On April 6, 1995, Al Marion received a surprising letter from his boss, US Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas. At the time, Marion was supervisor of an independent investigative bureau of the Forest Service known as the Timber Theft Task Force, which Congress established in 1991 to pursue white-collar timber crimes in California, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. Nobody expected the task force to do much more than inoculate the Forest Service against critics, but it won a string of stunning convictions, including a record-setting $3.2 million case against the Columbia River Scaling Bureau in 1993. Later that year, Marion's 10-man team launched a law enforcement initiative unprecedented at the Forest Service—three concurrent investigations, into allegations of million-dollar timber theft, accounting fraud, and obstruction of justice by Forest Service field managers.
The task force was midstride in this three-pronged operation when Marion received Chief Thomas' letter, politely thanking him and his investigators for their "outstanding contributions" and declaring that the task force had "accomplished its mission." Their jobs were eliminated, effective immediately.
Not everyone agreed that Marion's unit had finished its work. Assistant US Attorney Jeff Kent, who is responsible for timber theft cases in the Northwest and helped prosecute the Columbia River Scaling Bureau, wrote the Office of Inspector General, which has oversight over the Forest Service, in protest: "Even as Chief of Special Prosecutions in Chicago, responsible for corruption and organized crime cases, I have never encountered in my 20 years as a prosecutor such a concerted effort by management to impede and sabotage the Congressionally mandated mission [of a group like the task force] or such Machiavellian maneuvers."
Thomas promised to replace the task force with a national timber theft "cadre." But none materialized, even though the House Appropriations Committee estimates that timber theft costs the Forest Service $10 million to $100 million a year, which—according to former Forest Service Chief F. Dale Robertson—may represent 10 percent of its total timber harvest. A subsequent audit by the Inspector General in 1996 found that the problem had only gotten worse.
Federal prosecutor Kent has been ordered by the Department of Justice not to discuss the situation with reporters. Fearing retaliation, Marion also declines to comment, even though he has since retired to suburban Portland (he worries about former task force members who remain in the agency). Aside from a protest paper distributed two years ago by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), which advocates on many federal issues, the task force and the entire issue of large-scale timber theft have nearly vanished. (PEER will, however, try to revive the subject by lobbying to reinstate the task force when Congress votes on the Forest Service budget next week.)
Later this year, Marion and six former task force investigators hope to win back their jobs, with help from attorneys at PEER and the Government Accountability Project, in a lawsuit filed under the Whistleblowers Protection Act. This suit, Crisafi et al. v. US Department of Agriculture, the largest case ever brought under the Whistleblowers Act, is currently pending before federal Administrative Judge James Freet in Seattle. The case raises not only alleged retribution against the Timber Theft Task Force, and its abandoned investigations, but also an astonishing string of Forest Service documents, internal administration correspondence, and sworn affidavits that expose an apparent effort by senior officials in the Clinton administration to scuttle the crack unit just as its investigators were probing multimillion-dollar allegations against some of the Forest Service's biggest clients and, as it turns out, one of the president's oldest allies.
The Denver briefing
On March 7, 1995, in a Denver hotel room, the night before a Forest Service law enforcement convention and less than a month before the task force would be dismantled, Marion briefed Chief Thomas and his newly appointed director of law enforcement, Manny Martinez. Marion outlined his unit's three active investigations, code-named "Shuffle," "Model T," and "Rodeo." Of the three, Rodeo was probably the most sensitive. It targeted the largest private timber company in the world, the Federal Waybased Weyerhaeuser Co., for allegedly harvesting up to 66,000 trees, worth between $1 million and $3 million, from the Winema National Forest near Klamath Falls in Southern Oregon. Rodeo also involved a delicate internal investigation of three Forest Service field offices suspected of obstructing the investigation by tipping off Weyerhaeuser, quieting informants with promotions, and destroying pertinent documents.
An independent Forest Service review of Rodeo had already concluded that "the probability of conviction is good, as is the probability of civil recovery." And, at least for that night in Denver, Chief Thomas seemed supportive. According to Marion's day-timer diary notes, which have been submitted as evidence in the whistle-blower case, "The Chief said he would give us 18 months to finish the cases." This accords with handwritten orders from law enforcement director Martinez (also submitted as evidence) and an earlier internal Forest Service recommendation that $300,000 be directed to the Rodeo investigation through 1997.
Marion knew Rodeo was a volatile case. Internal investigations are never popular—his staff had been threatened on more than one occasion—and Weyerhaeuser was a Fortune 500 firm, valued at more than $13 billion at the time, with powerful political connections.
