Mr. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. My wife went with me.
Mr. JENNER. Your present wife?
Mr. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. Yes.
Mr. JENNER. When did this take place?
Mr. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. It was--I think it was in 1959. I cannot swear
you about the dates. But about 1959. Or early in 1960--one or the
other. I went to Mexico on other jobs before, many times. But this
particular job, since you are interested in the Mikoyan deal, which you
call it, was this particular----
Mr. JENNER. Did I say deal or incident? I think I said incident.
Mr. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. Incident. Anyway, one of our friends in Mexico is
the pilot of the president--the personal pilot of the President Mateos
of Mexico. He also took the Russian group, the Russian engineers, with
Mikoyan, on the tour of Mexico, at the same time I was there.
By the way, our proposition of the Texas Eastern was to provide some
financing for Pemex in exchange for this contract--which is the Mexican
Oil Co. And the Russians were offering the same thing to the Mexicans.
Mr. JENNER. So you were then really competing with the Russians?
Mr. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. Competing with the Russians. And through
my contacts with this pilot, and with the Mexican officials, I
knew exactly what the Russians were offering. We did not make any
particularly big fight about it, but we knew what they were offering,
and we knew what we could offer for our contract. It was one of the
most interesting jobs I ever had.
And then one day, Mikoyan was with that group--the rest of them were
technicians. One day Mikoyan was leaving. I remember we had dinner the
night before with this pilot of the president. And he said, "George,
why don't you come with me to meet Mikoyan tomorrow at the airport?"
I said, "By God, that sounds like an interesting idea. I would like to
meet the character."
He had such a publicity of being an excellent businessman, I wanted to
learn something from him.