Army’s top brass gave general’s behavior a pass
Inquiry’s findings of illicit relationship pulled from record
The Army inspector general was unsparing: The two-star general had an inappropriate relationship with a woman and lied to investigators about it, made his staff buy sexy clothing for her, subjected his underlings to racist and sexist emails and allowed himself to be photographed with another woman licking the medals on his formal dress uniform.
After the report was received and signed by top Army officials in September 2010, Maj. Gen. John Custer, commander of the Army’s intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., faced public shaming and the loss of rank.
That’s when Gen. Martin Dempsey intervened. Dempsey, the four-star general in charge of the Army’s Training and Doc-
trine Command, struck from the record the substantiated finding of Custer’s inappropriate relationship. That left the board of three generals deciding Custer’s fate with two relatively minor charges and the letter of reprimand Dempsey had issued.
Custer’s case, and Dempsey’s intervention, were kept in the dark by the Army for years. The matter came to light only after a whistle-blower complained to USA TODAY, which obtained the report through a Freedom of Information Act request. The military’s lack of transparency in meting out punishment allows favoritism to go unchecked, said Don Christensen, president of Protect Our Defenders, an advocacy group for people in the military who have been sexually assaulted.
“The discipline process is opaque. When it comes to generals, it’s a blackout,” said Christensen, the former top prosecutor for the Air Force. “You have to be lucky. Rarely ever does this see the light of day. ... At the four-, three-, two-star level, they cover for each other. Dempsey by his actions proved it.”
The generals considering Custer’s case could have busted him down to the last rank in which he had served satisfactorily.
Instead, Custer was treated to the pageantry of his change-ofcommand ceremony and a glowing story on the Army’s website, and he was allowed to keep his two stars in retirement and the six-figure pension attached to it. A two-star officer with his experience would receive about $162,000 per year in pension payments.
A little more than a year later, Dempsey ascended to the top of the uniformed military: chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. From that post, he would lament the ethical crisis in the military and the scourge of sexual assault and harassment. He and the chiefs vowed to root it out.
However, Dempsey fought attempts by Congress to limit the role of commanders in handling sexual assault and harassment cases, saying in June 2013 at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, “Our goal should be to hold commanders more accountable, not render them less able to help us correct this crisis. The commander’s responsibility to preserve order and discipline is essential to affecting change. They punish criminals and protect victims when and where no other jurisdiction is capable or lawfully able to do so.”
Stories in the past year by USA TODAY about the “swinging general,” Maj. Gen. David Haight, whose serial promiscuity killed his career, the demotion of the threestar adviser to the Defense secretary for drunken carousing at “gentlemen’s clubs,” and the firing of a member of the Joint Staff for adultery show that misconduct among senior officers has been anything but eradicated.
Even long-retired generals like Custer can be subject to sanction. Arthur Lichte, who retired in 2010 from the Air Force as a four-star general, lost two stars in February and $60,000 a year in pension benefits after it was determined that he had coerced a subordinate into sex.
Such conduct largely remains a dirty secret within the military. The case of Haight, who had the critical job of overseeing operations at European Command, probably would have passed unnoticed if not for a whistle-blower complaint to USA TODAY. The Army had quietly removed him from his post last spring, replaced him without notice and hauled him back to Washington. Even though he was a candidate for blackmail and espionage, Haight had been allowed to maintain his security clearance until USA TODAY asked about it late in the fall.
Custer’s story shows how military leaders’ public pronouncements of zero tolerance for sexual misconduct don’t match the private, preferential treatment they offer their own. The Army inspec- tor general’s report showed that Custer dismissed investigators’ concerns with laughs and offered answers about his relationship with women and denials of having sex that investigators deemed “not credible.”
In an interview, Custer called the charges false or overblown.
Dempsey declined to comment for this article.
Advocates for victims of sexual assault in the military were far less charitable toward Dempsey and Custer. “That Dempsey read this report and believes this guy who has violated every Army value that Dempsey claims to believe in?” Christensen said. “Holy crap. It’s 100% inappropriate.”
Custer’s case, like many before it, reveals a culture that looks out for its own and conceals its dirty secrets, said Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, a government watchdog group.
“It’s troubling that Gen. Dempsey found the alleged affair to be unfounded despite the fact that the Army IG found that Maj. Gen. Custer engaged in an inappropriate relationship,” Amey said. “It would have been wiser to let the entire report go to the review board, allow Maj. Gen. Custer to explain the situation and let the chips fall where they may.”
Custer was a successful and accomplished officer. He joined the Army in 1978 and built a career in military intelligence on successive accomplishments. One of his key posts: director of intelligence for Central Command, the nerve center for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, from 2003 to 2007.
In 2007, he became the commanding general and commandant of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center for Excellence at Fort Huachuca, Ariz.
That’s when the problems began, the IG found.
A complaint about Custer’s behavior reached the Army inspector general Sept. 1, 2009. Custer said he “self-reported.”
A year later, the IG released its scathing report in which investigators found three substantiated allegations against him: an inappropriate relationship from July 2007 to January 2010; failure to demonstrate exemplary conduct; and improper use of government resources.
At the beginning of the executive summary, the report says, “SUBSTANTIATED ALLEGATION AND CONCLUSION: MG Custer engaged in an inappropriate relationship.”
Custer remains adamant that he and the woman were old friends renewing their acquaintance, not romantic partners. “This is not an inappropriate relationship or an affair — of any type of sex, if you will,” Custer said in an interview. The relationship, he said, was with someone he had known since kindergarten.