SAN FRANCISCO — Bechtel Corp. helped build the Bay Area subway system, Hoover Dam and a city for 200,000 in the desert of Saudi Arabia. It likes to boast that it can go anywhere, under any conditions, and build anything.
In Iraq, Bechtel met its match.
A firm that prides itself on its safety record saw dozens of its workers killed. And a company that celebrates achievement won't know for a long time, if ever, exactly what it accomplished.
The assignment Bechtel won from the U.S. government in early 2003 was unique: Apply the brick and mortar needed to restart the long-starved and war-damaged Iraqi economy, allowing the country to blossom into a modern and free industrial state. Rarely had a single corporation been given so much power to affect so many so quickly.
More than three years later, Bechtel says its work on Iraq's water and electrical plants, its bridges, schools and port, is done.
The company said this week at its headquarters here that it had completed 97 of 99 projects for a total of $2.3 billion, a sum that included its undisclosed fee. Only two Bechtel employees are left in the country. At its peak, there were 200 people from Bechtel supervising tens of thousands of Iraqis.
If the story for Bechtel is drawing to a close, this isn't anything like the happy ending it once expected.
The company went to Iraq with a good deal of well-earned swagger. Chairman Riley Bechtel told the firm's employees in April 2003 that Bechtel's record was one "that few, if any, companies in the world can match." The tasks it would undertake in Iraq, he added, were "the kind of work we do best."
The company expected Iraq to develop from an aid recipient to a customer. The biggest U.S. engineering firm would help one of the world's most distressed countries into the 21st century.
That hope receded with each suicide bombing.
"We were told it would be a permissive environment. But to the horror of everyone, it never stabilized. It just went down, down, down, and to this day it continues to go down," said Cliff Mumm, who ran Bechtel's Iraq operation. "I'm proud of what we did, but had law and order prevailed, it would be a different situation."
At one Bechtel project, in the southern city of Basra, the company recorded this toll: The site security manager was murdered; the site manager resigned after receiving death threats; a senior engineer resigned after his daughter was kidnapped; 12 employees of the electrical-plumbing subcontractor were assassinated in their offices; and 11 employees of the concrete supplier were murdered.
