Boeing has been dropping not-so-veiled hints for years that it might leave Washington in part or parcel, but the real greasing of the skids began when Harry E. Stonecipher came to town.

Stonecipher came from McDonnell Douglas Corps when the California company was purchased by Boeing in 1997. As president and chief operating officer, he’s No. 2 man to board chair and chief executive Phil Condit. One of the first things Condit and Stonecipher did was start changing Boeing’s operations to be more like McDonnell,. Odd, my sources say, since it was McDonnell’s method of operation that put it in shape to be acquired by Boeing. It was the beginning of the de-emphasis of the commercial airplane division.

Stonecipher, I’m told, is in tight with General Electric from whom Boeing bought Hughes Electronics’ satellite-making business for $3.75 billion in January last year. Since then, Stonecipher has been exchanging meetings with GE, which has been doing some diversifying of its own. He also is tagged as the influence behind Condit’s decision to make the leaving town announcement back in Washington, D.C., instead of on home turf, and to keep this state’s political crowd in the dark until five minutes before it became public.

“Harry,” one of my sources told me, “pushed Phil to the point that Phil accepted what Harry wants. Phil did not have the ——- to do what he wants to do.”

This version of the blame game would appear to be endorsed by an article that appeared in The Economist magazine that said, “Boeing’s merger with McDonnell-Douglas in 1997 brought new managers to Seattle who have been openly contemptuous of the company’s local traditions and the premium placed on keeping ‘Boeing man’ happy.”

Boeing man definitely is not happy. Boeing’s top brass kissing Seattle and Washington good-by without even knowing where they’ll unpack their suitcases has to be like the bridegroom buying a one way ticket to anywhere while the bride and 500 people wait in the church.

Not only was it a blow to the image of city and state as a good place to do business, it was a slap in the face to those politicians who have carried the water for Boeing over the years. U.S. Rep. Norman Dicks, the Bremerton Democrat who succeeded the late Sen. Henry M. Jackson as “the (senator) congressman from Boeing,” flew into a rage.

Equally angry, for different reasons, was GOP House Speaker Clyde Ballard, who has been the Cassandra of the Legislature for years over the way business has been treated at the state and local levels. Nobody listened to him when he said they’d better stop strangling business with regulations or businesses were going to go where they got better treatment.

As early as 1991, said Ballard, then-CEO Frank Shrontz warned the Seattle Chamber of Commerce that unless the business climate improved, Boeing would take its business elsewhere. In 1993, Shrontz said that when Boeing tried to expand in Everett for the new 777 jetliner, it took 2-1/2 years to get the permits and cost $50 million in mitigation fees, from being forced to finance road improvements to building housing. If we decide to build a super jumbo jet, he said, it probably would not be in Washington because of the regulatory climate.

In 1999, Boeing CFO Debby Hopkins said Washington’s labor costs were among the highest in the nation and if Boeing determines it can produce parts more efficiently elsewhere, it will go.

The surly, arrogant attitude of labor bosses can’t help, nor Gov. Gary Locke’s promise to them that he’d veto any bills the Legislature passed that labor didn’t like.

The Wall Street Journal recently quoted former Boeing exec Gordon Bethune, now chair of Continental Airlines, as saying Boeing has feuded with local pols over being obliged to build housing, etc. “Boeing was seen as captive,” he said. “Maybe they are paying Seattle back for some of that.” If so, they’re doing a first class job of it.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.).