The dark secret of the black budget - Pentagon's defense budget

Washington Monthly, May, 1987 by Tim Weiner

The hearings were the result of a series ofsecurity lapses and frauds on Stealth projects. The Stealth-related criminal cases are only "the tip of the iceberg' of illegal conduct on black projects, said Robert C. Bonner, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, a hub of secret military contracting. One engineer hired by Northrop Corp., the lead contractor on the Stealth bomber, was a Florida chain-gang alumnus named William Reinke. He was convicted of defrauding Northrop of more than $600,000 by channeling Stealth subcontracts to a company he secretly owned.

Of course, fraud and cost overruns are notlimited to black budget items. But shrouding them in secrecy compounds the Pentagon's usual problems. In one case, a Northrop purchasing agent, Ronald Brousseau, was convicted of rigging contracts on Stealth in exchange for kickbacks from subcontractors. He told a government informant wearing a concealed tape recorder how easy it was: "We don't have any heads [of the projects], we don't have any supervisory people. . . . Nobody questions dollars or anything like that. As long as I can show competition--whether it's true competition or courtesy competition or bullshit competition, you know.'

Because information is so compartmentalized,there is virtually no supervision, critics claim. Fewer supervisors, fewer auditors, and fewer people looking over fewer shoulders cannot help but lead to runaway waste. "The Pentagon keeps these programs of almost unbelievable size secret from Congress, from the General Accounting Office, from its own auditing agencies,' says John Dingell, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. "And everytime they have kept secrets from us, the facts, when they come out, have been surrounded by a bodyguard of lies.' Unfortunately, Stealth will go straight into production without operational test flights, a black-budget induced practice that is certain to make matters worse.

Given the history of Stealth and Milstar, itshouldn't be surprising that many of those outside the Pentagon who have been the most throughly briefed on black budget programs say they could easily stand the light of public scrutiny. House Armed Services staff director Anthony Battista, who has had more access to black budget documents than most civilians, said the Pentagon has placed some programs in the black budget "not because of national security but to circumvent congressional review procedures.' In some instances, he said, programs have "gone black' to conceal from Congress the fact that the Pentagon awarded lucrative contracts to losing competitors. In 1985, he said, the Pentagon gave the contract for a secret system to jam radar to the less-qualified contractor. "There are very few instances where revealing the cost of a program would adversely affect national security,' Battista said flatly.

The senior members of the House Armed ServicesCommittee, Chairman Les Aspin and Republican William L. Dickinson, have said that 70 percent of the military's black budget could be declassified at no risk to national security. Senator William Cohen, a well-briefed member of the intelligence committee, agrees many of them could be declassified. "The fact is that it's difficult to provide adequate oversight of black programs--which is one reason some of them are black.'