The Pentagon: A History

by Steve Vogel

  Deutch stared at the pipe. “Let’s walk,” he said. They saw the seeping sewer lines and rusted air handlers, visited the decrepit steam and mechanical rooms, and pondered broken concrete ramps and walls. “I was impressed by the deterioration in the building’s infrastructure,” Deutch later recalled. But he remained skeptical about embarking on a $1.2 billion renovation when needs for the military in the field were going unmet.

  The review continued. John Hamre, then serving as comptroller under Perry, was astonished as he began to realize how enormous—and expensive—the renovation would be. “The whole renovation was typical Doc Cooke—pulling off a much bigger deal than he was telling people he was really doing,” Hamre recalled. “Gradually the full scope of it started to appear, but you never, ever saw it in any displays. Doc was just getting everybody pregnant, and then once you get into it, you got to keep working it.” In the end, the need for renovation was too great, and they were too far down the road to cancel it. On December 26, 1996, Deputy Secretary of Defense John White, Deutch’s successor, signed papers directing that the renovation of the first wedge finally begin in January 1998. To keep support on Capitol Hill, the Defense Department certified to Congress that the total cost of the renovation would not exceed $1.118 billion. “That turned out to be an entirely fake number,” Hamre later said.

  At the rate the program was spending money, Cooke was informed in January 1997, the entire $1.118 billion would be consumed with only a portion of the work done. But that was not the worst news. On November 7, 1996, the Corps reported a leak in one of the new sewer pipes in the basement, beneath a concrete floor slab that had already been poured. The Corps described it as “a local, isolated problem.” Pentagon building engineers inspected the area with television cameras and discovered it was far worse. There were three dozen areas with breaks, some deep in the ground. The sewer lines had been laid without proper insulation from the ground subsiding beneath them. Lines had settled and disconnected from vertical risers. Others had been installed with incorrect slope or had been left with low points, or bellies. The Corps lacked any real quality control beyond accepting the contractor’s assurances that everything was fine. To make it worse, the sewer lines had been laid in trenches, affording little access to the piping. The new slab atop the pipes would have to be jackhammered out, the ground excavated, and the pipes relaid.

  The renovation was in shambles. Throughout the building, the program was seen at best as a nuisance and more often as a joke. Frank Probst, a retired Army officer who joined the renovation program as a communications contractor, found spirits low among his colleagues. “The program wasn’t looked upon as doing great and wondrous things, so the morale was not real high,” he recalled. There was talk again on Capitol Hill of canceling the renovation.

  Hamre, who had succeeded White as deputy secretary, blew his top at the cost overruns and told Cooke things had to change. “Look,” Hamre said. “We’re going to find somebody else to build this.”

  The psychology major

  Walker Lee Evey knew nothing about construction—he was a psychology major, as he often pointed out. The cheerful Air Force contracts specialist, a short, mustachioed man with wire-rim glasses and an avuncular manner—did not seem particularly imposing. But he was a master of human nature and motivation. More than anything, Evey was a troubleshooter.

  Evey was from St. Petersburg, Florida—his psychology degree was from the University of South Florida in Tampa—but what he usually did not mention was that before he got his degree, he had served in combat as an infantry platoon leader and later a company commander with the 1st Infantry Division—the Big Red One—in Quan Loi in Vietnam during 1968 and 1969. After leaving the Army and earning his degree, he started with the Air Force as a contracting officer in 1974 and rose to become one of the top procurement officials for the Air Force Systems Command. He left in 1987 and spent nine years with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, serving as NASA’s lead negotiator on the contracts for the Mir Space Station and the International Space Station. After successfully dealing with the Russians, he had come back to the Air Force as a high-ranking acquisition official in 1996, his reputation firmly established as a negotiator extraordinaire.

  On November 17, 1997, Evey was called in to meet with his boss, Darleen Druyun, the Air Force’s chief acquisition official, in her fourth-floor Pentagon office. Evey had just returned from another successful rescue—this time a top-secret Air Force “black project” in California, a satellite program that had been mired in a contract dispute. Druyun was a demanding and powerful boss, usually up to some scheme. (Seven years later, she would be sent to federal prison for funneling work to Boeing, her future employer.) Druyun told Evey she had a new assignment for him. “I’d like you to volunteer to do a really special major project,” Druyun said.

  “What is it?” Evey asked.

  “Actually I would prefer that you agree to do it first and then I’ll tell you,” she said. Evey warily agreed.

  “I want you to become program manager for the Pentagon renovation,” Druyun said.

  Hamre and Cooke had decided to create the position of Pentagon Renovation Program Manager and to make it a slot for a high-ranking official, either a general officer or the civil-service equivalent from the Senior Executive Service (SES). At Hamre’s insistence, the program manager would report directly to the deputy secretary of defense, giving the renovation chief unquestioned clout in the building. The first choice, a one-star Corps of Engineers general, backed out after discovering the full extent of the program’s disarray. Hamre had turned to the Air Force, the service he believed most competent at handling complicated contracts.

  Hamre “asked Air Force to put up a program manager to run the program, and I’m asking you,” Druyun told Evey.

  Evey tried to beg off. Like everyone in the building, he knew the renovation by its reputation. “The program is a loser, and I don’t know how to do construction,” he told Druyun.

  “I’ve got faith in you,” Druyun said. “Go see Dr. Hamre.”

  Back in his office, somewhat dazed, Evey waited to be summoned by Hamre. He recalled a front-page story in The Washington Post he had glanced at that morning before leaving his suburban Virginia home. It detailed enormous cost overruns and delays in the construction of the new Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, at 3.1 million square feet second in size only to the Pentagon among all federal buildings. “I started thinking, ‘Gee, if I’m going to do design and construction, I better start learning about this stuff—here’s one that seems to have gone bad,’” Evey recalled.

  Evey found the article in the office and had just finished copying it when he was told Hamre wanted to see him right away. Evey stuffed the article into a manila folder and hurried to the deputy secretary’s office. Hamre warmly ushered Evey into his third-floor suite overlooking the River entrance. After they took seats around a coffee table, Hamre, “in his very best Interview 101 voice,” began the questions: “Now, Lee, could you tell me, what are your goals for the Pentagon renovation program?”

  Evey froze. “I didn’t know jack about the renovation program,” he later said. “I’m thinking, ‘What the hell kind of answer do I give to that?’” After a moment, Evey opened up his manila folder, took out the newspaper article, leaned over and put it in Hamre’s lap.

  “My goal for the Pentagon renovation program is not to end up on the front page of the Washington Post,” Evey said.

  Hamre looked at the article and then at Evey. “That seems like an excellent goal,” Hamre said. “I really like that goal. I think you’re my guy.”

  “Dr. Hamre, I’ve got a confession to make,” Evey said. “I’m not an architect, I’m not an engineer. I don’t know anything about construction. I’m a psychology major.”

  Hamre waved him off. “I’ve talked to people about you, and they say you’ll do just fine,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll do just fine.”

  Whistling in the dark

&n
bsp; On his first morning on the job, Lee Evey toured the basement renovation. It was November 27, 1997, the day before Thanksgiving. At first glance, the basement looked beautiful. In one area, carpeting was on the floor, lights were on, furniture was in place, and telephones were on the desks. But twenty feet away, the floor had been jackhammered away, and big mounds of dirt and concrete were piled up. Another leaking sewer line was being replaced.

  Evey went to the edge and peered over. The hole went twenty feet down into the wet, dark earth, to the very depths of the Pentagon. Shoring beams held the dirt from collapsing. Down at the bottom of the hole, raw sewage flowed around chunks of broken concrete. A little yellow rubber ducky was bobbing in the fetid water. The renovation team had a sense of humor, at least.

  After the tour, Evey went to his new office, shut the door, sat at his desk, and put his head in his hands. In subsequent days, Evey wandered around the renovation headquarters—set in a modular office complex at the far end of the North parking lot—talking to people. Few were willing to speak about the program’s problems. “Everybody was whistling in the dark, walking past the graveyard,” Evey recalled.

  At one of his first staff meetings, Evey asked a key question: Who was in charge of the basement renovation? “Everybody got real interested in their feet,” Evey recalled. It turned out one person was responsible for determining requirements, someone else for planning, another person for design, someone else for construction, another person for information technology, and so on. The various departments were organized like silos, with little or no interaction. The typical problem—how to make sure sewer lines did not subside in poor soil, for example—could take six months to work its way through the system. “Six months just to decide we need to put crushed rock underneath the goddamn sewer line—give me a break,” Evey recalled.

  Within days of taking over, Evey gathered all three hundred people in the renovation program in the fifth-floor Pentagon auditorium. It was the first time the entire team had ever been together. In preparation, Evey spent hours thinking about how to capture the renovation program goals in a few words. Up on the stage, he unveiled a single chart with one phrase: “On Cost, On Schedule, Built for the Next 50 Years.”

  “We’re going to practice right now saying what our goals are, and you’re all going to say it with me,” Evey announced. “Our goals are, ‘On cost, on schedule, built for the next fifty years.’” Evey repeated it rhythmically.

  The employees looked at Evey as if he were insane. “This guy’s lost it,” thought Frank Probst, the communications contractor. But a sprinkling of Army officers in the audience finally picked up the chant: On Cost, On Schedule, Built for the Next Fifty Years. It started to build, louder and louder. Before long three hundred people were screaming “On Cost, On Schedule, Built for the Next Fifty Years!”

  The first sign that anything had taken hold was visible as soon as Evey arrived at work the next morning. One of the secretaries had stayed late the night before pasting the slogan all over the program offices: on doors, next to light switches, even above the urinals in the men’s room. Then, when Evey held a second program-wide meeting in the auditorium several weeks later, he was interrupted by Jack Matthewman, one of the contractors, who stood up holding two big poles. “Sir, before you even get started, there’s something we want to say to you,” he announced. Matthewman handed one pole to another employee and they unfurled a banner between them. It had taken hours to print out on an old dot-matrix printer: On Cost, On Schedule, Built for the Next 50 Years. The whole room erupted in the now-familiar chant.

  At that point, Evey felt it was going to work: “I knew there were answers there and we were going to find them. People had this internal drive that they were sick and tired of being unsuccessful, tired of being the butt of everybody’s joke…. They were tired of failing.”

  The Big Bash

  The Big Bash was set for February 12, 1998. With his unerring instinct for showmanship, Evey made the start of demolition in Wedge 1 a big production, complete with a VIP wall-bashing ceremony. Pentagon dignitaries showed up in coats and ties or skirts, and were given mini-sledgehammers to pound against targets on the fourth-floor E Ring walls. Doc Cooke, wearing safety glasses and a hard hat perched atop his bald head, could not stop grinning.

  Wedge 1 would be the test. The basement work had been sharply curtailed; plans to put all the command centers there had been scrapped for being too costly and time-consuming. The basement represented “a Pyrrhic victory at best,” Evey recalled. “So we needed to make Wedge 1 work and work right.”

  It was easier said than done. Once again demolition brought surprises. Some were just historical curiosities, like the newspapers from 1942 with headlines about Hitler or the old whiskey bottles stuffed in the walls—Bob Furman had been unable to chase off all the liquor salesmen. The biggest problem was that the asbestos was far more prevalent than expected—crews would remove twenty-eight million pounds of asbestos-contaminated material from Wedge 1 alone, all of which had to be triple-wrapped and trucked to landfills in Pennsylvania. The demolition was soon behind schedule.

  As the work continued, Evey mulled how to turn the program around. Motivation and slogans were great, but by themselves were not going to change much. Evey wanted to change the fundamental nature of contracts for the Pentagon renovation program. His biggest brainstorm—once again—came from the newspaper, a story in the home section giving advice to readers who wanted to have new houses built. The worst thing to do, the article said, was to hire an architect to design a house, and then hire an unrelated construction contractor to build the plans. It was buying trouble, a situation where the architect and builder constantly squabbled over plans and costs. (Bergstrom and McShain were proof of that.) The best approach was to hire a construction contractor and architect who worked as a team. Evey, the construction novice, was intrigued: “Gee, that would probably make sense on our program too.”

  Evey unembarrassedly brought up the newspaper article at the next staff meeting. Soon he was convinced that this design-build concept then gaining popularity in industry circles was the path the Pentagon program should take. Evey also wanted to experiment with incentives. Most contracts assume failure and set up rules by which the government and the contractors could argue when things went wrong. He wanted to award fees based on performance, including quality of construction, ability to communicate, and problem-solving. To encourage cutting costs, the contractor would get a share of any savings.

  Evey soon hit a brick wall with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps—the organization of giants like Somervell and Groves—was the constructor of the Pentagon. Now they were supposed to take construction advice from a contracts guy who was getting his ideas from the home-improvement section of the newspaper? This was not what the Corps had in mind from the program manager. The Corps had liked the idea of having someone with clout in the building but had expected construction would remain its bailiwick.

  It was a battle of egos, in which Evey had no shortage of self-confidence. The chief of engineers, Lieutenant General Joe N. Ballard, a traditional-minded officer with two combat tours in Vietnam, refused to change the way the Corps did business. The divorce was done as civilly as possible. Evey did not put sole blame on the Corps for what had gone wrong, saying there was plenty of fault to go around. He offered Corps civilian employees a chance to stay, and many did, resigning from the Corps and forming the heart of the new Pentagon renovation team. The Corps described its departure from the renovation as “a business decision.”

  But there was no disguising the reality: The Corps of Engineers was out of the job of renovating the Pentagon.

  Terrorists don’t arrive on buses

  At about 10:30 A.M. local time on August 7, 1998, a 3.5-ton Mitsubishi Canter truck took an abrupt left turn off of Haile Selassie Avenue in downtown Nairobi, Kenya, and barreled toward the American embassy. The truck’s path was slowed by an oncoming car and then blocked by a barricade, but when
the bomb in the rear of the truck—a concoction of TNT and aluminum nitrate weighing several hundred pounds—detonated moments later, it sheared off the façade of the embassy and caused a nearby building to collapse. Nine minutes later, another truck pulled into the parking lot of the American embassy in Dar es Salaam in neighboring Tanzania and exploded. The two bombs killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and wounded more than 4,000, many of them horribly maimed.

  Intelligence quickly pointed to a Saudi Arabian multimillionaire named Osama bin Laden, leader of an Islamic terrorist group known as al Qaeda. At the Pentagon, military planners prepared for an attempt—ultimately futile—to kill bin Laden by firing seventy-five Tomahawk cruise missiles at an al Qaeda camp in eastern Afghanistan.

  In his office, Doc Cooke made his own assessment: The Pentagon remained shockingly vulnerable to a truck bomb. Indeed, a suicide bomber would probably find it easier to get to the Pentagon than the embassies. Every day, some two hundred delivery trucks backed into the Pentagon to the loading docks on the south side of the building; there was no practical way to secure the docks or inspect trucks at the Pentagon before they got close to the building.

  Cooke had been pushing for years to build an annex on the Mall side of the building to house loading docks. In May 1993—three months after a bomb intended to destroy the World Trade Center in New York City had exploded in an underground garage and killed six people—Cooke told Congress that moving the loading docks to a remote facility “dramatically improves” the Pentagon’s security and “diminishes the possibility of a World Trade Center type incident.” It was to no avail. The Mall annex was deleted from the plans later that year to gain Congress’s approval to start renovation; there was little support to expand the Pentagon at a time of military cuts elsewhere.