Engineer accused of stealing F-35 fighter secrets for Iran

Daniel Flitton
Published: January 19, 2014

The freight cost was barely $1700. But nestled inside an otherwise bland shipping container sat a cargo of secret blueprints sensitive enough to put to waste billions of Australian taxpayer dollars.

American Mozaffar Khazaee is accused of stealing design plans for the Joint Strike Fighter - the F-35A Lightning II, billed as the next generation in stealth air warfare - and seeking to ship them to Iran. Thousands of pages of engine schematics, technical manuals, diagrams and other as yet undisclosed detail had been secreted away in 44 boxes of documents.

Also inside one box of the illicit stash was a vacuum cleaner, cooking pots and mundane personal items.

An engineer and US citizen since 1991, the 59-year-old Khazaee was sacked in August from a private defence company working on the troubled Joint Strike Fighter project in a round of redundancies.

He was arrested last week when US authorities stopped him from boarding a flight to Germany, bound for his native Iran, following a two-month clandestine investigation into his attempt to ship a container to the southern Iranian city of Hamadan.

A spokeswoman confirmed the Australian Defence Department is aware of the case but declined to comment, stating the investigation is continuing.

It is understood US officials have become especially forthcoming briefing allies about security breaches, chastened by Edward Snowden's leaks about its surveillance programs.

Lockheed Martin - the company building the fighter and promising to the deliver the first Australian aircraft later this year - also declined to comment, other than to note it was co-operating fully with the investigation. Australia has committed to buying 14 of the US-built jets at a cost of $3.2 billion - with a further 58 under consideration - although the development is being plagued by delays, cost overruns and design faults.

China has several times been accused of hacking computers containing sensitive features of the plane.

Had the blueprints fallen into Iranian hands they almost certainly would have found their way to Russia and China - a potential fatal compromise as these countries manufacture the only aircraft the F-35A is likely to face in battle.

Mr Khazaee's job on the Joint Strike Fighter project was to test the strength and durability for the turbine engine - along with that of another highly secretive fighter, the F-22 Raptor.

A sealed affidavit by US Homeland Security officials, used to obtain an arrest warrant for him, has now been released by court order and gives a fascinating insight to his apparent plans to ship the documents to Iran - and how the scheme came unstuck.

But the affidavit claims not to outline all the facts known in the case - only enough to lay charges - and does not allege Mr Khazaee was working under direction of Iran's government, but visited the country five times in the past seven years.

It is also not clear whether he or others may have scanned electronic copies of the documents before the shipment was intercepted. According to the affidavit, in November Mr Khazaee sent the boxes by truck from Connecticut on the US east coast to California.

His mistake appears to have been marking the shipment as destined for Iran - rather than a transit country - and it was selected for inspection by customs officials.

While the container was marked ''House Hold Goods'', inspectors discovered the trove of sensitive reports described as ''voluminous documents and other material containing technical data''.

Mr Khazaee had left his Connecticut home but was discovered by surveillance agents at a former residence in Indianapolis. The documents in his shipment had been marked with export restrictions and other classifications as the property of at least three defence contractors and it is unclear how they were smuggled out of the supposedly secure worksite.

Investigators found Mr Khazaee's name written in red ink on at least one document, and estimated the value of one technical report at more than $350,000.

He is alleged to have told the freight company he was shipping the boxes to his brother-in-law to hold for his return to Iran. If convicted, he faces at least 10 years in prison.