Answers Needed--Hurry : Were defense contracting funds used instead for intelligence?

Did the Reagan Administration raid funds budgeted for the Navy’s version of the Stealth fighter, known as the A-12? If so, where did the money go?

Congress has no choice but to investigate any claim that defense funds have been moved around in some sort of shell game. It also must move fast, before the Justice Department can quietly settle a lawsuit filed by the top two U.S. defense contractors involved and perhaps bury the answers permanently.

General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas make the raiding charge in “Count No. 2” of a $1.3-billion lawsuit against the government, which last year canceled the A-12 program.

But the Navy has classified Count 2 “top secret,” and efforts by the defense firms to get their charges made public have so far been rebuffed.

Times writer Ralph Vartabedian reported Wednesday that sources close to the case say the money went to intelligence activities.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney calls the claim “ludicrous.” “We don’t go around taking money out of those kinds of programs to finance (intelligence),” he said last November.

But Americans have a right to some sort of evidence that Cheney has the story right. Cheney, of course, was not even in the Pentagon at the time. And his dismissal of the report ignores the clearly marked trail of money secretly diverted during the Reagan years to guerrilla forces in Nicaragua.

Congress will first want to know the specific allegations in Count 2. It will want to know how the money was moved, if indeed it was. Did diversions have anything to do with the fact that development costs on the A-12 ran over budget and the program fell a year behind schedule? Does Congress still hold the federal purse, or is part of it now locked away in the Pentagon? The answers are important not just to Congress but to the nation.