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 other person upset by Sparks's Cobras was Ron Garlick, in Montana, who telephoned the Pentagon to see what was going on. The call was lateraled to investigator Dave Barrington. Garlick was concerned over the Sparks seizures, he said, because he, too, was building Cobras--and he saw no reason to give his up. According to Barrington's notes, Garlick said he "had a significant amount of intact weapons and weapons systems." Garlick confirms this. "Mine was fully armed," he says of his chopper. "I had rockets on it and machine guns. I was out there shooting coyotes with them."
Garlick didn't want trouble. The government could have his Cobra weapons, he said, if they "want to buy them." Barrington finished scribbling his notes, thanked Garlick and hung up.
The fate of the Cobras would hang in the balance for months, as a bitter wrangle ensued inside both the Pentagon and the Justice Department. Investigators, federal agents, demilitarization officers and prosecutor Wiggins pushed for seizure of the Cobras. But the Army, which owns most of the choppers, resisted, as did Col. Charles Masters, who was in charge of surplus disposal. Feelings ran so high that Wiggins hauled Masters before a grand jury. Masters says: "Quite frankly, I thought I was close to being charged. With what, I have no idea." Ultimately, Wiggins prevailed, and the government seized the helicopters and parts from Sparks. But as agents began to plan raids on Garlick and other owners of Cobras, the Justice Department brought all such seizures to a halt. The law that might authorize them was just too murky. On September 25 of this year, the FBI sent a letter to the Pentagon advising that 23 Cobras belonging to private citizens had been "discovered during several FBI investigations."
Security threats. As worrisome as the Cobras may be to law enforcement, agents say that the greater threat to national security is the shipping of weaponry overseas. In September 1994, about the time the flatbed-truck driver with the three Cobras was pulling into Robins, Pentagon investigator Curt Murphree got word that a California company named Cal Industries was loading 14 seagoing containers at the Pentagon DRMO in San Antonio. The contents were listed as 240 tons of electronic scrap. Murphree, who knew that the base processed lots of sensitive weapons equipment, got Customs Service agents to stop the containers and pry them open. What they found were thousands of top-secret encryption devices, hard-cased field computers used for sending coded communications, as well as classified radio transmitter-receivers. None had been properly demilitarized. There was also a pile of banged-up Wang computers, but many still had their hard drives, and two had 5¬-inch floppy disks in them. One disk was ma
For 16 months, U.S. Customs ran an investigation that targeted surplus smugglers, says John Hensley, the special agent in charge of Customs Service investigations in Los Angeles. Dubbed "Operation Overrun," the investigation resulted in nine seizures of $157 million worth of parts bound for China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan and elsewhere. None of the items seized had been licensed for export. Included in their overseas-bound shipments were radar systems, electronic-warfare black boxes, and some bizarre items--10,000 new chemical-warfare-protection suits headed to Ukraine.
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