Former RCUH executive director Harold Masumoto, reached at his home, said he doesn't know what happened to an investigation the Navy launched three years ago when he was in charge of RCUH, or what it was about.

"They asked for a lot of information and we gave it," he said. "I don't know what they were fishing for. ... I don't keep up with those things anymore."

Jim Gaines, interim vice president for research for the university, has confirmed that there is an investigation, and said that UH's role is peripheral — "like a whistle-blower's, if we had one."

"I've checked on the UH end to see if we're clean on this, and it's my opinion we are," said Gaines.

A story in the University of Hawai'i student newspaper Ka Leo this week alleged that the Navy was investigating possible mismanagement of one classified contract by RCUH and the diversion of money from it to write a proposal for another.

According to Ka Leo, the investigation involves a research project headed by Vassilis Syrmos to develop a new generation of transmission/receiver switches for a radar system for the Navy's E-2C Advanced Hawkeye surveillance airplane.

Syrmos, associate dean of the UH College of Engineering and senior adviser to the vice chancellor for research, said he doesn't know anything about the investigation and cannot speculate on what it's about.

"At this point, we haven't been asked any questions," he said.

Gaines offered a deeper look at the issues involved.

"One of our contracts was the issue," said Gaines. "It wasn't that we had mismanaged contracts, but that our principal investigator didn't want to go along with some changes suggested by the program manager."

(Principal investigators are university researchers who have applied for grants, and are the major managers of the grant funding. It is generally their research that is being supported by grants.)

Gaines said the PI considered the suggested changes inappropriate. He said he, too, considers the suggested changes inappropriate, but he can't talk about any other details.

"It's really former Navy personnel who are in the serious positions here," Gaines said.

Syrmos said the project involved a Navy contract of $1.4 million that originally began in 1998, but which he took over in 2001 when the previous researcher left.

In the midst of the project, said Syrmos, two pieces of data were classified by the government, which meant that he and seven students needed to get security clearances to continue the work.

At the same time, he said, university computers needed to be scrubbed of data.

"It was a mess to clean it up," he said. "There was classified information everywhere in all our computing systems."

"The university did an excellent job and did the best of our ability to satisfy the Navy."