William Fisher

NEW YORK, Mar 18 2005 (IPS) — A tiny Pennsylvania college is challenging one of the United States’ leading open-government advocacy groups about its account of how the college won a no-bid government contract to provide training for intelligence officers at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

According to the Centre for Public Integrity (CPI), the contract was awarded to Mercyhurst College as a political favour by recently departed Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, for whom the college has named a new building.

Ridge is a native of the town in which the college is located – Erie, Pennsylvania. Before assuming his DHS role, he was governor of that state.

The DHS training contract, which is being negotiated now, came to light late last month when the agency filed notice it was entering into negotiations on a sole-source basis with Mercyhurst to develop and run an intelligence analyst certificate programme for the department.

Press accounts place the value of the contract at 96,000 dollars, although DHS officials have declined to comment on it.

CPI said that, according to the DHS contracting officer handling the Mercyhurst deal, "a number of other vendors" had expressed an interest in bidding on the project after the sole source notification became public on Feb. 25.

Gennifer Biggs, director of public relations at the college, told IPS, "We are not going debate in or with the media about this issue. We were the programme flexible enough to meet the needs of the intelligence community in this particular case."

"To imply Mercyhurst is better connected in Washington, DC than the behemoth universities whose programmes we’re being compared to is, while flattering, absurd."

However, in an update to its initial investigation published Wednesday, CPI says that the chairwoman of the Mercyhurst College Board of Trustees, Marlene Mosco, is one of Ridge’s oldest friends, as well as one of his top political supporters.

"Mosco knew Ridge in high school and in the mid-1970s introduced him to her future husband, Homer Mosco, who is identified as Ridge’s best friend in many published reports," the group says.

According to CPI research, Ridge co-owned property in Florida with Homer Mosco, and Marlene Mosco was co-chairperson of the state finance committee for the Tom Ridge for Governor Committee.

In 2001, she chaired the Erie County Convention Centre Authority when then Gov. Ridge presented a 32-million-dollar check to the group to finance a new convention center on the city’s waterfront.

The CPI website article said Mercyhurst had "short-circuited a selection process that would normally include a host of bigger and better known institutions – including George Washington University and Georgetown University – already working in the intelligence training field."

Mercyhurst has five professors in its Institute for Intelligence Studies. The intelligence faculty at Georgetown University (GU) has nearly 70 professors and the programme at George Washington University (GWU) has 25, CPI said.

Both GW and GWU are located in Washington near the homeland security department. Mercyhurst said it would establish an office in Alexandria, Virginia, outside Washington, to carry out work on the contract.

Mercyhurst’s intelligence programme was formally established in February 2004. The college has offered baccalaureate degrees in intelligence analysis since 1992. In 1995, using an established master’s degree in Administration of Justice, Mercyhurst created an intelligence concentration in that programme.

The founder and head of the Mercyhurst intelligence programme, Robert Heibel, was deputy chief of counterterrorism at the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the 1980s. He takes exception to suggestions that the sole-source contract being negotiated by DHS with Mercyhurst is improper.

"We were totally unaware that this would be a no-competition contract, and it was DHS’s decision to make," Heibel told CPI. "We would have welcomed the competition."

Heibel said that many of the programme’s more than 160 graduates work for federal agencies, including DHS. He said "two graduates of the Mercyhurst programme came up with the infamous set of playing cards used to identify former Iraqi leaders during the war and ongoing occupation there by U.S. forces."

Biggs told IPS, "No person from our college has ever formally presented information about our intelligence studies programme to Tom Ridge, although I certainly hope he is proud of the success a hometown college has had in the intelligence realm."

She added, "While I assume Mr. Ridge has personal friends who have ties to Mercyhurst College – our city is his hometown, it is small and he is a politician – our contract with the DHS is not a result of those friendships."

"In fact, the intelligence studies programme administrators have avoided contact with Ridge, preferring to build its reputation through hard work rather than political favours."

Next fall, Mercyhurst College will open its newest building: The "Tom and Michele Ridge Health and Safety Building". The college applied for twollion dollars in financing for the project while Ridge was governor of Pennsylvania, but had to reapply when the state changed governors.

The financing was actually finalised under the state’s present governor, Ed Rendell. Michele Ridge is Tom Ridge’s wife.

Mercyhurst is a private liberal arts Catholic school with an enrollment of about 3,100. The building bearing the Ridges’ names will be located on a satellite campus of the college. School officials say the decision to name the building in honour of the Ridges was made several years ago.

A DHS spokesman, Tom Burke, reportedly told Homeland Security Daily, a newsletter published by Congressional Quarterly, that the department’s decision to negotiate exclusively with Mercyhurst for the training programme was based on speed, cost and flexibility.

"Mercyhurst was the one that could meet our timelines, and bring a programme they had established to the local training location at no additional cost," Burke told the newsletter.

But CPI quoted one government contract expert who said the deal is highly unusual and might be "illegal."

Alan Grayson, director of the Grayson & Kubli law firm, which represents clients on government contract issues, told the group, "It seems to have all the indications of a political payoff of some kind. There are specific rules on what qualifies for a sole-source contract, and those rules don’t seem to even remotely apply in this case."

Biggs invited IPS to visit "the best-kept secret in intelligence studies, and see for yourself the real story behind this extraordinary programme and how we believe it is changing the future of intelligence for the better."

Neither nor GU nor GWU officials returned phone calls seeking reaction to the contract.

The CPI article concluded, "Whether Mercyhurst’s touted record of success is enough to justify receiving the sole-source contract remains debatable. What is clear, however, is that some of the institutions most capable of giving Mercyhurst a run for its money – and possibly saving taxpayer money in the process – were not invited to compete."