The top official at Arlington National Cemetery claims he was unaware of the most recently reported burial error at the cemetery, possibly, he says, because he was away at the time it occurred. Cemetery employee records, however, show Superintendent John Metzler present and working at Arlington when the cemetery discovered this most recently disclosed burial foul-up, which resulted in digging up and moving the remains of one service member the cemetery had accidentally buried on top of another.
Arlington officials also continue to struggle to locate key paperwork that must be completed when remains are moved. The paperwork would confirm that Grabe's remains were moved and explain the circumstances surrounding that decision. The Army, which oversees Arlington, has been unable to locate any such documents.
The still-missing burial paperwork adds to the mounting evidence suggesting that top Arlington officials may have disregarded cemetery rules in this case. The explanation from Metzler, meanwhile, raises serious questions about the conduct of top cemetery officials with respect to repeated burial mix-ups at Arlington. Cemetery officials have already established a pattern of incomplete, inconsistent or contradictory responses when asked by Salon to account for misplaced or misidentified remains at the cemetery.
Salon reported earlier this week on the case of Air Force Master Sgt. Marion Grabe. On Jan. 28, 2008, Arlington accidentally buried Grabe's urn on top of the remains of a staff sergeant already in that same plot. No one noticed until May 15, 2008, when the staff sergeant's widow found Grabe's headstone above her husband. The cemetery claims it dug up Grabe, moved her remains to a new plot and ordered new headstones for both service members.
In that article, cemetery Deputy Superintendent Thurman Higginbotham admitted via an Army spokesman that he learned about the mix-up in May 2008 when the widow discovered Grabe's headstone above her husband and complained to cemetery authorities. Superintendent John Metzler, however, claimed ignorance about the whole issue until Friday, Oct. 23, 2009, when Salon first began to question the Army and the cemetery about the Grabe error.
What was not in that article was Metzler's explanation for his ignorance. During a recent, lengthy back and forth, the Army sent Salon, via e-mail, the following statement attributable to Metzler: "The deputy superintendent has the authority to act on my behalf in my absence or when I am not available," Metzler explained. Metzler was raising the possibility that he might have been away from the cemetery or otherwise unreachable on the day in question.
The superintendent does travel frequently. However, a log kept by a former employee shows Metzler working at the cemetery on May 15, 2008, the day the mistake was discovered, including attending a meeting from 1 to 2 p.m. to begin planning for events surrounding Veterans Day 2008. Those notes also show Metzler working at the cemetery in the days prior to and after May 15, such as Metzler's attendance at an "action officer meeting" held on May 16.
The statement from Metzler also included the following: "Ideally, I should be kept informed of all situations requiring special attention," he wrote. "However, because the operational tempo at Arlington National Cemetery never slows down, that may not always be practical."
In other words, even if Metzler was there, he and Higginbotham were so busy they did not discuss fixing the burial mistake by digging up Grabe's remains and moving them. Salon asked, "Does it concern the superintendent that remains were discovered in the wrong location, moved, and new headstones were ordered, but his deputy apparently failed to inform him? What does he plan to do about that, if anything?"
Metzler did not respond to that question, but the back and forth between the Army, the cemetery and Salon exposed some potentially serious departures from cemetery policy in this case, including some key paperwork that remains missing.
Cemetery rules require Metzler to prepare a memo explaining the movement of remains within 10 days of digging. On Oct. 28, Salon asked for a copy of that memo. So far, it has not been found. "The records search is still under way," Army spokesman Gary Tallman said on Nov. 3. "That's all I can tell you at this time."
Those rules also dictate that no remains can be moved "without the express, prior approval of the superintendent." Metzler, however, clearly did not approve the digging up and moving of remains in this case if he did not know anything about it until October 2009.
As Salon previously reported, those rules also encourage obtaining "family or representative permission" before moving remains, though Dorothy Nolte, Grabe's official next of kin, is adamant she did not provide permission for the cemetery to dig up her sister. In fact, Nolte says she learned about the whole affair from Salon 17 months after the fact.
Meanwhile, over the course of many months, as Salon has investigated problems at Arlington, statements from cemetery officials have been wildly inconsistent and contradictory about this and other burial mix-ups. Some of the statements, most issued via cemetery or Army spokesmen, have appeared in previous Salon articles, but this full pattern has not been assembled until now.
Among Salon's earliest queries on the subject was this one, sent in writing to cemetery spokeswoman Kaitlin Horst last July 10: "Is (Deputy Superintendent Thurman) Higginbotham or (Superintendent John) Metzler aware of any information that suggests that in some cases, the person identified on a headstone may not, in fact, be the person buried underneath that headstone?" Salon asked. "For example, has the cemetery ever begun digging a grave, only to find that there is already someone there, though the grave is unmarked?"
Horst responded via telephone some days later. "The answer to that is no," she said. "To the best of our knowledge, we are not aware of any situation like that."
Ten days after submitting that question, Salon obtained proof that in 2003, the cemetery went to bury a service member in a grave only to find unmarked remains in that spot. The response from the cemetery was to cover up the unknown remains with dirt and grass and walk away. Cemetery officials then kept that secret for six years until Salon brought the case to the cemetery's attention.
In response, Horst admitted in writing that "Arlington National Cemetery officials have known about this situation since 2003, when in the process of preparing for a burial, a casket was discovered in grave 449 in Section 68," she wrote. That was the grave Salon asked about. "The identity of the remains in grave 449 in Section 68 is unknown at this time," she confirmed.
The cemetery then placed a stone marked "Unknown" above the grave -- the first unknown soldier so designated in a quarter-century. Because of DNA testing, there are no longer supposed to be any unknown soldiers. The cemetery has resisted digging in the dirt to identify the remains.
On Oct. 23 Salon asked the following: "Can Superintendent John Metzler or Deputy Superintendent Thurman Higginbotham tell me on the record if this is the only instance of people being buried in the wrong location?"
This time, Army Spokesman Dave Foster responded, "To the best of our knowledge, grave site 449 at Section 68 is the only 'unknown' grave site of which we are aware."
Perhaps Foster was parsing words. Salon had asked about the possibility of "people being buried in the wrong location." Foster had reported ignorance only about any more "unknowns."
Either way, on Friday, Oct. 23, Salon asked the cemetery and the Army about accidentally burying Grabe's remains on top of the unrelated staff sergeant. Foster then admitted that the cemetery had known about that one, too, since May of 2008 -- or at least Deputy Superintendent Higginbotham did. Salon's question that day was, allegedly, the first time Metzler had heard anything about any of it.
In the wake of a Salon investigation, the Army Friday announced a broad investigation into “lost accountability” at some graves at Arlington National Cemetery, along with shoddy record keeping and other issues at the cemetery.
Army Secretary John McHugh ordered the inquiry after a series of articles in Salon showed the cemetery found an unknown casket in a grave in 2003, covered it up with dirt and quietly walked away, and also buried another service member in the wrong plot in 2008 on top of a soldier already in that grave. In that second case, the cemetery also failed to alert family members when they dug up and moved remains to fix the problem. The Salon reports suggested these kinds of errors could be widespread, since the cemetery has failed to implement a computer system to track burials as other cemeteries have, despite nearly a decade of work and nearly $6 million spent on the effort.
“As the final resting place of our nation’s heroes, any questions about the integrity or accountability of (Arlington’s) operations should be examined in a manner befitting their service and sacrifice,” McHugh said in a statement. He directed the Army inspector general to spearhead this new inquiry.
The Army on Friday also released the results of a previous inquiry sparked by Salon’s first report on the unknown casket quietly covered up in 2003. The Army says “non-invasive geophysical analysis … strongly suggest[s]” that the unknown casket is either a husband or a wife who died years apart that should have been buried together in a nearby grave. (Spouses are stacked together in one grave at Arlington.)
Instead, the Army says, the pair was somehow placed near each other in separate graves. This seems unlikely, since it would have required engineers to dig in the wrong spot to bury the second spouse right near the previous spouse’s headstone -- which would have showed the correct grave location. It would also require engineers to go and bury the second spouse and not notice that the first spouse wasn’t in the grave already. The Army said it will not exhume the unknown casket and perform a DNA analysis to be sure of the identity of the unknown there. Instead, they will simply order a new headstone.
McHugh also ordered the inspector general to look into why the Army did nothing but cover up the unknown with dirt and grass from 2003 until 2009, when Salon revealed the problem.
Air Force Master Sgt. Marion Grabe passed away on Christmas day in 2007. She had served 26 years as an operating room nurse in the Air Force she loved, including 17 months in a Manila hospital treating wounded soldiers during the Vietnam War.
In death, Grabe wanted to mark her service to her country with a suitably honorable burial at Arlington National Cemetery. "She wanted to be buried there so bad," recalled Grabe's sister, Dorothy Nolte. Thinking of the fiasco that ensued with Grabe's burial at Arlington, Nolte added sadly, "She deserved better."
On Jan. 28, 2008, the cemetery interred Grabe's cremated remains in the wrong plot, on top of the casket of another deceased service member. The Army then moved Grabe's remains without requesting permission from Nolte, her next of kin -- despite cemetery regulations urging efforts to obtain permission from family -- but later claimed to Salon that it had notified the next of kin. The official who moved Grabe without family approval is the same official who may bear primary responsibility for the poor record keeping at the cemetery, which has already resulted in at least one "unknown" grave, as previously documented by Salon, in a cemetery that is supposed to have no new "unknowns." And the mistake is part of a pattern of errors at the cemetery, where several current and former cemetery employees tell Salon there may be a large number of similarly misplaced remains.
Arlington has more than 300,000 graves. Some cemeteries of similar size began tracking grave locations and burials years ago via electronic records and satellites. Despite paying nearly $6 million over the past decade to a clutch of contractors with ties to cemetery managers to create a similar system, Arlington has almost nothing to show for the money. As a result, the cemetery still tries to track around 30 burials a day with paper records and more than 100 paper maps. Preventable mistakes occur, current and former cemetery staff say.
In Grabe's case, the cemetery buried her urn in Grave 2133 in Section 67, a stretch of grass on the southern edge of the cemetery near the Pentagon and, fittingly, with the shining, curving spears of the Air Force Memorial rising up into the sky in the background, just off the cemetery grounds. It would have been an apt resting place for the 63-year-old former nurse who enlisted in the Air Force in 1963.
In a paperwork foul-up, however, cemetery officials forgot that a staff sergeant named Doe had previously been buried in Grave 2133 of Section 67. (Doe is a pseudonym; Salon knows the individual's name but is choosing not to use it.) His casket was 7 feet down, and engineers did not even see it when Grabe's urn went in the same spot, buried under 3 feet of earth. The cemetery buried Grabe directly on top of the unrelated staff sergeant.
Arlington then placed Grabe's headstone above her remains, leaving Doe beneath her, unmarked. (It remains unclear what happened to Doe's headstone. Perhaps it never arrived at the cemetery in yet another foul-up.)
That's how it stayed for four months. It might have been like that forever, current and former cemetery staff say, just like many other mistakes. Most of the errors are invisible to the naked eye, buried beneath the straight lines of perfectly aligned headstones that imply a military precision to the burials at Arlington despite disarray under the ground.
Salon recently reported on another case where the cemetery went to bury someone, only to find unknown, unmarked remains already in the grave. The cemetery kept that quiet for six years, leaving those remains unmarked under just a patch of grass until Salon exposed it. The cemetery's solution was to place a stone marked "Unknown" on the grave -- effectively creating a new unknown soldier, in an era when DNA testing has made such a designation obsolete -- rather than dig up the grave to identify the occupant.
In Grabe's case, however, it was the relative of someone buried at Arlington who noticed a problem. On May 15, 2008, Staff Sgt. Doe's widow visited her husband's grave, 2133 in Section 67, but found Grabe's headstone there. In a panic, she visited the Arlington visitor center, where workers could not explain the situation. By the time she reached the cemetery's nearby administrative offices, the widow was in "full boil," according to one official familiar with the events of that day.
Cemetery and Army officials say they immediately dug up Grabe and moved her that day or the next, though this mistake, like others, has been kept quiet. This is the first time the error involving Grabe's remains has been made public.
The Army, which oversees Arlington, confirmed the account assembled by Salon. "In May of 2008, Arlington interment officials were alerted to a potential discrepancy -- what appeared to be a mismarked headstone," by a member of the staff sergeant's family, Army spokesman Dave Foster confirmed in a statement to Salon. "A study of the records and graves found that there was an unintended burial of cremated remains in that same plot," he wrote. "The situation, once discovered, was rectified immediately," he added. " Master Sgt. Grabe's cremated remains were relocated to a new grave, 2130-1 with family notification, and new headstones were ordered" for both graves, Foster said.
Foster claimed that despite the foul-up, the cemetery did the right thing: Officials moved Grabe, ordered new headstones, and the "family notification" meant that the officials alerted Nolte, Grabe's sister, of the error and the new location of her sister's remains. Nolte, after all, is Grabe's official next of kin.
"Wrong," Nolte told me in a telephone interview from her home in Burns, Tenn. Nolte is adamant that no one at the cemetery alerted her of the burial error or that her sister's remains had been dug up and moved. "There was no phone message. No mail. No e-mail. There was nothing," she explained. "Nobody notified us of anything like this."
The first Nolte heard of the cemetery moving her sister's remains, she says, was when Salon called her in mid-October. She maintains a file of all the material and correspondence from Arlington -- even an old, unused cemetery parking pass -- in a file in the house she has lived in for 13 years. Nolte's file still shows her sister buried in Grave 2133, where she was mistakenly placed above Staff Sgt. Doe.
Failure to alert Nolte isn't just insensitive; it's an apparent violation of cemetery policy, which requires the cemetery to "obtain family or representative permission, as the superintendent or deputy superintendent deem necessary or appropriate" before moving remains. It certainly would not have been difficult to ask Nolte. Salon found her with one phone call.
John Metzler is the cemetery superintendent and Thurman Higginbotham is the cemetery deputy superintendent. Both men have been there for years. Higginbotham is the official responsible for steering millions of dollars to contractors in the protracted and so far unsuccessful effort to computerize the cemetery's record keeping.
According to Foster, the Army spokesman, it was Higginbotham who learned about the Grabe error in May 2008. Higginbotham, Foster wrote, "undertook immediate corrective action" by moving Grabe and ordering new headstones. Foster says Higginbotham is also the cemetery official claiming that Nolte, Grabe's sister, was alerted when the cemetery moved Grabe's remains. "The deputy superintendent indicated that family notifications took place regarding this situation," Foster said.
The fact that Nolte is so adamant that she was never notified is not the only anomaly in this case. Foster says that while Higginbotham admitted he learned of the Grabe mix-up back in May 2008, Metzler told the Army he knew nothing about any of this until I alerted the cemetery and the Army on Oct. 23. "The Arlington Superintendent [John Metzler] indicated to us that he learned of the situation on Friday, October 23rd," Foster wrote.
That is odd, since Arlington's own regulations dictate that to move remains requires "the express, prior approval of the superintendent" -- meaning Metzler.
Those rules also require that within 10 days of moving remains, the superintendent must write up a memorandum describing the "specific reasons" for the move. Salon requested a copy of that memo last week. The Army says it is still looking for those documents. The rules also require that corrected copies of the new burial records be sent to the next of kin, in this case, Nolte.
Nolte, of course, says she never got those records. It is just more insult to injury, she says. "She spent 26 years in the Air Force that she loved so much," Nolte lamented about her sister. "My, oh, my. What a mess."
According to a cemetery source with intimate knowledge of Arlington's record-keeping problems, the mess is bigger than one misplaced master sergeant. " I hope you understand that the [Grabe] story," said the source, "while real, indicates that there may be thousands of these problems that they don't know about."
"What about the goof-ups that don't have a loved one who knows where to look and what to look for?"
Salon's Mark Benjamin was on "Morning Joe" Thursday morning to discuss his investigation into continuing problems at Arlington National Cemetery. Specifically, he was discussing what he reported last week, that Arlington has its first unknown soldier in 25 years, because of a bureaucratic snafu -- the cemetery lost the paperwork identifying the remains. Video is below.
For the first time in a generation, Arlington National Cemetery has marked the burial of an unknown on its storied grounds. Only this time, 25 years since the last interment at the Tomb of the Unknowns, the identity of the body remains a mystery not because the ravages of war made identification impossible, but because in a bureaucratic error the cemetery lost the paperwork showing the identity of the remains.
Arlington recently installed a headstone marked "Unknown" above grave 449 in section 68 of the cemetery. "A grave marker has been placed at grave 449 in section 68 noting the remains as Unknown," Army spokesman Dave Foster confirmed to Salon in a statement.
This is the first time the cemetery has marked an unknown since 1984, when Arlington entombed the remains of a Vietnam veteran in the Tomb of the Unknowns in a ceremony rife with pomp and circumstance. Former President Reagan presided, posthumously awarding that service member the Medal of Honor. And that unknown soldier was supposed to be the last unknown interred in any U.S. military cemetery, given advances in DNA technology and a multimillion dollar effort to account for every soldier and identify all remains. A body that could not be identified was supposed to be a thing of the past.
But Arlington's newest unknown, buried without special ceremony, is the exception to what was intended to be the rule. The cemetery buried someone in grave 449 -- likely relatively recently, since that section is an active part of the cemetery -- and then lost track of the paperwork showing the identity of the remains. In 2003, workers went to bury a newly deceased service member in that plot, only to find unmarked remains in the ground. Paper records had listed the plot as vacant.
Rather than publicly admit this error, Arlington quietly left the remains unmarked for six years. For those six years, passersby saw only an empty plot of green grass in spot 449, surrounded by stones etched with names.
This remained the case until this past summer, when Salon began working on tips from current and former workers at Arlington who said these kinds of mistakes occur with disturbing frequency at the cemetery, which calls itself "our nation's most sacred shrine."
At first, Arlington denied any problem. Salon asked the cemetery last summer, "Has the cemetery ever dug a grave only to find there is already someone there, though the grave is unmarked?" Cemetery spokeswoman Kaitlin Horst responded, "We are not aware of any situation like that." Salon later produced internal paper records showing that the cemetery did not know the identity of the remains in grave 449.
That apparently caused Arlington to change its tune. "Arlington National Cemetery officials have known about this situation since 2003, when in the process of preparing for a burial, a casket was discovered in grave 449 in Section 68," Horst then admitted. "At that time, a review of records took place to locate the corresponding documents. The files could not be matched."
Horst insisted that this was the only mistake of its kind. "At this time," she said, "cemetery officials are not aware of any other instances."
In this case, the cemetery lost the paperwork among the blizzard of paper records the cemetery still uses to track around 30 burials a day. While other cemeteries have computerized burial operations and now track grave locations via satellite, Arlington has failed to implement a similar system despite spending millions on favored contractors working on the fruitless effort for nearly a decade.
Arlington admits that the cemetery's burial paperwork does not match the location of some headstones in numerous cases, but cemetery officials insist that while the paperwork is wrong, all the headstones stand above the correct remains. This includes discrepancies in section 60, the final resting place of 600 veterans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The cemetery's 2008 report to Congress showed an example where cemetery officials tried to locate grave 6 in section 60 using one of over 100 paper maps the cemetery uses to guide operations. "When ANC went to locate the grave by using the burial map, section 60 grave 6 was in a different location than the actual physical location of the headstone marked section 60 grave 6," the report admits. The paperwork is wrong, the cemetery claims, but the headstone is in the right place.
Foster, the Army spokesman, said the Army is investigating how to identify the remains in grave 449, but would not reveal any details to Salon. "We cannot comment on an ongoing investigation," he said. "However, once the investigation is complete and reviewed by officials at Arlington National Cemetery, it is our intent to inform you at the earliest opportunity of what course of action has been deemed appropriate."
But the fact that the cemetery installed a marble headstone marked "Unknown," rather than the small temporary markers used at Arlington, suggests a degree of permanence. Also, the fact that the Army, which runs Arlington, has done little to identify these remains over the past 12 weeks suggests a reluctance to take the most rudimentary steps towards a possible identification.
For example, current and former service members represent a large percentage of the remains at Arlington. Many are buried in their dress uniforms, which include a name tag. Discovering the identity of the remains in grave 449 might be as simple as using a backhoe and Google.
However, this poses the risk of triggering a ripple-effect public relations disaster. The cemetery does not know if the remains in grave 449 are unknown because the intended headstone was mistakenly placed above another grave. If so, the identity of those remains then becomes unknown. And so on, and so on.
Foster did not return an e-mail asking why the Army has not disinterred the remains for purposes of identification.
The idea that Arlington is creating unknown soldiers by bungling paperwork is particularly ironic given the military's otherwise exhaustive and often valiant efforts to live up to the "leave-no-soldier-behind" ethos. In 2003, the Army consolidated various offices that had already been working for over 30 years to find and identify remains into the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command. Around 400 service members work full time, conducting roughly 50 missions per year, scouring the battlefields of Vietnam, Korea and even Germany for remains that are returned to the largest forensic anthropology laboratory in the world, located in Hawaii. The Department of Defense regularly issues news bulletins documenting the successful repatriation and identification of remains from long-ago conflicts, despite the obvious difficulty of the task.
Remains that cannot be immediately identified are stored in Hawaii -- but never buried anonymously. The idea is that continuing advances in DNA testing will eventually result in the identification of all remains.
These efforts even resulted in the identification of the remains from Vietnam that Reagan helped lay to rest in Arlington's Tomb of the Unknowns 25 years ago. In 1998, the remains were disinterred and identified as those of U.S. Air Force 1st Lt. Michael Blassie. Blassie was later laid to rest in his hometown, St. Louis.
This unending dedication to preventing another unknown soldier lies in stark contrast to the paper-pushing going on at Arlington, which has resulted in at least one new unknown where most people would least expect it.
A top official at Arlington National Cemetery steered millions of dollars to a handful of contractors operating a series of different companies over the past several years. When the contractors would leave one company and start another, the official would hire them again, yet the work they were hired to do has never been completed. The firms have ostensibly worked since 2003 to computerize burial records at the cemetery, but to date, despite receiving as much as $5.6 million, they have produced almost nothing in return.
The small group of contractors, all favored by Deputy Superintendent Thurman Higginbotham, includes one currently facing more than a dozen counts of child sex offenses and a company that a cemetery information technology manager felt was so unqualified to handle sensitive private data that the manager resigned in disgust.
Since the contractors have failed to produce, the cemetery continues to rely on a flurry of paper records in an attempt to keep up with around 30 burials a day. Paper goes missing, current and former workers there say, resulting in burial fiascoes that occur with disturbing frequency.
For example, Salon reported this past summer on workers who went to bury a service member in an active part of the cemetery only to find unknown, unmarked remains already there even though paper records said the grave was unoccupied. The cemetery at first claimed such things do not occur. When Salon produced the grave card labeled "CASKET IN GRAVE REMAINS UNKNOWN," and photos of the unmarked grave, the cemetery admitted the error -- but insisted that is the only case.
In a 2008 report to Congress, the cemetery admitted to poor record-keeping across the cemetery, including Section 60, the final resting place of troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. "There are numerous examples of discrepancies that exist between burial maps, the physical location of headstones, and the burial records/grave cards," the report admits. Despite that admission and the claims of current and former employees, top cemetery officials insist the correct remains are always beneath the headstones above them.
The process of trying to address Arlington's record-keeping problems by computerizing the burial process has been under way for at least six years The cemetery's de facto boss, Higginbotham, has spearheaded the computerization efforts. The plan is to duplicate operations at other large cemeteries that already electronically handle burial records and next-of-kin data and track grave locations via satellite, making foul-ups far less likely.
Electronic systems to record grave information and track grave locations via satellite are relatively common. The Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, for example, is a similar age and size to Arlington and has used computer systems and satellites to track graves for years. That cemetery did not return calls for comment on the cost of implementing that system. The Department of Veterans Affairs, which maintains more than 2.9 million grave sites at 130 national cemeteries in 39 states, tracks information on graves through its electronic Burial Operating Support System. In fact, family can track the locations of many veterans' graves right off the V.A. Web site using the "Nationwide Gravesite Locator." Arlington, which contains the remains of roughly 320,000 service members and their families, is run by the Army. The cemetery Web site does not offer any matching capability because it does not exist.
Interviews, internal cemetery e-mails and budget documents show that since 2003, to do this work Higginbotham has guided millions of dollars to a small cast of contractors operating under a succession of different company names. The contracts were also awarded through a bidding process that either eliminates any competition for bids or tightly limits competition. Internal e-mails show Higginbotham appearing to exert complete control over the awarding of the contracts. The companies, however, have produced almost nothing and the cemetery still relies almost exclusively on pieces of paper to track operations, leading to mistakes like the kind uncovered by Salon.
Under Higginbotham's direction, the cemetery seems to have awarded some, if not all, of the contracts to computerize operations to companies designated as small, disadvantaged businesses. The Small Business Administration designates such firms as "8(a)" companies. The firms can compete for specially set aside government contracts under reduced or no competition.
In 2003, the cemetery hired a company called Standard Technology Inc. to begin the work. The project manager was someone described by cemetery employees as a Higginbotham favorite at that time, Richard Greaux. Within a year, Greaux struck out on his own, founding his own Manassas-Va.-based company, Offise Solutions Inc. The contract followed Greaux there.
Records from the Small Business Administration show the agency granted Greaux's company, Offise Solutions, the small, disadvantaged 8(a) status on July 12, 2005. "We are official," Greaux e-mailed Higginbotham that day. "At last," Higginbotham fired back.
For reasons that remain unclear, in late 2006 Higginbotham and Greaux had an apparent falling out. Higginbotham steered the work to another company. An internal e-mail from a cemetery employee to Higginbotham on Sept. 8, 2006, asked about Greaux, "Do you still want him to be the 8A firm that does this?" The employee asked Higginbotham in that e-mail whether to drop Greaux, asking if Higginbotham "wants to consider another firm."
Higginbotham typed back on his BlackBerry: "Yes. ATG."
He was referring to Carlton Wells, who at that time was the chief operations officer at a company called Alpha Technology Group, with offices in Waldorf, Md., and Newalla, Okla.
E-mails show Higginbotham saying that the contract would go to ATG with no competition from other firms. An e-mail from Higginbotham to a government contracting official on Sept. 6, 2006, says, "It is my understanding that we are going sole source 8a." Sole source refers to a contract granted with no competition, a process carried out when only one firm can possibly perform the work. (Other companies can computerize burial operations using satellites and have done so successfully at other cemeteries.)
Once hired, Wells and Higginbotham worked closely with another ATG employee, Bobbie Garrett, to perform much of the nuts and bolts computer work at Arlington. In 2008, however, things got messy for Higginbotham and ATG. In October 2008, the Army Criminal Investigation Command launched an investigation into the cemetery after someone at Arlington impersonated Gina Gray, a former spokeswoman for the cemetery, online, and Gray appealed to Army investigators.
The Army investigation ultimately found wire fraud at Arlington and said Higginbotham had Garrett hack into Gray's government computer. Investigators were able to determine that Garrett had hacked into Gray's computer on Higginbotham's behalf and found e-mails from Higginbotham containing information from that computer, but could not prove conclusively that either of the men was the person who had sent out e-mails using Gray's account, pretending to be her. Investigators also cited Higginbotham for "false statements" during the probe, though the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia declined to prosecute the case.
Garrett resigned from ATG soon after the Army investigation started. When Army investigators sought to interview Garrett, the company said he was away, visiting his sick mother in Ohio. Investigators never found him. At some point during this period, though it is unclear exactly when, Wells also left ATG.
Records show that Wells and Garrett later teamed up again and quietly incorporated a new company, Optimum Technical Solutions, in Jacksonville, Fla., on March 18, 2009. In June, cemetery officials recently confirmed, Arlington hired Optimum Technical Solutions to do more of the same kind of work computerizing records, giving the firm a four-month contract worth $193,000.
That work was likely disrupted, however. U.S. marshals arrested Garrett on July 31 as he walked off a plane in Columbus, Ohio. He faces trial in December on more than a dozen counts of child sex abuse in Charles County, Md. Also that month, the former I.T. manager at Arlington resigned after Higginbotham forced the manager to ship two computer servers to Wells and Garrett in Florida containing the personal data -- including Social Security numbers -- of thousands of deceased soldiers and contact information on their next of kin. The I.T. manager quit after warning Higginbotham that the shipment violated privacy law.
Higginbotham and the revolving cast of contractors have almost nothing to show for the years-long effort to computerize burial records. Burials are managed by distributing dozens of paper schedules and more than 100 paper cemetery maps, according to cemetery documents. A report to Congress from fiscal year 2008 shows the cemetery had already spent $3.7 million on the project by the end of fiscal year 2006, and expected to spend an additional $1.885 million through fiscal 2009.
Higginbotham has refused to talk to Salon throughout the continuing series of articles on the cemetery. While Garrett was released on bail on Aug. 19, his whereabouts remain unknown. Wells declined to talk about the contracts, calling his work for the cemetery "a private matter." Greaux confirmed his work for the cemetery, first at STI and then Offise Solutions, but then wouldn't discuss anything further, saying, "I'd like to talk to Mr. Higginbotham first."
Thousands of people lined up in a seemingly endless line to pay their last respects to Sen. Ted Kennedy at the J.F.K. library in Boston on Friday, one day before his burial at Arlington National Cemetery. During that procession, a select list of guests had been asked to stand vigil at the senator's side as the visitors filed by. Among them were Kennedy's nephew Bobby Shriver, former staffer Patti Sarris, now a federal judge in Massachusetts, and Tim Hagen, the senator's old college buddy.
A couple from Bedford, Mass., Brian and Alma Hart, had also been asked to stand vigil at Kennedy's side for an hour Friday night. "Basically we were sitting in a chair next to the casket," said Brian Hart, who remembered watching the seemingly endless line of well-wishers stream by, estimated to be in the tens of thousands. "It was something to see."
The Harts are not former staffers or part of the Kennedy family. They became linked to Kennedy, interestingly, through Arlington National Cemetery, where Kennedy would be laid to rest the next day.
The beauty and dignity of a funeral at Arlington, including Kennedy's, is obvious. Because of the Harts, however, Kennedy learned about just a few of the serious problems at Arlington that lurk behind the pristine veneer of the historic cemetery where his brother, John and Robert, are also buried.
The Harts' son John died in Iraq in 2003. At the time, Arlington National Cemetery told his parents they would have to wait weeks before the cemetery would bury John there. "If we waived the chapel service we could get it to six weeks," Hart says the cemetery told him. The family appealed to Kennedy, who intervened on the Harts' behalf. The cemetery cut the wait in half.
Kennedy then attended John's funeral. Working with the Harts, Kennedy also worked tirelessly in the Senate for more armored vehicles, body armor and other equipment that could have saved John's life.
Six years later, however, the delays for funerals for soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan persist at Arlington. That wait time also reflects a pattern of serious, though little known, problems at the storied cemetery. Earlier this month, the New York Post reported that Jill Stephenson, mother of Army Ranger Cpl. Benjamin Kopp, would have to wait until October for her son's funeral, in part because she wanted the full honors for which he was eligible, including a horse-drawn caisson. Kopp died July 18 from wounds suffered a week earlier in Afghanistan.
The article noted that that even though casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan are supposedly Arlington's first priority, families are regularly told they must wait two months for a funeral there. "The fact that that isn't fixed at Arlington baffles me," said Hart. "The whole family life is stuck on hold until that funeral happens."
Other problems include claims by current and former cemetery employees that even in the newest sections of the cemetery, headstones might not match the identities of the bodies beneath and the cemetery has lost track of some remains. To illustrate this point, Salon last month showed how the cemetery dug down in an active part of the graveyard a few years ago and found remains already there, though records showed the plot to be empty. The cemetery, which had denied such problems, now admits that cemetery officials have no idea who is buried there.
The problem is that unlike other similar-sized cemeteries, Arlington has failed to install a system to computerize burial operations and keep track of graves via satellite, despite a ten-year effort and countless dollars spent on the effort. Another Salon article last month showed that a contractor working on that project was particularly close to the de facto boss at Arlington, Deputy Superintendent Thurman Higginbotham, and that Higginbotham and the contractor, Bobbie Garrett, were the focus of an Army investigation that found wire fraud at the cemetery after Higginbotham had Garrett break into an employee's computer there.
Army investigators couldn't find Garrett during the course of their work, but Salon found him operating a new company, Optimum Technical Solutions, in Jacksonville, Fla., and showed that the cemetery had rehired Garrett with a six-figure contract back in June.
U.S. Marshals arrested Garrett in a Columbus, Ohio, airport a few days after Salon began asking the government about him. He faces 14 charges, including child abuse, second-degree sex offenses, third-degree sex offenses, fourth-degree sex offenses, unnatural or perverted practices, and second-degree assault.
Hart's son, John, is buried in section 60 at Arlington, the final resting place of more than 600 troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. As at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, known to many as simply "The Wall," mourners in section 60 decorate the graves with mementos, poems, letters and photographs, particularly around Memorial Day. Unlike the wall, where the artifacts are carefully preserved and literally end up in museums, Arlington throws the lion's share of artifacts left in Section 60 in the trash.
Senators like Kennedy can try to help their individual constituents, but veterans' advocates have been frustrated that no one in Congress or the White House has taken a closer look into the widespread problems at Arlington.
"We continue to be concerned about the revelations at Arlington and we have yet to see an adequate response from Congress or the Army," Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said in a recent interview. "Despite national reporting on this, there has yet to be an official response from the president. It is clear that these are not isolated incidents and there are deep-rooted problems at Arlington."
Brian Hart believes soldiers and veterans lost a crucial ally with Kennedy's death. He cited statistics showing vastly increased numbers of armored vehicles, in part, because of Kennedy's work: "Frankly, he saved several thousand lives based on his work on armored vehicles, no doubt about it," Hart says. He is also grateful for Kennedy's work getting a more timely funeral for his son: "We would have had to wait a lot longer to have John buried if it had not been for him."
Since John's funeral, Hart has visited Arlington with Kennedy on several occasions, privately, most recently in January 2007. Kennedy expressed concern about the similarities between Iraq and Vietnam and about leaving troops in Iraq too long. Brian talked to Victoria Kennedy last night, and they agreed they would visit Arlington again together soon.
Kennedy liked to visit Arlington early in the morning, Hart recalled. "He said the best time to have private time in a public space was early in the morning."
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