Commentary: Get a new top cop for the Pentagon

Stand by for more incoming rounds on why the Pentagon waited 18 months before acting on CIA warnings that former Deputy Defense Secretary John M. Deutch may have compromised some of the military's deepest secrets. CBS is preparing a 60 Minutes segment on the fiasco, and the program is expected to ask this key question: Why didn't acting Inspector General Donald Mancuso, the Pentagon's top cop, blow his whistle loudly and clearly back in 1998 when the CIA first sounded the warning?

The story has appeared in print before, including in National Journal, but CBS will amplify it for millions of people. Before the program airs, the Clinton administration should drop its fight to make Mancuso the permanent inspector general of the Defense Department. Mancuso was a controversial figure long before the Deutch episode. His handling of the Tailhook investigation in 1992-93 drew fire from several federal judges, and his generosity toward a convicted felon in the Inspector General's Office was the original reason Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, put a hold on Mancuso's nomination for the top job.

The Pentagon's inspector general holds an important post, paying $130,200 a year. The inspector general directs the Pentagon's battle against waste, fraud, and abuse in the military industrial complex. The office is also in charge of combating hackers trying to raid the military's computers. Overseeing 1,200 employees, spending $230 million a year, the IG is comparable to the director of the FBI. But Mancuso's nomination has reached the point of diminishing returns inside and outside the Pentagon.

Inside, Pentagon career officials report that the protracted nomination fight in the Senate over Mancuso is poisoning the atmosphere of the Inspector General's Office. Colleagues portray him as an old-fashioned "you're for me or against me" practitioner, rather than a modern leader capable of uniting his investigators against such new threats as cyberattacks on Pentagon information systems. But some of his deputies are disputing Mancuso's public assertion that he never saw a 1998 memo from one of his own agents, a memo that specified CIA fears about Deutch's endangering the Pentagon's most sensitive secrets, dubbed Special Access. The memo was written after CIA investigators determined that Deutch, who later became CIA director, had placed similar CIA secrets on his home computer.

Outside the Pentagon, two Senate committees--along with 60 Minutes--continue to investigate why Mancuso, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, former Deputy Defense Secretary John J. Hamre, and other top Defense officials neither acted on the CIA warnings in 1998 nor informed the Justice Department and congressional intelligence committees that a crime may have been committed by Deutch when he was the Pentagon's No. 2 executive from 1994-95. In contrast, Deutch's mishandling of secrets at the CIA caused heads to roll at that agency.

Mancuso, Cohen, and Hamre all insist that they did not know until February of this year of the CIA's warnings about Deutch's mishandling of Special Access information. But Carol Levy, a Mancuso deputy, was directly informed. A June 18, 1998, memo from the CIA deputy inspector general to Levy, obtained by National Journal, states clearly that CIA investigators briefed Special Agent Mark W. Spaulding of the Pentagon's Inspector General's Office on June 17, 1998, about the Deutch issue and the potential risks to military secrets.

Senate Armed Services Committee members, in a confirmation hearing for Mancuso on July 26, did not ask a single question about unusually harsh criticism leveled at Mancuso's running of the Tailhook investigation as director of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service. Nor did the Senators indicate any knowledge about his actions, or inaction, in regard to Deutch's handling of Pentagon secrets. The committee recommended that the full Senate confirm Mancuso as Pentagon IG. So did the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, which is now having second thoughts as it digs deeper into the Deutch case. The full Senate has yet to vote on Mancuso.

Congress investigating Pentagon investigators wasn't what lawmakers had in mind when they established an Inspector General's Office within the Defense Department in 1982. They envisioned the selection of an inspector general with an unblemished record, who would stay in office for an extended period. But, alas, inspectors general have generally passed so quickly through that office on the way to somewhere else that the post has been filled by stand-ins for seven years of its 18-year existence.

All of this is not to say that the Pentagon's Inspector General's Office has been a total failure. Hundreds of its dedicated investigators, especially the unsung heroes in field offices outside Washington, have saved taxpayers millions of dollars and prevented flawed weapons from going to the troops. But the point is that these dedicated people, and the taxpayers, deserve a new and unsullied inspector general who is in charge of keeping honest a government department that spends $500,000 a minute. Mancuso's nomination will not get better with age.