Beyond Bang-Bang Bulletins

In hundreds of U.S. newspapers last week, readers found some version of the Louisville Times headline: U.S. MILITARY FUEL STOLEN IN THAILAND. In recent months, they have seen other accusatory headlines, including NAVY AWARDS JOB TO SUSPECT FIRM, STUDY SHOWS WASTE BY PENTAGON, LYNDA BIRD'S PAL WINS CHILE POST and ARMY'S M-16 PROGRAM is "UNBELIEVABLE." All appeared above exclusive stories produced by what the Associated Press calls its Special Assignment Team, a group of Washington-based reporters with deceptively everyday faces and an unusual mission: to ignore daily deadlines in search of what its leader calls "the submerged dimension" of the federal government.

Described by one admiring colleague as "ten sons of bitches with table manners," the team is headed by Ray Stephens, 41, an 18-year A.P. veteran who contends that Washington has become too complex to be covered by the traditional "bang-bang bulletin" wire service approach. All too often, he claims, decisions affecting countless citizens or millions of taxpayer dollars are made by "an anonymous civil servant who is neither responsible to the electorate nor responsive to its voice." Pinpointing such officials and exposing governmental deception normally require weeks of persistent, tedious probing.

Dull as Death. Last week's fuel theft story, which charged that some U.S. military and civilian officials in Thailand had been bribed and others had been careless in allowing at least 5.5 million gallons of aircraft and other fuels to slip out of government hands, surfaced more easily than most. Lawrence Knutson, one of A.P.'s regional Washington desk hands, got a tip from a friend and turned to the team for help in checking it out. Team Member Gaylord Shaw phoned his sources at the Government Accounting Office, learned that GAO was already investigating the matter but had not revealed its findings. Shaw and Knutson secured a copy of the GAO report from Senator William Proxmire and broke the story.

More often, the team's tips come from reading what Stephens calls "some dull-as-death Government report that no man in his right mind would pick up if he wasn't getting paid for it." Jean Heller, 26, the team's only woman member, was scanning a routine list of Government contract awards when the name "Techfab" rang a faint bell. She checked her files, confirmed her suspicions that Techfab, a St. Louis manufacturer, was under study by a federal grand jury for allegedly accepting kickbacks on $47 million worth of rocket launchers made for the Navy--and here was the Navy buying more from the same company. Jean's running stories finally impelled the Navy to seek competitive bids for the launchers in future purchases.

Team Member Don Rothberg, 34, who once ran a beatnik restaurant in Berkeley, got a guarded tip from a high military source: "If you dig far enough back into the history of the M16, you might find something interesting." But it took him three weeks of rummaging through Congressional-committee hearings and long interviews with reluctant manufacturers and defense officials to produce his story on how mass production of the lightweight M-16 rifle, sorely needed in Viet Nam, had been delayed by Pentagon indecision for seven years. When the Army finally placed its orders, he discovered, it was paying General Motors $316 for each gun, and Harrington & Richardson $250, even while Colt was offering it for $104. Moreover, the Army had rejected yet another bid, by the Maremont Corp., that would have saved $20 million. Rothberg's stories touched off congressional probes and led to a law requiring the Army to consider price in contract awards.

Depth Beats Speed. Heller and Rothberg then spent a full five months, including line-by-line reading of 15 volumes of appropriations-committee hearings, to produce a highly critical series on defense-procurement practices. Team Member Dick Barnes, 30, a former editor of the Stanford Daily, examined 12,000 property records in Detroit to document just one claim in a story charging mismanagement of federal antipoverty funds in that city--the fact that a former business associate of Mayor Jerome Cavanagh had benefited from unusually high rents paid for the program's headquarters. Rothberg's reading of a dreary Soil Conservation Service report paid off when he noted that five corporations all had the same box number. Suspicious, he learned that one corporation had divided its farms into five groups to qualify for an extra $2,-000,000 a year in sugar subsidies--and that an obsolete definition of a farm, clung to by Agriculture Department bureaucrats, made this legal.

Even when the A.P. investigators miss their mark, they still sometimes score. Barnes jetted to Nassau and studied more than 2,500 land records in search of rumored links between island casinos and U.S. legislators. That fizzled, but along the way he dug up an exclusive story on the listing of a Bahamas gambling operation by the New York Stock Exchange.

The success of A.P.'s Special Assignment Team demonstrates a journalistic truth that the daily press still too often ignores: in an age of complexity, depth is often more necessary than speed. This kind of reporting may be more expensive and more exacting, but its result is also more satisfying. Team Editor Stephens insists that "we're having more fun than anybody in this business."

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