Weapons Bazaar
This Cobra attack helicopter was built from surplus parts. The Pentagon sells millions of them a year. Many fall into the wrong hands.
Surplus Pentagon weapons are regularly traded away by Army and Navy museums scattered around the country, and some have been responsible for questionable if not illegal activities (story, Page 39). A federal law allows the museums to trade tanks, jet fighters, and attack helicopters to private citizens for other vehicles or "services." Two museums are under federal criminal investigations for such activities.
Within the cloistered world of the Pentagon, the problems of properly disposing of surplus weapons are nothing new, although the public has been kept largely in the dark. Surplus weapons sales are overseen by a Pentagon office called the Defense Logistics Agency, which manages all the military's supplies and equipment. The DLA has spent much of the past two decades trading barbs with the four military services about how to fix the surplus sales system. Progress has been virtually nonexistent. Nearly a decade ago, an internal memorandum signed by William Taft, then the deputy secretary of defense, leveled a startling charge. "A joint U.S. Customs-[Pentagon] investigation [has] confirmed," Taft wrote, "that the defense disposal system is a source of supply for arms traffickers." Since then the number of surplus weapons and critical parts has increased, and the problems have only worsened.
Guns and money. How much Pentagon weaponry is getting into the wrong hands is impossible to know, but it is happening, law enforcement officials say. When a Hell's Angels methamphetamine lab was raided in California last year, police also found military weaponry: three working machine guns and an M-79 grenade launcher. The grenade launcher was traced to a Pentagon surplus sales outlet in Crane, Ind. That same outlet had sold 70 of the launchers in 1989. Pentagon documents certified that the launchers had been cut into scrap; in fact, only their firing pins had been filed down. In 1992, in Illinois, a man was sentenced to 41 months in prison for illegal possession of 10 unregistered machine guns; the man had bought the weapons through Pentagon surplus sales and welded them up to make them work. The weapons should have been mutilated so they could never work.
Smuggling is an even bigger concern. A 16-month Customs Service investigation that ended earlier this year resulted in the interception of surplus military parts worth $157 million. Foreign countries can use these parts to resupply their own armies, to find out how American weapons work or to build their own weapons, avoiding years of costly development.
Despite a handful of successes prosecuting those who abuse the Pentagon's surplus sale system, federal officials who have tried to plug the holes in it are frustrated and angry. A few Pentagon officials have found themselves demoted or reassigned for being too aggressive. Federal task forces have been quietly disbanded with few results while prosecutors who take on inquiries involving illegal surplus-weapons sales say they find the criminal justice system unable or unwilling to cope. "Whenever we tried to do something bold or aggressive, the bureaucracy at the Justice Department said 'No,' " said Jim Wiggins, a former U.S. attorney in Georgia who investigated surplus-weapons sales.
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