Forest Service Hindered Theft Case, Groups Say

The U.S. Forest Service obstructed an investigation into allegations that Weyerhauser Co. illegally harvested millions of dollars of timber from national forests in Oregon and Northern California, according to two watchdog groups with close ties to agency investigators.

Furthermore, the groups contended, the Forest Service quietly acquiesced in the harvesting and has failed to combat large-scale thefts in the nation’s vast national forests. In addition, they said, Forest Service officials warned Weyerhauser employees that they were the targets of the investigation and disseminated confidential information about the probe.

The allegations are contained in a 24-page report produced by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and the Government Accountability Project. The groups represent six former members of a now-defunct federal task force created by the Forest Service in 1991 to investigate allegations of timber theft against some companies that harvest forest land through contracts with the Forest Service. The task force was abruptly dismantled last year by Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas.

Seven of the timber task force members have filed whistle-blower complaints with the federal government against the Forest Service. They assert that they were harassed and that their jobs tracking the commercial theft of wood were eliminated because their disclosures embarrassed the agency. The Forest Service has rejected such claims by task force members and has insisted that curtailing timber theft remains a priority throughout the agency.

No charges have ever been filed against Weyerhauser, and the company denies the groups’ allegations.

Asked to respond to the allegations in the report, Weyerhauser spokesman Frank Mendizabal said: “We operate this company in a legal manner at all times. Period.”

Beyond that, he added, “we can’t respond to any specific charges or allegations until we see a copy of the report.”

Repeated attempts to obtain a response from Forest Service management were unsuccessful.

An advance copy of the report provided to The Times describes in detail a major investigation, code-named Rodeo, that was begun in 1990 and picked up by the task force in 1991. Investigators say the primary target was Weyerhauser, a prominent Northwest timber-products company, and that the inquiry included about a dozen timber sales in four national forests between 1989 and 1994: the Klamath and Modoc in California and the Fremont and Winema in Oregon.

The Forest Service, which manages 191 million acres of forests and grasslands, administers timber sales on federal land. The agency is also responsible for ensuring that logging companies remove only the trees that they are entitled to harvest and pay their full value under contract.

Agents, including two of the whistle-blowers, were investigating charges that Weyerhauser had illegally cut up to 32,000 healthy green trees per month in a so-called salvage sale that limited the company to clearing only dead and diseased timber, the watchdog groups said.

The inquiry also focused on two other allegations: that Weyerhauser defrauded the government by understating the amount of timber it had harvested and that the company exported raw Forest Service timber in violation of a law that requires any federal timber to be cut into logs or otherwise processed domestically before it is sent overseas. The law is intended to preserve jobs in the United States.

The report further charges that Forest Service complicity included approval by agency officials of the illegally cut green timber after investigators discovered that it had been harvested in violation of the contract. And, the report says, the service erroneously recalculated the formula used to determine how much money Weyerhauser owed the government, benefiting the company to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The question of whether the company improperly profited from salvage timber sales makes the case politically sensitive. Under a controversial law enacted last year, the Forest Service has come to rely more heavily on salvage timber sales as a way to manage federal forests. Proponents say that the sales help preserve forest health by expediting the removal of dead, diseased or fire-damaged trees. But the practice has outraged environmentalists, who claim that it also has enabled companies to cut additional tracts of healthy, old-growth trees in public forests in the West and South.

The new law was approved by the Republican-controlled Congress and signed by President Clinton, who has since expressed regret at its enactment.

When the timber-theft strike force was shelved, the Rodeo case reportedly was one of three major investigations about to be referred to the Justice Department for possible prosecution, the watchdog groups said. Instead, progress on the investigation came to a halt for 10 months before the Forest Service recently assigned an investigator to examine the charges, the groups said. The other two cases were turned over to the Justice Department.

The watchdog groups’ white paper is based on interviews with 12 current and former Forest Service special agents and investigators as well as the whistle-blower complaints. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility is an association of state and federal resource management and environmental employees. The Government Accountability Project is a public-interest law firm that represents government whistle-blowers.

“The Forest Service’s major timber-theft program is unfunded and dead in the water,” the report concluded. “There is no national timber theft organization or plan.”

Although it is difficult to document the extent of timber theft, estimates have ranged from an industry-backed annual figure of $10 million to $100 million or more.

Critics of the Forest Service, including some insiders, contend that it is too closely aligned with large and politically influential timber companies such as Weyerhauser. They contend that the Forest Service is inclined to deal lightly with cases of possible large-scale theft by assessing small monetary penalties under timber sales contracts rather than pursuing criminal inquiries.

“Timber-theft prosecutions are especially embarrassing to the Forest Service since virtually every case must document sloppy sale administration or worse,” the watchdog groups said.

In 1991, in the face of critical congressional reports and testimony, the Forest Service created the timber-theft task force to investigate and help prosecute sophisticated commercial pilferage by companies that were believed to be taking far more and better trees than they were paying for. The unit had initial success, including the prosecution of the largest timber-theft case in the nation’s history, which led to $3.2 million in fines against several companies.

But the task force, which was based in Sacramento and Oregon, subsequently became mired in internal disputes, grievances and audits--which a majority of the task force agents claimed represented a deliberate backlash from pro-industry Forest Service forces. Senior Forest Service managers said the complaints were unwarranted.

After an inquiry by the inspector general of the Agriculture Department, which oversees the Forest Service, Thomas disbanded the strike force, whose territory was restricted to the Pacific Northwest, last April. Instead, he announced that the effort to prevent timber theft would be stepped up across the nation.

“We have increasingly concentrated our attention on timber theft,” Thomas said at the time. “Without control of the theft problem, our ability to manage the national forests as responsible stewards is severely compromised.”