CorpWatch : Vinnell Corporation: 'We Train People to Pull Triggers'

CorpWatch : Vinnell Corporation: 'We Train People to Pull Triggers': "Vinnell Corporation: 'We Train People to Pull Triggers'
by Pratap Chatterjee, Special to CorpWatch
March 20th, 2003




Vinnell corporation was founded by the late A. S. Vinnell in 1931 to pave roads in Los Angeles. Since then the company has handled a number of large domestic as well as government projects. The company was the major contractor for US military operations in Okinawa, overhauled Air Force planes in Guam in the early 1950s, and sent men and equipment onto the battlefields of the Korean War.
Now based in Fairfax, Virginia, the company has been controlled in the past through a web of interlocking ownership by a partnership that included James A. Baker III and Frank Carlucci, former U.S. secretaries of state and defense under presidents George Bush senior and Ronald Reagan respectively.
Perhaps the most important military contract Vinnell landed was in 1975 when the Pentagon helped the company win a bid to train the 75,000 strong Saudi Arabian National Guard, a military unit descended from the Bedouin warriors who helped the Saud clan impose control on the peninsula early in last century."