Ben T. Plymale, 55, a vice president of the Boeing Aerospace Co. and a former Pentagon official who was deputy head of the Reagan transition team at the Defense Department, died Aug. 8 in a hospital in Rivers Inlet, British Columbia, after a heart attack.

A resident of Seattle, Mr. Plymale was on a fishing trip in Canada when he was stricken.

He was deputy director for research and engineering for strategic and space systems at the Defense Department from 1968 to 1972. In addition to serving as deputy team leader of transition at the Pentagon, following Reagan's election as president in November 1980, he was also cochairman of Reagan's Defense Budget Committee.

Mr. Plymale joined the Boeing Co. in 1950 and became an authority in strategic defense systems. He was one of the Boeing managers who developed the Minuteman missile program. He was the author of technical works, dealing with gyro-dynamics and navigation systems of missiles, many of which are still used in university instruction.

After leaving the Pentagon in 1972, he returned to Boeing as space systems division vice president. From 1974 to 1979, he was vice president for business development, and was Boeing's vice president for advanced missile programs at the time of his death.

He was reared in Oregon and earned a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics at the University of Portland. He served in the Navy during World War II.

Survivors include his wife, Susan, a sister, and 10 children, all of Seattle. [...]

Chapter 4 THE ASYMMETRIC WARRIOR

[...]

As one connection led to another, [Thomas Paul Rona (born 1923)] himself came to Washington a few years later. Ben Plymale, a vice president at Boeing and former defense official from the Nixon administration, was Rona’s friend and mentor. Plymale introduced Rona to William van Cleve, a professor at the University of Southern California. Van Cleve had been an adviser to Ronald Reagan during the 1980 campaign and was directing the Defense Department transition team for the new administration. Rona started working for van Cleve, and soon caught the eye of [William Robert Graham (born 1937)], who was also working on the transition and was about to become Reagan’s new director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Graham offered Rona a job as deputy director. [...]

Ben [Playmale's] best friend was [Melvyn Robert Paisley (born 1924)], a colleague and fellow executive at Boeing. In the late 1960s, Melvyn lived on a farm in Kent, Washington and was married to his second wife, a younger woman named Mary Lou who enjoyed painting as a hobby. Then on May 8, 1968, Mary Lou’s dead body was discovered in their home in suspicious circumstances. She was found in the bathroom, lying face down and her head was surrounded by towels laced with carbon tetrachloride, a toxic cleaning fluid that she used to clean her paint brushes. The story that Melvyn gave was that she had gotten drunk and she took sleeping pills the night before and then accidentally asphyxiated herself with the cleaning fluid. There was a police investigation and an investigation by the coroner. Her death was officially ruled an accident and the matter was officially dropped.

Despite the cause of death ruling, the matter was not dropped entirely; mostly because Mary Lou’s sister didn't believe the official version of events. It became clear that there was more to the story, and the possibility of a cover-up and a murder became plausible. Twenty years later, when Melvyn was being investigated for separate corruption charges while working in the Pentagon, the case was reopened by King County. It became clear that there were many inconsistencies and inaccuracies with the autopsy report, including the fact that the report found no traces of alcohol or sleeping pills in her system and the fact that the coroner who performed the report also worked for Boeing and somehow kept the report from review by his boss, the head coroner. There was also the revelation that not long before her death, Mary Lou had discovered or speculated that Melvyn was having an affair and had hired a private investigator to follow her husband. (Seven months later, Melvyn married the woman he was having an affair with.)

Also damning was that – according to phone records – after Melvyn discovered his wife’s body, the police was not the first number he called. The first number he called was his attorney and the second was his best friend, Ben Plymale. Then that morning, my grandfather’s wife Susan went over to their house to clean it before the county authorities arrived. Susan apparently cleaned or threw away what the investigators assumed was vital evidence. That afternoon the investigators also noted that a fire was burning in the fireplace, which they remarked as unusual because it was May and not cold outside. The inference was that some evidence was probably incinerated in the fire.

Although the investigation was reopened in 1988, no additional charges were ever filed and Mary Lou’s death still remains classified as an accident. However, given the circumstantial evidence, it is likely that there was more to the story. Was Mary Lou Paisley was murdered? If so, my grandfather and his wife were directly involved with covering up the crime. Interestingly, for decades after the fact, the case of Mary Lou Paisley was used an example by the King County Sheriff’s Office as an example of how not to investigate a crime scene. [...]

Mr. KEMP.

Mr. Speaker, on August 8, I lost a friend-and the United States lost a patriot. His name was Dr. Ben T. Plymale, a brilliant defense strategist and engineer. Ben's formidable talents were placed in service of the Nation on many occasions: From 1968-72, when he served as Deputy Director of Defense Research and Engineering, and most recently as second in command of the Defense transition team.

Ben's judgment in matters of national security was held in highest regard by his professional colleagues, bringing distinction to the Boeing Corp., which he served with singular dignity and loyalty for 30 years. But his friends will remember him best for his forthright honesty; his knack for seeing the essence of any issue or individual, and stating his opinions without hesitation or equivocation; and the special touches of humor that could come only from him, reflecting both his sense of realism and the uncompromising principles by which he lived.

While critically ill from cancer and a failing heart, Ben devoted countless hours and bottomless energy to the campaign and transition work for Ronald Reagan. A leading candidateand my personal choice-for Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Ben withdrew his name from consideration for the office because he feared that his poor health might impinge upon his ability to continue to serve in an official capacity. But his advancing illness did not detract from his unofficial, uncompensated service to the Nation, as he completed work on the alternative defense budget President Reagan commissioned his campaign task forces on defense to prepare, and he actively participated in internal debates over the future of U.S. strategic forces. With this, and much more, how can we begin to measure the contributions Ben has made to the security of our Nation?

I am proud to have known Ben Plymale, and to offer this tribute as a token of my gratitude for his advice and friendship and for the high service he rendered the United States.

At my request, just a week before his death, Ben prepared discussion papers on several key issues in the MX-ICBM debate. Now I believe it only fitting that I share this work with my colleagues, that the country might have the benefit of his counsel one more time:

ISSUE PAPERS BY DR. BEN T. PLYMALE

I. LAUNCH ON WARNING OF ICBM'S

"Launch on Warning" is being discussed as one of the possible options to ensure survivability of ICBM's against preemptive enemy arguments related to this option.

The Launch on Warning concept calls for launching our ICBM's following warning information to the effect that enemy missiles are actually on their way, and are aimed at our ICBM launch sites. In this sense, Launch on Warning <LOW) is not preemptive, since it will only take place upon reliable evidence that the enemy has actually fired its first strike.

On the pro side of the LOW issue, one must recognize that if our ICBM's are launched on warning, they will "survive", in the sense that they will destroy the intended targets (subject to the usual attrition factors due to reliability and penetration). It is also possible, although by no means proven, that the improvements in the warning and command and control systems which could make the Launch on Warning concept technically acceptable would result in somewhat lesser overall cost than looking to completely new systems to ensure survivability.

The arguments against the attractiveness of the LOW concept are many and interacting. For reasons of clarity, they are grouped here into four categories: Technical, Military, Policy and Cultural.

1. Technical

The LOW concept depends on sensors to detect that an attack is in progress, on communication links to relay the sensed information, on data processing equipment where sensed information is combined to gain increased confidence, and requires an override <or veto> function, to give the President or National Command Authority the option of circumventing automatic response.

Under many situations, many different types of sensors can be used to enhance strategic warning and increase system confidence. However, we must provide protection against a totally unexpected <surprise> attack or be vulnerable to its consequences. Only satellite sensors and early warning radars are useful in this context. In the LOW context, false alarms, due to equipment failures that report an attack are catastrophic in that they result in an unwarranted nuclear war, so a high degree of equipment redundancy is absolutely required. Failures that result in not reporting an attack when one is in progress are also catastrophic. When the attacker can cause such failure he is motivated to attack rather than be deterred. When these are not caused by the attacker, he may be deterred to some extent, but the survivability feature of LOW has, nonetheless, failed.

In any redundant systems, some form of "voting" mechanism is needed to reject or accept the inputs received from the sensors. While the sensors and communication networks can be made highly redundant, in the end the "voting" mechanism will be the weakest link in the confidence building chain. Within our ability to forecast and plan, the technology state of the art will not support a data processing mechanism with sufficient confidence to chance a nuclear war when one is not called for.

The LOW veto power given to the NCA is more cosmetic than real and may indeed be counterproductive as discussed below. If the NCA had any independent basis on which to execute a veto, such basis would be incompatible with the LOW mechanization to increase its reliability and confidence.

Even though the performance of the warning, command and control system can be tested to a certain degree in the field, the possible destruction by means of enemy attacks on key elements, or the possible degradation by means of enemy countermeasures cannot be accurately predicted or essentially precluded. This introduces a further element of uncertainty in the decision process implied in LOW approach to survivability.

2. Strategic

Our deterrent capability against the Soviet Union is further weakened by allowing the Soviet decision makers any room for doubt about the reliability of our retaliatory strikes. If it is possible for the Soviets to interfere with our warning, command and control systems even for the short time span required for the LOW to offer its alleged advantages, then such doubt becomes possible with possibly catastrophic consequences.

The short period preceding the irrevocable commitment of our missiles in the LOW mode precludes retargeting, i.e., changing the targeted aimpoints prior to launch. This, of course, deprives the ICBM force of one of its most attractive attributes, flexibility coupled to accuracy.

Retention of a secure reserve force, capa-· ble of supporting our national objectives over long protracted periods of nuclear warfare, is considered as a paramount requirement of our strategic posture. To various degrees, the other elements of our strategic TRIAD exhibit deficiencies in regard to this essential characteristic of endurance. Making the ICBMs dependent on LOW for survival would in effect deprive this segment of the TRIAD from any degree of enduring survival.

3. Policy

Our policy is, and is expected to remain, to endure any conceivable attack on our strategic nuclear forces and to decide the appropriate response following careful assessment of our then apparent national interests and objectives. Under no circumstances should the President be faced with the dilemma of either losing significant fraction of all strategic nuclear forces, or launching them against a previously established target set which may not at that time be consistent with our national interest. If for instance our ICBMs are targeted in the "counterforce" mode, they may be simply wasted on empty enemy launchers. If our LOW salvo is even partially aimed at Soviet urban/industrial targets, we may precipitate a Soviet retaliatory strike against our own cities. This could result in excess of 100 million U.S. fatalities. If the original attack was limited to our ICBM force and we survived the attack, assessed damage and limited our response to a counterforce attack we might well be able to terminate hostilities with as little as 10 million fatalities. An automatic LOW response almost guarantees the deaths of half or more of our population.

The LOW concept implies that the President has the capability to effect a massive ICBM launch against Soviet targets by simply not exercising his veto power to stop and otherwise irrevocable LOW process. In effect then, the President can, by default, start a nuclear war on the basis of the (possibly automated) command and control decision process, overlaid by his personal judgment in regard to a matter of such momentous consequences. He may, if there is time, consult his personal advisers, but he is more likely to make the ultimate decision on the basis of his own deeply held standards, convictions and prejudices. The Cabinet may not be at hand on short notice; but consultation with Congress, as required by law in matters of exercising war powers, is certainly out of the question.

4. Cultural

Irrespective of the formally prescribed process for leasing nuclear weapons, the individual exercising the functions of the National Command Authority <NCA) faces a problem of unprecedented nature and magnitude when it comes to commit, or not to veto, the massive use of nuclear weapons. When the decision must be taken in a matter of minutes, when the views of the advisors are confused or conflicting, and when the outcome would result in certain death for tens of millions of human beings, it is almost certain that the NCA's decision will be against the launch of our weapons. This simple fact deeply rooted in our cultural background, is largely independent of the political persuasion of the individuals involved and cannot be changed by additional refinement in equipment or procedures. It is a massive argument against the alleged survivability afforded by the Launch on Warning concept.

II. BALLASTIC MISSILE DEFENSE OF ICBM'S

Introduction

Solutions to the ICBM survivability question, with major emphasis on basing alternatives, have been studied by the past four administrations, examined in depth by innumerable expert panels and committees, and further reviewed extensively by the Congress. Alternative survivable ICBM deployments were analyzed based on proposals from basement inventors, universities, "think tanks", major defense contractors, and the Armed services.

As a result of this exhaustive public review and the ongoing R&D program, the MX MPS system advantages and disadvantages are well understood. However, an uneasiness still persists with respect to some perceived disadvantages of MX MPS basing-such as the environmental impact. This continuing uneasiness has led to a compulsion to discover a quick and easy answer. An active defensive system or ABM is now a candidate to solve the ICBM survivability problem. But is the ABM technology ready and can the proposed ABM concept do the job? ABM systems have not been given serious consideration in recent years because of concern over < 1) adequacy of ABM technology in the nuclear environment, (2) effectiveness against a reactive threat, (3) MPS shelter proliferation cost advantage over ABM total costs, and (4) ABM treaty constraints.

LoAD's ability to improve MX survivability is doubtful

The LoAD system, proposed to defend MX MPS, may cause MX to fail catastrophically by contributing to compromise in Position Location Uncertainty <PLU) before an initial attack. LoAD also could cause MX to fail catastrophically if a low level "spoof" attack forces LoAD to reveal the MX location, even if pre-attack PLU is not compromised. LoAD was not designed to engage a responsive Soviet threat, which might include maneuvering RV's, anti-radiation homing RV's, jammers, decoys, or a myriad of other potential countermeasures.

The ability of ABM's to protect ICBM's launchers in known locations has not been proven adequately

An ICBM, in a silo of known location, will be subject to saturation attack, not only on itself, but also on any defensive system designed to protect it. The reason that no U.S. operational ABM system exists today is that no one has been able to show cost effectiveness and technological feasibility for such a system.

Abrogation or modification of the ABM Treaty will be done deliberately, not by default

There exists in Congress a significant number of members who look to SALT type treaties to guarantee a stable strategic balance with the Soviets. If the current ABM treaty is to be modified or abrogated, Congress will insist that such action be weighed and argued on its own "arms control" merits rather than backing into such a decision by committing ABM for the defense of our ICBM's.

Conclusion

At this point, it is premature to make a major commitment to ABM defense of ICBM's. However, ABM systems show sufficient promise to warrant aggressive R&D, within the confines of the existing treaty, to resolve the critical technical questions while the larger national security issues related to ABM undergo the test of public debate.

III. AIR LAUNCHED MX IN THE CONTINUOUS AIRBORNE ALERT BASING MODE ("BIG BIRD")

1. The continuous airborne alert basing mode for the air launched MX does not satisfy the major mission requirements

The continuous airborne alert basing concept calls for deployment areas over the oceans. Such deployment is, to a considerable extent, vulnerable to surprise attack. The Soviets are in position to develop specifically tailored "reactive threats," including surveillance and weapon delivery, which could in a time frame well within our planning horizon, preempt the MX force. Typical surveillance systems might be based on land or ship-based over-the-horizon <OTH> radars or satellite radars: weapons could be delivered by long-range strike aircraft equipped with terminally guided air-to-air semi-ballistic or cruise missiles.

The potential Soviet threat to the MX carrier aircraft over international waters does not require the use of nuclear weapons to be effective. Individually targeted air-toair or surface-to-air interceptor missiles have at present operationally demonstrated short miss distances which result in very high aircraft kill probabilities while using conventional warheads. The potential for attrition and even preemption is a destabilizing factor in the strategic balance.

The continuous airborne alert based aircraft are severely limited in postattack endurance. The airborne endurance of the currently contemplated carrier aircraft is, at best, six to eight days. With less than ten nuclear weapons the enemy can destroy the main operating bases provided for recovery; with a few hundred weapons the enemy can destroy dispersed emergency recovery airfields as well. In both instances, this is a very small price for him to pay to force us either to launch the MX missiles <which may result in immediate escalation to uncontrolled levels of general nuclear warfare, including attacks against our cities), or to lose the whole MX system for lack of usable recovery bases.

Airborne deployment, especially when constrained to slow, low-flying (propeller) aircraft in the interest of fuel economy, has all the disadvantages of placing major nuclear assets over broad ocean areas not under sovereign U.S. control. In this sense, airborne deployment has the disadvantages of submarine basing without the corresponding unique benefits of submarines: relatively long on-station endurance <up to 60 days) and being essentially unaccessible to wide-area surveillance.

2. The effectiveness of the proposed implementation concept<s> is open to question

The current configuration of the MX missile has not been defined in keeping with the requirements for air launch. Its size, range, and_payload capability are not even close to that -needed for an air launch role. There is no evidence based on test programs to show that an MX-size missile can be launched from the proposed aircraft. No commitment to such a system should be made until this capability is verified by tests.

It is possible, and indeed likely, that other missile configurations <two Minuteman III missiles or several small, single reentry-vehicle missiles in the 20 to 25,000 lb. gross weight range) may be more suitable for the air launch deployment role.

In order to ensure even a minimal level of protection against surprise attacks, major defense assets (sea/air based air and antimissile defense) would have to be diverted from the U.S. general purpose forces. The cost of these defensive assets must be included when assessing the effectiveness of the airborne alert type deployment. Defensive assets will have to be provided from our heavily committed general-purpose forces inventory, if the enemy chooses to increase his preemptive threat against the MX airborne deployment.

The cost for the enemy to preempt an airborne alert based weapon system is considered to be much smaller than the resources required to preempt the MX in their landbased multiple shelter mode. The latter, for sake of comparison, imply the expenditure of 4,600 high-accuracy warheads or, alternatively, remarkably sophisticated intelligence/ surveillance, retargeting capabilities.

Air-deployed intercontinental missiles not having access to accurate azimuth references will have delivery accuracy significantly inferior to those associated with land-based ICBM's. This can be remedied at the additional cost of radio beacon based inflight updating, which in tum introduces its own vulnerability risks.

Relatively low altitude, fuel efficient flight profiles (5,000 to 15,000 ft.) and propulsion techniques are required in order to give a minimum level of airborne endurance (six days). Such flight profiles imply accident rates far exceeding those normally associated with modern jet aircraft, and certainly far in excess of those associated with land basing. Extended deployment ranges may require flight through turbulent atmospheric regions where the accident rate would be higher still.

The MX missile design is not best suited for airborne carriage. In point of fact, the specially developed airplane which is being proposed may not be necessary. It is an open question whether one should design the carrier aircraft for one large missile with ten warheads or for two or three Minuteman III's with three warheads each, or perhaps for several small missiles each carrying a single warhead.

The number of trained crews is significantly larger than the number of airplanes in the air all the time. Six-day continuous airborne missions are beyond the experience to date.

3. The continuous airborne alert basing has a number of undesirable side effects

The number of peacetime takeoffs and landings with the associated risk of crashes involving live nuclear weapons raises the question of environmental impact due to plutonium contamination. The problem could be partially solved by redesigning and procuring oralloy based warheads, but such designs and weapons are not now available in stockpile.

Attacks against the main operating bases or against the emergency recovery bases, aimed at destroying the endurance of the airborne deployment could result in several tens, and possibly hundred, million casualties.

4. A number of technical, schedule, and cost risks are associated with the continuous airborne alert basing

Nuclear hardening of MX-carrier aircraft.

Ejection of missile from aircraft, postlaunch stresses and flight dynamics.

New navigation/ guidance initialization system.

New, dedicated special-purpose missile carrier aircraft.

Design of all-oralloy nuclear warheads.

All these put an early IOC date at considerable risk.

SPRINGFIELD, Va. - In a rented brick townhouse on a quiet street here last week, Richard L. Fowler's friends and relatives phoned to wonder why he didn't just tell authorities what they wanted to know.

Had he talked, he might not be in jail today.

For more than four years, federal investigators had zeroed in on the man they would call the defense industry's mother lode of classified Pentagon documents. It ended with the shutting of a cell door Wednesday morning, when Fowler went to jail for refusing to say who gave him the secret budget documents. On Friday, he received a two-year prison sentence for passing them on to The Boeing Co. and other major defense contractors.

All along, Fowler has insisted it was the job that a Boeing vice president had specifically hired him to do.

He thought it was legal. He said everybody was doing it. It was ``as common as trading baseball cards.''

Now Fowler, 64, describes himself as ``the fall guy'' in a government ``witch hunt'' to plug the Pentagon leaks. But he refuses to name the sources, despite the pleas of lawyers and family members.

``Yeah, I know I make you mad,'' Fowler told a friend on the telephone a few days before he went to jail. ``I've made a lot of people angry, and a lot of people don't understand, and I'm not asking that people understand. But if I talked, I wouldn't be able to face myself in the mirror.''

Fowler, a senior marketing analyst for Boeing between 1978 and 1986, is the first person to be convicted in what prosecutors said was a far-reaching conspiracy among employees at Boeing and other defense contractors with whom he shared and traded the documents.

On Dec. 7 Fowler was convicted of one count of conspiracy to defraud the government, 18 counts of conveying government documents without authority, five counts of converting the documents to his use and 15 counts of mail fraud for having them sent to Boeing.

But his own view is that the investigation and prosecution of him boiled down to a test of ``my integrity, trustworthiness and loyalty.''

In one of a stack of ``position papers'' he has painstakingly hand-written over these past many months, Fowler says, ``I am here today not for what I did; I'm here for what I did not do'' - name his sources. Fowler says he was offered immunity in March 1987 if he would cooperate. The chief investigator on the case said his office checked with prosecutors and they could not recall any such offer. But no one disputes that Fowler's sources are the ultimate goal of the continuing federal probe.

``Good, patriotic, honest government employees who had no idea what they were doing was wrong,'' Fowler calls them, his voice rising with emotion.

He shuffles through his piles of notes to remind himself of all that has happened. He has lost weight and developed a skin condition from nerves, he says.

Though his lawyer advised him against giving any interviews, he is talking, he says, because he feels the public might understand what the justice system did not.

The Pentagon classifies its spending projections for weapons systems largely to keep them out of the hands of meddlesome members of Congress before they are finalized and presented by the president, according to Fowler and two other former Pentagon workers who knew him. They said the plans were often informally released to companies in the defense-contracting business so they could do a better job of using research money and preparing to compete for contracts.

Fowler's job was to obtain Pentagon financial and budgetary information for Boeing. From years of work inside the Pentagon, he had the best Air Force sources. He swapped ``secret'' documents with industry representatives who had better sources in the Army, Navy and Office of the Secretary of Defense. Fowler, who had government clearance to handle ``secret'' documents legally given to him, entered the documents in a Boeing log book and assumed the practice was legal because Pentagon inspectors checked the log every six months.

Boeing officials have admitted that the company acquired and used the documents, but stopped five years ago. Boeing spokesman Paul Binder says the company will have no other comment on the Fowler case. And Fowler has taken on the singular responsibility of protecting the sources who made him a success at Boeing.

His sources' jobs, their pensions, perhaps even their freedom, are at stake, Fowler says. He knows the experience of personal ruin.

After 35 years of government work and eight years at Boeing, Fowler is nearly broke. He and Muriel, his wife of 35 years, owe back taxes. They rent their house, lease their cars. They are getting by on Muriel's job with a real-estate office and his $231-a-month Boeing pension. Their federal pension went down the drain with the felony conviction.

``There isn't a soul out there who can put themselves in our shoes,'' says Muriel Fowler, 62. ``And I'm not talking hardened criminals - I'm talking patriotic, law-abiding citizens. Right now I am very bitter, and I'm not through fighting yet. That's all I'm going to say.''``Of course my family has some reservations,'' Richard Fowler says of his decision to protect his Pentagon sources. ``They'd have to. Like my daughter, at the beginning, the very beginning, said `Dad, I'd rather have a snitch for a father than a jailbird.' And then she's turned completely around, and now she's saying `My father's a hero.' ''

``I have to admire him,'' Muriel Fowler admits. ``But I don't always understand it.''

Fowler said the sources didn't need to ask him to assure their anonymity when he was getting several hundred classified budget documents over the years. They didn't imagine they were doing anything criminal. And the sources haven't needed to beg him - or even thank him - for keeping the secret since.

In fact, Fowler said, he hasn't heard a word from any of his old sources in nearly two years.

``I don't care what they expect or don't expect,'' Fowler says with the kind of resignation acquired from years of preparing to go to prison. ``I'm doing this out of my own - what do I say? compassion? - my own self-respect.''

He thinks his sources are ``smart enough to just stay away and have no contact. I mean, these are not people who are inconsiderate, but they know enough to keep a respectful distance.''

Boeing has kept its distance, too. Nobody from Boeing telephoned Fowler for a year and a half until last week. Then three employees called to wish him well. One said he had gotten his supervisor's permission to phone

``Well, I can understand why I haven't gotten a lot of calls from people,'' Fowler said. ``They don't know what to say. All I can say is, hell, I can take it, because I can hold my head up high.''

Why is Fowler so steadfastly protecting his sources?

``We wonder about it all the time,'' an in-law said.

The price Fowler is paying also causes people to wonder if he has hidden motives.

Is he being paid off? Investigators have never suggested that Fowler, his sources or Boeing was involved in payoffs or bribery of any form. The only money involved was Fowler's salary, which rose from $29,500 to $56,200 during eight his years with Boeing.

So, is he protecting some military brass or Boeing executive? Again, nobody connected to the case has alleged that. Fowler was a middle-level worker with a high-school education. He said he kept his nose to his work and stayed out of company politics. Fowler's concerns are with smaller, more personal things, like his old friends' pensions.

Is it possible he is making the sources up? Did he sneak into the Pentagon and steal the documents to impress Boeing? ``Absolutely not,'' says the chief of the investigation, Michael Costello of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, a Pentagon watchdog.

There is simply no explanation to rival the one that Fowler gives - that he got the documents from old friends, whom he will not betray.

``If you're in trouble, why pull somebody else in with you?'' Fowler asks.

Costello wants the leakers punished to send a message to other people who might give away classified documents.

``They were put in a position of trust, and they violated that,'' Costello said in a recent interview. ``They independently and capriciously made decisions to give this information to an individual who was not entitled to it by any stretch. There are a lot of reasons these people should be slam-dunked.''

But so far, Fowler is the only one convicted in the case. And so far, he's taken his punishment with equanimity. He stood erect before the jurors who found him guilty, and looked them calmly in the eye.

For now, Fowler is willing to go to jail for his Pentagon sources, though he sees a point when he might name them. In nine months, it will have been five years since he received his last classified document from one of them. The statute of limitations on criminal charges will expire.

Costello agreed that the statute of limitations was ``the controlling factor'' in the investigation of the leaks. He said the government has a good idea who the sources are, but not enough to prosecute.

``We need a little bit to put this thing over the edge, and Fowler could be that,'' he said. ``We'll see how long he can sit in jail.''

The case has national importance. With or without his sources, Fowler set the precedent in what Costello says will be similar prosecutions this year of ``a lot of people and a lot of companies'' that were involved in unauthorized use of Pentagon budget documents.

Fowler says he has handled classified documents since he was a 16-year-old messenger for the War Department. His father was a civil engineer who helped build one side of the Pentagon. During World War II as a gunner, the younger Fowler suffered a broken neck when a B-29 went down in the ocean during a training exercise.

Fowler missed action because of the accident, but he did report to the Philippines and flew over Hiroshima and Nagasaki four days after the atomic bombs hit.

Fowler went to work as a civilian in the Pentagon the next year. He progressed through the ranks until he reached a job in the Air Force Research and Development office.

``The job was challenging. I had established myself. I had a good name.''

And there he stayed for 18 years. As a budget officer for missile programs, Fowler had frequent contact with Boeing and other contractors. He received the Award for Meritorious Civilian Service, the Pentagon's top award for a civilian.

At home, Fowler took pride in his principles. He picketed a local car dealer for two days when the dealer wouldn't fix a problem on his teen-age son's new car.

Fowler quit the Pentagon in 1978. He said President Jimmy Carter's zero-based budgeting was a paperwork nightmare. Shortly after that, Boeing offered him a job. Fowler said he was hired by Ben Plymale, then vice president for marketing. (Plymale died in 1981.)

Fowler says Boeing had scores of marketing analysts who were all trying to get inside information, including budget projections, at the Pentagon. Fowler's job was to get those budget documents, freeing up his fellow analysts for other areas.

Fowler says Plymale told him his sources were nobody's business, and Boeing's security chief told him it was legal as long as he entered the documents into Boeing's classified-documents security system.

Financial intelligence-gathering was nothing new at Boeing. When Fowler joined Boeing in 1978, a woman named Gloria Mahaffey was operating a secret library in the company's office in Kent. Boeing kept its cache of classified Pentagon budget documents there for review by select marketing officials, Mahaffey said at Fowler's trial.

In 1979, for reasons that are unclear, Boeing began handling the classified documents with tighter security. They were all logged into the company's classified documents accountability system in Rosslyn, Va. Inspectors for the Defense Investigative Service checked the log twice a year, and they didn't raise questions until 1986.

Fowler said the log was one reason his Pentagon sources trusted him so much. They knew Boeing was handling the documents carefully. He said it was also a reason the government targeted Boeing. They had a road map to the evidence.

The worst mistake Fowler will admit to is putting some of the classified information in his weekly activity reports. Those were not classified. In some cases, his superior repeated the information in his own report, which was circulated to 268 Boeing employees.

Fowler says Boeing wanted the documents for many reasons. The company could direct its research money to areas the Pentagon was planning to finance. It could look for opportunities to compete.

Fowler was named one of Boeing's Marketing Employees of the Quarter in June 1986. Everything was going along fine - fine, that is, until the Pentagon's Defense Investigative Service started raising questions.

Behind the scenes in the early 1980s, Defense Department investigators and the Department of Justice had been trying to decide whether to crack down on the bootlegging. It was part of a broader move to plug leaks.

One former head of the Defense Procurement Fraud Unit of the Justice Department argued that the cases were not conspiracies. A Defense Department inspector general appealed to higher-ups to pressure the Justice Department to bring a case.

In October 1985, Bernie Zettl, a consultant for the Connecticut-based GTE Corp., was indicted.

Fowler says Boeing speeded up its usual schedule of destroying out-of-date documents after he heard a warning that contractors should get rid of their classified Pentagon documents.

Push came to shove over Fowler's sources in 1986. The Defense Investigative Service challenged Boeing's possession of 59 classified budget documents.

Fowler told a company investigator that he had obtained the reports from five friends in the Air Force Research and Development office. He says he was conned into identifying one of them, who had retired, on the promise that investigators would be satisfied the leak was plugged.

But that was not enough, he says. And after he saw the ``devastated look'' on that source's face when he told him the news, Fowler resolved never to reveal another source.

Boeing fired Fowler in September 1986. He says he is not bitter.

``They had no choice but to fire me,'' Fowler explains. ``I violated the industrial security manual by not cooperating with the investigation. Boeing was facing suspension from government contracts if they didn't do something.''

Boeing, he says, is the best company he ever worked for.

Muriel Fowler scoffs at the idea. ``You got screwed, and you didn't even get a kiss!''

Fowler, sipping a mai tai, shrugs. ``I can't do nothin' about it.''

Last year, Fowler says, the government twice offered him plea bargains on crimes with a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison if he gave up his sources. He says he rejected those offers, too.

Fowler's stubbornness grew as his trial approached last month. He was hoping to get off. He lost the gamble.

Six officials with other companies and 10 current and former Boeing workers were granted immunity as part of the Fowler prosecution. Former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci and a number of generals testified that the classified reports should never have been released; Fowler responds that they were out of touch with the reality at the working level.

The jury deliberated just two hours. One juror later said many of the jurors had believed Fowler was a scapegoat but had no choice but to convict him.

Fowler's insistence on protecting sources had influenced the trial strategy. He says one of the main reasons he did not testify on his own behalf was that he believed he would have been asked once again to name his sources. When he refused, he could have been held in contempt of court. That would have meant going to jail and missing Christmas at home with his family.

Last Monday, Fowler's lawyer sent him one more appeal to name the sources. The lawyer, Cary Feldman, wrote Fowler that investigators already had a good idea who the sources were. He argued that Fowler's cooperation with a grand jury probe would not hurt the sources much, if he didn't tie them to specific documents.

Refusal, Feldman warned, would mean certain jail time and possibly a longer prison sentence.

Fowler didn't budge. On Tuesday, he says, he told the federal grand jury he could only reveal the sources for documents named in 162 of the 334 ``overt acts'' cited in his indictment. Those sources were dead or had been granted immunity. They were employees of Boeing or other contractors.

Fowler says he feels free to speak about Boeing because the company obtained immunity for its employees' acts as part of a corporate plea agreement last November.

Boeing itself, unscathed by other recent contracting scandals, admitted guilt to one felony for receiving classified budget reports and agreed in a negotiated plea bargain to pay $5.2 million restitution and fines.

Boeing made nearly $3 million per working day in profits last year.

``The Boeing Company's fine, in exchange for total immunity, was a bargain, but appears to have sacrificed a single participant,'' retired Air Force Lt. Col. Richard C. Coupland Jr. wrote in a letter to U.S. District Judge Albert Bryan Jr. before Fowler's sentencing.

Boeing's field office in Rosslyn is applying for reinstatement from a suspension action that has prevented its estimated 100 employees from having contact with government contract officers.''

Meanwhile, Boeing's work can be done from its other offices - ``as if nothing had happened,'' says Charles H. Welling Jr., manager of Boeing Aerospace Company's field marketing offices from 1974 to 1979, who also wrote the judge on Fowler's behalf.

``Although Dick broke the law, he never derived any personal gain from his actions but was always motivated by a desire to benefit the company,'' wrote Welling, who had helped hire Fowler.

At a Christmas party last month, a group of Pentagon and industry people were talking about the Fowler case and agreed they had let him down, according to one industry consultant who used to work with Fowler at the Pentagon.

``Everybody in the industry is scared,'' he said. ``What could we do? Speak up for Dick? If we did, we'd probably be targeted.''

Anthony Asterita of Mount Vernon, Va., worked with Fowler in the Pentagon between 1974 and 1978, then retired at the rank of lieutenant colonel and went to work in the industry. He said the ``secret'' budget information actually had little value and was widely shared through the early 1980s.

``The value to a contractor like Boeing is to structure long-range planning,'' Asterita said. ``And who benefits from it? The military benefits from it, because you have a more informed industrial base.''

Asterita said he had to admire what Fowler has done in protecting his sources from harm.

``The guy has made a lot of thought about it, I'm sure,'' he said. ``He is sacrificing family life at his age, which is children and grandchildren, in order to stick to what he believes.''

A Federal grand jury is investigating the cases of three Boeing Company executives who received at total of $400,000 in severance payments when they left the company in 1981 to take high-level Defense Department positions in the Reagan Administration, according to officials in the Government and the company.

The investigation, which began last summer, according to law enforcement officials, is to determine whether the severance payments were larger than or different from those normally paid by Boeing to executives who resign, whether they constituted a conflict of interest and whether the officials reported the payments properly on the public financial statements Government officials must file.

It is against the law for companies to pay extra compensation to employees who enter the Government. The officials under investigation are [Melvyn Robert Paisley (born 1924)], Assistant Secretary of the Navy for research, systems and engineering; T.K. Jones, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for strategic theater nuclear forces, and Herbert A. Reynolds, Deputy Director of the Defense Department's Office of Intelligence and Space Policy.

Mr. Jones and Mr. Paisley declined numerous requests for interviews and did not respond to written inquiries left with them last week. But, according to Government officials, they denied any wrongdoing when questioned by Federal investigators.

Mr. Reynolds said that whatever he received from Boeing was ''perfectly proper.'' ''I haven't done anything wrong,'' Mr. Reynolds said. ''Boeing is not going to gain from what I do. If I have any residual loyalty it's to the Government, where I served 27 years, not to a company where I spent five years.'' Mr. Reynolds was for 27 years an Air Force officer before retiring as a lieutenant colonel and going to work for Boeing.

The Defense Department declined to comment on the investigation. Boeing, in a statement, said that it was fully cooperating with the Government's requests for information and that the company ''has done nothing unlawful, unethical or otherwise improper.''

The so-called revolving door between the Defense Department and military contractors has often been studied, but, according to authorities in the area, this may be the first time that a criminal investigation has focused on payments to aerospace executives entering the Pentagon.

Boeing was the nation's sixth largest defense contractor last year, receiving $3.2 billion in fiscal year 1982, up from $2.6 billion in 1981 and $2.3 billion in 1980, Defense Department figures show. Last year, the head of Boeing's aerospace divisions predicted that further gains could be expected over the next few years, in part because of more than a billion dollars in expected new contracts with the Navy.

The Secretary of the Navy, John F. Lehman Jr., who was a consultant to Boeing before taking office in 1981, is also under investigation by the Justice Department, according to Government officials. Mr. Lehman has denied any wrongdoing.

Consulting Company Involved

The Lehman inquiry is separate from the Boeing investigation. It involves the Abington Corporation, a defense-related consulting company owned by Mr. Lehman, the officials said. Before 1981, Abington earned $350,000 a year from Boeing, and Mr. Paisley was the main point of contact between Boeing and Abington, according to a former Abington employee. The issue in the Lehman investigation, according to authorities, is Mr. Lehman's handling of his interest in Abington after he entered the Government.

After taking office in 1981, Mr. Lehman retained his ownership of Abington and, for $60,000, gave the use of Abington's name abroad temporarily to Lord Chalfont of Britain. Lord Chalfont said he had retained some of Abington's clients, including Boeing.

Boeing declined to disclose the size of the severance payments and other compensation to Mr. Paisley, Mr. Jones and Mr. Reynolds or to say how they compared with those of other employees of comparable rank. Government officials said the payments to the three men totaled $400,000, but the officials did not provide a breakdown. Public records and other documents show these figures:

Mr. Paisley earned a total of $180,000 in salary from Boeing in 1980 and the first part of 1981, according to a financial disclosure statement dated June 1981, three months before he left the company. The statement also showed holdings of $100,001 to $250,000 in Boeing's Voluntary Investment Plan. Mr. Paisley and Boeing had contributed to this.

Records from a 1980 divorce case show much lower income in previous years and an investment plan value of only $68,000 as of September 1979. The supervisor of Boeing trust funds' accounting department said she was puzzled how the value of Mr. Paisley's investment program holdings could rise so much in 21 months.

Mr. Jones, in a June 1981, financial disclosure statement, listed a 1980 salary from Boeing of $68,200. For 1981, he originally showed income of $176,900, but that figure was crossed out and changed to $200,300, which included ''income from company sponsored investment plans.''

Mr. Reynolds's disclosure statement, dated July 1981, listed no income or payments from Boeing, where he was employed from 1976 until Aug. 1, 1981. Mr. Reynolds said that his income from Boeing was a private matter and that Defense Department officials had told him he was not required to disclose his Boeing salary.

David R. Scott, acting head of the Office of Government Ethics, said that incoming Government officials like Mr. Reynolds were required under the law to disclose any income they received in the previous two years. Mr. Reynolds said he would disclose his compensation if asked by the Defense Department. A Defense Department lawyer said today that Mr. Reynolds was asked to amend his original disclosure statement after investigators learned of his severance payment. The lawyer said that the Justice Department took jurisdiction of the case away from the Pentagon before Mr. Reynolds fully complied with the request.

No Direct Involvement Seen

After the investigation began, the three men, at the request of the Defense Department, disqualified themselves from dealing with matters involving Boeing, according to a Pentagon lawyer. The lawyer said that he did not know whether they had dealt with Boeing before they disqualified themselves.

From 1970 to 1979, 388 officials moved back and forth between Boeing and the Pentagon, the largest for any military contractor, according to a 1981 study by the Council on Economic Priorities, a nonprofit research group.

There are many ties between Boeing and the Reagan Administration. They date from the transition period, when the deputy head of the Reagan transition team for the Defense Department was a Boeing vice president, Benjamin T. Plymale. Mr. Reynolds said he served with Mr. Plymale on the transition team. Mr. Plymale, who died in August 1981, supported the choice of Mr. Lehman and Mr. Paisley for their Government positions, according to Administration sources and former Boeing employees.

Mr. Plymale also helped introduce Mr. Lehman and Mr. Paisley, according to former associates. Other Administration officials with ties to Boeing include Richard N. Perle, Assistant Secretary of Defense for international security policy, who worked for Mr. Lehman's Abington Corporation and did consulting work for Boeing, according to public documents, and Ronald M. Mann, who left Boeing for the White House, where he is associate director for Presidential personnel in the national security area.

One Finds Severance Small

Neither Mr. Perle nor Mr. Mann is under investigation. Mr. Mann said that Boeing's 1981 severance payments to him, $13,000 according to Mr. Mann's financial disclosure statement, were less than generous. Mr. Mann, whose salary at Boeing for 1980 and part of 1981 was $65,000, said he did not participate in Boeing's voluntary investment plan.

The investigation of Boeing's severance payments was referred to the Justice Department from the Defense Department after the Defense Contract Audit Agency came across the payments, according to Government officials. The audit agency examines the books of military contractors and evaulates the acceptability of costs claimed or proposed.

According to Government officials, the three Defense Department officials denied any wrongdoing in interviews with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is assisting in the investigation. The bureau also interviewed Boeing officials, the officials said.

One Federal law on conflict of interest at issue in the investigation is Title 18 Section 209, which makes it a crime for the salary of Government officials to be supplemented by non-Government sources.

Lawyers for Boeing said they could not find record of any criminal prosecutions under this staute in the last 65 years. The statute became an issue last year when, after news accounts of the matter, Attorney General William French Smith returned a $50,000 severance payment he had received from a company upon entering the Government.

Norms for Severance Involved

According to Government lawyers, a key factor in any prosecution under Section 209 would be whether the severance payments to an person who resigned to enter the Government differed from severance payments to other employees.

Boeing has several programs under which employees receive compensation upon leaving. The basic terms are detailed in the company's proxy statement.

In a statement, Boeing says it had, ''as is commonplace in industry, paid severance compensation to employees who left the company to enter Government service.'' The statement did not address the question of how payments to Mr. Paisley, Mr. Reynolds and Mr. Jones compared with compensation paid other employees who left Boeing.

Details about some of Mr. Paisley's compensation from Boeing came out in the divorce trial in Seattle in 1980. According to court records of the proceeding between Mr. Paisley and Mildred, his third wife, and his income tax returns, his average income from 1974 and 1979 was $60,000 a year. By contrast, for 1980 and part of 1981, Mr. Paisley earned a total of $180,000 from Boeing, according to his financial disclosure statement.

Value of Investments at Issue

In October 1979, in response to a subpoena, Boeing told Mrs. Paisley's lawyer that as of Sept. 1, 1979, Mr. Paisley's Voluntary Investment Plan was valued at $68,000. In the June 1981 financial statement, Mr. Paisley placed his holdings in the $100,001-to$250,000 bracket.