According to the book In Plain Sight, the Admiral Wilson Memo named United States Department of Defense (DoD) Major General Marshal Ward and William Perry, a former Secretary of Defense, as having told Thomas Wilson that he should examine files held by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology.1 The same account names Perry, described there as a former Defense Secretary, alongside Paul Kaminski - then Director of Special Programs in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (OUSDAT) - and Michael Kostelnik, Director of the Special Access Programs Coordination Office and executive secretary for the Special Access Program Oversight Committee, as one of three people Wilson confirmed a programme’s contractor with.2
Wilson’s testimony to Eric Davis also describes a reorganisation Perry carried out in 1994. Wilson was told of a special-projects record group that did not belong to the usual Special Access Programs (SAP): a subset of unacknowledged, carve-out and waived programmes, held apart from and obscured by conventional SAPs.3 As part of the same reorganisation, Kostelnik became director of special programmes within OUSDAT.4
By May 1997, Wilson had raised the matter with Perry directly; the two discussed it quietly, and Perry suggested Wilson take the same approach as Major General Ward.5 Later that month, Wilson telephoned Kaminski, Kostelnik and Perry in turn to confirm he had identified the right contractor and programme manager, and each of the three confirmed it.6 When Wilson then approached the programme manager, the manager asked who he had spoken to beforehand and was unhappy with the answer; Wilson did not disclose that he had also spoken with Perry and Kaminski.7
Wilson said that Kostelnik told him the programme’s security budget typically ran at two to three times the size of the programme budget itself, and at times reached six to seven times that core budget - a ratio Kostelnik considered absurdly high; Wilson said Perry wanted the matter investigated but was told to drop it.8 Perry separately ordered the programme’s security-budget reporting to be reorganised to improve audit transparency.9