Government Accountability Office (GAO) 
Finds Itself Accused by Subrata Ghoshroy of
Cover-Up in $26 Billion Missile System

WILLIAM J. BROAD / New York Times 2apr2006

A senior Congressional investigator has accused his agency of covering up a scientific fraud among builders of a $26 billion system meant to shield the nation from nuclear attack. The disputed weapon is the centerpiece of the Bush administration's antimissile plan, which is expected to cost more than $250 billion over the next two decades.

The investigator, Subrata Ghoshroy of the Government Accountability Office, led technical analyses of a prototype warhead for the antimissile weapon in an 18-month study, winning awards for his "great care" and "tremendous skill and patience."

Mr. Ghoshroy now says his agency ignored evidence that the two main contractors had doctored data, skewed test results and made false statements in a 2002 report that credited the contractors with revealing the warhead's failings to the government.

The agency strongly denied his accusations, insisting that its antimissile report was impartial and that it was right to exonerate the contractors of a coverup.

The dispute is unusual. Rarely in the 85-year history of the G.A.O., an investigative arm of Congress with a reputation for nonpartisan accuracy, has a dissenter emerged publicly from its ranks.

And Mr. Ghoshroy's assertions raise new questions about the Boeing Company's military arm, the main contractor for the troubled $26 billion system of interceptor rockets now being installed in Alaska and California. The system's "kill vehicles" are to zoom into space and destroy enemy warheads by force of impact.

But years of test failures have thrown the program into disarray, and the military has recently begun to look for a kill vehicle of greater reliability.

Mr. Ghoshroy, 56, a senior analyst with seven years of service at the accountability office, makes his charges in a recent letter to Representative Howard L. Berman, a California Democrat who, along with Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, originally requested the G.A.O. study. Mr. Berman's office provided his letter to The New York Times, along with dozens of Mr. Ghoshroy's documents.

After the G.A.O. made its report public in February 2002, Mr. Ghoshroy quietly tried to have his agency reverse itself and grew increasingly frustrated at its denials. He took a sabbatical at Harvard.

John P. Holdren, a Harvard physicist who oversaw his leave as director of the university's program on science, technology and public policy, praised Mr. Ghoshroy as "smart, capable and honest," and added, "I think Subrata's been right to stick to his guns."

Mr. Ghoshroy is now on leave from the accountability office as a research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In an interview, David M. Walker, the head of the G.A.O. (formerly known as the General Accounting Office), called the senior analyst "a relatively low-level, disgruntled employee" out of step with his technical peers.

He denied that his agency had produced a biased report and defended the rigor of its investigations. "We don't pull any punches," Mr. Walker said. "It's almost laughable for anybody to say that."

Pentagon planners hail the weapon, known as the ground-based midcourse interceptor, as a hedge against disaster. Skeptics ridicule it as an unworkable defense against a nonexistent threat.

The dispute over its reliability began a decade ago. Nira Schwartz, a senior engineer in 1995 and 1996 at the military contractor TRW, told her superiors that the company had falsified research findings meant to help kill vehicles differentiate incoming warheads from clouds of decoys.

In April 1996, Dr. Schwartz filed a suit under the False Claims Act, a federal law that allows heavy fines against contractors who lie about their government work. TRW strongly denied her accusations.

She subsequently singled out the prototype kill vehicle's first flight test, in June 1997, arguing that the contractors falsified data from it. The flight cost $100 million.

TRW was a Boeing subcontractor. Boeing, in turn, was competing against other companies to build the overall kill vehicle. Both denied any impropriety.

In 2000, Senator Grassley and Representative Berman asked the G.A.O. to examine Dr. Schwartz's charges.

Mr. Ghoshroy became the main technical analyst. Born in India, he earned a master's degree in electrical engineering at Northeastern University in 1973. He worked at Princeton, for military contractors and for the House National Security Committee in Washington before joining the accountability office in 1998 as a senior defense analyst.

Almost immediately, Mr. Ghoshroy recalled, the G.A.O. team found signs of a coverup — for instance, disturbing charts buried at the back of an upbeat report.

The stakes rose in January 2001 as George W. Bush took office, having pledged to deploy antimissile arms "at the earliest possible date."

On April 12, a G.A.O. manager wrote a draft summary of the team's findings. It strongly backed Dr. Schwartz, saying the contractors had "excluded some data and modified statistical techniques."

The summary added that failures of the kill vehicle during its test flight made most of the collected data unusable. It also questioned whether the test showed that "the Boeing sensor could distinguish a warhead from decoys."

Around this time, the G.A.O. team was directed to switch its focus from looking for fraud to searching for contractor admissions of failure. While it found written reports that disclosed some flight-test problems before Dr. Schwartz revealed them to federal investigators, it was unable to document them all.

Finally, the team learned of a meeting in late August 1997 at which contractor personnel had reportedly made complete oral disclosures. But no contractor or federal official could recall anything specific about this meeting — no date, place, agenda or list of attendees.

Mr. Ghoshroy came to believe that the meeting had never happened, he said. Even so, the G.A.O. report incorporated its claims. The report also noted the explanations that the contractors gave for excluding some experimental data.

After the report was made public, Mr. Ghoshroy in private called for an independent investigation of its integrity. The G.A.O. conducted three internal inquiries, each absolving itself of any wrongdoing.

In an interview and written responses to questions, Mr. Walker of the accountability office said part of the controversy grew from a "communication breakdown" with Mr. Berman's office over the report's scope. His agency, he said, has a policy of addressing no issue that could affect litigation, but had failed to tell Mr. Berman that.

Mr. Walker emphasized that the strong consensus at the G.A.O. was against Mr. Ghoshroy. The communication breakdown, he said, "doesn't mean the report is wrong."

And he defended the report's use of the disputed oral disclosures, saying it relied "more heavily" on written admissions. Mr. Ghoshroy said the office's dependence on such evidence was highly unusual.

The contractors never presented the exonerating G.A.O. study in court. In early 2003, a federal judge threw out Dr. Schwartz's suit after deciding that going ahead would release military secrets that could hurt national security.

Today, the military calls the dispute irrelevant to national defense because the Boeing kill vehicle was rejected in favor of one made by Raytheon. The Raytheon model now tips the nation's antimissile interceptors.

But Mr. Ghoshroy says the issue matters greatly. Boeing may have lost the kill vehicle competition, but it won a bigger contest as the Pentagon in 1998 named it lead contractor for the whole antimissile project. Charges of corporate dishonesty, he said, threaten to undermine the program's overall credibility.

Boeing declined to comment on the dispute. A spokeswoman, Maria McCullough, said company policy was to not comment on reports it had not seen.

Meanwhile, the military has quietly begun looking for a better interception method. One alternative under study is a shotgun approach that would try to destroy all enemy targets in space, whether warheads or decoys.

For his part, Mr. Ghoshroy said he found it "totally amazing" that the G.A.O. refused to admit that its report misinformed Congress and the public. "I'm concerned," he said, "that there's no one out there to oversee the overseer."

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/washington/02missile.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print 3apr2006

NRI Whistle-Blower Takes on US Govt 

S RAJAGOPALAN / Hindustan Times (India) 3apr2006

An Indian American investigator has blown the whistle on the highly-regarded US Government Accountability Office for exonerating contractors in an alleged scientific fraud involving builders of a $26 billion missile defence system.

Subrata Ghoshroy, who led the technical analysis for GAO, has accused the oversight agency of ignoring evidence that the project's two main contractors had doctored data and skewed test results, the New York Times [above] reported on Sunday.

The GAO, however, has strongly denied the allegations. Asserting that the 2002 report on the subject was impartial, David M. Walker, who heads the agency, has dubbed Ghoshroy "a relatively low-level, disgruntled employee" out of step with his technical peers.

But Ghoshroy, currently a research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on leave from GAO, has won appreciation from others. Harvard physicist John P. Holden regards him as "smart, capable and honest".

This is the second instance of an Indian American whistle-blower attracting attention in recent times. Last November, Seema Bhatt, a middle-rung official of Washington's Water and Sewer Authority, had won a $500,000 court package for exposing excessive lead levels in the capital's water supply.

The 56-year-old Ghoshroy, who earned his master's degree in electrical engineering from Boston's Northeastern University in 1973, has made the charges against GAO in a letter to Congressman Howard L. Berman and Senator Charles E. Grassley, who had sought the GAO study.

Obtaining a copy of the letter from Berman's office along with dozens of documents submitted by Ghoshroy, the NYT report speaks of the cover-up detected by the investigator. One of his findings was that the military contractors had buried disturbing charts at the back of an otherwise upbeat report.

The allegations of falsified research findings in the missile defence project were first raised about 10 years ago by Nira Schwartz, a senior engineer with TRW, a subcontractor for Boeing. However, both TRW and Boeing denied any impropriety in executing the project that has been marked by several test failures.

It was Schwarz's allegations that prompted the lawmakers to ask the GAO to take up the matter. Much to Ghoshroy's surprise, the GAO report ended up giving a virtual clean chit to the contractors. He made repeated attempts to get the agency to reverse its position, but to no avail.

source: http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/5967_1665295,001600060001.htm 3apr2006

GAO Accused Of Coverup

UPI 2apr2006

WASHINGTON, April 1 — A senior Congressional investigator says his agency covered up fraud by builders of a system intended to shield the United States from nuclear attack. The $26 billion system is the centerpiece of the Bush administration's anti-missile program, which is expected to cost more than $250 billion over the next two decades, The New York Times reported.

Subrata Ghoshroy, the Government Accountability Office investigator who made the charge, led technical analyses of a prototype warhead for the anti-missile weapon. He received awards for his "great care" and "tremendous skill and patience" in studying the project over 18 months, the newspaper said, but he says the GAO ignored evidence that two contractors had doctored data, skewed test results and made false statements in a 2002 report in which the contractors were credited with revealing the warhead's failings to the government.

The GAO denied the accusation and said the 2002 report was impartial and accurate. Agency head David Walker called Ghoshroy a "relatively low-level, disgruntled employee."

Ghoshroy, 56, made the charge in a letter to Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif. He is currently on leave from the GAO as a research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

source: http://www.postchronicle.com/news/breakingnews/article_21212720.shtml 3apr2006

Subrata Ghoshroy Biography
Senior Associate, MTA's Strategic Security Project

Mr. Subrata Ghoshroy was a Senior Research Associate at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. He holds the same position at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C. Mr. Ghoshroy’s areas of interest include the weaponization of space and nuclear weapons in South Asia.

Until his arrival at the Belfer Center, Mr. Ghoshroy was a Senior Defense Analyst at the U.S. General Accounting Office, which he joined in 1998. Mr. Ghoshroy’s primary responsibility has been to provide independent technical advice to GAO staff and managers on GAO evaluation of weapons systems that employ sophisticated technology. In this capacity, Mr. Ghoshroy has contributed among others to reviews of National Missile Defense, Airborne Laser, Land Warrior, and Joint Tactical Radio. He was the technical leader in GAO’s review of the allegations of fraud in a missile defense test. Mr. Ghoshroy did original analysis that led to the finding that a cooling system problem in the infrared sensor on the interceptor missile resulted in very poor data quality.

From 1997–1998, Mr. Ghoshroy was a Professional Staff Member of the House Armed Services Committee. He was responsible for the Science and Technology programs in the RDT&E account. He was additionally responsible for the Department of Energy defense programs.

In 1996, Mr. Ghoshroy served as a Congressional Science and Engineering Fellow with the House International Relations Committee. He was awarded the Fellowship by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. His responsibilities included non-proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons; arms control, land mines ban, and ballistic missile defense.

Before moving to the policy and legislative world, Mr. Ghoshroy worked for 20 years as an engineer. From 1984–1996, he was with Textron Defense Systems in Everett and Wilmington, Massachusetts. From 1984–1990, he was a Member of the Senior Technical Staff at Avco Research Laboratory, a division of Textron. From 1990–1996, Mr. Ghoshroy was a program manager for high-energy laser programs. He was credited with the development of a prototype laser for a satellite-based laser radar system for global atmospheric research. The laser operated for a number of years at the Air Force Maui Optical Station in Maui, Hawaii, for space research.

In his early professional career, Mr. Ghoshroy worked at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, where he developed pulsed energy conversion systems for the Tokamak fusion test reactor. He spent also two years at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. His contribution at Brookhaven was the development of a new beam extraction system for the AGS proton accelerator.

He has written numerous technical reports and authored or coauthored several scientific papers. He has also written about science policy and arms control in South Asia. Mr. Ghoshroy holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering and an M.S. degree in Public Policy. He is a naturalized U.S. citizen. He is married and has one son.

Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
John F. Kennedy School of Government
79 JFK St., Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel. 617-495-1400 Fax. 617-495-8963

source: http://bcsia.ksg.harvard.edu/person.cfm?item_id=741&ln=&program=CORE 3apr2006

In June 1995, Subrata Ghoshroy was a senior engineer at Textron Defense Systems, Everett, Mass., USA. He is a member of the New England Regional Task Force on Defense Conversion. He was also a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE), which was formed in 1963 with the merger of the AIEE (American Institute of Electrical Engineers, formed in 1884), and the IRE (Institute of Radio Engineers, formed in 1912).

source: http://www.theinstitute.ieee.org/inst_art.jsp?isno=06951&arnumber=06951_r_n_d&section=0 3apr2006

Not a Catastrophe:
Another Look At the South Asian Nuclear Tests
A Response to William Walker 

SUBRATA GHOSHROY / Arms Control Association 1dec1999

Professor William Walker's article, "The Risks of Further Nuclear Testing in South Asia" (ACT, Sept./Oct. 1999), was a welcome departure from what passes these days for scholarship on India and Pakistan. Walker makes a number of important observations regarding the present situation in South Asia, which is dominated by the lack of normal relations between India and Pakistan and which now has an overt nuclear dimension. However, like most commentators in Western countries, he also subscribes to the conventional wisdom that the 1998 nuclear explosions by India and Pakistan had catastrophic consequences for the world. On the contrary, the psychological shock waves have far outweighed the real ones recorded by seismometers around the world. This comment is not meant to belittle the significance of the nuclear explosions conducted by India and Pakistan, but it is intriguing that India's explosion of a so-called "peaceful nuclear device" in 1974 was not cause for such large-scale alarm and attention. That test was perhaps more destabilizing because Pakistan could not reciprocate in kind, thus creating a significant asymmetry in the perceived balance of power between the two countries.

It was also well known that both India and Pakistan had maintained their respective nuclear ambitions since that first test, albeit without resorting to nuclear testing, similar to Israel or (previously) South Africa. Perhaps it is the audacity of India and Pakistan in openly flouting the big powers and the embryonic Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) that has caused the stir. However, the bottom line is that five or six explosions-with possibly exaggerated results-cannot qualitatively expand the nuclear capabilities of these countries. More importantly, the perception of a nuclear asymmetry in South Asia has been removed for the time being. Therefore, the situation is not as bad as it is made out to be, rhetoric and armed conflict in Kashmir notwithstanding.

In addition, more credit has been given to the August 1999 Draft Report on Indian Nuclear Doctrine than is deserved. (See ACT, July/August 1999 for the text of the draft report.) While it certainly is a wish list of the pro-nuclear lobby, Walker also aptly characterizes it as having an "air of unreality, even adventurism." Obviously, for it to be become a real concern, it will have to be backed up by significant funding.

But recently, there has been noticeable backpedaling away from the draft report by the administration of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh, in a November 29 interview, clearly attempted to downplay the significance of the draft document by labeling it as only "one of a number of papers, including one on a possible [emphasis added] Indian Nuclear Doctrine" that the National Security Advisory Board was tasked to prepare.[1] (See full interview.) He also tried to distance his administration from the policy recommendations contained in the draft by saying that a debate was underway and thus the report had yet to become "a policy document of the government of India."

More specifically, addressing the issue of a so-called "triad" of nuclear forces, which has raised hackles universally, Singh stated that a "triad was not a prerequisite for credibility" of India's nuclear forces. He even went a step further by indirectly chastising the authors for having borrowed the concept from Western analysts without paying close attention to their underlying assumptions, which do not apply to India. Therefore, he said, it was premature to talk of an Indian "triad."

Frankly, the language in the draft doctrine is not as worrying as the growing influence of the scientists and the increased power of the research and development organizations that cater to the military. The nuclear scientists and engineers who led these efforts in both India and Pakistan were feted as national heroes after the nuclear explosions. Their growth in stature will inevitably present itself as demand for higher and higher budgets in the future.

Fortunately, there are substantial countervailing forces that will act against such aspirations. Most commentators seem to have underestimated the potential for domestic opposition to India's nuclear adventure. That domestic support for nuclear weapons is tepid at best is apparent from the fact that Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) did not benefit from the Pokhran tests significantly in the recent elections. Its share of seats in the new Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, remained at 182-the same as the last Lok Sabha.[2] It is also noteworthy that in the new government the BJP is leading a precarious coalition of 23 parties with a majority of only 26 seats in the 543-seat parliament. The tensions within the administration are serious, as was demonstrated during the recent debates in the parliament on the price hike in diesel fuel and the insurance liberalization bill.

India's grim economic and demographic situation is a further deterrent to any nuclear adventurism in the future. India is the only country other than China to have a billion people. According to a report published by the Worldwatch Institute, the amount of land available to each Indian is shrinking, and food production is threatened by falling water tables.[3] The report also points out that India spends 2.5 percent of its GNP on its military and a mere 0.7 percent on health. It is no surprise that half of all children in India under four are malnourished and that 60 percent of women are anemic, as reported by a recent World Bank study.[4]

Economic realities aside, there is also domestic opposition to India abandoning its traditional role as the champion of nuclear disarmament. In an opening salvo against the draft doctrine, a leading leftist opposition group, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)], met with Prime Minister Vajpayee and stated in a December 22 press release that the CPI(M) was opposed to nuclear weaponization and deployment.[5] It is calling for "a national commitment to no further nuclear explosive testing-first, through a unanimously adopted resolution of both Houses of Parliament and then, as soon as feasible, through an Act of Parliament." One may also recall that 250,000 people reportedly protested against the government's nuclear policy on Hiroshima Day in August 1998.

By carrying out the nuclear tests in 1998, the BJP government accomplished two major objectives. First, it showed it could stand up to the big powers. By doing so, it neutralized critics on the left and people like former Prime Minister Inder Gujral, a longtime advocate of global disarmament. Indeed, riding on a wave of near-unanimous support from across the political spectrum against signing the CTBT, Vajpayee, in a speech at the Asia Society in New York on September 28, 1998, justified the tests as "a powerful challenge to the practitioners of nuclear apartheid."[6] Speaking in this way, he sounded less like a leader of the BJP and more like the late Krishna Menon-the socialist firebrand who represented India at the United Nations in the 1950s. But it worked. Second, it demonstrated that India itself was a big power to be reckoned with, thus helping the BJP to shore up its electoral base, which advocates a strong position vis-à-vis Pakistan (and occasionally China). The BJP needed such a boost, especially since it has been soft-pedaling the Ayodhya temple issue since it first came to power at the national level in 1998-a move that has hurt its core base, but helped to retain precious coalition partners.

Having accomplished its basic objectives, it is unlikely that the BJP and its partners would risk drastic steps in this regard. In fact, there are clear signs that the Vajpayee government wants to sign the CTBT after building a domestic consensus. Singh emphasized that India's national security needs have now been satisfied and that there is now a need to reassure the international community. Significantly, he did not mention India's earlier demand for a "time-bound formula for nuclear disarmament," which was one of the main sticking points that resulted in the Conference on Disarmament deadlocking during the negotiations on the CTBT. Pakistan's policy on the CTBT can be expected to essentially follow India's.

Finally, the key to achieving peace and stability, and especially arms control, in South Asia lies in strengthening democracy in the region. As has been amply demonstrated, sanctions are largely ineffective and also counterproductive. Robert Hathaway, director of the Asia program at the Woodrow Wilson Center, lamented in a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor that the Brownback Amendment to the FY2000 Defense Appropriations Bill, which gave the president authority to waive all sanctions imposed on India and Pakistan, was an "extraordinary reversal of American policy."[7] He went on, however, to say: "Quite clearly a sanctions-based policy has not kept nuclear weapons out of South Asia."

Instead of focusing on a sanctions policy based on Cold War imperatives, a new strategy should be based on a broader engagement between the United States and the region as a whole. There are already signs that such a shift in thinking is taking place in the Clinton administration. For example, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson held discussions with Indian officials about cooperation in energy, science and climate change when he visited India in October 1999.[8] Singh, who has been holding a series of meetings over the past year with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott echoed the sentiment when he hinted that future dialog with the United States will be expanded to cover a wide range of subjects from energy and the environment to terrorism.

The Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO) initiative can serve as an example. It is difficult to understand why the United States can engage a so-called "rogue" state like North Korea and come up with a workable framework for denuclearization, and yet cannot do something similar in South Asia. It is also noteworthy, as U.S. Ambassador Stephen Bosworth has said, that KEDO has served as about the only place for regular contacts between the two Koreas-a rather significant benefit.[9]

Frank Wisner, the former U.S. ambassador to India and Egypt, was correct when he said that it is more urgent to defuse problems that drive countries to seek nuclear devices-a recommendation that applies not just to South Asia, but to others, such as Iran, as well.[10] President Clinton's anticipated visit to the region later this year provides an important opportunity to turn a new page.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NOTES 

1. "India Not to Engage in a Nuclear Arms Race: Jaswant Singh, External Affairs Minister," The Hindu, November 29, 1999.

2. Y. Aggarwal. "Implications of Poll Verdict for the Congress and BJP," Free Press Journal, October 15, 1999.

3. Alex Kirby. "India Passes Population Landmark," BBC News Online Network, August 10, 1999.

4. Daniel Lak. "India's Malnutrition Crisis," BBC News Online Network, November 19, 1999.

5. Press Release, Communist Party of India (Marxist), http://www.del.vsnl.in/cpim, December 22, 1999.

6. Celia W. Dugger. "For Pakistan and India, Atom Pact is Hard Sell," The New York Times, September 30, 1998.

7. Robert Hathaway. "Fresh Start or Shameful Retreat in South Asia?" The Christian Science Monitor, December 15, 1999.

8. "Richardson Shifts from Proliferation to Energy Use," Statesman News Service, October 26, 1999.

9. Ambassador Stephen Bosworth. "Keeping the U.S.-North Korean Nuclear Accord on Track," Arms Control Today, August 1997.

10. Steve Mufson. "Losing the Battle on Arms Control," The Washington Post, July 17, 1999.

Subrata Ghoshroy is a senior evaluator in the Nationaly Security and International Affairs Division of the U.S. General Accounting Office. The views expressed here are his own.

source: http://www.armscontrol.org/act/1999_12/sgde99.asp 3apr2006