Air Force Contracting Scandal Blamed on Bureaucratic Flaws

Former Air Force official Darleen Druyun, who pleaded guilty to favoring Boeing Co. on several multibillion-dollar contracts, became unusually powerful because she took advantage of a flawed bureaucracy, a top Pentagon official said.

But the armed services shouldn’t be blamed, Marvin Sambur, the Air Force’s outgoing assistant secretary for acquisition and Druyun’s last boss, said in an interview. He said the Air Force had been tarred because of the “great misdeed of an individual.”

“We’ve all been cast in a terrible light,” he said. “There is a perception that everybody is guilty because of what she has done.”

Druyun, who worked for nine years as a civilian employee of the Department of the Air Force, was sentenced in October to nine months in prison.

She admitted she favored Boeing in several large contracts because the company gave jobs to members of her family.

The Chicago-based defense contractor hired Druyun herself after she retired from the Pentagon in November 2002.

Boeing’s former chief financial officer, Michael Sears, pleaded guilty this month to improperly offering Druyun a job while she was overseeing Air Force contract negotiations with Boeing. And last week, Sambur and Air Force Secretary James G. Roche said they would resign in January, citing the need to help clear the way for military promotions that had been blocked by Congress in the aftermath of the Druyun affair.

A criminal investigation is continuing to determine if any Air Force personnel or Boeing employees acted improperly. Sambur was cleared after an investigation by the Pentagon’s criminal investigative agency.

When he arrived at the Pentagon in late 2001, Sambur said in the interview, he found that Druyun was the ultimate decision maker on virtually all Air Force contracts and controlled a $30-billion-dollar-a-year procurement budget.

“She treated me like summer help,” he said. “She knew she would always be there and political appointees like me would come and go.”

During her time at the Pentagon, Druyun was temporarily elevated to acquisition chief four times, for a total of 47 months, according to a recent Pentagon review. She filled that power vacuum because of high turnover and delays in congressional confirmations that left gaps in her supervision, Sambur said.

“She had a lot of responsibility and authority because no one was sitting in my office.”

Sambur began dismantling Druyun’s authority by transferring two- and three-star generals out of the acquisition office in Washington to military bases where various defense programs were supervised. He also gave the generals more authority to award contracts and ordered them to report to him instead of Druyun.

“She was pretty upset about all the power I was taking away from her,” Sambur said. “And within six months she announced she was retiring.”

In August 2002, Druyun informed Sambur she would be leaving the Pentagon and planned to talk to Lockheed Martin Corp. and Raytheon Corp. about a job.

Druyun disqualified herself from handling contracts involving those two contractors, but not those involving Boeing.

At the time, Druyun was negotiating a $23.5-billion deal with Boeing for aerial refueling tankers. A few months later she accepted a $250,000-a-year job with the company; she and Sears were later fired.

The Pentagon is reviewing hundreds of contracts handled by Druyun. Congress killed the tanker deal and the Pentagon plans to reopen the competition.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld vowed this week to prevent a repeat of the Druyun scandal.

“Over time, what she did was acquire a great deal of authority and make a lot of decisions. There was very little adult supervision, above, below or on the side,” he said. “Obviously, there’s something [that] needs to be changed.”

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a chief critic of the Boeing tanker deal, plans to hold hearings in January and questioned the Air Force’s contention that the wrongdoing was confined to a single individual.

“I simply cannot believe that one person, acting alone, can rip off taxpayers out of billions of dollars,” McCain said last week in a speech on the Senate floor.

Even before McCain began raising questions about the tanker deal, Sambur said he was able to renegotiate the contract. Sambur said the price of each aircraft was cut from about $150 million to $131 million.

According to e-mails McCain released, Sambur wrote to Roche as early as December 2001 about the initial tanker contract.

Sambur was concerned that the “numbers were very misleading,” and that the “deal was not good from a true financial basis.”

Roche, apparently unaware of Druyun’s close ties with Boeing, responded: “Pls fix ASAP. How did Darleen miss this!”