Arlington National Cemetery Investigation

Smith’s account is the most damning evidence to date showing that Army officials were repeatedly warned about budgetary, management and record-keeping problems at the cemetery. The Army, which oversees Arlington, has said it was kept in the dark about the problems there. Army Secretary John McHugh told the House Armed Services Committee recently that the cemetery was “somewhat of a satellite sitting off by itself.”

A Senate subcommittee is investigating Arlington and has requested that several of the major players in Smith’s story, revealed for the first time in this article, testify at a hearing set for July 29.

The budgetary high jinks and the burial scandal at Arlington are closely intertwined. If properly executed, the cemetery’s computerization effort would have eliminated the messy paperwork that is still used today to document the identities of deceased service members and their grave locations. The project was supposed to replace that flurry of paper with digital records and the capability to track grave locations precisely with the aid of satellites. That capability has been common at other cemeteries of similar size for years. Top cemetery officials funneled somewhere between $5 million and $20 million to a small group of contractors over the past decade to do the work, but got little or nothing in return.

As the budget officer at Arlington for two decades, Smith was the point man between the cemetery and the two government offices that oversee Arlington’s budget: the White House Office of Management and Budget and the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works. Smith also worked closely with the House and Senate appropriations subcommittees that fund the cemetery.

In the spring of 2003, the cemetery had already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on consultants just to study possible modernization plans without actually doing any modernization work, a situation Smith found troubling but possibly justified. At that point, cemetery superintendent Jack Metzler and his deputy, Thurman Higginbotham, were revving up to put the spending into high gear.

Metzler wanted the congressional appropriations subcommittees that funded the cemetery to give Arlington a budget “add-on,” an infusion of $5 million to jump-start the modernization effort. Smith was alarmed to learn that at the same time, Metzler and Higginbotham had also lobbied Virginia Republican Sen. John Warner from the Senate Armed Services Committee — a committee that does not normally fund the cemetery — to authorize an additional $5 million for the same work. This troubled Smith because Defense Department policy prohibited government workers from lobbying Congress for money outside of the president’s budget, and because the unorthodox involvement of multiple congressional committees would have blurred oversight over the modernization project.

Smith held lengthy negotiations with congressional staff and managed to keep the cemetery’s money flowing from the correct appropriations subcommittees. The cemetery received $2.7 million at that time for the automation work.

The cemetery next had to explain to the Army and the Office of Management and Budget how that $2.7 million would be spent to modernize cemetery operations. Smith was puzzled when over the coming months Higginbotham hired at least one outside consultant — a representative from a company that might later receive some of the money — to write up those explanations. Smith felt oddly cut out of the loop, since he usually prepared such documents.

When Smith reviewed the documents Higginbotham planned to submit for review, he found the description of the work and explanation of the costs remarkably vague. “When you work with Congress and the Office of Management and Budget, your credibility is everything,” Smith explained later about his consternation at the time. “I just got to a point where I could not look people in the eye and tell them, ‘This is where the money is going. This is what we are working on. This is who will do it, and this is when it will be done,’” he said.

In late 2003, Smith complained directly to Metzler that the explanation of the modernization work being developed by Higginbotham looked like a shell game. The cemetery, Smith argued, owed the Office of Management and Budget a much better explanation. “He usually deferred to me on these issues,” Smith said about Metzler. Not this time. Metzler ordered that Higginbotham’s plans be forwarded to the Office of Management and Budget.

In January 2004, Smith relayed his concerns to several officials at the Office of Management and Budget, including Bill McQuaid, a senior examiner responsible for some oversight of the cemetery’s budget. Smith argued that the cemetery’s explanation of how the funds would be used was dubious, at best.

McQuaid tried to get a handle on the cemetery’s plans and establish better accountability for the money. In late January 2004, McQuaid temporarily barred the cemetery from spending more money on contractors working on the computerization effort at Arlington. “We would like prior notification before any additional consulting or other outside work is commissioned on this project,” McQuaid wrote on Jan. 30 to Metzler, Higginbotham and Army officials.

Among other things, e-mails showed that McQuaid wondered why the cemetery wanted to reinvent the wheel and create a new computerization system from scratch, rather than build on grave-record computerization programs already developed by the Department of Veterans Affairs or the private sector.

The Army, which oversees the cemetery, was in the loop on all of this, according to e-mail traffic. The Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works helps oversee Arlington’s budget as well. Two civilian officials from that office, John Parez and Claudia Tornblom, appear in the e-mail chain. (Smith notes that he had previously relayed to Parez his concern about the accountability of the money, but was rebuffed.)

Notably, e-mails show that as Smith raised concerns, those same Army officials weighed in decidedly in favor of Metzler and Higginbotham’s automation plans and against Smith and McQuaid. Tornblom, the deputy assistant secretary of the Army in that civil works office, emphatically sided with Metzler, Higginbotham and the contractors at Arlington in an e-mail to McQuaid on April 22, 2004. “I have been shocked by the pejorative language you [McQuaid] have been using, at least in discussions with my staff, when discussing ANC [Arlington National Cemetery] automation efforts,” she wrote. “Please be aware that I will respond if I hear words like ‘disaster,’ ‘stunned,’ ‘throwing money at contractors,’ or ‘no product to show for it.’”

Tornblom suggested in that e-mail to McQuaid that Smith was motivated not by fiscal prudence but by a grudge he harbored against his bosses at the cemetery. “I believe you have been influenced inappropriately by one disgruntled ANC employee [Smith] who is trying to stir up controversy to retaliate against ANC managers with whom he has disagreements,” she wrote.

Salon could not reach Bill McQuaid for comment.

By 2004, Smith had worked at the cemetery for 20 years. After he became vocal about his concerns on Arlington’s funding, however, cemetery officials began a campaign of harassment against him, Smith says. He found himself being held responsible for a purchasing system outside his job purview. He was called insubordinate. Higginbotham took steps to suspend Smith for several days without pay.

Smith reluctantly took his whistle-blowing to a higher level. In April 2004, Smith tried to alert Virginia Republican Rep. Frank Wolf about the problems at Arlington and the harassment. Wolf appealed to the Army and the cemetery on Smith’s behalf, but Wolf seemed satisfied with a later written explanation from Metzler that all was well at the cemetery. (Staff for Wolf explained that their boss receives hundreds of similar complaints and cannot investigate each one at great length.)

That same month, Smith, seeking help, dialed the Defense Department’s inspector general hot line. After an hourlong conversation with a member of the inspector general’s staff, Smith faxed a written complaint to the inspector general saying he faced “retaliation for the putting on hold or rejection by the Office of Management and Budget of ANC’s automation effort submitted by the deputy superintendent.”

Smith says he never heard again from the inspector general. “They never even called me back,” Smith said. “I just felt like they just totally left me hanging.” A Defense Department spokesman did not respond to questions about why the inspector general apparently failed to follow up on Smith’s complaint.

In July 2004, Smith sent a formal complaint to the Office of Special Counsel, the government agency responsible for protecting whistle-blowers. That complaint included a detailed chronology of the problems Smith encountered at Arlington and his concern about the “serious mismanagement” of money there. Smith warned that “public funds would be at significant risk to be put to waste and the integrity of the automation effort would be placed in jeopardy.” In late July 2004, the Office of Special Counsel alerted Smith that after “carefully reviewing” his complaint, the office claimed it lacked jurisdiction and considered the matter closed. That office also did not return a request for an explanation.

With respect to the retaliation, at least, Smith did get some help from his union, which was ultimately successful in overturning the cemetery’s suspension of Smith without pay.

With allies like Tornblom in the Army, the cemetery funneled millions over the years that followed to contractors hired to modernize cemetery records. In April 2005, in fact, Tornblom testified before a House subcommittee that the cemetery’s automation program was proceeding swimmingly. Tornblom said the automation would “reduce the risk of errors associated with the manual data access and maintenance,” she testified. “I would like to invite you, Mr. Chairman [New York Republican Rep. Jim Walsh], and members of the subcommittee and staff to visit the cemetery and observe a demonstration of the new automation capability,” Tornblom told the committee. “Mr. Metzler would be very happy to host you if you would have the time to actually see the improvements we are making at the cemetery.”

It is unclear what improvements Tornblom was referring to. The Army last month released an investigation into the Arlington scandal. While that probe does not mention the culpability of any Army officials, it admits that shocking burial mistakes continued because the modernization effort failed. “Although it is not known with certainty how much has been expended on [automation], evidence established that at least three contractors over a seven-year time period were awarded multiple contracts” to do the work. “Despite these expenditures,” the report says, “at the time of this investigation, ANC still prepares and maintains manual records.” The Army was able to track only $5.5 million spent on the project. Smith thinks the real number could easily top $20 million. He said that far more than $5 million was appropriated by Congress over the years to do the work, and he alleges that Higginbotham moved funds from other innocuous-sounding accounts to the project as well, making the real total that much more difficult to pinpoint.

Army officials declined to make Tornblom available for an interview. She is expected to appear before Congress this month, however. The Senate Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight is set to conduct a hearing on the Arlington scandal on July 29, and Metzler, Higginbotham and Tornblom are among the witnesses invited to testify.

Smith was clearly on the outs with his bosses at the cemetery as far back as 2004, though he kept his job for a while. “I hung in there until 2007,” Smith said. Then he retired earlier than he had planned, because of what he says was continued harassment in a hostile work environment at Arlington.

He isn’t alone. The last two budget directors at Arlington, including Smith, left in disgust. The last two information technology managers also quit, extremely concerned about the validity of the cemetery’s modernization effort. Two of the last four cemetery spokeswomen quit in disgust. A third — Gina Gray — was fired in what she said was an act of retaliation for her own whistle-blowing. As they allegedly retaliated against Smith and Gray, cemetery officials relied on the advice and counsel of Army officials in another office, the Military District of Washington.

After her firing, Gray also appealed to the Defense Department’s inspector general, and in October 2008 the inspector general’s office initiated an investigation into its circumstances. The Pentagon released the resulting report on June 29, 2010, the night before a House Armed Services Committee hearing on the Arlington scandal. The inspector general found that Gray’s firing was not an act of retaliation.

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Salon began to uncover the burial mistakes and related financial mischief at Arlington in a yearlong investigation that started a year ago.

Top Army officials continue to insist they did not know about the burial fiascos and related contracting and budgeting shenanigans that have mushroomed into a full-blown scandal at Arlington National Cemetery.

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.

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