Missile Defense Contract Under Fire

Former Kennedy School of Government fellow Subrata Ghoshroy has submitted allegations of falsified reports and investigations against the Government Accountability Office (GAO), where he served as a defense analyst.

At the center of the allegations is the development of a $26 billion missile defense system that is a key part of the Bush administration’s anti-missile program.

According to Ghoshroy, the GAO purposefully ignored evidence suggesting that the military contractors involved in developing this missile defense system skewed data, and falsely stated that the contractors had revealed the failures of the system to the government.

The original dispute over the missile project dates back to a decade ago when the military contractor TRW Inc. was developing software which would enable interceptor missiles to differentiate real warheads from decoy ones.

Back then, Nira Schwartz, an engineer at TRW, alleged that there were major flaws with the missile’s sensors which prevented it from collecting data about the right target. Schwartz alleged that TRW withheld this information from the government.

Schwartz was fired from TRW, but later submitted a report on the matter to Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Calif.) and to Senator Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), who jointly commissioned the investigation of the matter by the GAO in 2000. The case was headed by Ghoshroy, then at the GAO.

Ghoshroy now alleges that the GAO’s claims in the final report in the investigation, released in 2002, were falsified.

“I immediately found out by looking at the classified data that the infrared sensor failed to perform,” said Ghoshroy yesterday. “There was no data collected by the sensor, so these claims of success were false and our report should have stated that. But the GAO didn’t want to say anything like that. Instead, they decided that the GAO was not in a position to judge one way or the other, which was a complete cop-out because of the overwhelming evidence.”

Ghoshroy claims that the GAO also falsely reported that officials met with the contractor in late 1997 and that the contractors told the government of all of the system’s failures. Ghoshroy claims that such a meeting never took place.

Ghoshroy said he submitted his own report of the events to Rep. Berman this past December, claiming that the Pentagon pressured the GAO to cover up the matter because it did not want to draw attention to a failure in the missile defense plan.

In a statement issued to the New York Times, David M. Walker, head of the GAO and Comptroller General, wrote that the 2002 report “has been the subject of three internal investigations, including one by our Inspector General. All of these investigations found that [Ghoshroy’s] assertions lacked merit and the employee concurred with the related report before it was issued.”

Ghoshroy is currently directing a program on South Asia at MIT that is working to develop a dialogue on nuclear weapons between Pakistan and India.

—Staff writer Aditi Banga can be reached at abanga@fas.harvard.edu.