Policeman of Foreign Aid

One hundred thousand cans of Viet Nam-bound hair spray? Explosive rubber-sandal chemicals? Suspicious silver nitrate? Pilferage and black marketing from the U.S.'s $375 million-a-year commodity aid program to South Viet Nam (TIME, May 20)? Last week the man responsible for discovering and curbing all these irregularities was back from a new and unpublicized visit to Saigon aimed at investigating currency manipulations and bringing still further control out of chaos. He is J. K. (for John Kenneth) Mansfield, who, as Inspector General of Foreign Assistance, patrols an unending beat, checking on U.S. military and economic help going to 97 countries.

Boots & Cable. Holder of the post ever since it was created four years ago, Chicago-born Mansfield, 44, is a onetime investigative staff member of congressional committees who bears the rank of Assistant Secretary of State, and is empowered to suspend almost any aid program. Thus Mansfield and his 24 fellow traveling inspectors are greeted on their journeys abroad with apprehensive cooperation, if not jubilation--further encouraged by the frequent assumption that the Inspector General is a relative of Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (he isn't). Mansfield and his operatives have tracked everything from 24 million bushels of U.S. wheat diverted from Austria and sold on European markets ($800,000 in settlements has been recovered) to 3,600 pairs of U.S.-supplied boots found moldering in a Mali warehouse because local American officials groundlessly thought them too small for Malian feet (the footwear was issued to the country's soldiers).

Two years ago, Mansfield's sleuths discovered that a NATO communications cable laid beneath the Mediterranean at a cost to the U.S. of $1,000,000 had yet to transmit a single syllable; studies are now under way on how to utilize it. Another time, Mansfield's office noticed that 151 Jeeps destined for Thailand were being repainted green, though their original blue coat was in perfectly good condition, halted the paint job, and saved $12,000. In all, Secretary of State Dean Rusk told the

Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a recently pried-loose report on Mansfield's operation, the savings that it has achieved "must be measured in many millions of dollars"--by conservative estimates more than $50 million.

"Caesar's Wife." The Inspector General's office itself has never spent more than $800,000 a year, though it is authorized expenses up to $2,000,000. One official explains that Mansfield's men, a mix of ex-FBI agents, Foreign Service officers, accountants, lawyers and computer experts, are "deeply imbued with the Caesar's wife idea. We couldn't be auditing and checking on others and not be extremely careful ourselves." The I.G.'s gumshoes log upwards of 1,000,000 miles a year by everything from DC-8 to dugout canoe. (Mansfield, who sees precious little of his wife, Jane--no relation to Jayne--averages 175,000.) They gobble so many antimalaria pills that they are ineligible to donate to the State Department blood bank.

As long ago as last year, Mansfield's field investigators sniffed logistical skulduggery in Viet Nam, learned that villagers were claiming that they had never received loads of fertilizer that provincial officials had recorded as delivered. It was Mansfield who, from Washington, discovered that the chemical Unicel-100, which the U.S. was shipping to Viet Nam for the manufacture of rubber sandals, was only slightly less explosive than TNT; at his insistence, shipments were halted. Reposing on Mansfield's desk is another testimonial to his efficiency: an ashtray forged from silver recovered from silver nitrate that the U.S. had been sending to Viet Nam for industrial use and swabbing sore throats--until the Inspector General's Sherlocks pointed out that it could be stolen and easily boiled down to lucrative pure silver.

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