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Hudson assured nervous legislators that no member of Congress had been subpoenaed or served with a search warrant. There is no indication yet that any Congressman is a target of the investigation.
At the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci moved to prevent questions about the legality of future awards by reassigning six officials whose names have come up in the scandal. All were switched to duties that have little to do with contracting. Besides Berlin, the officials include Victor Cohen, deputy for tactical warfare systems for the Air Force, and James Gaines, director for acquisition and congressional support for the Navy. NBC News reported that investigators have videotapes of both accepting bribes from consultants, including Melvyn Paisley; lawyers for Cohen and Gaines did not immediately comment.
The reassignments were about the most Carlucci could do for the moment, since nobody mentioned in the probe has yet been formally accused of anything. Last week Attorney General Edwin Meese said he might have been too sanguine when he predicted that criminal charges in the case could be announced in as little as 30 days. Prosecutor Hudson, who is leading the investigation, said he expects the first of many indictments to be handed down late in the year, perhaps after the November election.
There were reports last week that investigators had learned indirectly, through wiretaps on conversations between other people, that Lehman had tipped Paisley off to the investigation. But Justice Department officials told TIME that the department's evidence is harder and more direct than has been reported. They say Lehman's tip-off to Paisley came late last year, after both had left the Pentagon. Paisley, when he served as a subordinate, had helped Lehman concentrate virtually all Navy contracting decisions in the Secretary's office.
Investigators have not determined how Lehman found out about the secret probe. He was not officially briefed about Operation Ill Wind before he left the Pentagon in 1987. It is unlikely that Lehman can successfully be prosecuted for warning Paisley; that would require evidence that the contentious and impulsive former Navy Secretary had a corrupt motive. But the incident, if proved, could hurt Lehman's reputation. It is also a headache for Vice President George Bush, who has long been close to Lehman and helped persuade Ronald Reagan to give Lehman his job.
Even before Operation Ill Wind surfaced, many Pentagon watchers believed that Lehman and his former boss, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, could have done more to prevent the increasing number of leaks to defense contractors. An internal Defense Department memo, disclosed earlier this year in an unrelated criminal case, revealed that Weinberger was warned by his staff as early as 1985 that vital information was leaking out of Lehman's office. Weinberger seems to have taken little action.
Between 1984 and 1987, Lehman was the subject of a criminal investigation by the Justice and Defense Departments. The inquiry attempted to determine whether he had acted illegally in awarding General Dynamics a profitable Trident submarine contract amid a furor over cost overruns in another submarine project by the giant defense contractor. The investigation was closed without indictments.