Over the Side

File cabinets. Metal desks. Brass fire nozzles worth $85 each. A $5,000 oscilloscope. All were dumped into the ocean from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk because its sailors were too lazy to return the items to the vessel's storerooms or to do the needed minor repair work.

So claims Petty Officer First Class Robert Jackson, 26, who served ten months aboard the San Diego-based carrier. Working as an auditor on the ship, he accumulated about 1,100 pages of notes and documents on what he describes as appalling acts of waste, fraud, auditing forgeries and altered books in the handling of spare parts and other equipment. The system was so lax, Jackson charges, that when bookkeepers in various departments feared they were exceeding their budgets on supplies, they simply neglected to enter further purchases in the computerized record system. Jackson contends that he examined twelve departments last March and discovered that $2.45 million worth of supplies had been received aboard the ship but had not been charged to the departments. After turning his records over to Navy investigators, Jackson said that the supply system contained "no checks or balances, no accountability. It's a breeding ground for crooks." (Late last week the Navy found that it could not account for some $14 million worth of Kitty Hawk supplies.)

Citing a particularly egregious example of theft, Jackson said that Kitty Hawk sailors managed to requisition 31 bars of pure silver, each weighing 9 Ibs. and worth about $535. The sailors were able to secure the bars from a shore supply depot and hide them. No record of the orders was kept on board, so the pilfering would not have been discovered if one of the sailors had not been caught trying to sell several bars.

Jackson contends that the careless handling of supplies made it possible for a recently discovered international ring of dealers in aircraft parts to acquire sophisticated components from the Kitty Hawk. Seven people, including two Navy men, have been charged by the Justice Department with smuggling at least $5 million worth of spare parts for F-14 fighter planes to Iran. Six of the defendants are natives of the Philippines, the other is an Iranian. Jackson told investigators that he became suspicious of one of the defendants, who served on the Kitty Hawk as an aviation storekeeper, because the man would often "drop a hundred dollars a night playing poker." The smuggling was easy, in Jackson's view, because of the ship's "flawed supply system with minimal or no internal accounting."

The Navy promised a thorough investigation into Jackson's allegations about the Kitty Hawk, which recently won a Navy excellence award for having the best-run supply department in the Pacific Fleet. "If this is the best," Jackson scoffs, "what sort of shape are the bad ones in?"