
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 6, 1993                   TAG: 9310060099
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

OFFICIALS SAY TREES STOLEN WITH AGENCY PERMISSION

Law-enforcement officials told Congress Tuesday that timber companies are routinely stealing millions of dollars worth of trees from national forests with the tacit encouragement of senior U.S. Forest Service managers who frequently thwart efforts to stop the practice.

In testimony before a House civil-service subcommittee, three Forest Service law-enforcement agents and a former U.S. attorney from Oregon painted a portrait of an agency so driven by institutional and political pressures to maximize timber production and so "inbred" with the industry that it invites and sometimes colludes in massive fraud and theft.

"Timber theft is out of control in our national forests," said Michael Nitsch, a former Secret Service agent and 15-year veteran of the Forest Service's law-enforcement program now working on the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington state. "There has been a systematic breakdown of the Forest Service law-enforcement program."

The agency's "inbred relationship" with the timber industry combined with easily manipulated practices governing bidding, timber measuring and sale layouts, has resulted in a system riddled with "invitations to steal and defraud," said Charles H. Turner, the former U.S. attorney in Portland, Ore.

"The law-enforcement component of the Forest Service simply does not have sufficient independence to conduct wide-ranging investigations, free from administrative interference and the longstanding devotion of Forest Service managers to `get out the cut,' " said Turner.

By law, each national forest draws up a 10-year management plan that determines an allowable annual timber-harvest level. But many experts within and outside the Forest Service believe those ceilings were inflated during the 1980s by political pressures from Washington. In addition, Congress has sometimes set timber harvest targets for different regions during the annual appropriations process.

by CNB