Stealing even commercial microchips which they can easily buy…
Hata hizo nuclear bomb zao ni American tech tu.
[SIZE=7]F.B.I. Says Russians Smuggled Out U.S. Microchips[/SIZE]
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
MOSCOW — Russian officials had a muted response on Thursday to a potentially embarrassing revelation by the Federal Bureau of Investigationthat 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 [SIZE=6][COLOR=rgb(184, 49, 47)]commercially available chips from the United States, after years of failing to create a computer industry here.[/SIZE]
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.”
[COLOR=rgb(226, 80, 65)]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.