Apples and Alarm Bells

Presidential appointees whose work involves sensitive information are supposed to be given rigorous FBI background checks to make sure that they aren’t security risks or potential political liabilities to the Administration that they serve. Before he was named assistant secretary of the Navy in charge of research and development in 1981, Melvin R. Paisley was given such a check. It appears to have done little good.

Interviews and documents obtained by The Times suggest that many of Paisley’s acquaintances and one-time colleagues provided investigators with information about the former Boeing Co. executive’s relaxed business ethics and dubious personal behavior so unflattering that, at a minimum, alarm bells should have been set off in both the Reagan White House and in Congress. But nothing like that happened. Instead, Paisley was confirmed for the Navy job, and now he stands as a central figure in a huge bribery and fraud scandal. What went wrong?

The answer to that could turn out to be a scandal in itself. Did the FBI muff its investigation, either by failing to acquire or to report compromising information? Did it soft-pedal its inquiry, knowing that Paisley was a pal and former benefactor of the politically powerful Navy secretary, John Lehman? Did Lehman himself insist that any negative information about Paisley be ignored? Did the White House get full FBI reports but, at some level, choose to do nothing about them? Did former Sen. John Tower (R-Tex.), then chairman of the Armed Services Committee, see but fail to share with his colleagues the allegations against Paisley?

Former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger says that the current scandal is the faultnot of the system but of a “few rotten apples.” The growing indications, though, are that at least one of those apples may have been deliberately slipped into the barrel despite evidence of its putrescence. In that event the system surely did fail. One of the things to be determined now is how much that failure, which allegedly led to Pentagon contracts going not necessarily to the most qualified bidders but to those who were best at bribing and cheating, may have cost the nation in wasted dollars--which is bad enough--and, worse, in the quality of its national defense.