The Clinton administration may have broken the law.

Remember how the President whined about the woeful state of the White House phone system? Clinton got a lot of mileage during the early weeks of his administration by telling cocktail-party stories of little old ladies sweating away at the White House's vintage 1960s "plug-and-play" switchboard. It was a laughable image. Disgraceful. Such a dinosaur wouldn't do. Certainly not for a President on the "cutting edge." So change they did. Congratulations, America, you just bought the White House a new telephone system. And you only had to pony up US$25 million. Such a deal!

Don't you believe it.

The laughter's long since died. What really happened to the White House phone system in the early months of this administration reveals more about mismanagement and chaotic transition than failed technology. And in the process of the upgrade, the Clinton administration may have broken the law.

Digging through procurement documents, White House memos obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and documents obtained from a Congressional investigation into the purchase of this system, WIRED has pieced together a tale that's as convoluted as the fiasco of trying to fire the entire staff of the travel office.

When the Clinton troops advanced on the White House, the Bush administration didn't leave them an instruction manual. Sure, Clinton had been briefed on foreign policy, state secrets, and so on. But no one bothered to tell him how the phones worked. In fact, the system's hardware has been patched together over years, so it's no wonder nobody told him. Maybe nobody really knew.

Currently each agency under the Executive Office of the President has its own voice mail system. In fact, the 1960s switchboard is only the "front end" to the system, and then only for top level officials. All the other troops use fairly modern equipment and features: speed-dial phones, call transfer, and conferencing. But none of these systems works with the others. Someone in the Treasury Department can't transfer a call to someone in the Justice Department. Voice mail is the same way: Each department is a different system, and no voice mail can be forwarded outside the agency.

Remember how Clinton complained that anyone could pick up and listen to his phone conversations in the Oval Office by just picking up an extension line and pressing a button? That's because no other president had ever requested a private line! Other cabinet officials have private lines in their offices - because they asked for them. All Clinton had to do was request a private line - he did - and it was installed in a hour. (And the Carter, Reagan, and Bush camps wondered how all those leaks got out...)

Documents show that calls coming in on the White House's public comment lines are usually answered by volunteers. Those volunteers are recruited from the ranks of bright-eyed, fresh-faced campaign workers. When Bush left office, so did the bank of volunteers staffing the public call-in phones. It seems nobody mentioned that the Clinton people would have to staff those phones.

Because the White House was operating in a state of controlled chaos in those early days, the public comment lines were deserted. This left the "little old ladies" at the plug-and-play switchboard (which is primarily used for calls to the President and high-ranking White House officials) trying to stem the flow of calls. And no matter how competent these women are - and I'm told by current Clinton staffers they are topnotch pros - they simply couldn't handle the volume of calls. The badly configured phone system simply overloaded and literally tens of thousands of calls never got through.

The White House declared that the phone system had "failed," and immediately began its hunt for a new one. In an attempt to rush through the order for the system, the White House claimed there was a dire need for the upgrade. The final straw? According to documents obtained under the FOIA, the phone system "on a single day in February" reached a "saturation point" of 65,000 calls, which jammed the entire telephone network.

Under the guise of national security and "urgent and compelling need" (a designation used mainly for wartime procurement) the White House decided to bypass the Competition in Contracting Act that mandates all federal contracts be subject to full and open competition. Instead, the White House chose to submit bids to only two hardware manufacturers - AT&T and Northern Telecom - and went with the default local telephone company, C&P Telephone, for Centrex services.

So what did your US$25 million buy? Lots of high-tech goodies no doubt?

Wrong! The new system consists of 4,000 leased Centrex lines that will feed three AT&T Definity G3R PBX switches with digital consoles (to do away with that nasty 1960s plug-and-play front end). The White House bought three in order to insure "survivability" of the system. What did they do before for survivability? Nothing. That's right, there was no backup hardware in the White House in case the system failed. That doesn't mean Clinton couldn't make calls during a crisis. Fact is, for secure calls, he uses a system run by the White House Communications Agency, which is classified. The system you bought isn't, though the administration at first claimed it was and used that excuse in attempts to deny FOIA requests. (The Secret Service later told the administration that the system isn't classified, hence our success at retrieving the documents.)

That's it. Feel better? I didn't think so. The system is adequate, but it's no monster central office switch like the one currently in use, a Northern Telecom DMS-100. This beast is a mid-1970s analog switch. Although more than 40 percent of the nation's central office switches are in this class, no telephone company has bought an analog central switch since the late 1970s. They've all turned to digital switches, like the AT&T flagship 5ESS. Now, stuffing a 5ESS in the White House basement would have been impressive and it would have given the Clinton administration the telecommunications power of a city roughly the size of New York, give or take a couple of boroughs. Sensing overkill, the Clinton administration went with the cheaper Definity G3R PBXs.

I can hear you now, desperately trying to justify that noose tightening around your collective taxpayer wallet: "Okay, sounds good. Wise choice, no overkill. I like that. But in this age of digitalization, I'll bet the new system is pumped with a shitload of new features for the Prez and his troops, right?"

Wrong again. Here's the sum total of the improvements you bought for Clinton's vaunted high-tech cyber-elite: first, voice mail that can be forwarded throughout the entire Executive Office of the President, an improvement over the current voice mail system that has only limited message forwarding capabilities. Second, policy wonks can now set up six- way conference calls from their desks without operator assistance. The current system permits - for shame - only three-way conference calling without operator assistance.

Third, when one of Clinton's whiz kids gets promoted, rerouting the phone number can be done via a computer terminal; the current method entails having a C&P technician come out and rewire the telephone junction box for the wonk's new desk.

That's it. Honest. The real kicker here is that the old system in the White House isn't as bad as we've been led to believe.

A Congressional investigation by the House Government Operations Committee, which has oversight of the White House budget, determined that the American public was being ripped off in the deal. The GovOps investigation found that it "appears" new contracts were given "in clear violation of the federal Competition in Contracting Act." The GovOps committee ranking minority member, Rep. Bill Clinger said: "In reality, busy signals and unanswered calls during the early days of the Clinton administration were caused by inadequate management and a failure to adequately staff the public comment lines. It's hard to understand how limiting competition and saddling the taxpayers with a $25 million bill solves the problem of mismanagement."

But Clinger's investigation was a pebble tossed into the roiling Washington political waters. Lawmakers have had other things on their minds lately: US troops dying in Somalia, the second Russian Revolution, the North American Free Trade Agreement, health care reform, and - shudder - rising cable TV rates. In an attempt to give his investigation some longer legs, Clinger has submitted his findings to the Government Accounting Office. The GAO has taken up the issue and has begun its own investigation. GAO officials wouldn't comment on their investigation or estimate when it might be completed.

The GovOps committee investigation did turn up some interesting facts the public hadn't previously known. The old setup, which uses a Northern Telecom DMS-100 central office switch, is currently configured to handle 100,000 calls per hour and can technically handle twice that capacity. But back in February when the system burped and went belly up - on a mere 65,000 calls in an entire day - the switch was set up to handle only 1,000 calls per hour.

Then, in April, a full two months after the "February Surprise," C&P Telephone sent in a team of engineers and, with $600,000 of its own money, "voluntarily" upgraded the DMS-100 switch, White House documents show. Nice touch, don't you think? Previously shielded from any publicity surrounding its dealings with the White House, C&P saw a public relations fiasco in the making and took the initiative to upgrade the switch, a move that should have been made years ago, according to other telephone engineers familiar with the improvements. Why did they wait? "Before Clinton began complaining [about the phone system], there was never really any need to put all that money into the switch," a C&P official told us. The upgrade consisted of reconfiguring the call-handling capability of the switch.

Okay, okay, sounds like a typical government-contractor snafu, but at least there's a cost savings with the new system, right? Well, it depends on how you look at it. The White House argues that the present old system is more expensive, and would cost approximately $27 million over the next ten years. On the face of it, the new contract is a steal, saving the taxpayer about $200,000 a year. But look again. And you'll have to look closely, because the contract for the new system is 12,000 pages long. No, I'm not joking.

Your $25 million doesn't include such essentials as, oh, say, wiring, construction, round-the-clock staffing of a brand new White House department called the Telephone Service Office, cabling and installation of new PBXs, and structural renovations to the White House for the new equipment. Of the $25 million, C&P gets $10 million for handling the local service; AT&T gets $15 million for the PBXs, which includes maintenance.

Oh yeah, one last thing: This is a done deal. The contract's signed. The check, as they say, is in the mail. But at least now, if you want to call in and complain, you shouldn't get a busy signal...The White House: +1 (202) 456 1414.