The Palm Beach Post from West Palm Beach, Florida • Page 445

ST THE PALM BEACH POST SUNDAY. JULY 13, 1986 SE Military buildup: A calculated error i a Stockman assumed that these events meant the defense-at-any-cost arm of the Reagan constituency was in retreat, if not in ruins, when he took over the Office of Management and Budget. In this he gravely underestimated his opponent. The conservatives' bureaucratic losses gave them a kind of reverse power in that they put Stockman and especially Weinberger in the defensive position of having to prove that they weren't soft. Reagan himself, as it quickly became clear, was a strong defense spender.

Also, and critically important, the conservatives knew defense encyclopedically; they had spent years writing detailed wish lists. Stockman and Weinberger knew next to nothing about defense at the time that they were committing the country to its biggest peacetime buildup. The official at the OMB who was in charge of defense, and who accompanied Stockman to the Jan. 30 meeting, was William Schneider, who is portrayed in Stockman's book as a loyal and not very important spear carrier. Schneider is a smart cookie, though, more so perhaps than Stockman noticed.

He came to OMB from the House Armed Services Committee staff, where he worked for Jack Kemp; he was also close to Tower, he was also a member of the transition team that Weinberger fired; he also the chapter on defense spending in the Heritage Foundation's post-election blueprint for the Reagan administration. There, Schneider recommended that defense spending be immediately increased by $33.7 billion. After Inauguration Day, defense spending was immediately increased by $32.6 billion, in a package that Stockman calls "a miscellany of small fixes," but that actually contained the conceptual framework for the main trillion-dollar increase that was to come. On the very day of the "calculator error" meeting, both Stockman and Weinberger met with Tower, who suggested to them specific numbers very close to the ones that Falcon cealed hinges to reveal the entrance to a walk-in vault stocked with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and kilos of cocaine. I had last been in California in March 1980, nine months earlier, to talk to Pat Gregory and Rich Gorman, the agents who had devoted a large portion of their lives to Cen-tac-12 and the pursuit of Falcon.

I had heard then how Falcon had arranged the shooting of one of his own executives, Albert Barruetta, by a mysterious assassin who resembled Clint Eastwood. Someone knocked on my hotel door. I opened it and saw a strongly built man, at least 6-foot-3, with large hands and the face of a movie star. His real name, though he had not used it for years, was Michael Decker. I had heard about some of the things Decker was supposed to have done the number of people killed was, literally, countless.

Decker's whole tale took three days, during which, for security reasons, neither of us left the hotel. DEKER: One of the most interesting jobs I did some of Falcon's people broke into a National Guard armory in northern California and brought a lot of weapons down to Tijuana, about SO M16s, six and M60 machine guns on turret tripods, hand grenades, M70 grenade launchers, cases of ammunition, everything. And Falcon had it all loaded onto a pickup truck and a van and we went out to the Tijuana airport and they put it all on a couple of his planes and we flew to Guadalajara. Guadalajara was one of Falcon's main storage areas and some group down there had broken into a warehouse and stolen several tons of marijuana. Falcon wanted that taken care of.

So we get there and when we land I'm blown out of my saddle. Because Mexican Customs agents and four people from the Guadalajara Police Department are there at the airport. The cops and agents came up, opened the cargo hold and started unloading the guns and putting them on a truck. They were all on Falcon's payroll. The people who had taken the marijuana came in four cars just before sundown.

As the final car turned to the right, six men with automatic weapons stepped out behind them and opened fire. They were firing from behind the cars, so the cars naturally speeded up to get away. -From IE, But when they got to about 50 feet of the gate, two M60s at the corner turrets opened up and two machine guns on each side of the gate opened up. I had four more men firing M16s on each side of the road by the gates, and several guys throwing hand grenades and firing grenade launchers. Within 30 seconds it was over.

Twenty-one people died, and there was very little even recognizable of the cars. It was a kill-fire, just like Vietnam. I guess one of the most dramatic things I ever saw Falcon do, because there was no violence to it, it was all mental, was at a party Falcon gave in the Fiesta Palace Hotel in Mexico City. It was a magnificent party. In the big ballroom.

Food beyond compare. A buffet table with gold bowls full of cocaine surrounded by little silver spoons. When Carlos Kyriakides (an associate of Falcon) walked in, Falcon said to him, "Would you care for some sugar?" Falcon and Kyriakides were competing. Who could impress the most people. Kyriakides had on a kind of lime-colored custom-tailored suit and had all this elaborate jewelry on.

And Falcon had his platinum Rolex out there with all the yellow diamonds gleaming. The evening goes on. Dancing and drinking and eating and talk Centac planes and coastal gunboats. So discreet did Centac remain that many of the foreign agents and American police officers didn't even know they were working for Centac. Centac had been in operation since 1973, with Dayle as chief the last four years, and so far it had destroyed nearly a score of international criminal conglomerates, caused the imprisonment of thousands of criminals, solved hundreds of major crimes, seized millions of dollars yet remained, itself, virtually unknown.

Unlike more highly visible anti-narcotics forces, Centac took almost no interest at all in "If you took all the heroin in the world," Dayle said, "and stacked it up on some barren wasteland, all you'd have is a large pile of white powder. You cannot put a kilo of heroin in jail. You cannot make it tell you who its friends are. The i ing. Probably 300 people in this ballroom.

And one of President Echeverria's assistants, one of his top people, one of his four or five top aides was there. A young guy, about 35. And Kyriakides walks up to him in a group of about 25 people and just like that hands him the keys to a brand-new Ferrari. Now, this was like a $55,000 car. Carlos said, "This is in gratitude for all the wonderful things you've done for our country, and also the wonderful things you've done with us in our businesses." Everybody ohed and ahed and was really impressed when Carlos did that.

Falcon steps forward and pushes him right out of the picture. He says to Echeverria's aide, "I would really like to congratulate you for all you've done And everybody who was in that room knew what he was going to do, because during parties over the years many people had admired Falcon's yellow diamond ring. It was a gorgeous ring, worth I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of dollars. And Falcon handed that ring to this guy. And the guy who got the ring what he did shocked me to death.

He took Falcon's other hand, his left hand, and he kissed his hand, the way you would a bishop or a king. He bowed and kissed his hand and said, "Thank you very much, Mr. Falcon." From IE- problem is not powder. The problem is people. And Centac just simply devours people.

Its metabolism is such that it is constantly in search of kingdoms to consume." Dayle said he worked with a budget, provided by DEA, of $1.1 million a year. This was only a fraction of the value of funds and property Centac seized. Centac made more money for the taxpayer than it spent. I pointed out that the men he goes after were rarely mentioned by the news media. Could that be because the media's attention had for years been concentrated on the Mafia? "I would think so." "If you regarded the Mafia as a single corporation," I asked, "and all the other multinational criminal groups as a corporation, how would they compare?" "I think the other groups together would be five times as great as the Mafia," Dayle answered.

RaHriinn norm rtm Ant in David Stockman emerged that evening supposedly by accident. Was Stockman duped? Is it possible, then, that rather than making a mistake, Stockman was had? That the numbers he thought he was plucking from the air had actually been carefully assembled by Tower, Schneider, Van Cleave, et ak? Robert Kaiser, The Washington Post's assistant managing editor for national news, questioned Stockman not long ago and presented him with this theory. Stockman didn't go along with it wholeheartedly, but he didn't dismiss it, either. "Maybe they knew," he told Kaiser, referring to Schneider and company and the import of the numbers. "I didn't." Stockman's book, like most political memoirs, assumes that the people at the top level of government really do run the government, even if they often make ignorant and bad decisions.

Quite often, though, the truth is that it's people at the second and third level who run things and that one of their prime techniques is to set up a dec. sion and then trick the ignorant new head of the agency into thinking he arrived at it himself. The real lesson of the "calculator error" story is that even the smartest of high officials, when they don't know the details of the programs they're running, can be successfully conned into believing just about anything even that great changes in the direction of government can happen purely by accident. Nicholas Lemann is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. but ships were not designed to stay in the harbors." William W.

Hannah, chairman of Martin County's Housing Finance Authority, is Martin County division manager for a West Palm Beach-based consulting engineering firm, He is vice chairman of the Martin County Chapter of the Treasure Coast Buillders Association and chairman of the builders' legislative affairs committee. He is a past president of the Arts Association and has lived in Martin County for 3 years. 1559 CYPRESS DRIVE JUPITER. FLA. (BETWEEN TEQUESTA DR.

AND RIVERSIDE DR.) 744-5855 OPEN: SAT. By NICHOLAS LEMANN One of the half-dozen most sensational stories in David Stockman's memoirs is the one about the defense, budget and a "calculator error." If you'll recall, Stockman recounts a meeting at the Pentagon on the evening of Jan. 30, 1981, at which he and Caspar Weinberger, in a rush to come up with some numbers for the new budget, agree to raise defense spending by 7 percent. Weeks later, Stockman realizes that he has agreed to raise by 7 percent not defense spending as it then existed, but the current Pentagon budget plus a huge addition that the new administration had decided to make so the resulting figure was enormous. "I nearly had a heart attack," Stockman writes.

"We'd laid out a plan for a five-year defense budget of 1.46 trillion dollars!" The point of the story as Stockman tells it is to show how intellectually slapdash was the initial execution of the Reagan promise to raise defense spending, cut taxes and balance the budget at the same time. But there may have been more going on at that meeting than Stockman realized, and the true point of the story may be quite different. Weinberger disliked Let us take a brief immersion in the defense-spending debate at the time of the "calculator error." Weinberger, as it's now difficult to recall, was then tremendously unpopular with the Republican right. Conservatives hadn't wanted Weinberger as secretary of defense in the first place, because he was known as a budget cutter, many had supported the candidacy of the impeccably hawkish Sen. John Tower of Texas.

Weinberger had made, matters worse just before Reagan's inauguration by firing the defense-transition team, which was headed by William Van Cleave, another ardent hawk, and then appointing as deputy secretary of defense a high Carter administration official, Frank Carlucci. Hannah- different-sized population areas throughout the state. These demonstration areas should be diversified in locale, size and types of programs. If the intent is to find a workable means of making funds available, then it should begin with an evaluation process. If the intent is to justify bureaucratic failure, then let's forget it.

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