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Sunday, May 21, 2000
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
Men claim top-secret retaliation by Air Force
Two workers say they had their clearance to Area 51 revoked for pointing out problems.
By Keith Rogers
Review-Journal
Kevin Dye wanted to do the right thing when he saw a problem in the way an officer was advancing in rank at a secret Air Force base on the Nellis range.
That's why the tech sergeant felt obligated to report to his commanders in 1997 that a helicopter pilot had falsified job qualifications in order to secure a promotion at the Nellis range installation.
"He was committing fraud," Dye said. "According to the Air Force guidelines, any time you see that you are supposed to report it."
After Dye took his complaint up the chain of command, investigators eventually determined that by misrepresenting his qualifications, the pilot had indeed violated Air Force regulations to become a commander for air traffic controllers and airfield managers.
But by that time, Dye said his supervisors had changed the issue, maintaining that Dye was a security risk because he had used his unit's secret identifier in letters to Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Rep. Bob Clement, R-Tenn., when he alerted them to the promotion scam.
As a result, his commanders revoked his top-secret security clearance, an action that was later determined to be improper by an administrative law judge, who last year found in Dye's favor.
"The bottom line is the inspector general system failed miserably. It practically collapsed," said Dye, 40, of Las Vegas. "They were too busy trying to cover things up to investigate properly, and they used national security to do it with."
The Air Force sent no one to the hearing to contest Dye. A spokesman at the Pentagon, Lt. Col. Ed Worley, said the Air Force "didn't know about the hearing. Had we known about the hearing, we would have contested the ruling."
Another Las Vegas man, Forrest Darby, said he, too, was retaliated against by Air Force officials after blowing the whistle on what he described to former Rep. Jim Bilbray, D-Nev., as a safety problem linked to the Area 51 base and other Nellis range installations. He complained that he and other contract workers were excluded from government-chartered flights that shuttle personnel to their remote assignments.
Darby and a dozen other craftsmen met with Bilbray in 1994 to discuss allowing contract workers to board direct flights on a weekly basis from McCarran International Airport to the Tonopah Test Range -- a northern part of the Nellis range -- instead of having to drive the 500-mile round trip to their assignments. They told Bilbray that taking the flights, which were only half full, would mean they wouldn't have to endure long, dangerous drives to and from the work site.
Two craftsmen, Darby noted, were killed traveling at night on the rural roads where range animals often wander.
He said because of military secrecy, workers generally were prohibited from discussing any specifics concerning the base, including the charter jet commuter flights. But in approaching Bilbray, who served on congressional committees overseeing the military, Darby said he was protected as a whistle-blower.
It wasn't until three years later, when he was dispatched to work at Area 51, that he found out the commander there wouldn't allow him on the base even though he held a clearance to be there. As a result, his employer -- the Special Projects Division of EG&G Inc. -- terminated his job.
Bilbray said the action stemmed from Darby's role in persuading him to insist that craftsmen be allowed on the charter flights.
Both cases illustrate the problem of determining what is justice, let alone delivering it, when Air Force personnel and contract workers are forbidden from discussing basic details of their employment, such as where they work and to whom they report.
The two cases are described in 1,400 pages of documents that the Air Force and the Defense Department were compelled to release to the Review-Journal under the Freedom of Information Act. Many of the pages, particularly in Dye's case, contain gaps of redacted information. Sixty-four pages concerning Dye were withheld to protect national security and privacy of certain individuals.
Like Dye, Darby claimed the base commander -- Col. Craig P. Dunn -- retaliated against him after he contacted his congressman to report a problem.
Dunn has since retired from the Air Force, but indicated he had no comment, saying in a telephone voice message, "I can't help you."
However, an Air Force spokeswoman at the Pentagon, Maj. Andree Swanson, said that in Dye's case, after Dunn established "that a deficiency existed" in the promotion of the helicopter pilot that "the commander directed changes ... to correct the deficiency."
But Dye claims the deficiency that Air Force officials acknowledge was really fraud.
Now he says the Air Force owes him thousands of dollars in back pay because he was passed over for a promotion and, for more than a year, kept from holding any job he was qualified to work.
Near the end of his 20-year military career Dye spent six months sitting in an office known as Graystone, which is leased by the Air Force in southeast Las Vegas, where -- without a clearance -- his duty involved shredding classified documents.
Unlike Dye, who had his case heard by an administrative law judge, Darby never got a hearing, one that the Pentagon's inspector general said he was entitled to under an executive order.
Among 600 pages released last month pertaining to Darby's case, a memorandum dated Jan. 21, 1999, shows the Defense Department didn't follow through on a finding that Darby should be given a fair and impartial hearing.
The memo to the Air Force inspector general from an assistant Defense Department inspector general, whose name was blacked out, said the Air Force's probe "was incomplete and only addressed a portion of Mr. Darby's complaint."
"Despite several discussions with responsible Air Force officials, we remain unconvinced by their argument. We believe the executive order supersedes the prior procedures and Mr. Darby should be afforded the opportunity to appeal his access denial accordingly," the Jan. 21, 1999, memo states.
The documents indicate that the Air Force's only rationale for preventing Darby from working at Area 51 was because Darby was "badgering everyone he could to ride on an aircraft to the work site rather than driving," according to an investigator who interviewed Eugene Boesch, Air Force director of security and special program oversight.
Having exhausted his administrative remedies on May 12, Darby, through his attorney, Victor Perri, filed a lawsuit Friday in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas against the Defense Department and the Air Force. The eight-page complaint names Defense Secretary William Cohen and Air Force Secretary F. Whitten Peters as defendants, alleging their agencies violated federal laws and Darby's constitutional rights of free speech and due process.
Besides compensation for emotional distress and mental anguish, the complaint seeks "a fair and impartial hearing" for Darby or reinstatement with back pay and benefits.
Darby said the Air Force's failure to act on the Jan. 21, 1999, memo is evidence of "a scandal of great proportion."
"It is as if Area 51, and possibly other areas, operate like some South American tyranny, outside the laws and norms of our country," he said.
Darby recalled the 1994 meeting with Bilbray in an interview this year conducted a few hundred feet from the tarmac at McCarran International Airport where red-striped 737s -- so-called Janet planes -- shuttle workers to the secret Nellis range operations.
"A lot of people were getting hurt by hitting black cows while driving at night to and from the Tonopah Test Range " he said.
"The bottom line was Bilbray made it possible for us to fly on the airplanes."
Bilbray, who is now a lobbyist in Arlington, Va., confirmed the 1994 meeting, and said he would testify on Darby's behalf at a hearing, if one is held.
"There is no question in my mind that he (Darby) is being discriminated against because he raised a problem," Bilbray said in a telephone interview.
But Bilbray noted an important obstacle: The Air Force doesn't acknowledge the existence of classified bases on the Nellis range.
"How can you have a problem at something that doesn't exist? Everybody knows it's there," said Bilbray, who served on the House Armed Services and Select Intelligence committees. "I've been there. I know what's there.
"If they just stonewall it, and say it doesn't exist, they don't have to answer the substantive question."
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Area 51 known to 'vanish' from government landscape
Kevin Dye, left, listens as Forrest Darby describes in a February interview near McCarran International Airport how government officials stripped his access to a secret installation after he reported a safety problem to former U.S. Rep. Jim Bilbray in 1994. Dye, a former Air Force tech sergeant, and Darby, an electrician who worked for a government contractor, claim the Air Force retaliated against them after they contacted their congressmen about problems at classified facilities.
Photo by John Gurzinski.
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