How the Condor Was Killed

...He wasn’t, and Eagleton kept up the pressure...

...McClellan proposed that Condor spending be temporarily limited to $10 million, but that after the Pentagon considered the missile ready for production it could go ahead and produce without further congressional approval...

...It documented Currie’s undue cooperation with Rockwell in his efforts to save the Condor from cancellation...

...The Nation published a detailed critique of the Condor, which it called “the missile nobody wants,” and named two Currie aides who had previously worked for Rockwell and who may have been “hired to get two major Rockwell items into production-the E l bomber and Condor...

...In April John W. Finney, The New I York Times’ veteran Pentagon reporter, wrote an article casting severe doubts on the integrity of Dr...

...The second memo was a report to Clements from a four-member panel called the Defense Systems Acquisition Review Council, and it too raised serious questions-about the missile’s reliability, its vulnerability and operational use, and the Navy’s quality of management...

...Eagleton called the investigation a “whitewash,” and said it was “as much a disservice to Dr...

...they come with sales talk, not information...

...The only Condor skeptics within the Pentagon were middle-level employees who, because of their firsthand expertise, were familiar with all the Condor’s flaws...

...In 1975 the Defense Department told Congress that the need for the Condor had been convincingly demonstrated, and in November of that year the Senate Appropriations Committee approved the requested $101.4 million to begin production...

...Sales Talk, Not Information The Condor case may seem to be a totally haphazard victory, but it points toward two ways Congress can keep track of new weapons programs...

...Ihe lesson of the Condor is that it is possible to find out the truth about a missile, if only you ask the people who know it...

...Clearly this had become more touchy than the average missile project, touchy enough, apparently, to tip the balance against it...

...The missile’s opponents were worried that behind the conference’s closed doors, in the atmosphere of favor-trading, the House side’s facts-and-figures opposition wouldn’t carry much weight...

...Air Force [glide bombs] will cost around $70,000 per bomb, assuming a buy of 1,000...

...Leaking Out Early in 1976, a second line of attack against the Condor developed, this time through the press...

...The Washington Star reported that the Navy’s outside consultant on the Condor had close ties to Rockwell itself, and the Times detailed those ties-a former Currie aide had founded the consulting firm, and Rockwell was now one of his major clients...

...Its course would be guided by someone on the plane who could watch it on a television screen...

...The cloud remained over Currie’s head...

...In 1975, Rep...

...When Eagleton read the Times story, he immediately wrote Secretary Rumsfeld and asked that Currie be suspended pending an investigation...

...With McClellan’s words, the project was dead...

...Currie, the letter said, had gotten a promotion “which now gives him total power over all weapon systems acquisition” and allows him to “make all the decisions from Research, Development, and Production...

...It was estimated that more than 800 Condors would cost the government at least $500 million by 1980...

...Proxmire’s committee issued a report in October, after the major fireworks of the Condor affair were over...

...Senator McClellan asked Inouye and Proxmire to sum up the Senate’s pro-Condor position...

...Gutmann said the GAO had raised questions about the Condor several months before that had not been answered...

...When word of that got around the Pentagon, another middle-level official phoned Brian Atwood, Eagleton’s aide, and told him that Currie had aggressively promoted Condor within the Defense Department...

...Then, on June 8, the House Appropriations Committee recommended that the Condor be terminated...

...The other way Congress can find out the real merits of new weaponsis to ask a new set of people about them...

...They saw it, understandably, as an inefficient missile, one that would not strengthen the nation’s defense, but to kill it they had to go through unusual channels...

...Generally the lower and middle-level people who have first-hand knowledge of the project are so concerned about approval from above that they report any new project to their superiors as a great success...

...The Harpoon has a range of 60 miles and carries a warhead of 500 pounds, and costs half as much...

...And although the House Appropriations Committee recommended the Condor’s demise several times, the program always was restored in House-Senate conferences...

...as a result of a curious process common in the federal bureaucracy, they may well have thought it was a fine missile...

...regarding Mr...

...Ironically, as a result of the Condor controversy, Rumsfeld quietly abolished the post of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Program Analysis and Evaluation, and downgraded evaluation to a lower office-a change that Senator McClellan supported and helped push through...

...Cheating on the Exam Meanwhile, the Condor was moving steadily through Congress...

...The Times reported Eagleton’s attacks on Currie on April 6, the day after its first story ran...

...It is simply not feasible,” he said in the hearing, “to certify to Congress on the one hand that a missile is ready for production and, on the other, ask the military service to evaluate whether it can be used operationally and whether it can perform its mission...

...Greg Rushford is a former congressional staff aide and now a Washington writer...

...The first of the memos was dated November 4, 1975, the day before the Senate Appropriations Committee gave Condor production the go-ahead...

...The high officials who are usually paraded before congressional committees have no idea whether a new missile is a loser because they haven’t had any first-hand experience with it...

...The Navy’s manager for the Condor project had tried to have the study done by another firm, but he had been overruled from above-and later, the same firm got a second contract to study the Condor...

...It was the military equivalent of going back and looking up answers after you’ve already seen the exam questions...

...Eagleton got McClellan’s permission to hold a hearing on the Condor and made a final attempt to marshal the opposition...

...Inouye defended the project one last time, and McClellan called on Proxmire to add what he would...

...The Condor missile was conceived in the Navy’s laboratories at China Lake, California in the early 1960s by scientists in search of what they liked to call a “smart bomb...

...Still, there was a crucial transition for the project to make: from receiving research money to being approved for final production...

...it costs about $1 million per missile...

...But at the same time, a new wave of unfavorable press coverage of the Condor began, and it helped tip the balance the other way...

...But those circumstances make up more than just an isolated once-in-a-lifetime case of beating city hall...

...Eagleton used the conflict-ofinterest allegations to press his antiCondor case in Congress...

...The Navy’s own independent test command, Gutmann testified, had conducted tests whose results were critical of the Condor’s effectiveness and vulnerability...

...The missile would be so accurate that it could be shot through any designated window of a building...

...The first is strong in-house evaluation at the Defense Department, the results of which would then be made available to Congress...

...Inouye, heavily burdened with other committee duties, had turned over defense budget issues to a 22-year-old aide...

...The Eagleton-Proxmire strategy foundered, however, when Senator Daniel Inouye arrived with an unexpected Condor amendment of his own, one that had been written by Rock well International officials...

...He also said that a private study of the missile that the Navy had commissioned had exonerated the Condor by slanting its results in the missile’s favor...

...Clements knew, it was clear, that there were serious problems with the project, but he did not raise them before Congress (indeed, didn’t want Congress to find out about them...

...He was unsure that he had the votes he needed, but if he did not, F’roxmire had agreed to offer an amendment of his own making it clear that further appropriations depended on more realistic tests and detailed congressional review...

...But the Defense Department still insisted on going ahead with the project, and on June 10 Clements told the Senate he had authorized the Navy to proceed with procurement...

...The Defense Department, the letter said, “didn’t pay much attention to your letter to the Secretary of Defense...

...Hughes was Cume’s former employer...

...John Finney at the Times also received the anonymous letter, and, after looking into it himself, reported in early June that indeed, Currie, “a high-ranking Pentagon official who was severely reprimanded last March for accepting hospitality from a major defense contractor, has quietly been placed in charge of the development and acquisition of all weapons by the Defense Department...

...Sources at the GAO then leaked the memos to Brian Atwood, an aide on defense and foreign policy issues for Senator Thomas F. Eagleton, who would become a leader in the fight against the Condor...

...Its defense subcommittee had already approved the Condor, but Eagleton came into the meeting with an amendment to strike the Condor funds...

...In March Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had fined Currie one month’b pay for accepting a fishing trip to Bimini from Rockwell International, Condor’s manufacturer...

...The committee’s Republicans issued a minority report saying that the “mutuality of interest” between Currie and Rockwell did not result in preferential treatment, and a Defense Department spokesman said the report’s findings “do not seem to be supported by the facts...

...Neither contract, the Times said, had gone through the normal competitive bidding process...

...the lobbyist wrote a draft of a pro-Condor amendment, and the aide talked Inouye into introducing it...

...Eagleton seized on that $10 million figure...

...It turned out to be usable only on clear days-its television-screen guidance system needed high visibility to function, and even in good weather, an enemy could obscure its targets with smoke...

...The Defense Department’s handling...

...Currie as to the Pentagon...

...The idea was that Rockwell would do whatever was necessary to the missiles to make them look good on testsand answer the objections of the Condor’s opponents...

...One important group that had opposed the Condor for some time, however, finally started secretly to take action...

...At the end of May, Eagleton got an anonymous letter from a group of Pentagon employees who called themselves “concerned taxpayers...

...It was natural, then, that opposition to the Condor began to take shape even before initial testing was completed...

...The committee’s staff had also learned that the Navy, knowing its Condors had major problems, returned ten prototype missiles to Rockwell for remodeling before testing them...

...As of June 1976 $300.4 million in research funds had gone into the project, and it was estimated that by 1980 the government would have put up to $600 million more into the Condor...

...Senator William Proxmire, who co-chairs the Joint Committee on Defense Production, began to investigate Currie...

...Why he said that, what combination of feelings about the Condor was going through his mind, only McClellan knows...

...It was a rare case, one of the few times the Pentagon hasn’t gotten what it wanted from Congress, and it came about through a curious, unofficial combination of circumstances...

...Although Secretary Rumsfeld wrote Eagleton two days after the Times story to say a Pentagon investigation had exonerated Currie, who had “acted contrary to the business interests of Rockwell International,” he did admit that Currie had been “approached on various occasions by contractors suggesting possible arrangements for employment...

...Both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees approved it, and by early June it appeared to be headed for production despite all its problems...

...Patricia Schroeder summed up the case against the Condor in her contribution to the House Armed Services Committee Report like this: “The Condor missile has a range of 60 miles and carries a conventional warhead of 500 pounds...

...With Eagleton’s addition the amendment seemed to guarantee some review of the project, and it won even the support of Senator Robert Taft, a Republican from Ohio, the state where Condor was to be built...

...The story ran on page one, and it also reported that “a rear admiral in the Navy’s legislative liaison office recently called to warn’’ Eagleton that if he “continued to criticize the Condor program he could jeopardize future Navy contracts to Missouri...

...In addition to lobbying for the Condor, Finney reported, Currie also had been dropping hints to defense contractors that he would be leaving the Pentagon soon and looking for a job in private industry...

...The Currie affair, though not directly related to the Condor’s lack of merit, did, as one source put it, “really cause the shit to fly at the Pentagon...

...Atwood in turn passed the tip on to Finney, who checked with his own sources and came up with the story...

...Proxmire of course wanted to speak against the Condor, but he was worried about violating Senatorial courtesy by speaking for the House side of the issue...

...In addition to rhetoric, the hearing also produced some new anti-Condor evidence, the most convincing of which came in the testimony of Richard W. Gutmann, director of the GAO’s procurement and systems acquisition division...

...In December 1970, the General Accounting Office, Congress’ investigative arm, warned of Condor’s problems in a report to the Senate Armed Services Committee...

...The new missile was relatively easy to track and shoot down...

...When a new federal project is on the drawing boards, the tendency is for only favorable information about it to filter upwards...

...The superiors believe the reports, think favorably of the subordinates who wrote them, and agree that the project is worth moving ahead with...

...Curry [sic] and his potential conflict of interest...

...Literary Lobbyists -In July the Senate Appropriations Committee met to mark up the defense bill...

...Filtering Upwards This is not to say that higher-level officials at the Pentagon also knew that Condor was no good but didn’t care...

...when Proxmire got into it, people began running around looking for hiding places so they wouldn’t be hit...

...He revealed the contents of the memos on the Senate floor, pointing out that at least one official who had reviewed the Condor had “taken a strong position that the Condor represents a ‘nice-to-have’ weapon at best and only if its cost is low, and its reliability high...

...the Condor can be used only during daylight, in clear weather, and from a A-6E aircraft...

...The Condor’s unit cost is over ten times that...

...Later the Eagleton-Proxmire forces talked the same aide into inserting tough review procedures into the Inouye amendment, but it remained that with the amendment’s passage the missile was still alive...

...Thus do basically good and honest high federal officials often support terrible programs: from what they know, they are convinced the programs are good ones...

...Malcolm Currie, the Defense Department’s research chief and one of the major participants in the decision to go ahead with the Condor...

...Eagleton accepted the substitute, but added a provision that Congress would be guaranteed access to the results of the further Condor tests...

...Its warhead was too small to destroy major targets...

...The missile would be fired from an airplane a safe distance (60 miles) from its target...

...Every year the Pentagon requested research money for the missile, and every year the requests sailed through Congress...

...The Air Force is developing electro-optical glide bombs that perform the same mission as Condor...

...The Times reported in detail on the Inouye affair, spelling out the close ties between the Navy sponsors of the missile and Rockwell...

...The investigation of Currie, he wrote Senator McClellan in May, “demonstrates that the decision to proceed with Condor production is one that we should carefully monitor...

...Both Armed Services Committees routinely approved the Condor...

...The missile seemed to be sailing through Congress for the final time, assured of being produced...

...In August, the House and Senate Appropriations Committees went into conference, the House still against the Condor, the Senate for it...

...A Rockwell lobbyist and the Navy’s program manager for the Condor (who had already been reprimanded for accepting a hunting trip at Rockwell’s Maryland lodge) visited the aide and persuaded her of the Condor’s merit...

...He hesitated for a few moments, and suddenly McClellan said, “The Senate recedes...

...So when the conference met, the public image of the Condor was getting progressively more tarnished...

...It revealed that Deputy Defense Secretary William Clements had ordered the Navy not to proceed with production until certain technical problems could be solved through further testing...

...of the charges against Currie yaiied even more questions...

...After the Senate appropriated money to build the Condor, middlelevel Pen tagon officials who knew the missile’s many flaws decided to take action...

...In a speech on the Senate floor he alleged that Currie had worked for modifications in an air defense system that greatly drove up the price its builder, Hughes Aircraft, charged the government...

...Somehow, however, all the criticism had no effect whatsoever...

...they also point toward a new way by which Congress might be able to evaluate-really evaluate-defense programs and maintain reasonable control over the Pentagon...

...Instead, he told the Navy that it could spend up to $10 million to remedy the missile’s defects and that after it did so he would authorize production...

...Comparable Navy and Air Force weapons were far less costly...

...By the late 1960s, a group of civilians in the Pentagon, supported by some Navy officials who were concerned about Condor’s poor test results and unsuitability for combat, wanted to kill the missile...

...He called Clements’ decision to conduct a secret review of the missile’s problems “inexcusable,” and in retaliation proposed an amendment to limit all 1976 appropriations to the $10 million Clements .had allotted for the ironing out of the Condor’s bugs...

...When the Condor came up before the conferees, an aide from the House side got up and made an effective tenminute anti-Condor speech...

...On paper, it sounded terrific...

...The Air Force weapons can provide day/ night, all-weather capabilities, with warheads of 2,000 pounds...

...Its report on the missile said that “still unanswered are questions of operational utility, effectiveness, vulnerability to enemy countermeasures, the ability to maintain adequate quality control, and affordability...

...In response, Senator John McClellan, an Arkansas octogenarian who chairs the Appropriations Committee and its defense subcommittee, introduced a substitute amendment to Eagleton’s...

...If the answer to fiose questions is no, who is going to explain to the American taxpayer that he has bought 2 15 missiles at a cost of $101.4 million which don’t work...

...One official anonymously gave two memoranda to the General Accounting Office, an act that, in retrospect, marked the beginning of the end for the Condor...

...The only people who are in a position to know if a project is bad and who might be willing to try to stop it are a small core who know the facts but do not have their egos and careers tied up in the project’s approval...

...But the Condor didn’t work out...

...Congress, however, could start to tap directly the people it has to thank for the exposing of the Condor: the officials lower down who, because they had worked on it, knew the missile was a bad one...

...The stage was set for a further battle over the Condor once new test results were in...