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It’s interesting how scandal after scandal has erupted in the State Department, many of them pointing to systematic mismanagement, but Condi Rice has consistently avoided any measure of accountability or blame.

The most egregious of these was probably the State Department’s longstanding role as Blackwater USA’s dedicated enabler and cover-upper—from trying to dismiss and whitewash mass murder to smuggling out of the country the drunken Blackwater guard who shot and killed a personal bodyguard of Iraqi Vice President to haggling with the bodyguard’s family about how much his life was worth.

But there has been a steady stream of embarrassing reports over the last few years about the State Department that represents a record of laughable mismanagement. In November 2007, we were moved to award Condi the Miss Mis-management USA 2007 title. In short order, she followed that up by walking away with the Miss Mis-Management (Universe) 2007 title as well.

The sheer volume of embarrassing revelations would have overwhelmed anybody else’s career. So much so, that even a Greatest Hits compilation of State Department debacles on her watch would take far too much space here. So I’ll regretfully restrain myself from sharing some of my favorite Condi-mismanagement stories. What you might do, though, is click on “Rice” in the “Categories” menu, and then sit back and take a nice little stroll down memory lane.

But enough reminiscing. Henry Waxman has now added to “The Mis-management Misadventures Of Condi” list with a truly unbelievable tale. Even after everything we have heard before about Condi Rice’s State Dept., this one is still utterly mindboggling.

Back in January 2007, Efraim Diveroli was a 21-year-old arms trader when he improbably landed a $300 million U.S. Army arms contract. This made him “the main supplier of munitions to Afghan security forces”. What Diveroli ended up supplying to Afghanistan was tens of millions of decades-old Chinese cartridges, much of them defective and sub-standard, almost all of them in poor packaging. Diveroli had claimed that the cartridges were of Hungaran origin, because it is illegal to trade in Chinese arms. Diveroli’s illegal conduct led to some arrests last week:

(Diveroli) was arrested along with several others involved with his company, AEY, Inc., including David Packouz, the AEY director and vice president; Alexander Podrizki, the company’s man in Tirana, Albania; and Ralph Merrill, who provided “financial and managerial assistance.”

They were charged with violating the Arms Export Control Act, which prohibits buying and selling weapons from certain countries.

According to the indictment released today by the U.S. attorney in Miami, Diveroli got nervous last year when his Albanian supplier emailed him some photos showing that the weapons he planned to buy and ship were clearly marked “Made in China.”

Diveroli emailed the U.S. State Department in April asking whether, hypothetically, it was OK to fulfill a U.S. Army contract with weapons from China, the indictment says.

It’s not, they told him. Not without special permission from the President.

He emailed back and asked if there was an exception for weapons that may have been sitting in Albania for 20 years, the indictment says.

The State Department emailed back and said there was no such exception.

So he had one of his financial backers, Ralph Merrill, help take care of the problem.
On or about April 25,2007, RALPH MERRILL sent an electronic communication to EFRAIM DIVEROLI and DAVID PACKOUZ, which referenced attached photographs showing methods of “cleaning wooden crates.” Attached to the communication was a photograph showing a person scraping the words “MADE IN CHINA” off of a wooden crate.

Diveroli then filled out forms for the Army indicating that the ammo was from Hungary rather than China.

The Army paid AEY more than $10 million between July and December 2007, according to the indictment, before the Times broke the story in March and his arms exporting license was suspended.

But the role of Condi Rice’s State Department, it turns out, wasn’t limited to answering hypothetical questions. Waxman’s investigators have found that the State Department not only knew that Diveroli’s cartridges were of Chinese origin, but it was fully cognizant of the operation to whitewash the origin of the cartridges, and it actually helped AEY with the whitewash. And then, to make matters worse, the State Department lied to Waxman’s committee about its involvement in the whitewash:

The House oversight committee says it has evidence that the U.S. embassy in Albania helped Albanian officials keep the allegedly illegal shipment of Chinese-made ammunition to Afghanistan under wraps and then failed to disclose that information when Waxman’s committee asked about it.
[…]
Waxman’s new– and potentially explosive — evidence stems from an interview by the oversight committee of Army Maj. Larry Harrison, the Chief of the Office of Defense Cooperation at the U.S. Embassy in Albania. Harrison told the committee about a previously undisclosed November meeting that included Albanian officials and U.S. Ambassador John Withers and others from the U.S. embassy in Tirana.

Waxman describes Harrison’s account of the meeting in a letter today to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:
According to Major Harrison, the Albanian Defense Minister, Fatmir Mediu, called him on November 19, 2007, to request an urgent meeting with the U.S. Ambassador to Albania, John L. Withers, II. Major Harrison stated during his interview that the Albanian Defense Minister was concerned that a New York Times reporter planned to inspect the facility at Rinas Airport in Tirana where AEY was conducting its operation to repackage Chinese ammunition before shipping it to Afghanistan, a process that included removing some ammunition from its original Chinese packaging. …

As a result of discussions that went late into the night, the Albanian Defense Minister ordered one of his top generals to remove all evidence of Chinese packaging before the site was inspected the following day. Major Harrison told the Committee: “the Ambassador agreed that this would alleviate the suspicion of wrongdoing.”

Back in April, after a front-page story about the 20-something arms dealers in the New York Times, Waxman asked the State Department for any information they had about the case. State officials responded with a memo noting only a few perfunctory meetings about the case.

Harrison had recommended coming clean to the committee. When State Department officials chose to lie instead, Harrison decided to cover his ass:

When Congress started asking questions about the weapons deal, Harrison suggested that the embassy officials be upfront about the late-night meeting they had in November 2007 with the Albanian defense minister when they talked about how to repackage the Chinese ammo.

But the embassy officials didn’t take his advice. And it looks like Harrison sent a C-Y-A memo to his military bosses at European Command on April 16:
Although I provided input to the third question, the Political–Economic Officer, the Deputy Chief of Mission and the Ambassador did not accept my input. The answers were forwarded to the committee with my name on the memo as having cleared the memo, or in other words, approved the content.

I did not approve of the content of the answers and I am concerned that information may have been omitted relevant to the question.

I don’t know about you but in my universe it is extremely improbable that senior embassy officials would have decided on their own to cooperate with, and cover up, the whitewash of the ammunition’s origin. In my universe, they did what they did because orders came down from Washington. Maybe there’s a paper trail? Maybe someone else wrote a CYA memo to file?