cont'd...
And I look back at it now and I know I was troubled that those documents were in the trashcan. I did ruffle through the top six to eight pages.
And what were they?
Those documents were performance, what I term performance documents, which would include retirement points, [unintelligible] type documents, which would be a record of drill performance or nonperformance, and there was at least one pay document copy within the top six to eight pages of that stack that was in the trash….
Now, George Conn had brought you here deliberately....
I believe so. And that's the reason I traced the path, I don't think there's any doubt about it.
And was there any further conversation with General Scribner?
We were there talking just for a second, and as the conversation went on George and General Scribner moved back to the corner office, so I'm left alone. They talked, the maximum time that we were in the museum, from the time I shook the man's hand until we left, the time of the conversation and everything else could not have been less than five minutes or more than eight minutes.
What did George Conn tell General Scribner about why he'd brought you there?
He didn't.
He just showed up and....
We were just there, we just happened there. Just walking by and visiting. Now, General Scribner did not act, and I still do not believe to this day, that he felt like he was doing anything wrong. Now I'm going a little offline here about intent....
Even though he was throwing away documents from a file?
Well, I'll carry through with that. I do not believe General James at the time felt he was doing any more than taking care of the boss. I do not believe that General Marty or anyone else at the Texas National Guard saw it as anything other — you have to understand the culture. If you understand that, in so many cases, especially when there is someone that is somewhat political in nature, and I think it proves itself throughout this whole case even down to a congressman's son in a unit, that when they want to promote somebody, they will oftentimes take full-time personnel and they'll go back and they'll make sure that that personnel file looks better than anyone else's when it goes forward for consideration before promotion boards.
[At this point there was a long digression about routine cleaning up of personnel files for officers up for promotion.]
So I'm telling you that from their intent I do not believe that Major General Daniel James, and I'm not trying to alibi him, I am trying to bend over backwards to be fair, I do not believe General Wayne Marty, Colonel Goodwin, General Scribner, or anybody else thought they were doing anything but taking care of the boss.
OK, what next?
All the way from the museum back I was terribly bothered and I obviously wanted to talk. I slowed down our walk and at one point I stopped our walk and I told George, I said, "God bless, George, what in the hell is going on and who in the hell is in charge?" I was upset, and he obviously, in looking back at it, I don't think he wanted to slow down or be seen, but at that point I wasn't really all that cautious of being seen.
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In addition to George Conn, Burkett says he talked about this to four other people: Harvey Gough, Dennis Adams, and two unnamed friends.
So we talked about this again at a time approximately three weeks later. Mr. Harvey Gough, a Chief Warrant Officer, a traditional guardsman who had been the special projects officer under four or five governors and I don't know how many adjutant generals, he was the conduit for trying to gain missions for the Texas National Guard and improve the way we were doing business, and I had developed his role of being out there with the four stars like General Wes Clark and others. He was out there trying to do good things for the Guard and I was doing the strategic plan. We developed this working relationship along with everybody else that was on the same team, we were trying to improve the Guard.
Harvey Gough is very political, extremely political. He runs Goff's, [a restaurant] in Dallas, Texas, which is the old haunt of Governor Bill Clements. Many of the early actions to plan the Bush campaign in 1994 for governor were done right there at Goff's Restaurant. Jim Francis, who's the head of the Bush pioneer program, is Harvey's best friend, as background. I mean, Dan Bartlett got his job by seeing Harvey to get access to Jim Francis, that sort of thing. Highly political, all of this sort of thing. Harvey's a guardsman, I was registered as a Democrat but totally nonpolitical, had made sure that it stayed out of my consulting practice because the first thing you do when you get that into a consulting practice is you cut your own throat.
Anyway, I talked to Harvey about three weeks after the incident at the museum, only because I was very concerned that a very dangerous action had taken place that probably politically endangered Governor Bush, who I considered my ultimate boss. And I didn't know how to get that message through because I really didn't know who I could trust. And I thought the guys at the Guard out there were just, I mean, they were just good 'ol boys and didn't know better. They were just taking care of the boss.
If that was true this had to go direct, you know, get a handle on this darn thing, get it corrected. I did not know, for example, that in 1994 at the debates, didn't know this until November of last year, that in the '94 debates Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News, and I believe Jim Moore at that time was either ABC, CBS, or CNN, or something, they asked the question about Bush's military record in the fifth and sixth year in the '94 debates. I didn't know that. I was naive to all this stuff. I was just the wrong guy, wrong place, wrong time. So I mentioned to Harvey, and my objective was pure, you know, somebody get this worked out before it gets worse.
I had mentioned it to Conn, I kept it to myself, kept it under button, there were a couple of people that I did mention it to about the same time I did Harvey, who have told me plain and simple their job is in jeopardy and don't mention them to anyone, and I won't.
I did mention to a fellow that I had worked with, a fellow by the name of Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Adams, and told him also. I told him I was troubled about it. I trusted Dennis to serve maybe a little bit as an ethical advisor, maybe a little bit as a friend. He knew the system since he was a full timer for so many years, he knew the system far better than I. So I asked his counsel and advice on the situation too. So I had told about five or six people within the first three weeks of this occurring.
In all honesty I didn't know what to do. I did not know what to do. It was a moral dilemma for me, it was an ethical dilemma, it was a military uniform dilemma because I had breached the oath and creed of an officer in the United States Army. I was in that dilemma and I didn't know what to do. That's as straight as I can be. I swallowed it and I didn't do anything.
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Nine months later, in January 1998, Burkett became ill during a trip to Panama for the Army and collapsed at the Abilene airport when he returned home. He spent the next five months trying to get medical care from the military and believes he was denied this care as a result of retaliation against him for earlier trying to raise the issue of "ghost soldiers" in the National Guard, a story that was eventually reported nationally in USA Today by Dave Moniz and Jim Drinkard. He eventually filed a suit against the officers involved but lost the case.
In the process of trying to gain access to medical care, Mr. Conn, who is probably as good a personnel expert as there was at the time, even though he was not assigned in personnel. I relied on his expertise, he'd been in the field for so many years and he'd been on active duty for so many years, and I asked for his advice and counsel.
They downloaded his hard drive off his computer and....found an email that he had sent to me. They brought him in to the Chief of Staff's office where the senior JAG officer was, who read George Conn his rights. They offered him an attorney and began a court martial proceeding against him and showed him the email that he had sent to me. The only thing he was told as far as the reason for the court martial was that he had made derogatory remarks about the governor. What George had actually done in that email was tell me that this might require political leverage to include, and one of the issues was the governor's own military files.
So this email said exactly what?
This email indicated to me that, well, first it indicated that they had no legal or regulation right to keep me from medical care, that they were obviously blocking that and in order to just get access to medical care I might have to play the card at the governor's office. This is paraphrased, play the card at the governor's office, which might require some political leverage. And included within that information was including the governor's own military files.
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Burkett says Conn was fired from the Guard the same day, presumably for advising him to threaten the governor's office with information about the missing files. Next up is Harvey Gough.
At the same time, Chief Harvey Gough, who had helped Colonel Goodwin get his job as Chief of Staff, and had helped Bartlett and all of these other people, was trying to run interference and trying to get me access to medical care. He confronted the Chief of Staff, Colonel Goodwin, and the way it's been told to me by Mr. Gough is that he and Colonel Goodwin had — Mr. Gough is a real in-your-face kind of guy, he can sure get rank on you in a hurry — that Colonel Goodwin had befriended him and asked for help, and Gough is the political guy, had asked for help to become Chief of Staff for the Texas National Guard, the state Chief of Staff, which he had done. There was a degree of familiarity, they cussed at each other quite normally and in fact Gough changed his clothes in the chief's office every time he came down to Austin. There was a familiarity there, but when Gough confronted Goodwin about my health situation Goodwin got angry, retorted back to him, and Gough called him a name, or referred to him in some manner with profanity, for which he was then submitted for court martial.
Now I want to bring up the background to that for this reason. About ten days or so later, this was not just an inner fight, it did seem it had gotten out of hand, so I called Dan Bartlett in Austin. And he did take my call that time, and I talked to Dan, and I was pleading for common sense on the case of Harvey especially, and on the case of all of this. I was just basically pleading that the whole thing had gotten out of hand, that it was all out of control, and that somebody needed to, well, I said somebody needed to pull their head out of their ass and get control of this deal. And Harvey Gough had served valuably, even though he was very political and we all knew him to be very political, Harvey Gough had done tremendous things for many governors, and for many adjutants general, and he was still being very well [unintelligible] and was bringing great profit to the organization, and he needed to stop this bull.
And Dan didn't respond a lot except he baited me on a couple of questions, and I told him, this is out of control. And he indicated, well, who would you put in charge out there? And he basically I think was asking me who should be the Adjutant General, I don't know, which I don't want to get into that, but there was some side loops in the conversation.
I know Dan was wary of the conversation at the time, but I did tell him, and I look back at this and I know he should have taken it different, I told him, I said Dan, Harvey's political, this whole situation has gotten political, and you know, there's a downside to this. There's some risks, including this personnel readiness issue, the readiness reports, even the governor's own files.
And he should have retorted back to me, "Are you threatening me?" But he did not. I was probably out of line in a way and yet I will tell you now that I was begging for what I at that point considered life saving help. I could not walk at that time. I was poured into a chair. We finished our call, nothing happened, they court martialed Gough, they kicked him out of the Guard....That was the first time that I personally know that the knowledge that the records issue was an issue was passed to Bartlett, Allbaugh, or somebody else.
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The "ghost soldiers" story finally broke in late 2001 in USA Today at the time that General James had been nominated to be national head of the Air National Guard. At about this time, Burkett was able to tell his entire story to the DOD Inspector General's Office.
Within that time frame there were several people who submitted letters of concern to the Senate Armed Services Committee, both to the majority staff and minority staff and to individual senators. I was aware of those because I was sent many copies by a lot of people, but I sent one that included the assertions about what I had seen on the governor's record.
I got a telephone call here and they had to have an immediate response. They wanted to do an interview and I wanted my attorney present and they didn't want my attorney present, and we did a basic dance and finally put something together there and responded. And they had five, six, or seven attorneys in the room and my attorney was not allowed to be there, and we did it by teleconference, which, it was not a real fair setting but it didn't make any difference, it went off what I considered fairly. I don't know if anything else was done fairly, I would doubt it, but they took my testimony and I detailed this issue of the governor's military records and what I had seen....
And this is what date now?
January, I think it's going to be either the fifth, sixth, or seventh of 2002. That's the date that that interview took place.
Let me go back and make sure I understand this. This is a teleconference among who and for what purpose?
I submitted a letter of concern to the Senate Armed Services Committee about the appointment of Daniel James as director of the Air National Guard. That prompted the DOD Inspector General's Office to conduct this interview. All of my concerns were brought up in this teleconference.
And during this teleconference one of the things that you mentioned was the George Bush records?
Yes. The entire story. I detailed the entire story. And they asked for corroboration and I gave them names, Gough, I gave them Adams, I gave them Conn, and as requested by those other two individuals I left them out.
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