WASHINGTON – “Everyone’s nervous,” warned Michael Wynne, acting undersecretary of defense, in a confidential e-mail to Air Force Secretary James Roche on July 8, 2003.
It was two days before the Bush administration was to send its first detailed report to Congress about a controversial Air Force plan to lease refueling tankers from the Boeing Co., and a few days after a fierce backroom struggle over its language between critics of the plan and its Air Force promoters.
Wynne’s anxiety, it turned out, was well-founded. Rather than solidifying congressional support, the report sparked more intense scrutiny of the most costly government lease in U.S. history, and ultimately helped end the government careers of some of those involved in preparing the report.
From a program initially seen by Boeing and the Air Force as a clever way to acquire a new tanker fleet without having to budget for it and buy the planes outright, the lease has now developed a reputation as the most significant military contracting abuse in 20 years, according to a letter sent to the Pentagon in November by Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and two other committee members.
Three Boeing officials have resigned in connection with the controversy; two have pleaded guilty in federal court to ethics violations. Wynne has been unable to win confirmation as undersecretary of defense as a result of a hold placed by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on most defense promotions to gain leverage in McCain’s continuing battle for access to the Pentagon’s internal communications about the deal.
Roche and Marvin Sambur, his top acquisition manager, announced their resignations from the government two weeks ago, just before McCain entered some acerbic and revealing internal Air Force e-mails about the plan into the Congressional Record.
The significance to supporters of the $30 billion tanker program, which would have used Everett-built 767s, is reflected in the extreme language Roche and Sambur used in the e-mails to describe what they believed was at stake.
“I will not give your enemies the tools to bury us!” Sambur told Roche on June 25, 2003, during a dispute over the wording of the report to Congress. Two weeks later, Roche accused dissenting government officials in an e-mail on July 8, 2003, of wanting “me to sign a suicide note.”
Roche, a former executive at the Northrop Grumman Corp., is well-known for his take-no-prisoners political style.
Both Roche and Sambur, a former executive at ITT Defense, have said the lease would have been a good deal because it allowed the Air Force to acquire the planes faster than if they had been purchased. But the e-mails indicate they saw themselves as primarily allied with Boeing and its congressional supporters in the dispute, rather than others in the Bush administration who considered the deal a costly rip-off and a violation of federal procurement rules.
Their e-mails, as a result, provide an unusual glimpse into part of what scholars described more than 20 years ago as the “Iron Triangle” – the enduring alliance among the military services, the defense industry and their congressional advocates.
Roche’s hostility to Airbus was reflected in an e-mail debate on April 16, 2003, between Wynne and Roche about inviting a new Airbus executive to lunch. Wynne opened the discussion by telling Roche and Sambur that he wanted the executive to say how much a refueling tanker built by Airbus would cost.
Wynne explained: “They came in a couple of weeks ago and offered to build the majority (of the tankers) here in America. … I am not sure where this will lead, but the benefits of competition may be revealing.”
Roche replied: “Mike, you must be out of your mind!!! (The executive) has lots of baggage, as does Airbus. We won’t be happy with your doing this.”
Airbus was not the leasing program’s only enemy, according to Roche and Sambur’s e-mails. Sometimes, top Pentagon officials including Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, caused problems by deviating from the Air Force orthodoxy that replacing the tankers was urgent.
Reacting to an interview with Myers published on April 9, 2002, in which Myers said that the existing tanker fleet was adequate for future needs, Gen. John Jumper, Air Force chief of staff, told Roche: “I don’t think there was malice. … We just have to articulate the problem we are trying to fix.”
In summer 2003, the Pentagon Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation also stoked Air Force pique by dissenting from its claim that in the long run leasing would essentially cost the same as buying the planes. In fact, said Program Analysis and Evaluation director Ken Krieg in a memo on June 20, 2003, to Wynne and others, lease costs would exceed purchase costs by $1.9 billion to $6 billion, depending on the accounting method used. He said the deal violated Pentagon procurement rules.
Roche sent Wynne – the more junior official, according to Pentagon protocol – an e-mail two days later warning that “the bureaucrats who opposed the 767 lease have come out of the woodwork to kill it. … Ken Krieg’s memo … is a cheap shot, and I’m sure has already been delivered to enemies of the lease on the Hill. It was a process foul. And Ken needs to be made aware of that BY YOU!”
Roche went on to say that Program Analysis and Evaluation was “trying to set the Air Force up to be destroyed by Sen. McCain. … As you might imagine, I won’t give them the chance, but I will make it clear who is responsible to Don (Rumsfeld). I refuse to wear my flak jacket backward” to protect against friendly fire.
Wynne then sent Krieg an angry note, and Krieg responded by suggesting a face-to-face meeting with Roche to clear the air. He explained in an e-mail that “I am trying to get the strategy to drive the deal; the deal and contract to set the numbers; the numbers (price) to be reopened… without a lot of hype.”
Roche and Sambur also resented an effort by analysts at the Office of Management and Budget to insert into a July 10, 2003, Pentagon report to Congress a single paragraph confirming that leasing the refueling tankers could cost at least $1.9 billion more than buying them.
Sambur e-mailed Roche on July 8 of that year: “What they are forcing us to say is that IF Congress gave us permission to PURCHASE under the same (terms, … then the lease is DUMB financially. Robin (Cleveland, a senior OMB official) wanted it in the text and Mike (Wynne) got her to accept it as a footnote.”
Roche, apparently alarmed by Wynne’s willingness to accept the insert, also sent an e-mail to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz’s top political aide, warning that OMB’s attempt to include the paragraph was “a bureaucratic trick to make a fool out of Don (Rumsfeld) as well as the Air Force.”
Roche also told Wynne in an e-mail: “McCain and others who oppose the lease will leap to this number! Why is this so hard for you to see, Mike?”
Various e-mails make clear that leasing advocates repeatedly assured top Pentagon officials that the deal was cost-effective and untainted by scandal. Despite the internal budget critiques, a special assistant to the defense secretary, Richard Greco Jr. – now the Navy comptroller – said in a January 2003 memo to Wolfowitz that the price was essentially equal to a buy.
After Boeing fired executive Darleen Druyun on Nov. 24, 2003, for violating its ethics rules – but before she pleaded guilty in court to raising the tanker price as a gift to Boeing while serving as Sambur’s principal deputy – Sambur told Peter Teets, the Air Force undersecretary, that “a thorough review of the Darlene situation had been completed, and … there was no way Darlene had had any influence” on the leasing plan, according to an e-mail on Nov. 27, 2003, from Teets to Roche.
When asked about the controversy at a news conference last week, Rumsfeld laid most of the blame on Druyun and the fact that she had “very little adult supervision above, below or on the side” while she steered contracting benefits to Boeing.
He added, “I’m told that when Secretary Roche and Assistant Secretary Sambur came in, they looked at that situation, were uncomfortable with it, and began taking authorities away from her and trying to re-establish a different arrangement.
“Obviously,” Rumsfeld added, “there’s something that needs to be changed.”
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