IEEE Spectrum October, 2011 - 41

of hundreds of megawatts for decades. In February 2008, the
Berger-Black & Veatch Joint Venture began working on a
USAID-funded project to "design and support the development"
of the Sheberghan gas fields to provide power to Kabul. A year
into the project, however, USAID rated its satisfaction with the
Joint Venture's work: It gave the organization a "zero" rating, on a
scale of zero to five. The rebuke was disclosed this past February
at a hearing in Washington of the Congressional Commission on
Wartime Contracting.
A few months later, on 1 June 2009, USAID killed the project, after issuing many memos complaining bitterly about the
Joint Venture's lack of progress. The termination came a month
after the project was supposed to have been completed. Very little had been accomplished. But $7.1 million of the project's total
estimated cost of $11.9 million had been spent.

n February 2008, before construction at Tarakhil got under
way and before Symbion fell out with Black & Veatch, Symbion
CEO Hinks threw a party at the Heetal Plaza Hotel in Kabul.
At the party, Hinks was approached by Jack Whippen, the head
of Black & Veatch's organization in Afghanistan. Hinks says that
Whippen told him that he, Whippen, would soon ask Hinks to
submit an "expression of interest" to bid on a huge project to
refurbish and upgrade the main electrical transmission system
in southern Afghanistan.
At the time, Black & Veatch was under pressure from USAID
to get more bidders for projects. So Whippen's disclosure didn't
surprise Hinks. But what Whippen said next sure did: "We both
know you can't do this job" is how Hinks remembers it. To Hinks,
the message was clear: Whippen did not want him to actually
submit the expression of interest.
But the job was precisely the kind at which Symbion
excelled. The project was part of an initiative referred to
loosely as the Southeastern Power System, or SEPS. It involved
repairing and replacing as necessary the 110-kV transmission
line running from the Kajaki hydroelectric plant to Kandahar
and other sites. Before he came to Afghanistan, Hinks had
managed work in Iraq that fulfilled the requirements of
15 contracts that together resulted in the installation of more
than 1000 km of transmission lines and 12 substations. The
work included a line through Al Anbar province at the height
of the often insanely violent insurgency there.
If there had been an attempt to dissuade a qualified and
responsible bidder from bidding on a government contract,
it would have raised all sorts of red flags. [Messages sent to
Whippen's e-mail address were not returned. Black & Veatch
declined to make Whippen and other executives available to
Spectrum for interviews.]
When the time came, Hinks wasn't deterred. "I thought, 'To
hell with it. We're gonna bid,' " he recalls. He responded with
an expression of interest, the first step in a bid. In the end, none
of it mattered, because in the summer of 2008 Black & Veatch
scrapped the bids without explanation.
Not long after, Whippen suggested Hinks talk to Haidar
Barak, the CEO of the Afghan Electrical Power Corp. (AEPC),
an Afghan-Canadian joint venture. "He [Whippen] drove us in
AEPC's direction," Hinks says. Then, on 24 August 2008, Black
& Veatch again put SEPS out for bids. Hinks and Barak agreed
to form a joint venture to bid on the SEPS project. In the hectic
weeks leading up to the final bid, as Hinks was fretting about
being underbid by a potential competitor from Turkey, Barak
suggested that they add at least $5 million to their $105 million
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bid. Stunned, Hinks asked why. In an e-mail response, Barak concluded: "I hope we are not leaving money on the table." Hinks,
nonplussed, refused to increase the bid.
Weeks later, the odd suggestion started to make sense to
Hinks when he learned that the Symbion-AEPC bid was the
only one submitted for the project. Had Barak been told that
there were no other bidders for the SEPS contract? USAID's own
inspector general issues a handbook for contractors that warns
explicitly about such a scenario.
Reached at his office in Kabul, Barak denied he had any
such inside information. He had "no idea what he [Hinks] is
referring to," he said. Then he added that "we had many, many
phone conversations about price going up and price going
down....It's a normal course of business in bid preparation to
go up and down in your suggested price."

One year into the
Sheberghan gas-field
study, USAID rated its
satisfaction with the Joint
Venture's work: It gave the
organization a "zero" rating,
on a scale of zero to five

Later, Hinks and Barak met with Whippen and three
USAID officials in Kabul about the SEPS project. "Out of the
blue," Hinks says, Whippen suggested that they build a 220-kV
line rather than rebuild the existing 110-kV line between Kajaki
and Kandahar, which was what the contract specified. Hinks
immediately realized it would add greatly to the cost and duration of the project and advised against it. "It made no sense," he
says of the 220-kV idea.
Despite all the maneuvering, Black & Veatch did not issue
a subcontract for SEPS. The "whole thing fizzled out" by mid2009, Hinks says.
After hearing nothing about SEPS for months, Hinks
wrote to Karl Eikenberry, who had been recently appointed
U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, urging him to reconsider
and restart the project. Eikenberry passed the message to
William M. Frej, USAID's mission director in Afghanistan,
who in an e-mail to Hinks dated 29 January 2010 said that the
SEPS project was "a high priority" and that as soon as the
security situation around Kajaki improved, "the United States
Agency for International Development will contract services
for this project through its normal full and open procurement
OcTObEr 2011 * IEEE SpEcTrum * NA

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum October, 2011