Air Force E-Mails Reveal Cheering for Boeing

Air Force Secretary James G. Roche asked a lobbyist for Boeing Co. to use the company’s Washington contacts to “quash” a deputy undersecretary of defense and make him “pay an appropriate price” for objecting to the Air Force’s decision to lease Boeing 767 tanker aircraft, according to e-mails released Friday by a Republican senator critical of the tanker deal.

Roche also pressured independent military cost analysts who questioned the high price of the lease, described other internal Pentagon critics as “animals,” and ridiculed executives at European Aeronautic Defense & Space Co. and Airbus, the European consortium that offered a competing plan, the e-mails show. He told his top public relations aide to “blow ... away” the EADS chairman for raising questions about the Air Force decision to work with Boeing.

At one point in the three-year Air Force campaign for the lease, Roche e-mailed a friend at Raytheon Co., “Privately between us: Go Boeing!”

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has conducted an equally vigorous campaign against the lease, said in releasing the internal Pentagon communications in a speech on the Senate floor that the missives reflected a “systemic Air Force failure in procurement oversight, willful blindness or rank corruption.”

McCain said top Air Force officials had recently been trying to “delude the American people” into believing that a single person was responsible for misconduct in the $30-billion leasing plan -- namely, Darleen Druyun, the Air Force contracting official who pleaded guilty to overpricing the tankers as a “parting gift” to Boeing before she became one of the company’s executives.

“I simply cannot believe that one person, acting alone, can rip off taxpayers out of billions of dollars,” said McCain, who said he would keep pursuing internal Defense Department and Bush administration communications until “all the stewards of taxpayers funds who committed wrongdoing are held accountable.”

Roche and Marvin Sambur, the Air Force’s top acquisition manager, announced their resignations several days before McCain’s speech. Both men said through Pentagon spokesmen that they had not been pushed out, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld issued a statement hailing Roche for serving “our country capably and with honor.”

The e-mails McCain released add detail to previous disclosures about the scope and intensity of the Air Force’s lobbying effort, mostly working with Boeing, to defend the lease against early complaints from the Office of Management and Budget and various Pentagon analysts that the lease was a costly Boeing bailout. The critics have said that buying the refueling planes outright would save billions of dollars and that no urgent need exists to replace Air Force tankers.

For Boeing, securing the lease was a way to keep its 767s in production during a period of declining orders from passenger airlines.

The deal was blocked by Congress this year, after Druyun pleaded guilty to ethics violations and two senior Boeing officials resigned. One, Michael Sears, has since pleaded guilty to violating an ethics law governing employment negotiations with defense officials such as Druyun.

According to the e-mails, Roche and Sambur organized a three-track effort to promote the deal: They sought to beat back a competing tanker offer from Airbus, to silence internal administration dissent and to promote glowing assessments of the tanker program in public forums and military circles, frequently with Boeing’s help.

Druyun expressed fury in a Sept. 5, 2002, e-mail to Roche about published remarks by an Airbus executive about the lease plan, for example. Calling his remarks “slime,” she added: “His day of reckoning will come hopefully.” Roche’s response was “Oy. I agree.” He also said he wished Druyun could have “tortured him slowly” over a period of years.