Behind the pristine lawns, the dignity of, and respect for, Arlington National Cemetery are tattered. An Army investigation this year found that the de facto boss of the cemetery, Deputy Superintendent Thurman Higginbotham, made false statements to Army investigators as they probed what they later classified as wire fraud at Arlington — a female employee’s computer had been tapped into without authorization, and she had been impersonated online. An internal Army memo and an interview with a former Army employee also suggest that high-level Army officials knew for months about problems at Arlington but failed to act. Three former public affairs officers have recently testified under oath about a hostile work environment at Arlington. One was fired after speaking out. The other two quit in disgust.

Sadly, Arlington’s internal problems have materialized on the grounds themselves. Despite nearly 10 years and countless dollars spent on computerizing its operations, the cemetery still relies mostly on paper burial records that in some cases do not match the headstones. “There are numerous examples of discrepancies that exist between burial maps, the physical location of headstones, and the burial records/grave cards,” the cemetery admitted in a 2008 report to Congress.

And in a relatively remote area of the cemetery, where 600 service members from Iraq and Afghanistan are laid to rest, personal mementos placed on graves are left out to rot in the rain for days, ruined by workers with power washers, or thrown into a trash bin.

“The aesthetics of the cemetery are deceptive,” says Gina Gray, an Army veteran of eight years who served in Iraq and who was the cemetery’s public affairs officer in early 2008, before she was fired over a clash with her boss. “To the naked eye, it is a place of sacred beauty and a tribute to our nation’s heroes,” says Gray, who has been rehired as an Army contractor at Fort Belvoir, in Virginia. “But if you scratch below the surface, you will find that it’s really just window dressing. They’ve put these pretty curtains up to hide the ugliness on the inside.”

At the center of the chaos is Higginbotham, Gray’s former superior and a focus of the Army investigation. While cemetery Superintendent John Metzler is the titular head at Arlington, Higginbotham runs the show, say current and former employees. A tall and imposing man, Higginbotham has worked at the cemetery since 1965. He started as a security guard and worked his way up to deputy supervisor in 1990. In his current position, he has earned a reputation for running the cemetery with an iron fist. (Higginbotham declined to talk to Salon.)

One of Higginbotham’s failures, say employees, has been his inability to rectify disturbing discrepancies between burial records and information on headstones. For years, Arlington has struggled to replace paper-and-pen burial records with a satellite-aided system of tracking grave locations. “My goal is to have all the gravesites available online to the public, so people can look up a grave from home and print out a map that will show exactly where the gravesite is,” Higginbotham told Government Computer News in April 2006. Such systems are standard at other cemeteries, like the Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, Ohio, nearly identical to Arlington in age and size. Yet an effort begun in 2000 to set up a similar system at Arlington remains unrealized.

In 2004 and 2005, Arlington conducted a pilot project to check burial records against headstone information on 300 graves. “The accuracy of interment records and maps that track reserved, obstructed, and occupied graves were proven to have errors,” the project found, according to Arlington National Cemetery budget documents. “For example, gravesites that were marked as obstructed were actually available and information listed on grave cards and burial records were not consistent with the information on the actual headstone.”

The problems continue today. In 2008, Arlington National Cemetery issued a progress report to Congress on the computerization project. “The current way of doing business is mostly manual, complex, redundant and inefficient,” cemetery officials noted, acknowledging continuing discrepancies among burial maps, headstones and burial records.

Gray says her conversations with groundskeepers suggest the discrepancies and confusion might not stop at the grave’s edge. “They told me they’ve got people buried there that they don’t know who they are, and then they’ve got the wrong headstones over the graves.” She adds: “I told several Army officials — in one instance, a two-star general — but nothing was ever followed up on.” Salon heard the same claims from current and former cemetery employees, who asked to remain anonymous.

Arlington officials insist that there are no cases at Arlington where headstones do not match the remains beneath. “We are not aware of any situation like that,” says cemetery spokeswoman Kaitlin Horst.

Gray, who was fired, has a gripe against the cemetery, to be sure. But her complaints against Higginbotham triggered an investigation that exposed criminal acts that question the Army’s oversight of Arlington.

Higginbotham fell under the eye of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command in October 2008, when Gray reported to investigators that somebody had tapped into her e-mail account. But the trouble between Gray and Higginbotham began months earlier, in April 2008, just a few days after Gray landed her job as public affairs officer. During the high-profile funeral of a decorated officer killed in Iraq, the deputy superintendent tried to move the media 100 yards from the funeral, making coverage all but impossible. Gray pushed back, stating that Army regulations did not bar the media from a funeral when families agreed to the coverage.

Gray’s insistence on fair access for the media turned into an embarrassment for the cemetery — and for the Army — when the Washington Post wrote about the tussle. Journalists trying to cover the funeral were “separated from the mourning party by six or seven rows of graves, and staring into the sun and penned in by a yellow rope,” the Post wrote. Gray, the paper added, “pushed vigorously to allow the journalists more access to the service yesterday — but she was apparently shot down by other cemetery officials.”

Gray locked horns with Higginbotham in the following weeks. In June, she pursued an equal employment opportunity complaint against the cemetery. She claimed discrimination based on “race, sex, age and reprisal” (Gray is white and Higginbotham is an African-American) and a hostile work environment. The cemetery fired Gray a few weeks later — a story that again made its way into the Post. “Putting her foot down and getting the boot,” read the headline.

The cemetery blames Gray for poor job performance. Its termination memorandum claims she failed to follow instructions, communicated poorly with superiors, and behaved disrespectfully to those superiors. Cemetery officials cited e-mail traffic prior to Memorial Day in 2008, in which Gray seemed intent on the use of Army public affairs specialists to interact with the media on Memorial Day, rather than the cemetery staff preferred by Gray’s bosses.

In her sworn testimony in the fall, as part of her equal opportunity complaint, which is still pending, Gray stressed “an elitist mentality among cemetery officials.” Kara McCarthy, who held Gray’s job at the cemetery from early 2007 until March 2008, also testified. She said Higginbotham and other top officials at Arlington “could do whatever the hell they wanted, and they did, because they had been getting away with it for years.” McCarthy said she also left the cemetery after a year because of the “hostile work environment.”

In his testimony, Higginbotham describes himself as in charge. “The day-to-day operation of Arlington National Cemetery is my responsibility,” he said. He stated he had little interaction with Gray and less to do with her termination. “I had no direct involvement with her on a day-to-day basis,” Higginbotham said under oath. “I was not involved in this.” He added that Gray was “not subjected to a hostile work environment.”

As it turned out, Higginbotham had been worried about Gray, fretting in an e-mail that he could be the victim of a “conspiracy.” He was apparently determined to learn what he could about her.

In October, a friend of Gray’s who had worked at Arlington e-mailed Gray’s Army account to say hello. An hour later, the friend received an e-mail with Gina Gray’s name on it. “I see you’ve moved on,” the e-mail read. “A lot of drama going on at ANC.” The note was signed, “GG.” Yet Gray had been locked out of that e-mail account since the day she was fired in June. She had not sent it.

“I felt sick,” Gray says, when she heard about the e-mail impersonating her. “I felt like somebody had broken into my house and gone through my things.” Gray alerted the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command.

Army agents first questioned Higginbotham on Oct. 16. The Army did authorize a search of Gray’s computer, but before that, Higginbotham said, “no one used her computer until they received authorization.” Higginbotham added that access without permission would have been impossible, as a special card and password were needed to get into Gray’s computer. “No one used her computer until after they received authorization,” he reiterated, according to the Army report.

But the Army soon found reason to doubt that Higginbotham was telling the truth. It discovered an e-mail written to the deputy superintendent dated June 27, 2008 — the day Gray was fired and before the Army authorized access to Gray’s computer. It was from Bobbie Garrett, who worked for a contractor favored by Higginbotham, called Alpha Technology Group. The e-mail sent to Higginbotham, and one of Higginbotham’s subordinates, read: “I was able to access Ms. Gray’s computer. I changed her domain account to be able to log in with the username and password. To login to this PC, use the following: Username: gina.gray. Password: PublicAffairs11**.”

Army agents learned Higginbotham had also ordered Garrett, the contractor, to remove Gray’s hard drive and send it out to a private company to mine for information. But an Army official involved in authorizing access to Gray’s e-mail said he “never authorized anyone at ANC [Arlington National Cemetery] to pull the hard drive from Ms. Gray’s work computer.” When Army investigators attempted to interview Garrett, Alpha Technology Group told them Garrett had resigned, adding, “Mr. Garrett was supposedly in Ohio visiting his sick mother” and was unavailable. Alpha Technology Group did not return Salon’s phone call or e-mail to the company’s director of public relations.

Army investigators uncovered further evidence that Gray’s computer had been broken into without authorization. They found an e-mail from Higginbotham discussing Gray with an Army official, in which Higginbotham had attached “the list of persons that she bcc’d.” That list, investigators noted, must have come “from someone logged into Ms. Gray’s email account.”

Lori Calvillo, who also worked as a public affairs officer at Arlington and quit under “hostile” circumstances, testified in Gray’s employment hearing that Arlington officials had also hacked her computer. “They did the exact same thing to me,” she said. (The computer analysis conducted by the Army states that it was “possible Mr. Higginbotham routinely reviews employee’s email when he deems necessary.”)

Why didn’t Army officials in Higginbotham’s e-mail chain — including Col. Jerry Blixt, the garrison commander at Fort Belvoir, and William Koon, an attorney at the Military District of Washington, which oversees the cemetery — recognize that Gray’s computer had been breached? In fact, the Army had been aware of complaints about a “pattern of workplace … hostility” at Arlington, as a July 2008 Army memo states, months before it launched its Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) investigation. In June, Gray had met with Maj. Gen. Richard Rowe, then the commanding general of the Military District of Washington, to explain the problems. So why did the Army wait months to investigate? “The Army viewed the allegations associated with the cemetery very seriously, as we do any such allegation,” Gary Tallman, an Army spokesman said. “Allegations of a criminal nature were referred to, and investigated by, CID.”

In the conclusion of their report, Army investigators declared Higginbotham “made false and misleading statements to agents from this office, regarding access to Ms. Gray’s email account and government computer.” The report said agents could not determine precisely who impersonated Gray online but called the act “wire fraud.”

Higginbotham has had a share of personal challenges. He came out of Chapter 13 bankruptcy proceedings in 2002. In the case, a judge did not excuse Higginbotham for a debt associated with “a death or personal injury caused by the debtor’s unlawful operation of a motor vehicle while intoxicated” in 1990. Today he is also the chief financial officer of Roads Inc., an organization of African-American funeral professionals, where he lists himself as “Dr. Thurman Higginbotham,” although he doesn’t hold a university Ph.D. or medical degree.

Currently no legal action against Higginbotham is expected. On April 23, an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia declined prosecution based on the Army’s findings. The report adds, however, that “civilian report of disciplinary action is pending.” Superintendent John Metzler would not say whether Higginbotham faced any disciplinary action. “The privacy act prevents me from discussing actions on individual employees here at the cemetery,” Metzler says. Higginbotham declined a request for an interview.

During the Higginbotham investigation, a different kind of crime arose at Arlington. But this one had little to do with the law. In her sworn testimony, Gray criticized the cemetery for disposing of artifacts left in Section 60, where soldiers who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried. “They throw away things that are left at the gravesites — cards, letters,” Gray said. “They don’t save anything.”

Tomorrow: A visit to Arlington’s Section 60, where history ends up in the trash, and to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection, where history is carefully preserved.

- – - – - – - – - – - – -

(Research assistance by Christopher M. Matthews and Josh Loewenstein)

The media covered Heath’s disinterment Wednesday closely, including the conclusion that Heath was buried correctly. But that’s far from the whole story.

“This thing has been portrayed as some big success story,” Warner told Salon during a telephone interview Thursday as he drove back to Ohio. “It was a disaster. It was a desecration of honor.”

It was also macabre. Warner says what really happened that day shows just how far the public trust in Arlington has evaporated and that the Army should be stripped of oversight of the cemetery. “Did I expect to be digging through my son’s casket looking for an arm? No,” he said. “For a family to go through what my family went through yesterday is beyond reproach.”

Warner had been suspicious even before he arrived in Virginia. During a Sept. 9 phone call with Kathryn Condon, the new executive director at the cemetery who was put in place this summer to clean up the scandal, Condon said a local funeral home had confirmed holding Heath’s remains just prior to his burial at Arlington in 2006. The same funeral home, however, had informed Warner there were no such records, Warner said.

Next, when Condon agreed to dig up Heath’s remains, she wanted it all done at 7 a.m., Warner says, before the cemetery opened to the public. “She tried to change the time from 8 a.m. to 7 a.m. so she could keep people out,” Warner said. “I told her I would be there at 8.” (He was.)

Then Condon said that Warner could bring two reporters to the cemetery with him, but no photography or video was allowed. “I said to her, you don’t have a problem with the media when everything is picturesque and you get those amazing photos,” Warner recalled. “But when it gets to the ugly side of your mistakes, you want to hide it.” (Warner lost this battle.)

Warner was so suspicious of the cemetery, he made Arlington agree not to open Heath’s casket until he got there. He wanted to see that process to make sure it was on the up-and-up.

“They said they were going to dig out the grave the night before and pump out any water that was in the vault,” but not open his son’s casket. Warner said he was insistent and the agreement was clear. “They said they would not open the vault or open his casket until we arrived on the 15th.”

The plan was that Arlington would pull up the casket with Warner there, and a friend of Heath’s would look at the remains to confirm his identity. This way, Warner would not have to see his son’s remains. Heath was killed in a roadside bomb attack in Anbar Province, Iraq. His body was badly ravaged by the blast, requiring a closed-casket funeral.

But when Warner arrived near his son’s gravesite, he was shocked when Condon handed him Heath’s dog tags. “Kathryn approached and said that they had opened the grave,” he said. “They proceeded to tell us they opened the vault, brought up the casket and made an external identification and gave me his dog tags,” he remembered. “They broke the agreement,” he said.

Warner said his mind raced. He felt unsure of who or what to trust. “Everything had been compromised,” he said.

Warner insisted they raise his son’s casket again. Arlington agreed. “The lid was (partly) open,” Warner said he noticed as the casket came up. “It looked like my son’s remains were going to fall out.”

Arlington workers put Heath’s casket on a flatbed truck, covered it with plastic and an American flag, and drove to a secluded warehouse on the cemetery perimeter. “It was like a garage,” Warner recalled.

When the casket was opened, Warner panicked. He felt like he would never get real closure unless he did the unthinkable. “I literally jumped up on the flatbed. Don’t ask me how I did it,” he said.

He looked at the remains. His son’s body was unrecognizable from the blast and the decomposition. “I could not even tell you what was there,” he said, describing the grisly inside of his son’s coffin. “It was so bad. It was a ghastly sight.”

Warner remembered a distinctive tattoo on his son’s arm. “I took my hat off. I took my jacket off. I began to dig in his casket,” he said. “They gave me a pair of latex gloves.”

Warner found his son’s torso. “The body had rolled,” he said. Under the torso was Heath’s arm. “It was underneath his back,” Warner said. “I began to rub some mud off his arm. I was able to make an identification because his tattoo was intact and viewable.”

Warner said he wants people to know what happened that day, how a scandal and further missteps by Arlington have driven grieving families past the edge. He says the scandal at Arlington followed by the cemetery’s bungling of the disinterment made him desperate for closure, and that his trust in Arlington has deteriorated to nothing. “I had no choice,” he said about going through his son’s remains. “This was just beyond anything I ever imagined. It is something I will have to live with for the rest of my life.”

Warner said he has no confidence that the Army, which has overseen the cemetery for years, can also be responsible for fixing the problems there: “These people should all just be fired.”

For weeks, the Army has not responded to any questions from Salon or any requests for interviews about the Arlington scandal, including a request to interview Condon.

The Army launched this stand-alone financial investigation in June as the yearlong Arlington scandal exposed by Salon rapidly became more public. Salon reported that many at Arlington had tried to blow the whistle on questionable spending to computerize burial records, under the supervision of deputy superintendent Thurman Higginbotham, with contracts going to some of the same people more than once, even after they failed to produce a product. After spending somewhere between $5 million and $20 million, Salon reported, the cemetery’s years-long effort to computerize its records wasn’t completed.

Last week, Higginbotham invoked the 5th Amendment when he was asked about the contracts during a congressional hearing.

Army contracting specialists reviewed cemetery contracts and spending on everything from landscaping work to cellphone bills over the past five years. The resulting July 27 “Procurement Management Review of Arlington National Cemetery” report documents a dizzying blizzard of disappearing money, missing or incomplete contracting paperwork and fishy-looking spending on all sorts of things.

In one section of the report, investigators examined between $400,000 and $800,000 of spending per year on various purchases at Arlington. The probe found numerous examples of “no evidence of delivery and/or acceptance of services and supplies” in return. The report documents the purchase of cameras, refrigerators, computer equipment, software and car parts, as well as cellphone charges and payments for car repairs. For those expenditures, investigators found “limited or no supporting documentation or validation of the location of the items.” The report called signatures on some purchase orders at the cemetery “questionable,” noting that, “signatures purported to be signed by the same person appeared to be totally different.”

“Based on the lack of documentation, justification for the items being purchased, independent receipt and acceptance, and the location of property purchased which should be maintained in the files, most of the purchases reviewed … would be considered questionable or improper,” the report says. When it comes to the Army, which oversees Arlington, the report says the Army failed to “ensure only authorized items were purchased, and receipt and acceptance was documented.”

In addition to the purchase of items, the Army report also looks into millions of dollars paid to contractors for services. Here, too, investigators found widespread lack of proper documentation and common deviation from government contracting procedures designed to ensure fair competition among contractors and preserve taxpayer funds — but that was only when the Army investigators could find the files at all. Investigators were unable to locate more than half the files for 167 Arlington contracts awarded through the Army’s National Capital Region Contracting Center, covering everything from horticulture work to construction.

The investigators also sought to review a separate set of 34 cemetery contracts awarded through an Army Corps of Engineers office in Baltimore. Four of those files were “incomplete” enough that they could not be reviewed, investigators found.

The report is particularly critical of millions the cemetery spent on contractors to computerize Arlington’s antiquated, faulty burial records still managed in a flurry of paper that has resulted in thousands of burial errors at Arlington. Despite payments to contractors who were close to top cemetery officials, Arlington received little to nothing in return, leading to the scandal exposed by Salon over the past year. “The contract files did not contain evidence that the government received deliverables as stated in the contract,” the report said of this modernization effort that was supposed to prevent burial mistakes. Arlington blew somewhere between $5 million and $20 million on this fruitless endeavor. No one is sure of the total amount, or exactly where the money went.

The report highlights the role of cemetery deputy superintendent Thurman Higginbotham, who handpicked the contractors who were supposed to perform that computerization work and managed the contractors to carry it out. “Contract file documentation indicated that the deputy superintendent ANC acted with apparent authority to receive services and provided direction to the contractors,” according to the report. “Receiving reports reviewed at ANC were signed by the deputy superintendent ANC. The contract files did not contain evidence that the government received deliverables as stated in the contract.”

The Army allowed Higginbotham and cemetery superintendent Jack Metzler to retire unscathed last month. The Army has shown no sign of any intent to hold any Army officials accountable for anything that took place at Arlington.

The report was released Tuesday by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. McCaskill chairs a Senate subcommittee that is investigating the scandal at Arlington and that held the hearing last week. 

“You did know about it and you did nothing,” she said. Then she turned to Higginbotham: “And you knew about it, Mr. Higginbotham, and you did nothing.”

Metzler went on to blame an inadequate budget — which senators quickly pointed had increased dramatically during Metzler’s tenure — and a busy burial schedule. But again, McCaskill was unsatisfied.

“This is not complicated,” she said. “It’s called keeping track of who you bury, where. That is not a complicated task.”

The subcommittee also examined the apparent waste of millions in taxpayer funds. Higginbotham directed somewhere between $5 million and $20 million to a group of handpicked contractors to modernize burial records at Arlington, but the contractors produced almost nothing in return, and burial records are still tracked on pieces of paper, which go missing. Higginbotham invoked the 5th Amendment when he was asked about the contracts.

Subcommittee ranking member Scott Brown, R-Mass., said it’s astounding that Arlington still tries to track 30 burials a day with a flurry of paper: “Let me get this straight: It is 2010 and you guys…are still dealing in cards? I just can’t get my head around that.”

Officials from the Army, which oversees Arlington, testified that they were mostly kept in the dark about the missing money and burial mishaps. Claudia Tornblom, the Army deputy assistant secretary who oversees the cemetery’s budget, claimed she was aware of burial paperwork “discrepancies,” but did not know that those discrepancies might reflect burial problems in the ground. “Obviously, we did not ask enough questions,” she explained.

Brown said the idea that the country’s most famous cemetery could not keep track of the dead was unimaginable. “It’s almost like learning there is no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny,” he observed.

That’s much higher than the estimate last month from Army investigators, who said about 211 remains were affected.

Metzler’s former deputy, Thurman Higginbotham, also appeared. Higginbotham says he plans to assert his Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Senate Democrat says that as many as 6,600 graves at Arlington National Cemetery could be misidentified because managers there didn’t do their job properly.

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., spoke at a hearing Thursday, where the cemetery’s former superintendent and deputy superintendent were scheduled to testify.

McCaskill says she believes that between 4,900 and 6,600 graves may be unmarked or mislabeled on cemetery maps.

The estimate far exceeds one given by Army investigators last month that some 211 remains could be affected by the graves scandal.

The memorandum says that estimate is based on a review of more than 5,300 pages of Army documents, material from whistle-blowers, and interviews with current and former government officials.

McCaskill’s estimate of missing or mismarked graves could well be correct, and may even be conservative. The Army last month released a report documenting 211 problems in three sections of the cemetery, where paperwork showed remains in a grave for which there was no headstone in that section. (Or, conversely, there was a headstone in that section for a particular grave, but no paperwork to match.) But there are 70 sections at Arlington, holding a total of over 330,000 graves. And as Salon outlined over the past year, each single burial blunder can create a domino effect: If the wrong person is named on a headstone, then where is the body that should be under that headstone?

Salon reported Tuesday that Arlington budget chief Rory Smith tried to warn Army higher-ups of management and contracting problems as early as 2003, to no avail.

Read the full subcommittee memo here:

ANC Public Memo Final