AF Weapons Expert Cohen : Defense Probe Focuses on No-Nonsense Foe of Waste

During three decades as a military analyst, Victor D. Cohen has cultivated a reputation as a no-nonsense champion of waste-free national defense. His critiques have killed major weapons systems; his barbs have torpedoed military planners’ schemes.

Yet for most of the last three years, Cohen, the Air Force’s chief tactical warfare expert, has himself been the subject of near-constant investigation for alleged misconduct wholly at odds with his image as one of the Pentagon’s good guys.

At first, the probing was low-key and unpublicized, an internal Pentagon review of the 52-year-old engineer’s role in the awarding of a contract that promised hundreds of millions of dollars in cluster bomb work to a Van Nuys firm.

But in recent months, the investigations have exploded into prominence. Cohen, to the disbelief of trusting associates, has emerged as the highest-ranking Defense Department official under scrutiny in the FBI’s nationwide investigation of Pentagon procurement fraud--and as the Air Force’s only alleged link to a scandal that otherwise seems focused on the Navy.

Federal agents say they are examining Cohen’s conduct in the chummy, informal interplay among Pentagon officials, Washington middlemen and defense contractors that is both the life’s blood of military procurement and the font of investigators’ concern that the integrity of defense purchasing has been compromised.

Among the matters that agents say have fixed their attention on Cohen are:

- His seemingly warm, personal relationship with executives of Marquardt Co., the Van Nuys rocket and bomb company. Cohen helped secure a $17-million award to build a cluster bomb manufacturing plant at Marquardt. The award--given to the firm without competition--will bring hundreds of millions of dollars in future work on casings for cluster bombs.

A former Marquardt executive has told the FBI that company officials bought Cohen lunches and dinners and gave him gifts of French wine--tokens of friendship of a sort that prosecutors have begun to use as the grounds for wider-bored allegations of procurement fraud.

Nonetheless, Pentagon officials familiar with the contract say there was nothing improper in Cohen’s conduct.

- His even closer association with defense consultant William M. Galvin, the Washington deal maker whose ties to both Pentagon powers and major defense contractors make him a pivotal figure in the procurement investigation. One of Cohen’s friends says Cohen ignored advice to distance himself from Galvin upon learning that the consultant was being investigated and instead let Galvin know he was under FBI scrutiny.

- His alleged role in a scheme by employees of Unisys, the nation’s second-largest computer company, “to illegally influence the defense contracting process” through bribery, fraud and conspiracy, according to the warrant backing the FBI’s search in June of a Unisys marketing executive’s office in New York.

Current and former Unisys employees are suspected of giving “benefits or things of value” to “federal public officials known to have been involved in the authorization of defense contracts,” the search warrant said. Cohen is the only such official listed in the heavily sanitized version of the warrant that was authorized for release by a federal judge.

- His participation in meetings and telephone conversations secretly videotaped or recorded by investigators in the procurement probe. NBC News reported in June that Cohen would clear his calendar and leave the Pentagon whenever a defense consultant called. The network said his meetings with defense consultants were videotaped.

Upon the disclosure of the federal investigation in mid-June, Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci stripped Cohen of procurement-related duties. The first indictments in the protracted inquiry are expected within a month.

But for now the Air Force official, who declined to be interviewed, has not been charged with any crime and has said he is not guilty of any wrongdoing. His Washington attorney says he doubts prosecutors can mount a strong case against Cohen, noting that they have refused to disclose any of the evidence they claim to have gathered.

“I hear these bits and pieces--lunches, dinners. Utter garbage, utter garbage, which they obviously cannot make a case with,” insisted the lawyer, Julian S. Greenspun. “They want to try this guy in the press and thereby pressure him. That tells everybody in the defense bar that they’re hurting for a case.”

It was early in 1985 when Cohen won a skirmish in the military bureaucracy to secure Marquardt’s hold on the $17-million contract to build a cluster bomb manufacturing plant. Three years later, Cohen’s role in the award remains controversial.

At the time, officials of a small Florida company, Sooner Defense, protested to their congressman that they were denied an opportunity to compete for the contract because of Cohen’s insistence that the work be awarded to Marquardt on a sole-source basis.

After Rep. Andy Ireland (R-Fla.) initiated an investigation, however, Sooner withdrew the protest on Cohen’s assurance that he would help the firm obtain other contracts and subcontracts in the future.

“Dr. Cohen readily admitted to us that outwardly it sometimes appears that the procurement activities are not up to the standards required,” Sooner President Edward J. Geoghegan wrote to Ireland in a letter explaining why the firm was abandoning its complaint. “It is my opinion that Dr. Cohen is attempting to accomplish goals which will save the government money and will hopefully improve the delivery of products.”

See Nothing Improper

Pentagon officials familiar with the cluster bomb contract insist there was nothing improper in the award to Marquardt.

In fact, according to Bernard H. Paiewonsky, the Air Force’s chief expert on advanced technology, work on the bomb casings had been monopolized by a longtime contractor up until 1985. It was Cohen’s intervention, Paiewonsky said, that brought a second firm--Marquardt, as it turned out--into the marketplace.

“Cohen did a service to the country,” said Paiewonsky, whose office in the Pentagon is next door to Cohen’s. “Vic forced a sole-source situation to be opened up.”

Nonetheless, federal agents initiated a probe of the Marquardt contract more than two years ago, as part of an investigation of Cohen’s dealings with a number of defense contractors. Agents have confirmed that the inquiry more recently was swept into the broader Operation Ill Wind, the far-reaching federal probe of alleged trafficking in Pentagon influence and information.

Case of French Wine

It was a barbecue one fall evening at Cohen’s suburban Washington home, some lunches at a private Washington club and a case of French wine that investigators say helped prompt their continuing interest in the cluster bomb contract.

A former Marquardt executive has told agents that top company officials--including Ken Woodgrift, a former Marquardt president promoted in 1986 to be a divisional chairman of the firm’s parent company--entertained Cohen at several meals and made him a gift of the case of wine.

Cohen’s relationship with the Marquardt officials was marked by an air of easy intimacy, the former company executive said in an interview.

He described one lunch he attended with Cohen and Woodgrift at the private Capitol View Club atop the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Washington.

‘Girls and Vacations’

“This was a non-business type of meeting. It was a casual get-together of old friends,” he said. “It lasted about 2 1/2 hours. We talked about girls and vacations, nothing of any consequence.”

The mood also was relaxed during the barbecue at Cohen’s home in the autumn of 1986, the government witness said. The visitors brought the steaks and deli salads, the former Marquardt official said, and Cohen did the cooking.

“At one point, Ken (Woodgrift) asked Cohen if he had gotten the wine he sent him,” the government witness said. “Cohen pointed to the cases of wine in the basement and said, kind of sarcastically, ‘Yeah, I got it.’ ”

The meals and wine may seem niggling concerns amid an alleged scandal of such magnitude. But they represent the backdrop of the procurement scandal--emblems of the casual give-and-take between Pentagon officials and defense contractors. And they could prove significant as prosecutors review Cohen’s dealings with Marquardt.

Rarely Prosecuted

Technically, it is a felony for a government official to accept a gratuity or for a businessman to offer one, according to the Pentagon inspector general’s office, but such cases are rarely if ever prosecuted. Pentagon ethics officials say offenses typically are penalized by less severe administrative action, ranging from reprimands to firing.

Yet the Pentagon inspector general’s office, in its procurement fraud manual, says efforts to enhance the relationship between contractors and Pentagon officials--particularly the exchange of gifts and meals--are key indicators of potential wrongdoing.

And in a few cases--notably the recent prosecution of ITT Corp.’s Van Nuys-based Gilfillan division--government lawyers have begun using such incidentals as evidence of an alleged conspiracy to defraud the government. Court documents indicate that gratuities may figure in prosecutors’ strategy in the Ill Wind investigation as well.

In any event, Cohen’s attorney Greenspun--who said he did not know if the former Marquardt official’s claims were true--insisted that Cohen’s conduct had been above reproach.

“The notion that Dr. Cohen would improperly exercise undo influence for a case of wine or a dinner or any other such items is preposterous,” he said. “And further, Dr. Cohen never exercised such improper influence, but presented his views based on the merits, in which others at the Pentagon also concurred.”

Moreover, Greenspun, a former federal prosecutor, said it was unlikely that government lawyers would attempt to mount a case against Cohen based on his alleged acceptance of gratuities.

“If these allegations are among the most serious the government has concerning Dr. Cohen,” he observed, “it does not seem to be a matter that an experienced prosecutor would present to a grand jury as a criminal violation.”

Like other critics of the procurement probe, Greenspun said investigators needed to understand that informal interchanges between government and industry are crucial to the efficient functioning of the procurement system.

Input of Information

“It is in everybody’s interest to have as much input of information into the Pentagon as possible,” he said. “You certainly are not going to get intelligence if you closet yourself in an office and refuse to see people unless it’s in a major crowd.”

Officials of Marquardt and its parent company, Lancaster, Pa.-based International Signal & Control Group, declined repeatedly over the last two months to comment on the firms’ dealings with Cohen.

However, Clarence B. Higgins, Marquardt’s Washington lobbyist, said the relationship between Cohen and Marquardt was strictly “professional.”

“Dr. Cohen was always someone who had such a great professional knowledge of what the Air Force was doing,” Higgins said. “If I had a question about the Air Force, I would call him up and ask him, ‘Hey, what about this?’ That was the only relationship I had with him, on a very professional basis.”

When asked if he or any other Marquardt officers ever had dinner at Cohen’s house or lunched with him at a private club, Higgins refused to reply.

“I can’t answer any more questions,” he said before hanging up the phone. “I have no comment to make on anything else. I have told you what I have told you.”

Cohen long has stood out in the defense Establishment as a straight-shooter with a distaste for the half-baked and ill-conceived.

At the Institute for Defense Analyses, where he worked from 1972 to 1978, Cohen conducted a study that helped persuade Navy and Air Force brass not to proceed with the costly development of a new short-range missile. At the Air Force, where he went to work in 1980, he has vetoed at least 50 major development schemes, according to Lucien M. Biberman, a senior staff member at the Alexandria, Va., institute.

Such diligence--along with a sharp wit and an outspoken manner--has made Cohen enemies in the military Establishment.

“He has done more for the country in cutting off things which of themselves have very little value, and in doing so he’s made a lot of people hostile to him and his office,” Biberman said.

Difficult Questions

“He asks very difficult questions,” added Paiewonsky, Cohen’s fellow Air Force deputy. “He looks for the facts in the matter. A lot of people don’t want to hear that.”

Even Bill Galvin--the defense consultant who was his acknowledged friend, an occasional dining companion and a guest at his wedding early this year--apparently could not meet Cohen’s tough standards when he sought help a few years back in obtaining an Air Force contract.

Galvin, who bragged to defense industry associates of his ties to Cohen, testified in a San Diego lawsuit that he asked his friend for aid in winning an extension of a $100,000 Air Force avionics contract for the Upshur Corp, the defense research firm Galvin owned from 1982 to 1984.

Instead, Cohen stood by the recommendation of a lower-ranking Air Force official that the extension was unneeded.

“I didn’t feel any sense of pressure (from Cohen) at all,” said the official, Frank Moore, then the head of the Air Force Avionics Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

$10,000 a Month

Nonetheless, Cohen’s ties to Galvin--who collected fees of as much as $10,000 a month from each of a dozen of the nation’s biggest defense contractors for insights and inside information--remain under investigation.

Both men are named by the FBI in the warrant describing the probe of suspected procurement fraud at Unisys, one of the firms for which Galvin worked. Another warrant says agents sought information about Cohen when they searched Galvin’s office in Washington for evidence “relating to the payment of bribes or gratuities to any government official or employee regarding a Department of Defense program.”

And when the FBI searched Cohen’s Pentagon office in June, they let him listen to wiretaps of conversations involving Galvin in hopes of winning cooperation in their inquiry, Cohen’s attorney Greenspun confirmed.

Scripted Questions

Agents asked Cohen to call another of the figures under investigation and ask a series of scripted questions, while agents secretly recorded the conversation. On his lawyer’s advice, Cohen declined.

Two years earlier, when agents were just beginning their probe, it was Cohen, according to a longtime friend, who alerted Galvin to the federal investigation.

The friend, Washington defense consultant John Adams, said he was questioned by the FBI about Galvin, for whom he had worked briefly after Cohen introduced them in 1982.

“I went to Vic and said, ‘Galvin is being investigated by the FBI. You ought to put more distance between yourself and this guy,’ ” recalled Adams, who had worked with Cohen at the Institute for Defense Analyses in the 1970s and who still regularly plays squash with Cohen.

‘A Real Friend’

Rather than dissociate himself, though, Cohen immediately let Galvin know he was under scrutiny, Adams said. “He considered Galvin to be a real friend,” Adams said, “and he just didn’t see the problem.”

Greenspun--noting that he was not aware whether the two men had, indeed, discussed the matter--said it would have been both proper and wholly reasonable for Cohen to ask Galvin if he was under investigation.

“It’s a very natural human reaction to call up somebody and ask, ‘Are you being investigated,’ ” Greenspun said. “In fact, he would be remiss in not doing so,” the lawyer said, explaining it would have been “the height of irresponsibility” for Cohen to have cut off contact with Galvin simply because someone told him that Galvin was under investigation.

A Defense Department ethics lawyer, asked to respond to the scenario without knowing it involved Galvin and Cohen, said it would reflect poorly on a Pentagon official if he informed the subject of an investigation that he was under scrutiny.

“It’s bad judgment,” the lawyer said. But such conduct would not violate any law or regulation, he added.

All the investigating seems to have taken its toll on Cohen. He has earned accolades for his role in the development of some of the Air Force’s most critical aircraft and weapons systems, including the advanced tactical fighter, the F-15 and the F-16. But the questions regarding his involvement in the Marquardt contract, a procurement dwarfed by those projects, have cast a shadow over his accomplishments, associates say.

“The fact there was some kind of cloud . . . definitely was an obstacle to his career,” Paiewonsky said.

And Cohen--who associates say shows little hesitancy in his candid harpooning of others’ procurement whims--has grown more self-effacing in the wake of the inquiries.

When he met Adams for a squash date soon after prosecutors disclosed the existence of the procurement investigation, Cohen ruefully recalled his friend’s advice two years earlier to steer clear of Bill Galvin.

“He said, ‘I wish I’d listened to you,’ ” Adams said.

Staff writers George Frank and Daniel M. Weintraub contributed to this story.