Air Force officials want more information about acquisition improprieties

Air Force officials want to question former acquisition chief Darleen Druyun about how she steered billion of dollars in contracts to Boeing without raising suspicions, according to Marvin Sambur, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition.

Druyun was sentenced in September to nine months in federal prison after she admitted to violating ethics rules for negotiating a job with Boeing, while still overseeing the company's Pentagon contracts. Druyun said she favored Boeing in four contract negotiations and called a multibillion Air Force proposal to lease tanker refueling aircraft from Boeing a "parting gift" to her future employer.

"Whatever she did it wasn't fairly obvious," Sambur said in an interview Monday. "We asked the prosecutors if we could speak to Darleen to see how she was able to manipulate [the system]. We want to find out 'Hey, is there an Achilles' heel in the system that you were able to exploit?' "

Druyun has yet to respond to the Air Force's request.

Sambur said the recent announcement that he and Air Force Secretary James Roche were resigning before the start of President Bush's second term was driven in part by the Druyun scandal. He conceded that he and Roche had become "lightening rods" for criticism surrounding Druyun and the controversial tanker lease proposal, and that was affecting the service's relationship with Congress.

"God knows why because, from my point of view, I was the one who cleaned up her act in terms of getting her to retire six months after I came here. All the things that she admitted to having done, happened before my watch. She was here for 10 years. I was here for six months," said Sambur.

Shortly after taking over in 2001, Sambur, who had spent his career as a Defense industry executive, realized that Druyun had enormous sway over every aspect of Air Force weapon's buying. "She allowed only herself to see information and herself to make decisions," he said.

Sambur, who was Druyun's immediate boss, said he began taking authority away from her and sharing it among managers outside of Washington. He said he never suspected Druyun of wrongdoing, but believed that she held too much sway over how the service spent billions of dollars. Druyun retired from the Air Force in 2002.

Sambur echoed concerns raised by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last week that Druyun was able to go unnoticed because there were often vacancies among political appointees who oversaw her work. Sambur said when Druyun was at the Pentagon from 1993 to 2002, there was no assistant secretary of the Air Force of acquisition for nearly half that period.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., insists that Air Force leaders should be held accountable for the scandal. "I simply cannot believe that one person, acting alone, can rip off taxpayers of possibly billions of dollars. This appears to be a case of either a systemic failure in procurement oversight, willful blindness or rank corruption," McCain said in a Senate floor speech earlier this month.

Sambur said he was "frustrated" by McCain's remarks and the suggestion that Air Force leaders besides Druyun favored Boeing in tanker talks. He said the Air Force was simply following a congressional mandate that it lease tankers from Boeing. "If you don't like [the deal], it does not mean I was doing something illegal," he said.