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Other sources said Boeing would have to redesign the wings of the 767 to add the ability to refuel more than one plane at a time. That cost also would be additional to the Air Force.
Politics has played a heavy role in the Boeing deal. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., whose state is home to Boeing headquarters, and Democratic Rep. Norman D. Dicks, who represents the state of Washington, where a key Boeing production plant is located, lobbied the White House on the deal.
Boeing and the Air Force also lobbied for the deal, and President Bush designated his chief of staff, Andrew Card, as the point man on the issue.
The Office of Management and Budget and other independent agencies criticized the tanker deal as too expensive and unneeded.
Card intervened and ordered them to move ahead with the Boeing deal.
White House spokesman Claire Buchan said Card sought to mediate the contract dispute without taking sides.
"There were disagreements among the Air Force, the DOD (Department of Defense) and the OMB. His role was to ensure that all sides were heard, and that the military's needs were met, and that the taxpayers got the best value for their money," she said Saturday.
Boeing e-mails indicated that Card was primarily interested in how many jobs the contract would create: Boeing claimed upwards of 28,000, but Roche, the Air Force secretary, in a letter to the White House upped the ante to 39,000 new jobs.
"This was a negotiation between the Air Force and Boeing; they weren't giving it to Airbus," said Steven Schooner, co-director of the Government Procurement Law Program at George Washington University. "It definitely lends support to the generally accepted reflection that this was never intended to be an open competition.
"In a competitive procurement, you don't let one of the competitors write this because it gives them a competitive advantage," Schooner said.
Senate investigators have plowed through some 8,000 pages of Boeing documents that were so embarrassing and revealing that the company last year fired one of its vice presidents, Darleen Druyun. Druyun had been an Air Force acquisitions officer involved in negotiations on the tanker deal. Boeing also fired its chief financial officer, who had hired Druyun. Boeing chairman and chief executive Phil Condit also left the company in an attempt to help Boeing put the scandal behind it and get the deal back on track.
McCain - who's led a two-year fight against what he considers both a bad deal for the government and an unnecessary deal for the Air Force - pointed out in a letter to Department of Defense Inspector General Joseph Schmitz earlier this month that the Air Force in 2001 developed a draft Operational Requirements Document (ORD) with 26 specifications for the new tanker aircraft, then gave the document to Boeing.
The Air Force's minimum requirements were subsequently reduced to only seven - and Boeing tailored the specifications to the airplane the company had on hand. The first 100 planes can only be used to refuel Air Force fighters and bombers.
The rewritten document was so thoroughly tailored to Boeing's wish list that when it was briefed to the Pentagon's Joint Requirements Board in July 2002 it was actually titled the "KC-767 ORD."
A board member's memo on the briefing said the operational requirements documents "should not be written for a specific aircraft but rather for a capability" and directed the title to be changed so as not to identify a particular aircraft.
The Air Force changed the name, but not the specifications.
Schmitz is set to release his audit report within the next week. It's the first of several investigations of the Boeing deal, including one by federal prosecutors.
A draft of the audit report, leaked earlier this month to Bloomberg News, said the Boeing contract was flawed and may need to be renegotiated because of "unsound acquisition and procurement practices." But Schmitz could find "no compelling reason" to kill the deal.
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