Forest Service Undercut Own Probes, Agents Say : Resources: Investigators say timber thefts by lumber firms are deliberately ignored. Agency officials deny it.

For years the government suspected that large amounts of timber were being stolen from the vast national forests of the Pacific Northwest, accounting for tens of millions of dollars in revenue lost to the Treasury.

In 1991, a special federal task force was created within the U.S. Forest Service to investigate and help prosecute the biggest thieves--believed to be lumber companies taking far more and better trees than they were paying for.

But nearly four years later the effort is in disarray. After bringing forth the biggest timber-theft case in U.S. history in 1993, the special unit has not produced a single prosecution in more than a year, and many members are now directing their attention toward another alleged culprit--their own agency, the government’s caretaker of the valuable timber.

In internal complaints being investigated by the Agriculture Department’s inspector general, a majority of task force members charge that Forest Service officials are deliberately ignoring pervasive thefts in the government preserves and are trying to prevent investigators from uncovering them.

In formal allegations not yet made public, they detail what they say are systematic attempts by agency officials to sidetrack cases, and efforts by officials to target the task force investigators themselves with harassing disciplinary action.

“Our crackdown has drawn a powerful backlash from entrenched agency officials on whose watch timber theft has reeled out of control,” 10 of the 17 Timber Theft Investigative Branch members said in a Sept. 9 letter to Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas. They claimed that they have been hamstrung by “agency management that winked at industry misconduct and blackened the eyes of agents who did not wink with them.”

The charges are causing a furor inside the Forest Service, where officials contend the agency is strongly committed to combatting timber theft. Lowell Mansfield, who headed the task force, maintains that the complaints reflect personal grievances by the investigators. The department wants the investigators to use their expertise to combat timber theft nationwide, Mansfield said, while they want to stay solely in southern Oregon, near their homes and families.

The complaint is “a bunch of baloney,” Mansfield said.

Nonetheless, such a coordinated protest is highly unusual inside the federal government and raises the specter of a particularly tough confrontation between an agency and internal whistle-blowers. Its outcome may be viewed as a reflection of how well government agencies can probe delicate questions about their own operations by using investigators in their own ranks.

In this case, the dispute is magnified by recommendations from congressional oversight panels in recent years that Forest Service law enforcement investigators be made autonomous from agency managers in order to ensure that their efforts are credible and effective.

The relationship between the Forest Service and private lumber companies has been a source of dispute almost since the agency’s creation in 1905. The Forest Service’s primary mission is to manage 191 million acres of national forests and grasslands, balancing the demands of conservation and recreation with providing a renewable supply of wood to the private market.

Since 1990, the government has sold 37 billion board feet to various timber companies for proceeds of about $4.8 billion.

Over the years, critics, including environmentalists, have grown increasingly concerned that the business dealings between the agency and the industry were too cozy, and that the government sellers were condoning a certain amount of theft in the spirit of smooth relations.

Personal ties and proximity helped fuel the suspicions. Forest Service employees who oversee the sales and timber cuts and the company workers who carry them out are neighbors in the small, close-knit communities where logging firms are the major employer and trees are big money.

And the incentive to cultivate goodwill is strong. When the Forest Service contracts for a timber cut, the companies can “leave behind a good forest or a big mess. You don’t get them to voluntarily do a good job by setting up a confrontational relationship,” said Neil Sampson, executive vice president of American Forests, a conservation organization.

Congressional oversight panels concluded that companies were cutting more trees, and more highly valued trees, than they paid for, shortchanging the government by millions of dollars. As a result, under pressure from Congress, the Forest Service formed the special timber theft task force in 1991 to crack down on the problem.

The task force brought together proven Forest Service criminal investigators and foresters with computer specialists and auditors. They began focusing on cases in the Pacific Northwest and California where they already had strong leads.

The undertaking got off to a productive start. Working largely with a hard-charging assistant U.S. attorney in southern Oregon, they made cases that led to a string of convictions and guilty pleas by logging businesses and several million dollars in fines and settlements.

In some instances, task force members detected timber companies cutting outside the boundary markings at the harvest site in a national forest or illegally moving the markings to take more wood. Other times, they discovered logging firms razing trees after hours or on weekends so they were not recorded for payment.

The biggest theft case of all--and the largest of its kind in the nation’s history--involved the Columbia River Log Scaling and Grading Bureau, which was hired by two Oregon timber companies to measure and grade the logs they had harvested. The task force found that the scaling bureau was routinely declaring high-quality logs defective or worthless, thereby robbing the government of millions of dollars. The case has thus far led to $3.2 million in fines and restitution.

Then, in 1993, Mansfield, a 28-year agency veteran, was dispatched from his post as deputy Forest Service representative at the agency’s Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia to temporarily head the task force. He was joined by a deputy, Richard Grandalski. Both men were regarded by task force members as part of the agency’s “old guard.”

Task force members declined to discuss the conflict while the complaint is pending, but the letter to Forest Service Chief Thomas charges that the managers soon tried to blunt their efforts on a number of fronts.

The supervisors moved to make the task force members consultants to regional Forest Service offices, removing their investigative authority, the agents said. They allegedly sat on “close to 60 identified timber thefts in California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska” through bureaucratic stonewalling. And they targeted disgruntled agents with harassment, from opening audits of travel expenses to showing “personal disrespect (and) abuse over gender, personality traits and investigative style,” the letter charged.

Agent Dennis Shrader, a 16-year veteran, was specifically targeted for an audit after he testified before Congress in 1993 that Forest Service management had “resorted to every trick in the book, from subtle to blatant, to avoid enforcing the laws”--including tipping timber companies to spot checks and destroying evidence.

At the Forest Service, Mansfield rejected the allegations and said that no viable cases have been obstructed. He said the real flash point was the decision to use task force members to teach personnel around the country how to combat white-collar timber theft, which would have required the agents to travel--an inconvenience.

“I’m firmly convinced that timber theft of a large magnitude occurs in all areas of the United States,” said Mansfield, who returned to the law enforcement center in October. “We wanted to educate timber-management personnel so they could recognize the way business was conducted.”

The malcontent task force members “would rather use the expertise they’ve acquired in local areas. They’re looking on such a narrow scope,” he said.

The task force members insist that this was just a way to consign them to “pushing paper” rather than investigating crimes, said their attorney, Thomas Devine.

Devine said two additional task force members have subsequently joined the original 10 who wrote Thomas--bringing the total to 12 of the 17 current timber unit employees.

As it has gained force, the confrontation has only highlighted the central mystery that brought about the task force in the first place--how much valuable timber is being stolen from the federal government’s forests, and thus, the federal Treasury?

Government officials have cited a figure as high as $100 million a year. Timber company spokesmen say they believe the number is closer to $10 million.

Mark Rentz of the American Forest and Paper Assn. said the industry supports the efforts of the theft task force to get to the bottom of the matter.

“We, as an industry, of course, don’t condone any timber theft whatsoever,” Rentz said. “We support their law-enforcement procedures where they have adequate evidence that timber theft has occurred.”

Most agree that the opportunity for theft under Forest Service supervision is enormous.

“Inspections are not always made on a timely basis and are often sporadic and cursory,” Forest Service officials acknowledged, according to a 1993 congressional report. “In some instances, sales administrators are responsible for more contracts than they can effectively supervise. Other sale administrators have become complacent, relying on the timber purchaser not to violate contract provisions.”

Task force member Sherene Lee Jennings said timber industry informants have told investigators that “timber theft is openly discussed, it’s the way of doing business, it’s relied upon in profit considerations and that at times as much as 50% of the timber cut and removed from federal lands is stolen.”

“Some of this stuff is extremely gross, it is flagrant,” said Charles H. Turner, who prosecuted various timber-theft cases as the U.S. attorney for Oregon before stepping down in 1993. “But it’s a way of doing business. The chief culprit here is the Forest Service. If (it) didn’t permit it, it would never have occurred.”

In a prepared statement, the Forest Service emphasized it is “making the organization more responsive to the needs of natural resource protection, public safety and timber theft.” These changes “have expanded and incorporated the timber-theft investigation emphasis throughout the nation’s national forest system,” the agency said.

Thomas, the first wildlife biologist to head the Forest Service, has prompted high hopes among agency critics with his pledge to take a more balanced approach to timber management.

Thomas met with the task force members after receiving their complaint but declined to be interviewed, pending the conclusions of the inspector general, expected this month. In a letter sent to the task force members, he expressed concern about their allegations and gratitude for the task force’s “unprecedented record of accomplishment.”