Whidbey Melodrama: Who Fired Fatal Shot?

OAK HARBOR - Who killed Naval Air Station Whidbey Island?

Was it the hidden hand of a retired rear admiral, seeking revenge for two years of often fractious, sometimes bitter relations with the natives of this sprawling Puget Sound island?

Was it the supposedly less-than-spectacular performance of the Whidbey-based A-6 carrier attack plane in the recent Gulf War?

Was it the islander environmentalists?

Was it the Navy's own "light attack mafia," who favor the extinction of the medium attack A-6 in favor of the more modern FA-18, and who are now moving into positions of top responsibility in the Navy?

Was it Rep. Al Swift, who pressured the Navy over Whidbey Island noise issues?

Or was it those nastiest of nasties, the Californians?

Sometimes, when things go wrong, there is a human tendency to look for the darkest theory to explain the seemingly inexplicable. That's approximately where the citizens of this Navy dependency now find themselves.

Ever since Defense Secretary Richard Cheney announced two weeks ago that NAS Whidbey - with its $280 million annual payroll - would be among the 43 military installations he would recommend for closing, theories of what happened and who did it have been circulating throughout this island community. The suspects are many and the motives are legion.

Swift, Rep. Norm Dicks and Sens. Slade Gorton and Brock Adams met with Navy officials yesterday to discuss the situation.

The delegation members focused on the cost of closing Whidbey and moving its planes to California: $492 million.

The Navy says that after nine years it would begin seeing savings of $76 million a year by not operating Whidbey. But delegation members said the high initial cost of closure may make Whidbey worth saving.

The Pentagon recommendations are yet to be approved by a bipartisan commission, President Bush and the Congress. Swift and the others said that hearings by the base-closing commission may be the only practical forum for opposing the Whidbey closure.

The lead in fighting for the base is likely to be taken by a team in the community. Swift said they could go before the base-closure commission as early as a May 6 hearing in San Francisco.

In the meantime, islanders are breaking into familiar factions in their attempts to apportion blame. The targets:

-- Retired Rear Admiral Fred Metz, the man many Whidbeyians love to hate. Metz commanded the air wing stationed at NAS Whidbey from 1986 to 1988, a time when training flights rose by nearly 200 percent. Nearly all sides on the island, including pro-Navy partisans, agree that his tenure was a public-relations disaster for the service.

Now some people, including some current active-duty Navy people, are contending that Metz' old friends in the Pentagon are wreaking revenge on islanders because of the retired admiral's battle with island residents over noise levels. Metz, who could not be reached for comment, retired from the Navy after he was not promoted. Some Navy people on the island contend Metz was denied promotion because of the way he handled the noise squabbles. Metz was on record for officially recommending that the ill-fated A-12 attack plane, intended to replace the A-6, be based in California instead of at Whidbey.

-- Whidbey Islanders for a Sound Environment (WISE), a group of about 600 islanders, living mainly around Coupeville, who objected to use of the Coupeville area as a training field for the pilots. The WISE people wrote hundreds of letters to politicians and Pentagon muckety-mucks protesting the noise and danger associated with use of the Coupeville air strip for touch-and-go training runs.

Now some WISE members say they are receiving angry calls from other islanders blaming them for the Navy's decision. WISE Secretary Bill Skubi says his group isn't responsible and instead blames what he calls the limited military usefulness of the A-6.

-- Swift, who met with Navy officials in 1988 and told them it was "imperative" for the Navy to find an alternative "bounce field" to Coupeville, according to Swift aide Andy Anderson. The Navy took Swift literally, all the way to NAS Lemoore in California, now designated as the future home for the Whidbey Navy people, under this theory.

-- Rear Admiral J. D. "Bear" Taylor, a former FA-18 commander now in charge of Navy aviation plans and requirements in the Pentagon. Taylor, a former commander at NAS Lemoore, is one of a group of high-ranking Navy officers who see the A-6 as obsolete, 30-year-old technology and who want to replace it with upgraded FA-18s.

NAS Lemoore has been the West Coast headquarters for the Navy's FA-18s. One Navy source at Whidbey contends Taylor and the Navy's "light-attack mafia" who favor the FA-18 over the A-6 want the A-6 to fly training missions side-by-side with FA-18s in hopes the A-6 will look bad.

-- The A-6 itself. In the aftermath of the decision to close NAS Whidbey, the Whidbey News-Times published an article suggesting that the A-6 had a bad Gulf War record. The newspaper quoted a Los Angeles Times article published last month in which unnamed Pentagon officials claimed that it took the Vietnam War-era A-6s 790 sorties to destroy 36 bridges in Iraq, and that the job ultimately was turned over to the Air Force.

Navy sources at Whidbey say the 790 sorties figure is comparing apples to oranges, because the number includes all A-6 flights, including routine combat air patrols and surveillance efforts.

-- The Californian congressional delegation. Despite gaining a seven more seats in Congress, California will actually see a reduction of military spending within its borders if Cheney's recommendations are adopted. Giving the Californians the Whidbey planes might be seen as a Pentagon attempt to soften the economic blow on the largest state and help maintain the Pentagon's political relations on Capitol Hill.

A key decision in Cheney's recommendations was the closure of Fort Ord near Monterey and the transfer of its 7th Infantry Division to Washington's Fort Lewis, as previously requested by Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Tacoma), a powerful member of the military construction subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. Even with the closure of NAS Whidbey, transfer of the 7th Infantry means that Washington's military payroll will actually increase by nearly 3,100 jobs.

Moreover, the decision to keep building the homeport in Everett - represented by Swift - means the state's military payroll will increase even further in the future. Sending Whidbey's aging planes to California is construed by some as the Pentagon's attempt to lessen the sting of the loss of the 7th Infantry among California representatives.

Swift, who visited Whidbey over the weekend, discounted accusations that Navy politics were behind the closure recommendation; rather, he said, the Navy mistakenly viewed Whidbey as an aging facility.

Swift quoted Hubert C. Taylor, a former dean at Western Washington University, Bellingham: "Do not ascribe to conspiracy that to which stupidity will suffice for an answer."

-- Times staff reporter David Schaefer contributed to this report.