Stolen Defense Parts: Stemming the Tide, Following the Ring : Sailor Used Phone on Ship, Prosecutor Says

A sailor charged with stealing sophisticated aircraft equipment that was to be shipped to Iran was so brazen that he used the phone on the deck of a U.S. warship to tell a contact that he had procured the parts, a federal prosecutor said Monday.

Antonio G. Rodriguez, an aviation storekeeper on the amphibious assault ship Belleau Wood, made “several” calls from the ship to Franklin P. Agustin, who allegedly headed a smuggling ring that sold stolen military aircraft equipment to the Iranians, Assistant U.S. Atty. Phillip Halpern said.

“It was revealed in conversations between Rodriguez and Agustin that were electronically intercepted that he (Rodriguez) was involved in the stealing of military parts. When we traced the calls made to Agustin, we found that they were made from the deck of the Belleau Wood,” Halpern said.

A custody hearing originally scheduled Monday for Rodriguez, a petty officer, was postponed until 9 a.m. Friday. Federal prosecutors are expected to ask a U.S. magistrate to order Rodriguez held without bail and to transfer him to San Diego to face the charges.

The Belleau Wood is based in San Diego but has been in dry dock since March at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard at Bremerton, Wash. Rodriguez, 38, was arrested Sunday by FBI agents at the Naval Submarine Base in Bangor, Wash. Halpern said Rodriguez, a native of the Philippines living in San Diego, was AWOL at the time of his arrest. He is the seventh person and second active-duty sailor arrested in the case.

Others arrested for their alleged involvement in the San Diego-based smuggling ring include: Franklin P. Agustin, 47, a Canadian citizen and the alleged ringleader; his wife, Julie, 46; Primitivo Cayabyab, 36, a sailor and aviation storekeeper on the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk, and Pedro Quito, 60, a retired sailor who is now a civilian employee of the Navy.

Also taken into custody were Edgardo P. Agustin, 45, of New York, a brother of Franklin Agustin, and Saeid Asefi Inanlou, an Iranian national living in London, England. Edgardo Agustin is the only one who has been indicted in the case.

According to an affidavit released Monday, Rodriguez called Franklin Agustin on April 18 to tell him that he was “on duty now” and “would bring ‘them’ with him.” Agustin responded by saying that he wanted “to see a lot of small shrimps.”

Customs agents who monitored the conversations said the “small shrimps” referred to stolen military aircraft parts.

Federal officials in San Diego also raised for the first time the national-security implications of the smuggling ring. Halpern said that investigators intercepted 8 of 26 known shipments made by the ring to the Iranians since the investigation began in February, 1983.

“We have hard evidence that they had obtained the parametric amplifiers to the Phoenix missile,” Halpern said. “We recovered three parametric amplifiers from among the eight shipments we seized. At this time, we don’t know if any amplifiers were shipped among the others that we did not intercept.”

Quintin Villanueva, U.S. Customs regional commissioner, said last week that some of the intercepted shipments were allowed to be sent to Iran. But Villanueva said that no “critical parts,” including the parametric amplifiers, were allowed through. The amplifiers are a component of the Phoenix’s guiding system. They enable a pilot to fire several of the air-to-air missiles at once at different targets.

“These parts may represent a serious breach of security, enabling a foreign power to obtain military equipment heretofore available only to the United States,” Halpern said.

In Norfolk, Va., home of the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet, law enforcement officials said the investigation “is very much ongoing,” and has included the questioning of Chief Petty Officer Florenzio Ragasa, the brother-in-law of Franklin and Edgardo Agustin.

Ragasa’s Virginia Beach home was searched July 12 by federal agents, according to documents filed in federal court in Norfolk, and his ship, the guided missile cruiser Josephus Daniels, sailed Monday without him on board.

“At the request of the Department of Justice,” a Navy spokesman said, “we left him behind to make him available for any further questioning.”

In an affidavit made public in San Diego last week, federal agents said the first four shipments intercepted by customs agents “contained five different parts that were last traced to naval facilities in Virginia.”

Meanwhile, The Times has learned that federal officials now believe that some of the parts allegedly obtained by the Agustin ring were stolen from the sprawling Clark Air Base in the Philippines and the Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach, Va.

The Oceana Naval Air Station, which is near Ragasa’s home, is one of two F-14 training bases in the United States. The other is at Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego. Sources familiar with the investigation have told The Times that it appears that some of the stolen parts came from the naval station at Oceana.

Halpern said the investigation of the ring’s activities is continuing. Other sources said that, once the investigation began in 1983, the ring members’ lack of sophistication made the investigators’ job easy.

“The wiretaps helped a lot because most of the time they openly discussed what they were doing,” said a source who did not want to be identified. “But when you’re talking about a paper trail, well, it was a hot one. These guys were so stupid that they made payments to each other with cashier’s checks.”