Ernest Graves
In the Ministry of Defense there were people that normally handled this type of work
who didn't like the idea that the Americans were going to run this job. They consisted
of two types. One was the operational people who were concerned that, if we ran the
job, we wouldn't build the field as they would wish it to be, that the configuration
wouldn't meet all their needs. The other was the construction management people--the
counterpart of the Army Corps of Engineers--who wanted to build things and didn't
like the idea that they weren't going to be in charge of this.
Paul Hartung, who anticipated being the project manager, was very concerned that he
would not have adequate authority, that in these negotiations we would concede too
much of a say about details to the Israelis. But I told him he didn't have to worry about
that. We hammered out some very tough language in that agreement that gave the
United States pretty much the final say.
There were some words about operational requirements. But we provided for an appeal
procedure up to the level of Weizman and McGiffert, which was never used.
One of the things we wrote in, that was never fully implemented as it was conceived,
was a procedure whereby the Israelis would come up with the requirement. The
Americans would sign off on this and cost it. Then, whenever there was a change, they
both had to agree to the change.
The rationale behind this was very simple. If they once got the requirement for the field
signed off and every change had to be agreed on, then all the Americans had to do was
to refuse the change and go ahead and build the field according to the original
requirement.
That was the whole idea behind it. The Israelis saw that, but there wasn't much they
could do. I told them, if the field had to be built in three years and we got a year and
a half down the road and the operators got a different idea for the length of the runway
or some other feature, there was no way in a job like this that you could go back and
start over and make the three years.
Therefore, the situation had to be that they got the requirement right in the first place.
This had been the premise of Hartung's early work in the fall of '78, to come up with
a decision. When we went to Israel, the presumed posture was that the Israelis had
made up their minds what the field was going to be.
Q:
That was the assumption that you took over there with you?
A:
Yes, that the scope of the work was nailed down pretty well. Of course, as a practical
matter, it wasn't. A lot of things had still to be decided. But we had said that we
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