back to doing what they did best, providing contractor services to the armed forces under extraordinary circumstances. The army was constantly amazed at their
ability to get things done quickly. Often it cost them more than
if they had done it themselves, but in the overall war effort, it
was worth it. By the time the conflict in Bosnia started in 1995,
Brown & Root was ensconced in the military machine, and
earning lucrative contracts. It was as if World War II and
Brown Shipbuilding were back in business. The army’s growing dependency on the company hit home when in 1997 Brown
& Root lost the LOGCAP contract in a competitive re-bid to
rival Dyncorp. The army found it impossible to remove Brown
& Root from their work in the Balkans, by far the most lucrative part of the contract, and as such carved out the work in the
area to keep it with Brown & Root. In 2001, Brown & Root won
the LOGCAP contract again, this time for twice the normal
term length: 10 years.
LOGCAP became part of the popular vocabulary after Halliburton was awarded several contracts in Iraq, which some lawmakers saw as blatant favoritism to the company once headed
by Cheney who was CEO from 1995 to 2000. Many of these arguments were undercut by the fact that the task orders awarded
to Halliburton, with the exception of Operation Restore Iraqi
Oil (RIO), in Iraq fell under the existing LOGCAP contract,
competitively bid back in 2001. This was, of course, true. And
the fact that Halliburton had already competed for the work in Iraq took a great deal of the sting out of these charges. But nobody bothered to go back and question the original legitimacy
of the LOGCAP contract, circa 1992. If they had, they would
have found that LOGCAP should never have been awarded to
Brown & Root in the first place.
The question of LOGCAP’s legality was first brought to my
attention by Steve Schooner, co-director of the Government
Procurement Law Program at George Washington University.
When I related the story of how Brown & Root was contracted
to design LOGCAP originally in 1992, and then was allowed to
bid on its own contract, it raised red flags for Schooner. “If
that’s what really happened, then it’s illegal,” he told me.
Schooner pointed me in the direction of the Code of Federal
Regulations, which dictates the terms of all federal procurement. There, buried in countless pages of contractual guidelines, under Chapter 1, section 48, subsection 9.5, are the
organizational conflict of interest rules. The idea behind the
conflict of interest rules, as stated by the Code of Federal Regulations, is to prevent “the existence of conflicting roles that
might bias a contractor’s judgment; and prevent unfair competitive advantage.” All of this is a fancy way of saying that allowing a contractor to bid on a contract it designed would
constitute an unfair advantage.
Maddeningly ambiguous, the Code of Federal Regulations
then attempts to clarify the law by providing mock examples
using fictional circumstances. Several examples ring true to the
LOGCAP scenario, but two examples in particular appear to
apply to Brown & Root’s case. You need to look through the fictional scenarios to draw the parallel to Brown & Root. The first
example (f) reads as follows: “Company A receives a contract to
define the detailed performance characteristics an agency will
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The Big Score
require for purchasing rocket fuels. Company A has not developed the particular fuels. When the definition contract is
awarded, it is clear to both parties that the agency will use the
performance characteristics arrived at to choose competitively
a contractor to develop or produce the fuels. Company A may
not be awarded this follow-on contract.” The next relevant example reads: “Company A receives a contract to prepare a detailed plan for scientific and technical training of an agency’s
personnel. It suggests a curriculum that the agency endorses
and incorporates in its request for proposals to institutions to
establish and conduct the training. Company A may not be
awarded a contract to conduct the training.”
Brown & Root competed against four other firms for the
LOGCAP contract that it had designed. It would be safe to say
that the contract was awarded under highly questionable circumstances. Brown & Root clearly had a competitive advantage
in addition to proprietary knowledge and should never have
been allowed to compete for the contract. As they had done so
many times before, the company had worked the system to perfection, and scored a contract that has netted the company
more than $2.5 billion since it was first enacted.
Joan Kibler, a spokesperson for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the branch of the army that oversaw LOGCAP for most
of the 1990s before they transferred management of the contract to the U.S. Army Material Command, said she had asked
around the Corps to find out more about the conflict of interest. “It’s an interesting thing you bring up and that really
needs to be confirmed. The Pentagon really needs to answer
that question.” Pentagon officials declined to comment.
10
Backseat Cheney
Richard Bruce Cheney was born on January 30, 1941, the
same time that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was beginning
his third term as president of the United States. In fact,
Cheney shares FDR’s birthday, of which his parents, staunch
Democrats, were immensely proud. There is an odd symmetry
when you consider that despite being a lifelong conservative
Republican, Cheney would once again fatten Halliburton at
the government trough during his time as CEO, much like
FDR had done (via LBJ) for Brown & Root 60 years earlier.
The names changed many times over the six decades since the
company made its first fortune from the American military
during World War II, but the business model had not. During
its most successful years, Brown & Root had thrived by using
political influence to garner government work, and the late
1990s, the Cheney era, would be no exception.
To the uninitiated, the appointment of Dick Cheney to the
chairman, president, and CEO positions at Halliburton in August 1995, made little sense. Cheney had almost no business
experience having been a career politician and bureaucrat. Financial analysts downgraded the stock and the business press
openly questioned the decision. Cheney, having been Secretary
of Defense under the first Bush administration, was in theory a
celebrity appointment, a big name that was supposed to be big
news. But for someone that had spent so much time in the Washington spotlight, Cheney was still an unknown quantity, with
very little public personality and even less experience in business of any kind, let alone the expertise needed to manage one
of the largest oil services companies in the world. Halliburton
must have understood Cheney’s value though. Clearly the time
had come for Halliburton to get back in the business of politics,
and with Dick Cheney at the helm, they had all the fire power
they would need.
•••
Born in Nebraska, Cheney moved with his family to Casper,
Wyoming, when he was thirteen years old. Casper was a typical oil town, and Cheney would later recall the giant, bright red
Halliburton trucks kicking up dust as they rolled through town
during his youth. As an oil town, Casper attracted the get rich-quick folks from the surrounding areas, and money was the
overriding concern of the townspeople. Family, sports, and
Betty Crocker were the other pursuits of choice, and politics
was virtually eschewed. Cheney played outside linebacker at Natrona County High, and dated the most popular girl in school,
Mustang Queen Lynne Vincent. By his senior year, Cheney had
little direction, and a friend of the family made a phone call to
Yale University and asked the school to take Cheney on a full scholarship. Yale accepted Cheney without question, and the
quiet kid from Casper was headed for the Ivy League.
Despite his ease in being admitted, Yale proved to be too
difficult for Cheney. After completing four semesters of study,
Cheney flunked out, and returned to Wyoming to get a job. By
1963, he was building power lines in Rock Springs, Wyoming.
He became fully blue collar, joining the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. At the time when he should have
been graduating from Yale on a full scholarship, he was instead living the life of a simple laborer, rooming with friends
and getting arrested for drunk driving (twice). Things didn’t
start to turn around for him until he married Vincent in 1964,
and re-enrolled at the University of Wyoming.
Lynne made it known to Dick that “she wasn’t interested in
marrying a lineman for the county,” and Cheney started to bear
down at school. He made straight As and took a job as an intern
at the Wyoming legislature. He was exceedingly quiet, given to
terse, one-word answers, but he applied himself diligently and
devoured information. In 1968, Cheney took a job with a Republican congressman from Wisconsin named Bill Steiger, and
began working on a piece of legislation that would eliminate
federal funding to college campuses that had been home to
antiwar protests. It was in this context, the radical 1960s, that
Cheney forged his conservative values, disgusted by the student
rallies peopled by uninvolved academics. Cheney himself
avoided the draft by enrolling as a student at a Casper Community College after attending the University of Wyoming and
claimed a deferral.
When Donald Rumsfeld was appointed director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, Cheney wrote him a letter advising Rumsfeld on how to best handle the job. It was a bold and presumptuous move, but it paid off. Rumsfeld hired
Cheney onto his staff, and the two of them moved up through
the ranks of government together, Rumsfeld always in front,
Cheney, silent and strong, in tow.
Cheney has been described by those who know him as everything from low-key to downright bland, but the confidence he
inspired and the loyalty he professed made him an indispensable part of Rumsfeld’s rise to power. He was often chastised by
Rumsfeld for speaking too quietly or slowly, but his advice was
considered to be of great value, and as Rumsfeld navigated the
bureaucratic waters of Washington in the early 1970s, Cheney
came along for the ride. Eventually, Rumsfeld ended up as Gerald Ford’s White House chief of staff, with Cheney as his deputy.
During this time, Cheney was assigned a codename by the Secret
Service that would perfectly sum up his disposition: Backseat.
Cheney’s unique blend of quiet knowledge and anti-charisma
earned him the nickname. He has never been comfortable in the
spotlight, more content to be the silent strength behind a benefactor. He reads voraciously and studies political and military
history. He has a calming effect on those that work with him, a
reassurance that comes not through blustery overconfidence,
but studied, metered wisdom. When Ford lost to Carter in 1976,
Cheney returned to Wyoming and became a junior congressman. The move demonstrated his devotion to the life of a public
servant. It would have been easy for Cheney to carve out a lucrative lobbying business in Washington, peddling influence to the
highest bidder. Instead, he chose the life of an untested elected
official in a district nobody cared about. It wasn’t an easy life.
Many years of heavy smoking and the stress of running his own
office resulted in a heart attack at age thirty-seven, the first of
four he would suffer through the present day.
•••
For 10 years, Cheney worked as a Republican representative
for Wyoming, until in 1989, George H.W. Bush tapped him
to become his Secretary of Defense. Cheney wasn’t Bush’s first
choice, but after Senator John Tower of Texas failed to win
the confirmation, Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor
and former Ford aide, recommended Cheney. Cheney breezed
through the confirmation process and became the seventeenth
secretary of defense.
As defense secretary, Cheney was a worrier. He worried about
the Soviet Union, even long after it collapsed (to this day in
fact). He worried about nuclear proliferation, and the fate of
Russia’s arsenal. And long before George W. Bush made his infamous “axis of evil” speech, Cheney pointed out the growing
danger of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. But most of all, Cheney
worried about the effect the long-promised peacetime dividend would have on the armed forces. In his first year in office,
Cheney reduced military spending by $10 billion. He canceled a
number of complicated and expensive weapons systems, and reduced the number of troops from 2.2 million to 1.6 million.
Year after year, from 1989 to 1993, the military budget shrank
under Cheney.
The army took the biggest hit, sustaining troop reductions
of more than 25 percent. Though the Cold War had ended,
Cheney must have known that the U.S. troops would be
committed to smaller, but possibly more, skirmishes around
the world. Already he had overseen the liberation of Kuwait
and the invasion of Panama to capture Manuel Noriega. And
toward the end of his tenure in 1992, he had committed 26,000
troops to provide security and relief to Somalia. In fact, since the Cold War ended, American troops have been dispatched
nearly 40 times around the world as compared to only 10 times
over the entire history of the Cold War. The world had become
an ostensibly safer place after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
but U.S. troops were still in high demand, despite there being
far fewer of them.
During the conflict in Kuwait, Cheney was faced with the
decision of whether to continue the battle into Iraq and force
the surrender and capture of Saddam Hussein. At the time,
concerned about troop commitments and the potential of
heavy casualties, he decided against it. Troop limitations were
hampering the ability of the American military to get the job
done. The army depended very little on civilian contractors in
the early 1990s, and Cheney was inclined to change that. The
idea was to free up the troops to do the fighting while private
contractors handled the back-end logistics. It was also a tidy
way of handling the public relations nightmare that ensued
every time the United States committed troops overseas. More
contractors meant fewer troops, and a much more politically
palatable troop count. All of these factors resulted in the development of the LOGCAP mega-contract that was awarded to
Brown & Root at the end of Cheney’s time at the Pentagon. His
last day on the job was January 20, 1993, five months after
LOGCAP was finalized and awarded.
•••
After cleaning out his desk to make way for the Clinton administration in the winter of 1993, Cheney joined the American Enterprise Institute, the neo-conservative think tank,
where he and a number of his like minded politicos spent their
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Backseat Cheney
time writing and researching various issues of domestic and
foreign policy. Among the positions espoused by the group
was the elimination of the continued threat posed by Saddam
Hussein. They believed that America had the responsibility
of removing him from power. The decision not to pursue
Hussein into Iraq during the first Gulf War was one that would
haunt Cheney until he finally accomplished the goal in 2003.
After leaving office, Cheney also spent some time mulling a
presidential run in 1996, setting up a political action committee and visiting 47 states en route to a possible nomination. But
in 1995, he announced he would not be running. Speculation
on why Cheney declined to run varied from the fact that he
didn’t have the charisma to sustain a televised campaign to the
fact that his youngest daughter, Mary, is a lesbian, and Cheney
had upheld a policy banning gays from the military while
he was secretary of defense. It was more likely, however, that
Cheney’s reluctance to run came from a different source. He
was faced with a tempting economic opportunity that promised a far easier road.
•••
The story about how Dick Cheney came to be Halliburton’s
CEO goes like this: During a fishing trip at the Miramichi
River in New Brunswick with a group of high-powered corporate CEOs, the men were discussing the ongoing search for a
CEO at Halliburton. Cheney was asleep back at the lodge and,
in his absence, the men decided that Cheney would be the man
for the job, despite the fact that he had never worked in the oil
business. Without Cheney there to protest, he got the job. True
or not, the story explains Cheney’s baffling appointment to the position as well as anything. Unlike 15 years earlier when
he chose the life of a public servant, this time Cheney chose to
embrace a drastic career change. With Cheney as their CEO,
Halliburton would have considerable leverage in Washington.
The company was in the process of ramping up its government
and military contracting work after 10 long years of drought,
and Cheney’s contacts on Capitol Hill and the Pentagon offered a new level of access.
•••
Up until Cheney’s appointment in the fall of 1995, Halliburton’s business results had been decent. After a loss of $91
million in 1993, the company had returned to profitability
in 1994 with an operating profit of $236 million. With the
new revenue coming in from LOGCAP, Halliburton, and its
prize subsidiary Brown & Root, were back on track. Though
LOGCAP was producing only modest revenues—about
$212 million between 1992 and 1995—it was successful in reintegrating Brown & Root into the military machine. Besides,
with a monopoly on army logistics in its back pocket, Brown &
Root was sure to cash in sooner or later on a major conflict,
even with a dove of a president—Bill Clinton.
That opportunity finally presented itself in December 1995,
just two months after Cheney took the CEO job, when the
United States sent thousands of troops to the Balkans to provide
stability to a region that had been uprooted by war. As part of
Operation Joint Endeavor, Brown & Root was dispatched to
Bosnia and Kosovo to support the army in its operations in the
region. The task was massive in scope and size. The company
immediately set to work building two camps in the middle of
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Backseat Cheney
wheat fields, with no existing foundations or infrastructure. In
the course of just a few months, Brown & Root created what
amounted to two small cities—one in Bosnia, one in Kosovo—
capable of housing and feeding 5,000 troops each. Troop limitations imposed by the White House drove the army to rely
heavily on LOGCAP and the services Brown & Root could provide. The result was a bonanza for Brown & Root.
From 1995 to 2000, Brown & Root billed the government for
more than $2 billion in services. The company did everything
from build the camps to deliver the mail, with 24-hour food
service and laundering. It provided firefighting services, fuel
delivery, sewage construction, hazardous material disposal,
and the maintenance and delivery of equipment. In short,
Brown & Root became the lifeblood of the U.S. army in the
Balkans, an indispensable part of the military machine.
One example of the work Brown & Root did in the Balkans
was Camp Bondsteel. The camp was so large that the U.S.
General Accounting Office likened it to “a small town.” The
company built roads, power generation, water and sewage systems, housing, a helicopter airfield, a perimeter fence, guard
towers, and a detention center (à la Vietnam). Soldiers at the
camp said the only thing missing was the patch on their uniforms that said, “Sponsored by Brown & Root.” The camp,
still in use today, has communications towers, satellite dishes,
and a six-mile perimeter. Bondsteel is the largest and most
expensive army base since Vietnam. It also happens to be
built in the path of the Albanian-Macedonian-Bulgarian Oil
(AMBO) Trans-Balkan pipeline, the pipeline charged with
the task of connecting the oil-rich Caspian Sea region to the
rest of the world. The initial feasibility project for AMBO was
done by Brown & Root.
Brown & Root’s cash flow from LOGCAP ballooned under
Cheney’s tenure, jumping from about $144 million in 1994 to
more than $423 million in 1996, and the Balkans was the driving force. By 1999, the army was spending just under $1 billion
a year on Brown & Root’s work in the Balkans. The company
had become so integral to the army’s work in the region that
in 1997, when the first LOGCAP contract ran out, the army
carved out the Balkans region from the follow-on contract,
awarded to Brown & Root competitor Dyncorp, and kept it in
the hands of Brown & Root. The new contract, a sole-source,
noncompetitive contract, was called the Balkans Support Contract, and it remains with Brown & Root to this day. The fact
that a Balkans Support Contract even existed, separate and
distinct from LOGCAP, underscored a fundamental flaw in
the original design of the LOGCAP contract, in that awarding
a single contract for all army logistics support created an artificial dependency on that one contractor. Though LOGCAP
was originally intended to be competitively awarded in its
entirety every five years, the Army found it too disruptive and
expensive to remove Brown & Root midstream. The company
had become indispensable.
The work in the Balkans was all done under the cost-plus
structure of LOGCAP, which guaranteed a 1 percent profit on
top of expenses, with the possibility of up to 8 percent in award
fees. Between 1995 and 2000, Brown & Root was given the full
award fee for five evaluation periods, 99 percent two times,
and 98 percent one time. But the cost-plus structure of the contract came back to bite the army and Brown & Root when the
General Accounting Office issued a report in September 2000
charging serious cost-control problems in the Balkans.
The main problem with the work in the Balkans was a lack
of oversight by the army. From the army’s perspective, everything was running smoothly. After all, Brown & Root made
their lives considerably easier. By assigning ever-increasing
amounts of work to the contractor, the Army was able to reduce force size and concentrate on more important things.
And it wasn’t their money that was being spent. There was also
a fundamental and more systemic problem occurring. The
army was unclear about how the LOGCAP contract was to be
used. Originally, the contract was “intended to be the option
of last resort.” The army had come to think of LOGCAP, and
subsequently Brown & Root, as another branch of the military,
at their beckon call. The results were disastrous, and fantastically expensive.
Critics say Brown & Root benefited from the confusion.
The GAO found that the company overstaffed and oversupplied the army, resulting in higher costs and in turn, higher
profits. In one instance, Brown & Root was tasked with building a fire-fighting force to staff the camps in Bosnia, Kosovo,
and Macedonia. The company submitted a plan for 116 firefighting personnel. Army engineers concluded that no more
than 66 were needed. But Brown & Root was able to haggle
with the Army, finalizing an agreement to staff 77 firefighters
and the corresponding amount of trucks and equipment. Despite the difference of opinion on the matter, the army gave
in to Brown & Root’s requests, showing the rising level of authority the company had in influencing army policy.
Indeed, the army was confused about its authority over its
primary contractor. In December 1999, the administrative
contracting officer at Camp Monteith in Kosovo, issued a task order to Brown & Root to build a tent for use as the post office
at the camp. The government estimated the cost to be $6,000,
so the officer placed a $10,000 limit on the cost of the construction, giving Brown & Root ample wiggle room. Upon
hearing this, the lead administrative contracting officer at
Camp Bondsteel sent an e-mail to his equal at Camp Monteith,
telling him that Brown & Root “is the army’s customer and
that such funding limitations affect the army’s relationship
with the customer.” How the customer-vendor relationship in
the Balkans got so turned around is anybody’s guess. The army
is, of course, the customer in the relationship, not the reverse.
Brown & Root was growing in power by the day in the Balkans,
and so was the wastefulness. The company was leasing generators at a cost of $13 million a year to provide 100 percent power
redundancy throughout the base camps. Army officials, after the
money had already been spent, noted that they didn’t need the
capacity that Brown & Root was providing, and the excess would
cost $85 million over five years. The GAO also estimated that the
company had overstaffed 85 percent of the projects in Bosnia
and that “half of the crews had at least 40 percent of their members not engaged in work.” The cleaning services staff was finishing their work in a fraction of the time they were given,
resulting in long breaks several times a day.
The situation in Bosnia was a mess, and it harkened back to the cost overruns of the Vietnam era and RMK-BRJ (Raymond International, Morrison Knudson, Brown & Root, and JA Jones Construction). It also was a foreshadowing to the cost concerns of Kellogg Brown & Root’s work in Iraq. It was a pattern the GAO had tried to address in 1997, when it issued a report suggesting ways to improve the management of LOGCAP. But the situation had only worsened. Part of the problem was the 202 Backseat Cheney challenge of hiring local labor to complete tasks. It was originally thought that this would considerably lower costs in each military deployment, as well as curry favor with the locals. Instead, locals turned out to be difficult to manage and rely on, and worse, they posed a significant security risk.
In Somalia in the early 1990s, Brown & Root relied heavily on local labor, and at one point was the country’s largest employer. Bob Burroughs, the army officer in charge of Brown & Root during the brief American occupation there, remembers truckloads of “skinnys,” as the American soldiers referred to the locals, showing up whenever a job needed to get done. “One time we told them we had to get a roof put on the customs house, which had been mortared,” Borroughs recalls. “The next day, two tractor trailer rigs showed up with a hundred skinnys sitting on top. I don’t know how they did it or where they came from, but Brown & Root got whatever we needed.”
Where they got the labor was the problem. Borroughs said that one of the first “bad guys” the Americans arrested in Mogadishu, warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid’s “finance guy,” was found with “a bunch of Brown & Root checks in his pockets.” According to Borroughs, Brown & Root was hiring workers and buying supplies from the government the Americans were there to defeat. If that’s the case, Brown & Root was making the troops’ life easier at camp by making it harder for the soldiers to defeat the enemy. In addition, there were concerns at the American base camp outside of Mogadishu that the locals that worked inside the camp perimeter, were working as agents of Aidid. In his bestselling book Black Hawk Down, Mark Bowden references a Brown & Root employee who was feeding information to Aidid. Dan Schilling, an air force combat controller in Somalia says “We did have real concerns about using locals. The guy could be squeaky clean on paper, but in a country like Somalia, you never know. When trucks full of locals came into camp to clean out the latrines, I usually steered clear of the bathrooms. If you’re really determined to get something into the compound, you could do it. No one’s going to check out the inside of the sewage truck. If they really wanted to, they could wall off a section, they could put some C4 in there.” Burroughs, an unflappable, crusty veteran, who has seen everything in his 32 years of service, took the inherent risks of hiring locals in stride, and told me, without a hint of irony, “sometimes you have to work with the devil to make things work.”
General William Nash, the former American commander in Bosnia and U.N. administrator in Kosovo, told me that working with the locals is part of the game in modern day warfare. “Who knew who the bad guys were? There are so many things you don’t understand, that’s just the ignorance of being the new guy on the block.” Nash felt that in Bosnia, like Somalia, things ran as well as they could have, all things considered. “Was there waste in Bosnia? Of course there was. When you come in on the leading edge of an operation, you’ve got to expect that there will be some degree of less than perfect organization. To some extent, it’s the cost of doing business. There were a lot of scams that people could run. The fact that they got over on some portion of the contract, I can’t deny. Life is real.”
Nash is a realist, if nothing else. And his views of the waste that went on in Bosnia reflect his level-headed understanding of war-time contracting, and a lifetime of military service. But when it comes to Iraq, and Brown & Root’s (now known as Kellogg Brown & Root) involvement there, his tone turns much darker. “Iraq is different. The contracts that we’re concerned with now are the rebuilding of the country, [not war-time work]. Personally I think that these rebuilding contracts smell to high heaven. The whole thing is fouled up.”
Cheney seemed to take a similarly accepting approach to the overspending issues in Bosnia as Nash. Even as the GAO reports were coming out, Cheney chose not to get involved in the work in Bosnia, declining to visit the camps his company was supporting. He felt that it would represent a conflict if he was to appear too close to the military contracting side of the business, given his history in the department of defense. As CEO of Halliburton, Cheney specialized in delegation, and would often use that fact as a shield from contracting controversy. But a CEO is ultimately responsible for all of the actions of a company, and Cheney’s decisions during his time as CEO raised serious questions about his true political beliefs.
Cheney’s anti-sanction history is well documented. While a Representative from Wyoming, Cheney twice opposed levying sanctions against the apartheid government of South Africa. He favored carving out a piece of Cuba that could engage in free trade with the United States, like West Berlin. And as CEO of Halliburton, he joined the United States–Engage lobby, a group of trade affiliations lobbying to end sanctions against Libya and Iran. But in looking at Halliburton’s business in countries that are under strict American and U.N. sanctions, it’s difficult to understand why Cheney even felt the need to lift the sanctions. Business was being done in those countries despite efforts to the contrary.
Severe sanctions have been in effect against Libya since 1986, when Ronald Reagan was in office, and Libya had been implicated in several terrorist attacks against the United States and other nations, including the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The Reagan administration believed that the Libyan government was supporting these acts financially and otherwise. Yet Brown & Root has been working on a project, the size and scope of which boggle the mind, for more than 20 years. The Great Man-Made River Project is a $25 billion project that Colonel Muammar Qaddafi conceived and initiated in the early 1980s. It consists of 2,200 miles of massive underground pipes, 14 feet in diameter, that zigzag underneath the sun-baked sands of the country for the ostensible purpose of transporting water, found deep under the Sahara desert, to regions in need of it. The idea is to bring water to the thirsty nether regions of the country to use for agriculture.
Brown & Root began work on the project in 1984, drawing up feasibility plans and drafting specifications. When stricter sanctions were imposed in 1986, the company simply transferred the work to its British office and kept the follow-on contracts coming to this day. In his speech given to the Cato Institute in 1998, Cheney stated flatly that economic sanctions “almost never work.” With companies like his own skirting the sanctions with such ease, it’s easy to see why.
Even more troubling, the pipeline may end up carrying more troops than it does water. In 1997, engineers working on the project came forward to say that Libya’s explanation of the project was improbable at best. The engineers said that the enormous storage areas being constructed every 50 miles were far too complicated and immense for carrying water. They believed that the facilities were in fact intended to store military equipment, even poison gas. The tunnels are large enough to move military troops, equipment, or even install a rail line. “Qaddafi seems to have taken a leaf out of Kim Il Sung’s book and created a potential military arsenal underground,” feared one engineer. The tunnels are slated to intersect with Tarhuna mountain, a known chemical and biological weapons plant, and national security experts felt it possible that Qaddafi could use the tunnels to conceal movements of weapons and troops from U.S. satellites.
But Halliburton’s business continued in Libya, and the company was still managing the project as of 1997, with CEO Dick Cheney fighting hard to have the official sanctions against Libya removed. The company declined to say whether it was still working on The Great Man-Made River Project today.
Far more disconcerting though, is the work that the company has done in Iraq, the country against which Dick Cheney waged war twice during his career in public office. Between stints as secretary of defense and vice president, while Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, he helped to rebuild Iraq and enrich Saddam Hussein, circumventing strict sanctions and putting money into the pocket of America’s public enemy number one.
In 1996, a U.N. program called Oil for Food was created as a way to provide humanitarian relief to Iraqi citizens while keeping in place the international economic sanctions against Iraq and the Saddam Hussein regime. The idea was to allow Iraq to export its precious oil in exchange for humanitarian 208 Backseat Cheney aid, everything from first aid and medical supplies to the most basic food and water requirements. There were restrictions on the type of goods that could be imported by Iraq: anything deemed even remotely for military use was strictly prohibited. It seemed that the world had devised a clever way to obtain the much-needed oil of Iraq, without shouldering the burdensome crises of conscience associated with doing business with a brutal, murdering dictator.
Not surprisingly, the Oil for Food program was exploited for personal gain, on both sides of the deal making. The Council for International Justice, in a September 2002 report, estimated that for every $6 billion a year Iraq earned from the Oil for Food program, Saddam Hussein made $2 billion. He used this money for everything from luxury goods to weapons and training for his military. Oil for Food was the main source of income for Iraq, but the system was rife with corruption, skimming schemes, and kickbacks. Worse, the United States was consuming 75 percent of the oil exported from Iraq under the program.
The Oil for Food program was so thoroughly corrupt that it was reduced to a punch line. General Tommy Franks, the U.S. commander of forces in Iraq called it “Oil for Palaces.” Saddam Hussein and his sons were growing richer by the day, exploiting the poorly audited program by providing substandard services for its people and pocketing the rest. It is estimated that of the $57 billion the country earned through the Oil for Food program, only $23 billion of it was spent on humanitarian goods. That comes to about $170 per year per person, or less than the United Nations spends on dog food for mine-clearing operations ($400 per dog per year).
It was through this program that Halliburton did business with Iraq between 1998 and 2000. In September 1998, Halliburton closed on its $7.7 billion stock merger with Dresser Industries, the company that gave George H.W. Bush his first job. The merger made Halliburton the largest oilfield services firm in the world. It also brought with it two foreign subsidiaries that were doing business with Iraq through the controversial Oil for Food program. The two subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co., signed $73 million worth of contracts for oil production equipment while Cheney was CEO.
Cheney told the press during his 2000 run for vice president that he had a “firm policy” against doing business with Iraq. He admitted to doing business with Iran and Libya, but “Iraq’s different,” he said. Originally, Cheney denied the business ties to Baghdad outright, telling ABC-TV in the summer of 2000 that “We’ve not done any business in Iraq since U.N. sanctions were imposed on Iraq in 1990, and I had a standing policy that I wouldn’t do that.” Executives at both subsidiaries said later that no such policy existed.
Three weeks later, Cheney was forced to admit to the business ties, but claimed ignorance. He told reporters that he was not aware of Dresser’s business in Iraq, and that besides, Halliburton had divested itself of both companies by 2000. In the meantime, the companies did another $30 million worth of business in Iraq before they were sold off. But ignorance of the contracts was also ruled out as an excuse, as Cheney was forced into the uncomfortable position of either admitting he didn’t know that his company was trading with Saddam Hussein, or that he just didn’t care. James Perrella, the former chairman of Ingersoll Rand, said that Halliburton was simply concerned with whether the business with Iraq was legal, which it was.
The situation in Bosnia was a mess, and it harkened back to the cost overruns of the Vietnam era and RMK-BRJ (Raymond International, Morrison Knudson, Brown & Root, and JA Jones Construction). It also was a foreshadowing to the cost concerns of Kellogg Brown & Root’s work in Iraq. It was a pattern the GAO had tried to address in 1997, when it issued a report suggesting ways to improve the management of LOGCAP. But the situation had only worsened. Part of the problem was the 202 Backseat Cheney challenge of hiring local labor to complete tasks. It was originally thought that this would considerably lower costs in each military deployment, as well as curry favor with the locals. Instead, locals turned out to be difficult to manage and rely on, and worse, they posed a significant security risk.
In Somalia in the early 1990s, Brown & Root relied heavily on local labor, and at one point was the country’s largest employer. Bob Burroughs, the army officer in charge of Brown & Root during the brief American occupation there, remembers truckloads of “skinnys,” as the American soldiers referred to the locals, showing up whenever a job needed to get done. “One time we told them we had to get a roof put on the customs house, which had been mortared,” Borroughs recalls. “The next day, two tractor trailer rigs showed up with a hundred skinnys sitting on top. I don’t know how they did it or where they came from, but Brown & Root got whatever we needed.”
Where they got the labor was the problem. Borroughs said that one of the first “bad guys” the Americans arrested in Mogadishu, warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid’s “finance guy,” was found with “a bunch of Brown & Root checks in his pockets.” According to Borroughs, Brown & Root was hiring workers and buying supplies from the government the Americans were there to defeat. If that’s the case, Brown & Root was making the troops’ life easier at camp by making it harder for the soldiers to defeat the enemy. In addition, there were concerns at the American base camp outside of Mogadishu that the locals that worked inside the camp perimeter, were working as agents of Aidid. In his bestselling book Black Hawk Down, Mark Bowden references a Brown & Root employee who was feeding information to Aidid. Dan Schilling, an air force combat controller in Somalia says “We did have real concerns about using locals. The guy could be squeaky clean on paper, but in a country like Somalia, you never know. When trucks full of locals came into camp to clean out the latrines, I usually steered clear of the bathrooms. If you’re really determined to get something into the compound, you could do it. No one’s going to check out the inside of the sewage truck. If they really wanted to, they could wall off a section, they could put some C4 in there.” Burroughs, an unflappable, crusty veteran, who has seen everything in his 32 years of service, took the inherent risks of hiring locals in stride, and told me, without a hint of irony, “sometimes you have to work with the devil to make things work.”
General William Nash, the former American commander in Bosnia and U.N. administrator in Kosovo, told me that working with the locals is part of the game in modern day warfare. “Who knew who the bad guys were? There are so many things you don’t understand, that’s just the ignorance of being the new guy on the block.” Nash felt that in Bosnia, like Somalia, things ran as well as they could have, all things considered. “Was there waste in Bosnia? Of course there was. When you come in on the leading edge of an operation, you’ve got to expect that there will be some degree of less than perfect organization. To some extent, it’s the cost of doing business. There were a lot of scams that people could run. The fact that they got over on some portion of the contract, I can’t deny. Life is real.”
Nash is a realist, if nothing else. And his views of the waste that went on in Bosnia reflect his level-headed understanding of war-time contracting, and a lifetime of military service. But when it comes to Iraq, and Brown & Root’s (now known as Kellogg Brown & Root) involvement there, his tone turns much darker. “Iraq is different. The contracts that we’re concerned with now are the rebuilding of the country, [not war-time work]. Personally I think that these rebuilding contracts smell to high heaven. The whole thing is fouled up.”
Cheney seemed to take a similarly accepting approach to the overspending issues in Bosnia as Nash. Even as the GAO reports were coming out, Cheney chose not to get involved in the work in Bosnia, declining to visit the camps his company was supporting. He felt that it would represent a conflict if he was to appear too close to the military contracting side of the business, given his history in the department of defense. As CEO of Halliburton, Cheney specialized in delegation, and would often use that fact as a shield from contracting controversy. But a CEO is ultimately responsible for all of the actions of a company, and Cheney’s decisions during his time as CEO raised serious questions about his true political beliefs.
•••
“It is a false dichotomy that we have to choose between our
commercial and other interests.” That quote, delivered by
Dick Cheney in a speech given to the Cato Institute in the summer of 1998, succinctly sums up the vice president’s business
strategy while CEO of Halliburton. Cheney was speaking out
against economic sanctions levied primarily by the Clinton administration against countries suspected of terrorist activity.
“Our government has become sanctions-happy,” Cheney continued. His main gripe was that by sanctioning various countries,
known sponsors of terrorism, it hurt Halliburton’s business. In
particular, Cheney objected to sanctions against Libya and Iran,
two countries that Halliburton was already doing brisk business
with anyway. In fact, during Cheney’s time as CEO, was even conducting business with Iraq, the country Cheney
had led our troops against as secretary of defense in the first
Gulf War, and would again go to battle with in 2003. Under the
circumstances, it’s hard to imagine a regime with which Dick
Cheney wouldn’t do business. Cheney’s anti-sanction history is well documented. While a Representative from Wyoming, Cheney twice opposed levying sanctions against the apartheid government of South Africa. He favored carving out a piece of Cuba that could engage in free trade with the United States, like West Berlin. And as CEO of Halliburton, he joined the United States–Engage lobby, a group of trade affiliations lobbying to end sanctions against Libya and Iran. But in looking at Halliburton’s business in countries that are under strict American and U.N. sanctions, it’s difficult to understand why Cheney even felt the need to lift the sanctions. Business was being done in those countries despite efforts to the contrary.
Severe sanctions have been in effect against Libya since 1986, when Ronald Reagan was in office, and Libya had been implicated in several terrorist attacks against the United States and other nations, including the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The Reagan administration believed that the Libyan government was supporting these acts financially and otherwise. Yet Brown & Root has been working on a project, the size and scope of which boggle the mind, for more than 20 years. The Great Man-Made River Project is a $25 billion project that Colonel Muammar Qaddafi conceived and initiated in the early 1980s. It consists of 2,200 miles of massive underground pipes, 14 feet in diameter, that zigzag underneath the sun-baked sands of the country for the ostensible purpose of transporting water, found deep under the Sahara desert, to regions in need of it. The idea is to bring water to the thirsty nether regions of the country to use for agriculture.
Brown & Root began work on the project in 1984, drawing up feasibility plans and drafting specifications. When stricter sanctions were imposed in 1986, the company simply transferred the work to its British office and kept the follow-on contracts coming to this day. In his speech given to the Cato Institute in 1998, Cheney stated flatly that economic sanctions “almost never work.” With companies like his own skirting the sanctions with such ease, it’s easy to see why.
Even more troubling, the pipeline may end up carrying more troops than it does water. In 1997, engineers working on the project came forward to say that Libya’s explanation of the project was improbable at best. The engineers said that the enormous storage areas being constructed every 50 miles were far too complicated and immense for carrying water. They believed that the facilities were in fact intended to store military equipment, even poison gas. The tunnels are large enough to move military troops, equipment, or even install a rail line. “Qaddafi seems to have taken a leaf out of Kim Il Sung’s book and created a potential military arsenal underground,” feared one engineer. The tunnels are slated to intersect with Tarhuna mountain, a known chemical and biological weapons plant, and national security experts felt it possible that Qaddafi could use the tunnels to conceal movements of weapons and troops from U.S. satellites.
But Halliburton’s business continued in Libya, and the company was still managing the project as of 1997, with CEO Dick Cheney fighting hard to have the official sanctions against Libya removed. The company declined to say whether it was still working on The Great Man-Made River Project today.
•••
Libya was not the first country on America’s list of terrorism
sponsors with which Halliburton did business. The company
has had an office in Tehran, Iran, since 1975, when it was
awarded contracts worth more than $800 million to build a
naval base for the Iranian Imperial Army. That business, and
other oil-related business, continued for nearly three decades
before, just recently, Halliburton agreed to re-evaluate its
business with Iran. New York City Comptroller William Thompson, who manages the city’s pension funds, was incensed by
Halliburton’s business in Iran and insisted the company provide a full reckoning of its business deals in the country. Acting
on behalf of the police and fire department pension funds, he
filed a shareholder proposal asking Halliburton to disclose all
details related to its Iranian business. The report that came
back was incomplete, according to Thompson, and as of December 2003, Halliburton still had not provided enough information to satisfy the city. Far more disconcerting though, is the work that the company has done in Iraq, the country against which Dick Cheney waged war twice during his career in public office. Between stints as secretary of defense and vice president, while Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, he helped to rebuild Iraq and enrich Saddam Hussein, circumventing strict sanctions and putting money into the pocket of America’s public enemy number one.
In 1996, a U.N. program called Oil for Food was created as a way to provide humanitarian relief to Iraqi citizens while keeping in place the international economic sanctions against Iraq and the Saddam Hussein regime. The idea was to allow Iraq to export its precious oil in exchange for humanitarian 208 Backseat Cheney aid, everything from first aid and medical supplies to the most basic food and water requirements. There were restrictions on the type of goods that could be imported by Iraq: anything deemed even remotely for military use was strictly prohibited. It seemed that the world had devised a clever way to obtain the much-needed oil of Iraq, without shouldering the burdensome crises of conscience associated with doing business with a brutal, murdering dictator.
Not surprisingly, the Oil for Food program was exploited for personal gain, on both sides of the deal making. The Council for International Justice, in a September 2002 report, estimated that for every $6 billion a year Iraq earned from the Oil for Food program, Saddam Hussein made $2 billion. He used this money for everything from luxury goods to weapons and training for his military. Oil for Food was the main source of income for Iraq, but the system was rife with corruption, skimming schemes, and kickbacks. Worse, the United States was consuming 75 percent of the oil exported from Iraq under the program.
The Oil for Food program was so thoroughly corrupt that it was reduced to a punch line. General Tommy Franks, the U.S. commander of forces in Iraq called it “Oil for Palaces.” Saddam Hussein and his sons were growing richer by the day, exploiting the poorly audited program by providing substandard services for its people and pocketing the rest. It is estimated that of the $57 billion the country earned through the Oil for Food program, only $23 billion of it was spent on humanitarian goods. That comes to about $170 per year per person, or less than the United Nations spends on dog food for mine-clearing operations ($400 per dog per year).
It was through this program that Halliburton did business with Iraq between 1998 and 2000. In September 1998, Halliburton closed on its $7.7 billion stock merger with Dresser Industries, the company that gave George H.W. Bush his first job. The merger made Halliburton the largest oilfield services firm in the world. It also brought with it two foreign subsidiaries that were doing business with Iraq through the controversial Oil for Food program. The two subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co., signed $73 million worth of contracts for oil production equipment while Cheney was CEO.
Cheney told the press during his 2000 run for vice president that he had a “firm policy” against doing business with Iraq. He admitted to doing business with Iran and Libya, but “Iraq’s different,” he said. Originally, Cheney denied the business ties to Baghdad outright, telling ABC-TV in the summer of 2000 that “We’ve not done any business in Iraq since U.N. sanctions were imposed on Iraq in 1990, and I had a standing policy that I wouldn’t do that.” Executives at both subsidiaries said later that no such policy existed.
Three weeks later, Cheney was forced to admit to the business ties, but claimed ignorance. He told reporters that he was not aware of Dresser’s business in Iraq, and that besides, Halliburton had divested itself of both companies by 2000. In the meantime, the companies did another $30 million worth of business in Iraq before they were sold off. But ignorance of the contracts was also ruled out as an excuse, as Cheney was forced into the uncomfortable position of either admitting he didn’t know that his company was trading with Saddam Hussein, or that he just didn’t care. James Perrella, the former chairman of Ingersoll Rand, said that Halliburton was simply concerned with whether the business with Iraq was legal, which it was.
Halliburton must have been aware of the inherent dangers
of doing business through foreign subsidiaries with sanctioned states. In 1995, just before Cheney came on board,
Halliburton was fined $3.8 million for violating sanctions by
re-exporting goods through a foreign subsidiary into Libya.
So Cheney’s claim that he was unaware of the Iraq contracts
either makes him a terribly irresponsible CEO or a deceptive
politician. Either way, he’s not the man I want bending the
president’s ear on a daily basis. But more importantly, it’s difficult to imagine how Cheney justified in his own mind profiting from sales with Saddam Hussein, through a program that
was widely known to be a joke. In essence, Cheney had gone to
war against Iraq as defense secretary, helped rebuild Iraq’s oil
business and military as CEO of Halliburton, then went to war
again as vice president. Apparently, how evil Saddam Hussein
is depends on which side of the business-government continuum you currently sit.
Then how did Cheney do it? The answer, of course, is through the government—by hiring a handful of his pals from the Beltway. David Gribbin, Cheney’s former chief of staff, became Halliburton’s chief lobbyist in Washington. Admiral Joe Lopez, a former commander of the sixth fleet, was hired to be Kellogg Brown & Root’s governmental operations expert. Together, Cheney’s team made Halliburton one of the top government contractors in the country. On the surface, it appeared that Cheney had been doing a great job. The stock had increased 157 percent from the time Cheney came on board in the fall of 1995 to the time he announced his resignation in July of 2000, paying regular dividends to stockholders. Things were going so well that Cheney told the Dallas Morning News that, though he was helping presidential candidate George W. Bush to find a vice presidential running mate, he was not the man for the job. “I made a long-term commitment to the company and I have absolutely no desire to go back to government,” he said in May 2000, two months before he left Halliburton to become Bush’s running mate.
When Cheney did leave, he took a golden parachute package, and was forced to cash in his stock options for more than $30 million. He also left in his wake a grand jury investigation into overbilling and a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation into Halliburton’s accounting practices while Cheney was CEO. Just two months after Cheney left the corner office at Halliburton, a former employee of the company, turned whistle-blower and claimed that Halliburton had over-billed the U.S. government by $6 million and used poor quality materials in its decommissioning of the Fort Ord military base in California. The company settled the case, admitting no wrongdoing, by paying the government $2 million in February 2002. The SEC investigation is ongoing.
But there was more. The company had changed its accounting for revenues during Cheney’s tenure, allowing them to postpone revealing big losses on construction projects that had run over budget. It was reporting sales before it had even billed its clients, and kept them on the books for more than a year, even if there were only slim hopes of recovering the money. In making the change, Halliburton failed to inform its stockholders of the new accounting practice for more than a year, as the SEC requires. The company maintains that it followed generally accepted accounting principles. The cost overruns that Halliburton was booking as revenue accounted for 50 percent of the company’s operating profit in the fourth quarter of 1998. In May 2002, the company announced that it was under investigation, and Cheney, now safely tucked away in the White House, referred all questions regarding the matter back to Halliburton. The SEC investigation is ongoing, but Halliburton settled 20 shareholder suits related to the matter in June 2003. The accounting firm that Halliburton used was Arthur Andersen, the same company that went down in the Enron debacle. In a promotional video produced by Arthur Andersen in 1996, Cheney had this to say about the firm, “One of the things I like that they do for us is that, in effect, I get good advice, if you will, from their people based upon how we’re doing business and how we’re operating, over and above the, just sort of the normal by-the-books audit arrangement.”
Suddenly it seemed like Cheney hadn’t been such a great CEO after all. The stock that Cheney had cashed in on near its peak was plummeting. In the two years since Cheney had left office, the stock had gone from $49 a share (August 2000) to $14.57 (August 2002). One defense that was heard often as the Iraq business, the overbilling, and the aggressive accounting practices came to light after Cheney left Halliburton, was that Cheney was more of a “hands-off” kind of manager, not involved in minor details like pumping up revenues or doing business with Saddam Hussein. But Cheney’s history has been one of utter involvement in even the smallest details of his work. He has been known to pepper low-level intelligence personnel at the White House, poring over information and data. Several former coworkers have remarked at how Cheney was an information hound, devouring statistics and working long hours. It’s hard to believe that Cheney was so utterly uninvolved in Halliburton’s day-to-day business and didn’t have anything to do with the company’s increase in government business. If both were true, what exactly did he spend his time on at Halliburton?
During an address to the Export-Import Bank, in May 1997, Cheney wise cracked that “When I was secretary of defense, my biggest problem was with the Congress of the United States. Now that I’m chairman and CEO of a Fortune 500 company, my biggest problem is the Congress of the United States.” Perhaps no statement from Cheney about his time at the helm of Halliburton better explains why he was brought on board to head up a major international oil conglomerate as that. But as vice president of the United States, Cheney would be in an even better position to help out his former coworkers. In 2001, the 2000 election was finally decided and George W. Bush had won. Halliburton had another vice president in their pocket.
next
Fall from Grace
notes at page starting 268
http://the-eye.eu/public/concen.org/Conspiracy%20Theory%20eBooks%20Collection%20part%202%20%5BPDF%5D-OMNiSCiENT/Briody%2C%20Dan%20-%20The%20Halliburton%20Agenda%2C%20The%20Politics%20of%20Oil%20and%20Money%20%282004%29.pdf
•••
The Dresser merger, and the subsequent fallout, was the
crowning achievement of the Cheney years at Halliburton.
But Cheney left Halliburton with a few other legacies as well.
Brown & Root had nearly doubled its government contracts,
from $1.2 billion in the five years prior to his arrival, to $2.3
billion during his five years as CEO. Halliburton soared from
seventy-third to eighteenth on the Pentagon’s list of top contractors. Its government contracting business grew 91 percent. In the five years before Cheney took over, Halliburton
secured $100 million in government-backed loans from the U.S. Export-Import Bank. During the five years of Cheney’s
tenure, that number increased to $1.5 billion. By the time he
left in 2000 to become George W. Bush’s running mate, the
reason that Halliburton had chosen Dick Cheney as its CEO
had become clear, though Cheney continued to deny that he
had any influence on Halliburton’s government business.
During a vice presidential debate in 2000, Al Gore’s running
mate Senator Joseph Lieberman mentioned casually that
Cheney had done well financially at Halliburton. Cheney responded by saying, “I can tell you, Joe, the government had absolutely nothing to do with it.” Then how did Cheney do it? The answer, of course, is through the government—by hiring a handful of his pals from the Beltway. David Gribbin, Cheney’s former chief of staff, became Halliburton’s chief lobbyist in Washington. Admiral Joe Lopez, a former commander of the sixth fleet, was hired to be Kellogg Brown & Root’s governmental operations expert. Together, Cheney’s team made Halliburton one of the top government contractors in the country. On the surface, it appeared that Cheney had been doing a great job. The stock had increased 157 percent from the time Cheney came on board in the fall of 1995 to the time he announced his resignation in July of 2000, paying regular dividends to stockholders. Things were going so well that Cheney told the Dallas Morning News that, though he was helping presidential candidate George W. Bush to find a vice presidential running mate, he was not the man for the job. “I made a long-term commitment to the company and I have absolutely no desire to go back to government,” he said in May 2000, two months before he left Halliburton to become Bush’s running mate.
When Cheney did leave, he took a golden parachute package, and was forced to cash in his stock options for more than $30 million. He also left in his wake a grand jury investigation into overbilling and a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation into Halliburton’s accounting practices while Cheney was CEO. Just two months after Cheney left the corner office at Halliburton, a former employee of the company, turned whistle-blower and claimed that Halliburton had over-billed the U.S. government by $6 million and used poor quality materials in its decommissioning of the Fort Ord military base in California. The company settled the case, admitting no wrongdoing, by paying the government $2 million in February 2002. The SEC investigation is ongoing.
But there was more. The company had changed its accounting for revenues during Cheney’s tenure, allowing them to postpone revealing big losses on construction projects that had run over budget. It was reporting sales before it had even billed its clients, and kept them on the books for more than a year, even if there were only slim hopes of recovering the money. In making the change, Halliburton failed to inform its stockholders of the new accounting practice for more than a year, as the SEC requires. The company maintains that it followed generally accepted accounting principles. The cost overruns that Halliburton was booking as revenue accounted for 50 percent of the company’s operating profit in the fourth quarter of 1998. In May 2002, the company announced that it was under investigation, and Cheney, now safely tucked away in the White House, referred all questions regarding the matter back to Halliburton. The SEC investigation is ongoing, but Halliburton settled 20 shareholder suits related to the matter in June 2003. The accounting firm that Halliburton used was Arthur Andersen, the same company that went down in the Enron debacle. In a promotional video produced by Arthur Andersen in 1996, Cheney had this to say about the firm, “One of the things I like that they do for us is that, in effect, I get good advice, if you will, from their people based upon how we’re doing business and how we’re operating, over and above the, just sort of the normal by-the-books audit arrangement.”
Suddenly it seemed like Cheney hadn’t been such a great CEO after all. The stock that Cheney had cashed in on near its peak was plummeting. In the two years since Cheney had left office, the stock had gone from $49 a share (August 2000) to $14.57 (August 2002). One defense that was heard often as the Iraq business, the overbilling, and the aggressive accounting practices came to light after Cheney left Halliburton, was that Cheney was more of a “hands-off” kind of manager, not involved in minor details like pumping up revenues or doing business with Saddam Hussein. But Cheney’s history has been one of utter involvement in even the smallest details of his work. He has been known to pepper low-level intelligence personnel at the White House, poring over information and data. Several former coworkers have remarked at how Cheney was an information hound, devouring statistics and working long hours. It’s hard to believe that Cheney was so utterly uninvolved in Halliburton’s day-to-day business and didn’t have anything to do with the company’s increase in government business. If both were true, what exactly did he spend his time on at Halliburton?
During an address to the Export-Import Bank, in May 1997, Cheney wise cracked that “When I was secretary of defense, my biggest problem was with the Congress of the United States. Now that I’m chairman and CEO of a Fortune 500 company, my biggest problem is the Congress of the United States.” Perhaps no statement from Cheney about his time at the helm of Halliburton better explains why he was brought on board to head up a major international oil conglomerate as that. But as vice president of the United States, Cheney would be in an even better position to help out his former coworkers. In 2001, the 2000 election was finally decided and George W. Bush had won. Halliburton had another vice president in their pocket.
next
Fall from Grace
notes at page starting 268
http://the-eye.eu/public/concen.org/Conspiracy%20Theory%20eBooks%20Collection%20part%202%20%5BPDF%5D-OMNiSCiENT/Briody%2C%20Dan%20-%20The%20Halliburton%20Agenda%2C%20The%20Politics%20of%20Oil%20and%20Money%20%282004%29.pdf
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