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.
One of the biggest listings of warehoused arms and arms parts can be found on a system called the Inventory Locator Service. ILS is a business located in Memphis. ILS offers a computerized classified listing to paid subscribers. About 3,000 aircraft-parts sellers and users worldwide subscribe to it, for a fee of several hundred dollars a month. The sellers list their inventories on the system, and buyers can scan the inventories as they browse for purchases. ILS President Bruce Langsen says the computer system is queried about 26,000 times each day.
Heavy-duty stuff. Pentagon investigator Barrington remembers vividly the first time he tapped into the ILS database. A former police officer and Army Criminal Investigations Division agent who won a Bronze Star in the gulf war, Barrington went to work for the Defense Logistics Agency in 1994. Back then, he thought he had a pretty good sense of the international arms market, but the stuff he saw listed in the ILS database disabused him of that. "I ran weapons, machine guns, flamethrowers and components of guided bombs," he says. "And immediately, I was getting hits!"
A printout Barrington made from his ILS visits is an eye-popper. It runs 26 pages, single spaced, and lists such items as AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles, GBU-10 guided bombs, Maverick missiles, machine guns and grenade launchers. Virtually everything on the list should have been demilitarized, and probably destroyed--but it was all available for sale.
Curious to figure out where the stuff came from, Barrington began to check those items against sales at DRMOs. Checking more than 100 weapons parts advertised on ILS, he found that one fifth had been sold to surplus dealers in just the past three years. All were available in the United States. With more research, he came to believe that the heavy-duty weapons, the bombs and rockets and missiles, had probably been sold legally by the Pentagon to foreign governments, which then sold them as surplus. Brokers using ILS then offered them for sale.
Langsen, the ILS president, says he has provided law enforcement agencies access to his company's computer listings, but he did not know the details of their investigations. Because there are 30 million items listed on the inventory, Langsen contended that searching for weapons is not easy. But when U.S. News gave him the stock number for a grenade launcher, Langsen was able to find it pretty quickly. "From what I have learned in the past 48 hours," he said, "we are going to need to find a better way of combing the database. We are not an armaments database, and we don't want to become an armaments database."
The U.S. News test of the ILS system shows how easily surplus weapons and weapons parts can be purchased by the public. Using a dummy letterhead, the magazine sent letters to many of the companies listing weapons parts on ILS, requesting price quotes and availability for a variety of weapons and parts. The sellers responded with price quotes for 35 items, ranging from bomb-arming devices to circuit cards for nuclear submarines' targeting systems to the key components of night-vision scopes. U.S. News even bought some, and, with 60 Minutes, went undercover to talk with surplus dealers. Several dealers said that in buying aircraft parts at DRMOs they often scooped up a lot of other hardware, such as weapons parts. They said they listed it all on ILS hoping that someone would spot it and buy it.
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