The Project That Wouldn't Die

"I was interested in the technology" after Conkling invited him to see the facility, Moran said recently. He said he earmarks projects if the company involved employs people in his district and the military thinks it has merit. "I'm not sure the research bore out as effectively as they wanted," he said of Conkling and VSSL.

Former Armed Services Committee aide Anthony R. Battista was an original incorporator of VSSL. Former representative William L. Dickinson (R-Ala), long a senior member and colleague of Hunter's on the Armed Services Committee, was an investor, Conkling said. Both were on the company's board of directors and lobbied for its technology.

Hunter said he supported Project M because he thought the technology targeted critical national needs, not as a favor for Battista and Dickinson. Conkling did not contribute to Hunter's campaigns.

Earmarking appropriations bills with billions of dollars designated for projects of particular companies has been under attack in recent months because of the high federal budget deficit and the recent corruption convictions of former representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.) and a Washington defense contractor who traded bribes for federal contracts.

The practice has blossomed over the past decade. The number of earmarks in the annual defense spending bill increased from 587 worth $4.2 billion in fiscal 1994 to 2,506 worth $9 billion in fiscal 2005, according to a recent Congressional Research Service study. There were 231 "plus-ups" -- the Navy's term for the money Congress adds for its members' pet projects -- totaling nearly $600 million just in the Office of Naval Research budget in fiscal 2005, about a quarter of the total.

Advocates generally defend earmarks as a way to move innovative ideas quickly through a sluggish bureaucracy. Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, cites the development of the Predator pilotless aircraft in southern California as an example of a "good" earmark.

Winslow Wheeler, a retired congressional aide who has written a book about earmarks, said he knows of no study of how often such set-asides result in useful products for the military.

Members of Congress "don't want to know," Wheeler said, because "evaluating those projects would separate the wheat from the chaff."

Conkling, 69, said in a recent interview that Project M's origins trace to the Cold War in the mid-1980s, when he was consulting for a British company, GEC-Marconi.

Shortly before that, Conkling had been in business with Tongsun Park, a South Korean businessman who had been indicted on charges of bribing members of Congress in the 1970s. Those charges were dropped. Also, Park was a member of the wedding party at Conkling's marriage in 1986.

The British company's "maglev" technology interested the Pentagon's research agency, known as DARPA, which funded it, Conkling said. (The M, he noted, didn't stand for magnetic, but was just the next letter the research agency used to name its projects.)

By the early 1990s the Navy was impressed enough to want to finish development of the system in the United States. But Conkling said his client was reluctant to turn development over to a Navy lab and asked him to "Americanize the technology." In 1994 he incorporated VSSL, anticipating a project that would last about three years, he said.