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Texas Man Who Acted As Russian Agent Gets 10 Years' Prison (go.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: A Texas man who acted as a secret agent for the Russian government and illegally exported cutting-edge military technology to Russia has been sentenced to 10 years in prison. Alexander Fishenko learned his punishment Thursday in federal court in New York. He pleaded guilty in September to crimes including acting as a Russian agent. The 50-year-old Fishenko is a U.S. and Russian citizen. He owned Houston-based Arc Electronics Inc. Prosecutors say he led a scheme that evaded strict export controls for micro-electronics commonly used in missile guidance systems, detonation triggers and radar systems. Prosecutors say his company shipped about $50 million worth of technologies to Russia between 2002 and 2012. In other Russian-related news, a Russian government-owned news site Sputnik has reported that the Kremlin is building a nuclear space bomber that should be flight-ready by 2020.
I'm really curious about which "micro-electronics" he could have obtained that are strictly controlled and used in misile guidance systems.
By falsely claiming to be a traffic light manufacturer, Arc Electronics duped companies including Texas Instruments Inc., Xilinx Inc. and Toshiba Corp. to sell it sensitive electronic components, some of which were funneled to the Russian military, prosecutors said.
By the sounds of it, standard run of the mill components that I can easily buy here in New Zealand, but which because of completely retarded ITAR laws in the US, are prohibited for sale to the Russian Federation. I remember having to sign an ITAR import declaration for a batch of x86 based Sun servers; something that I could build a functional equivalent of with no ITAR license from off the shelf components.
To make it sound scary and justify a 10 year jail sentence, they have to imply that the things sold are scary military secrets. In reality the guy is probably only guilty of violating the US trade sanctions against Russia for political reasons. Most likely Russian businesses want the banal parts for the same banal reasons that any other company would want them for, but have to go through back channels due to economic sanctions.
These articles and the prosecutor are quoting the justification given in the ITAR laws, and there doesn't have to be evidence that the equipment has actual military purpose, the enduser is military, all that is required to be guilty under the law is exporting something on the DoD's list to a country on the State Department's list. Such banal items as the plastic fiber used to make SPDIF cables are on the list, so it's pretty easy to run afoul of this law when exporting things from the US, or importing things from the US for re-export.
Plenty of pilots were shot at while enforcing the No-Fly zone during that period. Hell, Clinton even actively bombed Iraq in '98 to distract from his domestic performance issues. So, yes, he continued teh Gulf war for 8 years. He certainly never attempted to create a peace treaty.
An electronics exporter who violates ITAR and sells electronics abroad is not a secret agent, even if he misrepresented the purchases when he acquired those electronics.
And, how did he get this stuff? By "falsely claiming to be a traffic light manufacturer." Now, think about that for a second. The traffic lights in your neighborhood have "microprocessors which are frequently used in military systems, missile-guidance systems and detonation triggers" ? Well, they may (microprocessors can be put to many uses), but that doesn't mean that the traffic lights in your neighborhood contain secret military hardware. In fact, they certainly do not.
In other words, this guy was convicted of selling export-controlled hardware, which you can buy on the open market, not militarily secret hardware, which you cannot. There is a big difference (not least in that there near no exhaustive list of what is subject to ITAR control, and at times no easy way to determine if something is or is not export restricted), but you wouldn't know it from reading this article.