F.B.I. Says Russians Smuggled Out U.S.
Microchips
MOSCOW — Russian
officials had a muted response on Thursday to a potentially embarrassing
revelation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that it had uncovered a ring of
Russian agents that was smuggling microchips out of the United States.
The scheme focused on chips and other electronic components that
are commonplace enough in the United States to circulate freely in the domestic
market. But their export still requires a license, lest the electronics wind up
in the foreign military equipment of countries unable to manufacture the
components themselves.
For Russia, the unraveling of this Houston-based
network of chip buyers, if upheld in court, would signify a second major
failure in spycraft since 2010, when federal agents arrested a circle of
Russian agents posing as American suburbanites. Within weeks, members of that
group — including a young woman, Anna Chapman — were traded for four men
imprisoned in Russia.
The real blow to Russian scientific
pride is the suggestion that the country’s military and intelligence agencies
are still reduced to stealing commercially available chips from the United
States, after years of failing to create a computer industry here.
The chips, which the F.B.I. said had
been bought by a Houston company called Arc Electronics Inc. that falsely
presented itself as a manufacturer of traffic lights, reportedly wound up in
such vaunted Russian weapons as MIG fighter jets and anti-ship missiles.
The F.B.I. unsealed the indictment
on Wednesday against 11 people, all from the former Soviet Union, some of them
naturalized American citizens, including the man accused of being the
ringleader Alexander Fishenko, co-owner of Arc Electronics, an electrical
engineer from Kazakhstan who studied in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Eight are in custody; all are
accused of various licensing and weapons trading violations punishable with
long prison sentences of up to 20 years. Mr. Fishenko is also accused of being
a Russian agent. Though the company was in Houston, the case will be heard in
the Eastern District of New York because the group shipped microchips to Russia
from Kennedy International Airport.
Russia’s deputy foreign minister,
Sergei Ryabkov, took pains on Thursday to note that the defendants had not been
accused of espionage, per se. The crime of failing to register as an agent of a
foreign government can also apply, for example, to an improperly registered
lawyer or lobbyist.
The charges “have no relation in any
way with intelligence activity,” the Russian Information Agency reported,
paraphrasing Mr. Ryabkov.
According to the F.B.I., the
Russians posed as traffic-light makers — but not very well.
A sister company in Russia, Apex
System, imported items from Arc Electronics. It was also partly owned by Mr.
Fishenko and had pictures of airplanes and missiles on its Web site until the
Russians got word of a pending check by the Department of Commerce, whereupon
it took them down. In Russia, a subsidiary of Apex was licensed as a supplier
to military industry factories, an exhibit filed with the indictment in the
Eastern District showed.
The F.B.I. said employees of Arc
once resorted to imploring their Russian-based counterparts to more cleverly
falsify end-user certificates. They should indicate “fishing boats and not
fishing/anti-submarine ones.”
The Russian inability to make
microchips goes back decades and has sapped the confidence of generations of
engineers here. In the late Soviet period it bared, dramatically, the
ever-widening technological gap with the United States. Russians took to
bragging darkly that Soviet microchips here were the biggest in the world.
The smuggled American chips, the
F.B.I. said, could be used in missile guidance systems, radar, police
surveillance equipment or bomb triggers.
“While some countries may leverage
our technology for financial gain, many countries hostile to the United States
seek to improve their defense capabilities and to modernize their weapons
systems,” the Houston F.B.I. special agent in charge, Stephen L. Morris, said
in a statement.
Through the day Thursday, Russian
military companies came forward to deny that their products contained American
chips, not to speak of those apparently first bought under the pretext they
would be used in traffic lights.
One unnamed representative of the
MIG fighter airplane company told the Russian Information Agency that there
were no American chips in its latest, ostensibly high-tech airplane, the
MIG-35. “We certainly don’t steal anything from the United States.”
Russia has a rich tradition of
technology heists for its military industry, dating to the theft of atomic bomb
secrets from the United States after World War
II.
Published: October 4,
2012
WHO : Russian officials
WHAT : had a muted
response to a potentially embarrassing revelation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation
WHY : it had uncovered a ring of
Russian agents that was smuggling microchips out of the United States.
WHERE : Moscow
Element of
Newsworthy : Progress
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/05/world/africa/fbi-agents-scour-ruins-of-attacked-us-compound-in-libya.html?_r=2&ref=world
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/05/world/africa/fbi-agents-scour-ruins-of-attacked-us-compound-in-libya.html?_r=2&ref=world
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