Crummer apparently didn’t. In February 1991, as American bombers pounded Iraqi targets during Desert Storm, two of Crummer’s disgruntled employees went to the Feds with a frightening tale. Crummer was building a sophisticated signal-interception system for the Jordanian government, complete with code names like Viper and 007, which would enable King Hussein to listen in on American military and diplomatic communications. The Pentagon feared that it would allow the king’s ally, Iraq, to know what we were doing in the war. Authorities raided Crummer’s business and seized his high-tech equipment. Crummer denied the espionage charges but pleaded guilty to building an intercept device. Distraught over losing his business, he committed suicide last year.
Spies like accused CIA mole Aldrich Ames were threats in the cold war because they sold secrets to the Soviets. Today’s security threats are spies and unscrupulous businessmen looting sensitive technology to sell abroad. “The fact that the cold war is over shouldn’t lull us,” warns U.S. Customs Commissioner George Weise. Technosmuggling is on the rise, particularly with shrinking Pentagon budgets forcing contractors to find more buyers overseas. The Customs Service, NEWSWEEK has learned, is investigating more than a dozen cases of Iraqi agents still trying to sneak equipment out of the United States. Meanwhile, Jordan and China have been caught running clandestine smuggling operations here-in one case right under the nose of the FBI.
Cracking these operations isn’t easy. To throw investigators off the scent, smuggling rings vacuum up innocuous items from far-flung American companies, then legally ship them abroad, where they’re assembled into more dangerous hardware. Customs agents-the frontline troops in this espionage war-must painstakingly unravel the incriminating paper trail. New snooping devices that bug fax and computer modem transmissions can help, but it often still takes years to fit the pieces together.
The Crummer case reveals the complexities of high-tech espionage. While pleading guilty to some charges, Crummer claimed that Viper had no military value and was being built only so that King Hussein could listen in on the phone calls of dissident Palestinians. But documents seized in the raid showed the technology would also be able to intercept communications relayed by American, Israeli, Arab and Russian satellites. The system was to be installed in a 22-room complex the Jordanian military had dubbed the Viper Den, which was located just 50 yards from King Hussein’s bedroom in the Hashemiyah Palace. It would target up to 10,000 telephone numbers for interception.
What penalty did Jordan pay for this? Not much. Angry Pentagon officials sought to have Field Marshal Zeid bin Shaker, King Hussein’s cousin and overseer of the clandestine operation to import Crummer’s equipment, barred from ever entering the United States. But the State Department blocked the move. Jordan, which denies any intention to monitor U.S. communications, is still an ally. Instead, the United States quietly expelled an army major in Jordan’s Washington embassy who was Crummer’s handler.
Crummer was caught in a sophisticated operation, but fighting hightech espionage is sometimes conspicuously low tech. Because techno-smugglers tend to keep meticulous records, agents like to inspect their garbage. in one recent case, Customs says it hit pay dir-t-a crumpled invoice showing that a Virginia businessman, Al Harb, allegedly had shipped accelerometers (devices used to measure nuclear detonations) to Jordan. With the help of the U.S. Postal Service, Customs agents say, they learned that Harb’s business had been corresponding with the real recipient of the technology-Iraq. Harb, who says he is innocent, was indicted last month on charges of violating the embargo against Iraq.
Occasionally the counterintelligence agents get hoodwinked themselves. Take the case of Bin Wu, one of the FBI’s most prized intelligence assets. A Nanjing professor sent by the Chinese to spy on the United States in 1990, Wu went to the FBI the next year, claiming he had a change of heart. The FBI gave him the code name Succor Delight and over the next 18 months paid him $21,500 to be a double agent, feeding the bureau information on Chinese espionage. Wu was “like a window looking right into their intelligence organization,” his FBI handler, Blake Lewis, would later testify.
But Wu soon became a counter intelligence agent’s worst nightmare. While passing information to his FBI handlers, he began shopping for U.S. technology to send to his Chinese handlers. An export company he set up quickly zeroed in on sophisticated night-vision equipment the military uses to see in the dark.
Phonying up shipping documents so Customs agents would think it was medical equipment, Wu began sneaking out small loads to a front company in Hong Kong set up by Chinese intelligence. Unaware that Wu was an FBI asset, Customs agents secretly photographed him as he tried to supply his Hong Kong contacts with the night-vision technology. At 9:30 a.m. on Oct. 7,1992, Customs agents raided Wu’s business. Ten minutes later, a stunned Lewis showed up at Wu’s office for a meeting, only to find that his asset had been arrested.
Wu, who was found guilty last year and sentenced to 10 years, insists that the illegal shipments were approved by the FBI as part of an operation to collect intelligence on Chinese smuggling. The FBI denies it, and there’s no credible evidence to back Wu’s claim. But the case was still embarrassing for the bureau. According to FBI counterintelligence reports, Wu had told Lewis seven months before his arrest that his Hong Kong handlers wanted to buy $2 million worth of equipment. But Lewis, who had no training in export regulations, assumed Wu was complying with the law. And FBI headquarters officials who were reading Lewis’s reports on Wu’s shipments to China never realized they were illegal. In the end, Wu scammed both sides. Seized documents revealed that be overbilled his Hong Kong handlers and pocketed the excess profits.
With the end of the cold war, the Clinton administration is considering easing hightech export controls. But that may open doors for more techno-smuggling to nations that don’t share American interests. “It’s a completely new ball game and we have to realign ourselves to deal with this threat,” says Ronald Noble, assistant Treasury secretary for enforcement. Allowing friendly nations to get our best technology may seem harmless enough. But what happens when they’re not so friendly anymore? The real spur for cracking down on technosmuggling is the knowledge that if we don’t, our own best technology will inevitably be used against us.
