BRACING FOR AN OIL SHOCK : Employers : U.S. Firms Are Unable to Aid Staff in Kuwait

The fast-moving Iraqi invasion of Kuwait caught many American firms with operations in the tiny country off guard, foiling corporate contingency plans to evacuate employees and leaving firms powerless to help.

With the airports and seaports in Kuwait shut down, executives familiar with crisis management said there is little that U.S. companies can do at the moment to get their employees out. They advised the companies to work with the State Department.

“If companies haven’t gone through the simulations that explore the consequences of various options in a crisis like this, any evacuation plans like the one pulled off by Ross Perot in Iran will not work,” said Brian Jenkins, managing director of Kroll Associates, an international corporate investigation and consulting firm in New York.

Jenkins was referring to the famous incident in which Texas businessman Perot hired a retired Vietnam veteran to direct the rescue of two of his employees from an Iranian jail in 1979.

“In my view, if you haven’t made preparations in advance, you don’t have those options, and the evacuation can become perilous to the employees,” Jenkins said.

Dealing with overseas turmoil is nothing new for many American multinational companies, which have often had to act quickly to protect their employees and interests abroad. In 1981, Exxon was forced to evacuate dependents of its employees in Libya after U.S. Navy fighter planes shot down two Libyan planes.

Last year, many firms were forced to airlift employees out of China in the wake of the Beijing government’s bloody clampdown on student demonstrations.

However, the Kuwait “situation is not at all similar to the crisis in Tien An Men Square in China,” said David Samuel, a political risk consultant in New York. “The risk is far greater here because the Iraqis are organized, and they’re a battle-tested group.”

Mammoth corporations often find themselves powerless when it comes to aiding their employees overseas. “There is nothing we can do,” said Mike Libbey, a spokesman for San Francisco-based energy giant Chevron, which has two chemical engineers stranded but reportedly safe in a hotel 20 miles outside Kuwait City.

Recent diplomatic efforts to ease tension between Iraq and Kuwait left many firms believing that it was safe to keep their employees in the country.

“We did not expect this level of conflict,” said Debra Williams, spokeswoman for Pasadena-based Parsons Corp., an engineering firm with about 100 employees and dependents in Kuwait. “If we knew if there was any threat to any of our employees, they would have left the country.”

Officials in the State Department’s Kuwaiti Task Force said U.S. Embassy officials in Kuwait have reached about 1,000 of the estimated 3,000 Americans since Iraq’s lightning invasion of the Middle Eastern kingdom.

Contingency plans and experience abroad have helped firms cope with emergencies ranging from earthquakes to coups d’etat. “We have been in the Middle East for 30 years, and we have seen many political problems,” said Williams at Parsons, which has worked on water supply and transportation projects in oil-rich Kuwait since the early 1960s.

Parsons’ contingency plans called for employees to remain inside their homes or office in case of a natural disaster or military attack, and employees have done so, Williams said. But some of the company’s plans have fallen apart in the face of the sweeping Iraqi invasion.

When they were notified at their homes, employees were supposed to immediately head to the airport for evacuation. That plan was rendered useless when the Iraqis shut down the international air terminal shortly after their attack.

The last contact the Pasadena firm had with its Kuwait office was shortly after the invasion. At the time, Williams said, several employees were unharmed and still at work. “We have not heard from them in over a day,” Williams said Friday afternoon. “We have been trying phones, fax, Telexes, everything.”

Lockheed Corp. was able to reach two of its employees conducting field work on military transport planes that the aerospace firm had sold to Kuwait. “We were in contact with them yesterday,” a company spokesman. “They are safe and believe they are in no danger.”