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.
The episode resulted in some surprising leads. Investigators discovered that a Chinese-owned scrap company was legally buying surplus materiel from Burton and from the Robins DRMO. Further inquiries revealed a score of Chinese dealers operating from coast to coast. Although no proof developed that they acted as agents for China, that did raise concerns. In a memo to his Chinese boss in California, the buyer in Georgia called Robins "the candy store." The base, he wrote, "will fill our needs into the next century," according to an investigator who has seen the note.
The Robins case had all kinds of reverberations. It led investigators to the discovery of a commercial listing service that offers thousands of military surplus weapons and weapons parts. The listing, called the Inventory Locator Service or ILS, is used worldwide by dealers in aircraft parts to advertise their inventories. Surplus dealers also use it to advertise weapons and weapons parts, all of which is perfectly legal too.
Fallout. The echoes from the Robins case would eventually be felt clear across the country, in Montana, of all places. Ron Garlick is a straight-talking businessman who runs a thriving helicopter-repair business about 40 miles south of Missoula. Garlick had modified UH-1 Huey helicopters for logging and construction use. Since the Cobra was a sleek and powerful follow-on to the Huey, he thought it would make a good logger. Garlick obtained an FAA license to build one for logging, firefighting or movie-making purposes.
When armed, the Cobra is one of the deadliest military attack vehicles ever invented. Before it is sold as surplus, it must be demilitarized. The demilitarization manual states that Cobra bodies must be cut into at least three parts and that their "airframe [must be] mutilated by destroying attaching structure by cutting, chopping, tearing, shredding, crushing or smelting to the degree that aircraft will be unfit for repair or flight." Garlick and other helicopter builders, however, knew that usable parts were plentiful, even at DRMOs. Says Garlick, who has amassed a huge store of Cobra parts, "If they were built once, I can rebuild it, and no one can stop me."
In September 1994, a flatbed truck pulled into the DRMO at Robins carrying three Cobra bodies that looked as if they had not been properly demilled. Air Force investigators questioned the truck driver, who said the Cobras had been purchased at a DRMO in Groton, Conn., and were headed for a warehouse in Joshua, Texas, owned by a man named Alan Sparks. "I don't know why you are so excited," the man reportedly said. "Sparks has 60 or 70 of these things."
Original crates. Sparks actually had 88 Cobra fuselages, which he hoped to use for logging. He also had the parts to go with them--the rotor blades, rocket tubes, gun pods, missile launchers, and weapons controllers, according to Pentagon records. "None of the items were demilled correctly," a Pentagon memo states. "Some items [were] in original packing crates."
Word of Sparks's covey of Cobras shocked Jim Wiggins, the top federal prosecutor for the middle district of Georgia, where Robins is located. A tall, sandy-haired man with a deliberate manner, Wiggins had won a Silver Star in Vietnam for piloting a Cobra gunship in a hazardous rescue mission. At the time of the Sparks discovery, Wiggins was overseeing something called the Middle Georgia Task Force, which consisted of military investigators and special agents of the Customs Service and the FBI. The task force had been set up after the $40 million retrieval of property from Hobart Burton.
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