Probe Targets Aydin Corp. Unit Over Army Radio Tests

Aydin Corp., an electronics defense contractor, said Thursday that its West Coast Division is a target in a grand jury probe of alleged falsified test results for a U.S. Army radio.

In a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Aydin disclosed that it was notified last month by the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California that it “is now one of the targets of a grand jury investigation.”

“We don’t know who the others are,” Robert A. Clancy, Aydin’s secretary and general counsel, said in a telephone interview Thursday.

A call to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco for comment was answered by a recording. However, federal prosecutors generally are barred from discussing grand jury investigations.

According to the filing, Aydin said its San Jose, Calif.-based West Coast Division has been under U.S. investigation since November, 1989, “for alleged irregularities involving the testing of the GRC-222 radio manufactured and shipped to the U.S. Army.”

FBI agents seized several boxes of records from the San Jose facility in 1989.

Clancy said the investigation resulted from test data allegedly faked by a low-level employee during a series of tests of the radio, which Clancy said was used by Army troops during the Gulf War.

“Most all the people involved in the production and manufacture and testing of that contract with the Army have been interviewed (by investigators) and quite a few of them have been subpoenaed to testify” before the grand jury, Clancy said.

“We still stand by our original investigation, conducted in 1989, that no management of the company--senior or middle management--was aware of, or involved in or condoned or knew anything about the test results,” said Clancy, speaking from Aydin headquarters in Horsham, Pa., outside Philadelphia.

The GRC-222, which Aydin developed, is a digital radio selected by the Army as a standard field radio, according to the company, which also makes electronics systems, computer display terminals and radar systems.

In 1986, Aydin signed the $57.4-million agreement with the Army to manufacture the radios.