September 16, 2004
Ex-Guardsman Is Said to Be a CBS Source
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
OUSTON, Sept. 15 - Bill Burkett once said his job was to make Gov. George W. Bush a hero.
As a lieutenant colonel working on the readiness of the Texas National Guard, Mr. Burkett, a lay preacher's son from Portales, N.M., was brought in with a high commission in 1996 to work on mobilization plans that would make the Guard shine.
"I was very supportive of Bush," he said in an interview this year.
But it was not long before Mr. Burkett, whom colleagues call a stickler for rules, fell out with senior commanders and ended up in a suit against the Guard and its leaders. He also became disillusioned with Mr. Bush, who he said was not supporting needed reforms in the Guard.
The bitterness, he later said, moved him to go public with what he said he and a fellow officer, George O. Conn, witnessed one night in Austin in 1997. That was when, he said, commanders, in touch with Mr. Bush's political advisers, left documents in the trash while sanitizing the governor's service records. .
Now, Mr. Burkett, whose account last February was derided by the White House, has been drawn into another fray, this one on documents supplied to "60 Minutes II" on CBS. On Tuesday, a person at the network named Mr. Burkett as a source of records critical of Mr. Bush's Vietnam era service that CBS said last week came from the personal files of Lieutenant Bush's squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, who died in 1984.
Citing discrepancies in the typeface and wording of the documents, a growing number of experts, as well as Mr. Killian's wife and son and his former secretary, have called them fakes. The secretary, Marian Carr Knox, said they appeared to reflect Colonel Killian's sentiments that someone might have sought to recreate from lost originals.
Mr. Burkett (pronounced BURR-kit), 55, did not respond to numerous messages in recent days and turned away a reporter for The New York Times on Wednesday who called several times from outside the locked gate of his ranch in Baird, Tex., east of Abilene.
His lawyer, David Van Os of San Antonio, repeatedly declined to answer when asked whether Mr. Burkett had a role in obtaining or providing the documents.
"Bill Burkett is tired of being speculated about when the real story is and should be where was George Bush?" Mr. Van Os said. "The possibility that Bill Burkett would falsify documents or falsify any story is zero."
Robert Strong, a former Guard officer interviewed on "60 Minutes,'' said documents that CBS showed to him for authentication bore a facsimile stamp of a Kinko's store in Abilene. Mr. Van Os, asked whether that pointed to Mr. Burkett, said he had no information about that.
Mr. Conn, who vouched for Mr. Burkett in his suit in 2002, has a United States government job in Germany and did not respond to an e-mail message and a telephone message left at his home in Dallas. In an e-mail message in February, Mr. Conn said: "I know LTC Bill Burkett and served with him several years ago in the Texas Army National Guard. I believe him to be honest and forthright. He 'calls things like he sees them.' "
Mr. Conn declined to say whether he had seen any cleansing of Mr. Bush's files with Mr. Burkett.
Harvey Gough, a restaurateur in Dallas who was in the Guard with Mr. Burkett and Mr. Conn, said this week that he had recently spoken with Mr. Conn in Europe and came away convinced that Mr. Conn had no knowledge of the Killian documents.
Mr. Gough said he also had no idea of their origins and had never discussed the matter with Mr. Burkett.
Yet another officer who served with Mr. Burkett, Dennis Adams, a retired lieutenant colonel now working as a security officer at the State Capitol in Austin, said this week, "I don't know of anybody I'd put in a higher category than Bill."
Mr. Adams said that Mr. Burkett had told him afterward of having witnessed the sanitizing of Mr. Bush's Guard file "and that some of the things in the trash were pulled out.''
"He never did say by whom," Mr. Adams added. "I don't have the foggiest idea what documents of any kind he ever had," Mr. Adams said.
In addition to describing what he said was the destruction of documents, Mr. Burkett said in the February interview that also overheard a conversation in mid-1997 between Gen. Daniel James, head of the Texas National Guard, and Joseph M. Allbaugh, a top aide to Governor Bush, that discussed the Guard records.
Contacted in February, Mr. Allbaugh acknowledged the conversation, saying he had talked with General James in an effort to ensure that the records would be helpful to journalists who inquired about Mr. Bush's military experience. He called Mr. Burkett's account about the destruction of documents "pure hogwash.''
Mr. Burkett was at home on Wednesday working on his ranch about six miles south of the tiny town of Baird, far from the swirl of attention around CBS News. His gate, on a dusty and little-traveled dirt road, was padlocked. He briefly answered the phone in his house on the far side of his tidy pasture to decline to comment.
This week, The Abilene Reporter-News identified Mr. Burkett as a suspected source of the CBS documents. At the Callahan County Farmers' Co-op in Baird, a gathering place where Mr. Burkett has been a frequent presence, his role as a public accuser of the president stirred strong emotions. Pete Mendez, a former firefighter who says he is one of the few open Democrats in the county as well as one of Mr. Burkett's few defenders, said the reports had made Mr. Burkett a pariah. Mr. Burkett has recently complained that when he sat down at the co-op table, all his neighbors rose and left, Mr. Mendez said.
"If you buck the system around here you are kind of an outcast or radical," he added. "A lot of people around here seem to think he was just upset because he was turned down for something or other."
Mr. Mendez said he had known Mr. Burkett for a few years and recently lent him a valuable tool.
"In my opinion - which is no more than I have known him - I feel that he is truthful and whatnot,'' the neighbor said. "He has always treated me fair."
In a book published this year, "Bush's War for Re-election" by James Moore, Mr. Burkett is quoted as reporting having received numerous death threats, including telephone messages and a bullet with his name on it that he says he found in his mailbox. More recently, he told people that his son's car had been burned.
In interviews with The Times in February as he was publicizing his tampering charges, Mr. Burkett said he grew up in New Mexico and majored in agribusiness and economics. He said he joined the New Mexico National Guard in 1970 to avoid service in Vietnam.
"I did not believe in what we were doing there," he said.
He became deputy commandant of the New Mexico Military Academy and, Mr. Moore's book said, headed training and planning for troops sent from Fort Hood, Tex., for the gulf war in 1991. Mr. Burkett said he worked on Defense Department projects for Boeing and, because the Texas Guard could not pay his civilian rate of $154 an hour, was commissioned a lieutenant colonel to revamp the Guard in 1996.
He clashed with General James, who, he later said, was the official whom he overheard and saw directing the censoring of the files at the behest of the governor's top advisers. The Guard gave him an assignment in Panama, where he contracted a tropical disease.
In letters to state legislators and a later suit, he said he collapsed at the Abilene airport in 1998 and was "willfully and maliciously" denied military medical care by Guard officials, worsening his condition. Before finally obtaining medical benefits in July 1998, he had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for depression, he told The Times.
An appeals court dismissed his suit in August 2002 because commanders enjoy broad legal immunity from their troops.