http://www.iranmania.com/News/ArticleView/Default.asp?NewsCode=48938&NewsKind=Current%20Affairs
Iran gets army gear in Pentagon sale
Tuesday, January 16, 2007 - ©2005 IranMania.com
Related Pictures
Archived Picture - The US military has sold forbidden equipment at least
a half-dozen times to middlemen for countries, including Iran and China,
who exploited security flaws in the Defense Department's surplus
auctions, The Associated Press reported.
LONDON, January 16 (IranMania) - The US military has sold forbidden
equipment at least a half-dozen times to middlemen for countries,
including Iran and China, who exploited security flaws in the Defense
Department's surplus auctions, The Associated Press reported.
The sales include fighter jet parts and missile omponentsIn one case,
federal investigators said, the contraband made it to Iran, a country
President Bush branded part of an "axis of evil."
In that instance, a Pakistani arms broker convicted of exporting US
missile parts to Iran resumed business after his release from prison. He
purchased Chinook helicopter engine parts for Iran from a US company
that had bought them in a Pentagon surplus sale. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement agents, speaking on condition of anonymity, say those parts
made it to Iran.
The surplus sales can operate like a supermarket for arms dealers.
"Right Item, Right Time, Right Place, Right Price, Every Time. Best
Value Solutions for America's Warfighters," the Defense Reutilization
and Marketing Service says on its Web site, calling itself "the place to
obtain original US Government surplus property."
Federal investigators are increasingly anxious that Iran is within easy
reach of a top priority on its shopping list: parts for the precious
fleet of F-14 "Tomcat" fighter jets the United States let Iran buy in
the 1970s when it was an ally.
In one case, convicted middlemen for Iran bought Tomcat parts from the
Defense Department's surplus division. Customs agents confiscated them
and returned them to the Pentagon, which sold them again, customs
evidence tags still attached, to another buyer, a suspected broker for Iran.
That incident appalled even an expert on weaknesses in Pentagon surplus
security controls.
"That would be evidence of a significant breakdown, in my view, in
controls and processes," said Greg Kutz, the Government Accountability
Office's head of special investigations. "It shouldn't happen the first
time, let alone the second time."
A Defense Department official, Fred Baillie, said his agency followed
procedures.
"The fact that those individuals chose to violate the law and the fact
that the customs people caught them really indicates that the process is
working," said Baillie, the Defense Logistics Agency's executive
director of distribution. "Customs is supposed to check all exports to
make sure that all the appropriate certifications and licenses had been
granted."
The Pentagon recently retired its Tomcats and is shipping tens of
thousands of spare parts to its surplus office, the Defense
Reutilization and Marketing Service, where they could be sold in public
auctions. Iran is the only other country flying F-14s.
"It stands to reason Iran will be even more aggressive in seeking F-14
parts," said Stephen Bogni, head of Immigration and Customs
Enforcement's arms export investigations. Iran can only produce about
15% of the parts itself, he said.
Sensitive military surplus items are supposed to be demilitarized or
"de-milled", rendered useless for military purposes, or, if auctioned,
sold only to buyers who promise to obey US arms embargoes, export
controls and other laws.
The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, found it alarmingly easy to
acquire sensitive surplus. Last year, its agents bought $1.1 million
worth -- including rocket launchers, body armor and surveillance
antennas, by driving onto a base and posing as defense contractors.
"They helped us load our van," Kutz said. Investigators used a fake
identity to access a surplus Web site operated by a Pentagon contractor
and bought still more, including a dozen microcircuits used on F-14
fighters.
The undercover buyers received phone calls from the Defense Department
asking why they had no Social Security number or credit history, but
they deflected the questions by presenting a phony utility bill and
claiming to be an identity theft victim.
The Pentagon's public surplus sales took in $57 million in fiscal 2005.
The agency also moves extra supplies around within the government and
gives surplus military gear such as weapons, armored personnel carriers
and aircraft to state and local law enforcement.
Investigators have found the Pentagon's inventory and sales controls
rife with errors. They say the sales are closely watched by friends and
foes of the United States.
Among cases in which US military technology made its way from surplus
auctions to brokers for Iran, China and others:
_Items seized in December 2000 at a Bakersfield, Calif., warehouse that
belonged to Multicore, described by US prosecutors as a front company
for Iran. Among the weaponry it acquired were fighter jet and missile
components, including F-14 parts from Pentagon surplus sales, customs
agents said. The surplus purchases were returned after two Multicore
officers were sentenced to prison for weapons export violations.
London-based Multicore is now out of business, but customs continues to
investigate whether US companies sold military equipment to it illegally.
In 2005, customs agents came upon the same surplus F-14 parts with the
evidence labels still attached while investigating a different company
suspected of serving as an Iranian front. They seized the items again.
They declined to provide details because the investigation is ongoing.
_Arif Ali Durrani, a Pakistani, was convicted last year in California in
the illegal export of weapons components to the United Arab Emirates,
Malaysia and Belgium in 2004 and 2005 and sentenced to just over 12
years in prison. Customs investigators say the items included Chinook
helicopter engine parts for Iran that he bought from a US company that
acquired them from a Pentagon surplus sale, and that those parts made it
to Iran via Malaysia. Durrani is appealing his conviction.
An accomplice, former Naval intelligence officer George Budenz, pleaded
guilty and was sentenced in July to a year in prison. Durrani's prison
term is his second; he was convicted in 1987 of illegally exporting US
missile parts to Iran.
_State Metal Industries, a Camden, N.J., company convicted in June of
violating export laws over a shipment of AIM-7 Sparrow missile guidance
parts it bought from Pentagon surplus in 2003 and sold to an entity
partly owned by the Chinese government. The company pleaded guilty to an
export violation, was fined $250,000 and placed on probation for three
years. Customs and Border Protection inspectors seized the parts --
nearly 200 pieces of the guidance system for the Sparrow missile system
-- while inspecting cargo at a New Jersey port.
"Our mistake was selling it for export," said William Robertson, State
Metal's attorney. He said the company knew the material was going to
China but didn't know the Chinese government partially owned the buyer.
_In October, Ronald Wiseman, a longtime Pentagon surplus employee in the
Middle East, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 18 months in prison for
stealing surplus military Humvees and selling them to a customer in
Saudi Arabia from 1999 to 2002. An accomplice, fellow surplus employee
Gayden Woodson, will be sentenced this month.
The Humvees were equipped for combat zones and some weren't recovered,
Assistant US Attorney Laura Ingersoll said.
_A California company, All Ports, shipped hundreds of containers of US
military technology to China between 1994 and 1999, much of it acquired
in Pentagon surplus sales, court documents show. Customs agents
discovered the sales in May 1999 when All Ports tried to ship to China
components for guided missiles, bombs, the B-1 bomber and underwater
mines. The company and its owners were convicted in 2000; an appeals
court upheld the conviction in 2002.
Rep. Christopher Shays (news, bio, voting record), R-Conn., called the
cases "a huge breakdown, an absolute, huge breakdown."
"The military should not sell or give away any sensitive military
equipment. If we no longer need it, it needs to be destroyed, totally
destroyed," said Shays, until this month the chairman of a House panel
on national security. "The Department of Defense should not be supplying
sensitive military equipment to our adversaries, our enemies, terrorists."
It's no secret to defense experts that valuable technology can be found
amid surplus scrap.
On a visit to a Defense Department surplus site about five years ago,
defense consultant Randall Sweeney literally stumbled upon some items
that clearly shouldn't have been up for sale.
"I was walking through a pile of supposedly de-milled electrical items
and found a heat-seeking missile warhead intact," Sweeney said,
declining to identify the surplus location for security reasons. "I
carried it over and showed them. I said, 'This shouldn't be in here.'"
Sweeney, president of Defense and Aerospace International in West Palm
Beach, Fla., sees human error as a big problem. Surplus items are
numbered, and an error of a single digit can make sensitive technology
improperly available and knowledgeable buyers could easily spot a
valuable item, he said. "I'm not the only sophisticated eye in the
world," he said.
Baillie said the Pentagon is working to tighten security. Steps include
setting up property centers to better identify surplus parts and
employing people skilled at spotting sensitive items. If there is
uncertainty about whether an item is safe, he said, it is destroyed.
Of the 76,000 parts for the F-14, 60% are "general hardware" such as
nuts and bolts and can be sold to the public without restriction,
Baillie said. About 10,000 are unique to Tomcats and will be destroyed,
he said.
An additional 23,000 parts are valuable for military and commercial use
and are being studied to see whether it's safe to sell them, Baillie said.
Asked why the Pentagon would sell any F-14 parts, given their value to
Iran, Baillie said: "Our first priority truly is national security, and
we take that very seriously. However, we have to balance that with our
other requirement to be good stewards of the taxpayers' money."
Kutz, the government investigator, said surplus F-14 parts shouldn't be
sold. He believes Iran already has Tomcat parts from Pentagon surplus
sales: "The key now is, going forward, to shut that down and not let it
happen again."
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