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Remove all clippings Remove all read clippings AP Exclusive: Military gear bound for Iran, China traced to Pentagon surplus sales
The Associated PressPublished: January 16, 2007
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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 still under way.
_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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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, was fined $250,000 (€193,000) 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 — 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 did not know the Chinese government partially owned the buyer.
Today in Americas
Clinton as underdog says fight isn't overThe pope gets a guide for his U.S. tourColombia details accusations about Venezuela and rebels_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 were not recovered, Assistant U.S. Attorney Laura Ingersoll said.
_A California company, All Ports, shipped hundreds of containers of U.S. 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.
Republican Rep. Christopher Shays 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 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 is 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 that should not 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 Florida-based Defense and Aerospace International, sees human error as a big problem. Surplus items are numbered, and an error of a single digit can make sensitive technology available, he said. Knowledgeable buyers could easily spot a valuable item, he added: "I'm not the only sophisticated eye in the world."
Baillie said the Pentagon is working to tighten security. Steps include setting up property centers to identify surplus parts better and employing people skilled at spotting sensitive items. If there is uncertainty about an item, he said, it is destroyed.
Of the 76,000 parts for the F-14, 60 percent 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.