Missiles were Tehran’s top priority because they were cheaper to build and operate than fighter planes. Small rockets and missiles could be easily shared with mobile teams of Hezbollah and Hamas fighters.
Iranian missiles lacked range and accuracy. Most of the Iran-made projectiles aimed at Israel landed harmlessly in the desert. “The limited lethality and accuracy of most of Iran’s rockets and shorter-range ballistic missiles mean that most Iranian missiles cannot hit a point target and would not produce significant damage if fired into an area target,” Cordesman wrote in a white paper published in October 2014 by CSIS. “They lack advanced precision guidance systems or terminal homing capabilities that could make them more political weapons and sources of intimidation than effective war fighting systems.”
When LeRoux’s emissaries came calling, Iran’s DIO was trying to develop missiles capable of precision strikes and with longer ranges, even to intercontinental missiles that could strike the United States. The DIO was working on a land-attack cruise missile system, a formidable threat to all its neighbors, and was seeking improved accuracy for its close-range ballistic missile systems. Its personnel were searching through multiple clandestine channels for advanced missile navigation technology. Smart missiles would be a game changer for Iran’s perpetual conflict with Israel and for Iran’s ally Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who was struggling to win a civil war that had killed at least half a million people and driven millions of people from their homes.
LeRoux said his emissaries were told that if LeRoux came up with a guidance system for Iran’s short- and medium-range rockets and missiles, he would be paid $100 million in gold.
LeRoux was all in, calculating that he could make himself indispensable to the Iranians. It wasn’t just the money, though $100 million was an attractive figure. He embraced “projects,” as he called new ventures, with a passion he never expressed for his children, wives, lovers, or kin. For him, the Iranian opportunity was like walking into a room full of fresh chessboards. He saw it as an opportunity to scale up to a larger arena—from weapons to weapons systems and eventually weapons of mass destruction.
He immersed himself in the world of clandestine missile design. He wasn’t a rocket scientist yet, but he saw no reason he couldn’t become one. He hadn’t met a problem he didn’t think would yield to him. He wasn’t shy about letting the Iranians know it.
He sent word to Tehran that the shopping list was unrealistic. Some of the items could be bought only in the United States, which had stringent export controls, over and above international sanctions, for militarily useful items. U.S. enforcement agencies were aggressive. Even if the DIO got a sample or two, Iran’s engineers and manufacturers didn’t have the expertise to copy them. U.S. and NATO-level weapons systems were hard to build, hard to keep up, and ruinously expensive.
He offered an alternative: missile technology simpler than what the Iranians wanted but better than what they had. Modern missile guidance systems achieved precision by a combination of GPS, inertial navigation, and radar technologies. Iran could not legally obtain GPS receiver technology and also certain inertial navigation aids because of an international anti-proliferation accord called the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), adopted by the industrialized nations (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States). The ITAR rules at the time required the chips in commercial GPS receivers to be degraded so that they stopped working when they reached 60,000 feet altitude and 1,000 knots velocity—in other words, in a missile—or when they were in an unmanned airborne device carrying a 500-kilogram payload.
LeRoux said he told the Iranians he believed he could create a GPS-based navigation system “ideally suited for deployment in low-cost mass-produced tactical or ballistic missiles.” He said he could reprogram the chips in cheap commercial GPS receivers and turn off the anti-proliferation restrictions so that the Iranians could mass-produce small, smart rockets and missiles.
If he succeeded, the consequences would be dire. In 2017, the U.S. Air Force’s National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC) reported, “If the Iranians and North Koreans use satellite navigation systems (such as GPS) onboard their CRBMs [close range ballistic missiles], then the miss distance of these CRBMs could be reduced to tens of meters. High accuracy of CRBMs would be a force multiplier for both the Iranian and North Korean artillery forces by giving them precision strike capability against high priority targets.”
In other words, the U.S. Air Force believed that an Iranian ballistic missile with good GPS guidance could strike targets within a circle as small as thirty-three feet across. Its controllers could pinpoint a specific building, even a specific room in that building. They could aim at a particular car or truck conveying a particular military commander, spy, or scientist.
Listening to LeRoux, Cindric and Stouch grasped immediately the implications of his missile navigation research, which he recited in a matter-of-fact voice, as if he were talking about designing next-generation hay balers. If Iran achieved its goal, its arsenal would advance from a tactical to a strategic threat to Israel and the Middle Eastern nations. Anyone who wielded so-called smart rockets could program them to strike specific buildings and critical infrastructure targets such as water purification plants, command-and-control hubs, communications links, airfields, military installations, and more. Batteries of smart rockets could overwhelm Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, cripple other defenses and government functions, and inflict incalculable civilian casualties. Israel would strike back furiously at Iran, and the conflict would escalate, embroiling the Persian Gulf nations in a hot war in the Middle East, this one involving at least two nuclear powers—Israel, certainly, and, possibly, Iran.
They could only imagine the cost in human suffering.
To carry out the project, LeRoux assembled a technical team and set it up with a lab in a warehouse in the province of Cavite. An electronics engineer and a computer programmer were already on his payroll, developing a cell phone intercept device he called the “X station.” It was supposed to alert when the Philippines authorities were skulking around his offices and research facilities. He was already paying hefty bribes and didn’t want the cops or military to pile on to shake him down for more than he was already paying. “Every little while the Filipinos try to fleece me for money,” he complained to Jack in Rio. “I mean they try to fuck my ass.” He certainly didn’t want the Iran missile project, which was far more extensive and potentially lucrative, to be interrupted.
He reassigned the technical specialists to missiles and, during 2010, brought in twenty to twenty-five more engineers, computer programmers, and scientists, mostly from Eastern Europe. These people were his research and development team. Essentially, he became an outside contractor reporting to Iran’s DIO, just as Boeing, Lockheed, Motorola, and other American corporations collaborate with the Pentagon.
He broke up the project into thirty or forty components. Besides the guidance system project, he agreed to have his team design a cruise missile, something like the U.S. Navy’s Tomahawk cruise missile. The Iranians wanted their Tomahawk-clone cruise missile to have a range of 1,000 miles, plus stealth capability to evade radar. LeRoux boldly told the Iranians that the stealth missile would take several advanced components and a couple of years, but it could be done.
He did not divulge the scope and true aims of the surreptitious Iran project to the engineers who staffed it. He told them various lies, for instance, that they were working on a “spectral analysis” project or that they were building a new kind of drone to be used to search for mineral deposits in the remote reaches of the Mindanao islands.
The Iranian DIO officials seemed to believe that LeRoux was on the right track, because they asked him to move his R&D team to Tehran. LeRoux refused, saying that his Eastern Europeans didn’t look Iranian and would be instantly spotted by Western spy services. Also, he said he didn’t want his people to travel to Iran with disks that might be
seized.
As usual, he had his own agenda. According to Jack, he was going to double-dip. He figured that if he could make $100 million from the Iranians, he could make the same amount from other buyers. He intended to piggyback on his smart missile research to create inexpensive knockoffs—the missile equivalents of Saturday night specials. Jack believed, based on some hints LeRoux dropped, that LeRoux intended to sell cheap precision-guided rockets and missiles to African and Asian warlords, dictators, and guerrilla armies. Who wouldn’t want a smart missile? Possessing just a few of them would serve for bragging rights and blackmail.
He didn’t tell the Iranians any of that. He wanted to preserve the option of using Iran as his bolt hole. He was getting worried that the Philippines officials he had bribed wouldn’t stay bought. In late 2009, after the Captain Ufuk was seized for gun-running in Bataan, LeRoux learned that agents of the Australian Federal Police were investigating him. Australia had strict gun control laws and put a high priority on arms trafficking in the region. LeRoux prepared to retaliate against the Australian cops if they caused him trouble. He bribed an official in the Philippines Department of Foreign Affairs 50,000 pesos, about $1,200, to slip him a dossier on the SOP Australian Federal Police agent posted to the Australian embassy in Manila. The dossier contained the Australian cop’s home address and the names of his wife and two daughters. LeRoux said he thought about having Dave Smith stalk the man but decided against the idea because he might be discovered.
LeRoux did his own cyberstalking by gaining access to an Internet chat group where wives of American and other diplomats posted to Manila discussed their families and social plans. He didn’t say what he planned to do with this information, but his casual tone implied that he saw nothing wrong with trolling the spouses and children of law enforcement officials and diplomats.
He got more leaked documents from his Filipino sources and realized that the DEA agents in Minneapolis were onto him. He knew he might need to ask Iran for asylum. Iranian citizenship would make him the ultimate untouchable.
To please his Iranian client, he set up an FTP server—a sort of private cloud—where his team would post plans and diagrams as they developed. Iranian scientists and engineers at the DIO could hop on the server and download whatever they liked.
He programmed the server so it wouldn’t create a cybertrail. It didn’t log when the Iranian scientists entered the system and downloaded documents. This was another security measure: if his server were ever compromised or seized, no one could determine what missile technology the Iranians had obtained through LeRoux.
In 2010, LeRoux delivered his first commissioned products to the Iranians, two explosives formulas, both based on chemicals derived from unmonitored household chemicals.
The first formula used scrap silver jewelry and some chemical salts. The second was based on coffee sweetener that contained erythritol tetranitrate, ETN. It was related to pentaerythritol tetranitrate, PETN, a component of military plastic explosives.
The coffee sweetener formula was especially insidious. Police and border control agents in most countries were trained to recognize common ingredients in IEDs—ammonium nitrate fertilizer, for instance, pool chlorine, and brake fluid. They weren’t told to look for a stash of coffee sweetener.
Yet this coffee sweetener bomb might pack a wallop. LeRoux calculated that it could reach a detonation velocity of 7,000 feet per second, compared to 8,000 feet per second for C4, the standard military explosive.
The product fulfilled the DIO request for a recipe that could be transmitted to terrorist cells a long way from Iran. A terror cell’s bomb maker could buy the ingredients at a local grocery and whip together a serviceable IED, with no need for smuggling, bribing, ducking, and covering.
The DIO officials paid up as agreed—$5 million in gold bars, delivered in late 2010 to Dave Smith aboard LeRoux’s yacht, the Mou Man Tai, in international waters off the coast of Indonesia. LeRoux never saw the gold bars. He said Smith stole them, which is why he had to terminate Smith. It was just business.
For LeRoux, the coffee sweetener explosives project was a one-off. It generated cash flow for salaries for his team while the more expansive and lucrative missile navigation project was under way. It was a practical short-term means to a long-term triumph, or so he hoped.
He acquired certain American-made electronic components and technologies on the DIO shopping list, in violation of U.S. and international sanctions. LeRoux told his Kentucky-based purchasing agent, Jonathan Wall, to buy some items that could have either military or civilian uses and that were regulated for export as so-called “dual use” goods enforced by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Because sanctions banned the sales of dual-use items to Iran, LeRoux had Wall acquire them and ship them out of the United States. Wall’s purchases included jet engines for testing; X-Plane flight simulator software; GPS chips; a HEATCON carbon fiber oven, presumably for nose cone construction; potassium perchlorate, nitric acid, and liquid mercury; a fume hood; vacuum pumping equipment; and electronic capacitors.
LeRoux told the DEA agents that he had no idea why the Iranians wanted those things. Nearly all could be used in weapons systems, in some cases, a nuclear weapons program, (though Iran had long denied that it was making nuclear weapons). For instance, the liquid mercury ordered by the Iranians could be destined for innocuous items such as thermometers. But it was also essential to a process for making lithium-6, an isotope that played a key role in producing tritium, an unstable form of hydrogen gas that could enhance a nuclear device’s blast and cut its weight for missile flight.
Similarly, a vacuum pump had many applications, some innocent, but one was not: pumping the air out of a centrifuge used to enrich uranium for the core of a nuclear device.
Capacitors are electronic one-off switches. A simple capacitor makes the flash of light in a copying machine. Sophisticated high-speed electronic capacitors are used as, among other things, as nuclear triggers, to slam bits of fissile material together to assemble a critical mass at the core of a nuclear implosion bomb.
Cindric and Stouch pressed LeRoux to explain what exactly he did with these items and several others that might have applications in weapons of mass destruction. LeRoux claimed that he hadn’t consciously helped the Iranians develop nuclear weapons—as far as he knew. What his clients did with goods he purchased for them was beyond his control. In law, the concept is called willful ignorance or willful blindness. For an arms merchant, it was just good business. Ask “why” and he might lose the sale.
Even as he was moving into major weapons systems, LeRoux took on a few more small jobs to get something he needed, or just to stretch. The more chessboards, the better. On a separate track, he was developing components for small, portable weapons of terror for a completely unrelated client, the New People’s Army, an armed communist separatist group that occupied part of Batangas Province, about sixty miles south of Manila. The U.S. government had designated the NPA a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
Somewhere along the way, LeRoux had bought a boatyard in Batangas Province to service his own yachts and those of others moored in the area. It was his only legitimate business, though bent to a nefarious end, to maintain his smuggling fleet. In 2010, LeRoux got worried that the boatyard would come under attack by NPA guerrillas. He decided to get an insurance policy. He approached a man he knew only by a nom de guerre, the Accountant, and offered to pay the guerrillas for protection.
The Accountant asked for money and lethal goods—explosives, blasting caps, igniters, and cell phone detonators. LeRoux gave him some C4 military explosives from his inventory at Red, White and Blue Arms. He had no ready-made detonators, so he decided to make some himself. This wasn’t a high-tech job, but—why not? Wasn’t the customer always right? And besides, LeRoux was curious to see if he could do it, hands-on, on top of his desk. He found some instructions someplace, probably on the web, crafted two or three detonators from cell phones, and handed them over to the Accountant
.
The detonators apparently worked, to LeRoux’s delight. He said he got a call from the Accountant that a bridge in Batangas had been blown up. But the news wasn’t all good. The Accountant added that this was a message that LeRoux wasn’t paying enough for protection. He had to send the NPA 50,000 pesos a month, about $1,200, which he did, for about a year. Later, the Accountant told him that a Philex Mining company office had been blown up, more proof, LeRoux thought, that his detonators worked.
If LeRoux had wanted to affect political change through violence, he could have been the dark world’s new Q, the gadget guy of the James Bond franchise. He could have crafted an array of clever electronics for the terror underground. He could have enlisted customers in twenty or thirty countries.
LeRoux didn’t want to go into the business of retail violence, inflicting casualties one or two bombs at a time. This wasn’t because he had grown a conscience, far from it, but because it was dull and repetitive, not innovative. People had been bombing bridges since the invention of black powder. Cell phone detonators were as old as cell phones themselves.
His purpose was to do something white-hot brilliant, like nothing before it, and very, very big. He wanted to be king of dystopia, beyond anyone’s imagination. When he was onto a new project, he got a rush of energy that came out as a brainstorm, and the brainstorms took him in new directions that were exhilarating. He had to generate awe. Not fear, not admiration. Awe. That’s what a god did, and he was getting closer.
While working on the missiles and detonators, he had a brainstorm, one of the best yet. Owning a boatyard on a remote, guerrilla-infested stretch of coastline wasn’t a liability. It was an asset that would solve a problem he had been pondering.
His engineers were asking for certain rocket fuel chemicals for testing. These included potassium perchlorate, to be used as an oxidizer and an igniter for solid rocket engines; ammonium perchlorate, another oxidizer; HTPB, a binder; and powdered aluminum, an explosion intensifier. These items were available in Hong Kong but could not be imported into the Philippines. Border control authorities would be watching for them and might seize them.
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