Blandly known as the
Office of Plans, Policy, Oversight and Integration, the small agency has about 10 people on staff, mostly civilians, and is supposed to focus on policy matters. Somewhere along the way, however, it started to become more directly involved in secret missions, prompting one former senior Navy official to describe the group as “wannabe spook-cops.”
The office came under scrutiny in January 2013 when one of its civilian executives appeared at a Defense Intelligence Agency office in Arlington, Va., and asked for a badge that would allow him to carry weapons on military property, according to prosecutors.
The executive flashed a set of credentials stamped with the letters LEO — an acronym for “law enforcement officer” — even though he lacked police powers. That prompted federal agents to search his office at the Pentagon, where they found more su ious badge materials.
The investigation broadened as NCIS agents uncovered evidence that the intelligence unit had arranged an unauthorized, sweetheart contract to purchase AK-47 silencers from Landersman’s brother, Mark, a California hot-rod mechanic.
Under terms of the deal, Mark Landersman produced a batch of 349 homemade, unmarked silencers in a machine shop and sold them to the Navy for $1.6 million, even though they cost only $10,000 in parts and labor to make.
After a federal trial, Mark Landersman was
convicted of conspiracy in October 2014 along with a Navy intelligence official who helped arrange the contract, Lee M. Hall. Both men are appealing the verdicts.
The silencers’ intended use remains hazy. Many details are classified, but some court filings suggest they were part of
a top-secret operation to help arm Navy SEAL Team 6, the unit that killed Osama bin Laden.
David Landersman, who was indicted after his brother’s conviction, has pleaded not guilty. His attorney has argued that the intelligence-unit director was kept in the dark about the contract between his brother and the Navy and that a subordinate orchestrated the deal without his knowledge.
Adding to the air of mystery have been revelations in court that Navy security officials burned and shredded piles of sensitive do ents shortly after The Washington Post first reported on the existence of the investigation in November 2013.
David Landersman’s attorneys have argued that the case against their client should be thrown out because the destroyed files would show that other Navy officials oversaw the silencer contract.
They have hinted that Navy officials also wanted to get rid of the do ents because they contained other embarrassing information, including notes about sexual misconduct at the Pentagon and files related to
a massive bribery investigation into the Navy’s 7th Fleet.
Richard Kent Ford, the Navy security officer who supervised the destruction of do ents, has said that he was purging old files in accordance with Navy regulations. He originally testified in 2014 that he was unaware that Landersman, Gill and others from the intelligence unit were under investigation or that that there had been news coverage of the case.
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