perhaps a bit dated ( 6 years ), but this may give an idea of some of the BS related to Colombia as well.

###



Covert action and political clout help Enron win contracts

Date: 1995/08/05





Covert action and political clout help Enron win contracts

By Pratap Chatterjee

WASHINGTON, Jul 31 (IPS) - What links Enron, the largest natural gas company

in the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Pentagon

and the fast-growing energy markets of developing countries around the

world?

If you said covert intelligence operations to support

Washington's aggressive pursuit of emerging markets and a network of ''good

old boys'' who have long helped each other in and out of government, you

probably got it right.

Consider the facts. Houston-based Enron was the one of the first

companies to bag lucrative new deals to build private energy projects in

both the Philippines and India.

One of the Filipino deals was to take over a power plant from the

Pentagon, the popular name for the U.S. Defence Department. Enron also

bagged two other projects to build power plants in the country.

The Indian deal was clinched with the help of the CIA which

provided Enron and U.S. government officials with key data on the risks of

the project and strategies of possible competitors, according to published

accounts.

''A number of U.S. government agencies worked on helping Enron in the

Department of Commerce's new advocacy centre. Several of them told me that

the CIA had helped them get information, but the Commerce people themselves

would not talk about it,'' David Sanger of the New York Times told IPS.

Curiously enough, the most senior U.S. diplomat in both

countries when the deals were negotiated was the same, Frank G. Wisner. He

served as ambassador to the Philippines from 1991 well into 1992. He has

presided over the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi since last August.

Enron agrees that the ambassador helped it in the final stages of the

Indian deal but says it had no contact with him in Manila.

''Enron officials paid a courtesy call on the embassy in

Manila, but ...did not meet Wisner until his arrival in India. The U.S.

government's assistance for the trip to India was to prepare for (Commerce

Secretary) Ron Brown's trip. You must remember that we had been negotiating

in India two years before Wisner or Brown arrived,'' says Diane Bazelides,

Enron's chief spokesperson.

Enron struck a deal to manage a 28-megawatt power plant in Subic Bay,

formerly the largest U.S. military base in the region, shortly after Wisner

left Manila in July 1992. Enron took over the plant in January, 1993, two

months after the last U.S. troops left the base.

''The U.S. embassy staff produced an excellent report on how U.S.

business could win contracts in the former base. They had an edge because

they knew it so well,'' recalls a senior staffer at the Filipino embassy in

Washington.

Wisner spent a lot of time after arriving in New Delhi last

year helping Enron win a 2.8-billion-dollar deal to build a 2,015-megawatt

power plant near the southwestern coastal town of Dhabol, close to Bombay.

The deal is now under heavy fire for being over-priced. Allegations of

bribery are rife.

''If anybody asked the CIA to help promote U.S. business in

India, it was probably Frank. That's his style - take action

rather than wait for somebody else to make a decision,'' a former Wisner

staffer told IPS.

In recent weeks, newspaper reports have claimed that CIA

support for U.S. business abroad is now an official priority. On Monday,

for example, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Clinton administration

has issued a set of rules for the CIA to engage in ''economic espionage'' in

keeping with the new, geo-economic mindset of U.S. foreign policy.

''The idea is that an ambasador can call on a chief of station (the top

CIA official in a foreign country) to find out who will take the key

decisions on the bid, information on competitors, any possible corruption on

the part of foreign companies,'' a former US ambassador told IPS.

Wisner is himself long acquainted with the CIA and its

capabilities. His father was one of its architects and served as a top

official there from just after its creation in 1947 until just before his

suicide in 1965.

As such, he helped oversee the toppling of the Guatemalan

government of Jacobo Arbenz for United Fruit company, a family-owned U.S.

business, in 1954. He also was involved in the 1953 overthrow of Iranian

Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq who had threatened to nationalise U.S. and

British oil interests, and in secret operations against Indonesian President

Sukarno in the mid-1950s.

Wisner, Jr. has not been associated with anything quite so

dramatic, but he has gone out of his way to promote both U.S. business and

military policy. Before his posting to New Delhi, Wisner held the number

three position at the Pentagon. During his stint there, Washington actively

courted the Indian military.

Help from such powerful sources in the elite and secret worlds of this

city are commonplace for Kenneth Lay, the chief executive officer and

founder of Enron, who started the company soon after quitting the Federal

Power Commission, a now defunct government agency here.

Lay had worked in the Pentagon during the Vietnam war, when Richard

Nixon

was president. An economics PhD, his work got him noticed at the senior

echelons of the administration.

''Lay understands how government works. He knows who cuts the deals and

he makes sure that he knows people in the right places,'' says a Houston

journalist who asked not to be named.

Lay, whose posh River Oaks home in Houston is a few kms from the

Tanglewood residence of George Bush, is a close friend of the former

president. Although Bush himself has never been accused of doing favours for

Lay, three of his sons have allegedly used their father's name to try and

win contracts for Enron.

Neil and Marvin Bush were named in an article in the New Yorker magazine

by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh as having tried to influence

Kuwaiti officials in favour of an Enron bid to rebuild Shuaiba North, a

power plant destroyed in the Persian Gulf war. Enron abandoned the bid a

year ago.

In 1988, George W. Bush, another of the Bush sons who is now governor of

Texas, reportedly telephoned Rodolfo Terragno, Argentina's Public Works

Minister, to ask him to award Enron a contract to build a pipeline from

Chile to Argentina.

''He assumed that the fact he was the son of the president

would exert influence. I felt pressured. It was not proper for him to make

that kind of call,'' Terragno recently told The Nation weekly magazine.

Enron ultimately won the bid under the next government, headed up by Carlos

Menem, another Bush friend.

In 1987, Neil Bush, a director of the failed Silverado Banking, Savings

and Loan Association, which made millions of dollars in high-risk loan,

created a subsidiary of his oil company to conduct business in Argentina.

The activities of the two Bush children in Argentina prompted a

par-liamentary inquiry in that country.

''None of Bush's sons have worked for Enron. I don't know why people

keep

bringing up these old stories,'' says Bazelides.

Two weeks ago, the head of Enron Development Corporation denied at in a

press conference in Bombay an IPS report that Enron used political clout to

swing deals. ''Enron's reputation is being attacked, and we do not do

business under the table,'' said Rebecca Mark.

But Enron officials acknowledge that the company used James Baker,

Bush's

Secretary of State, and Robert Mosbacher, his Commerce Secretary as

consultants. Also on the Enron payroll is Thomas Kelly, director of

operations for the Pentagon during the Gulf War.

Another powerful Enron contact is Wendy Gramm, who joined Enron's board

of directors in 1993 after resigning as chair of the Commodity Futures

Trading Commission (CFTC) here. Previously, she was a senior staffer in the

White House for former President Ronald Reagan.

In late 1992 Gramm began proceedings to remove energy futures, a highly

specialised financial instrument, from government regulation, based on a

petition from Enron and other energy companies. She resigned her job just

before the commission agreed to the petition. Today a tenth of Enron's

profits are derived from playing this financial market.

''Former associates say that Gramm would not be the first CFTC member to

go through Washington's revolving door to work for a company that has issues

before the agency,'' Jerry Knight, a Washington Post journalist who tracks

these markets, told IPS.