8 Arrested in Scheme to Sell Arms to Iraq

Six former high-ranking officials in the Polish government and two Southern California men have been arrested in a U.S. Customs Service sting operation for allegedly trying to sell $96 million worth of arms to Iraq, federal officials said Friday.

The alleged international arms ring was uncovered by customs agents posing as front men for the Iraqi government, authorities said.

The Poles, who included a former third-ranked general in the Polish army and two former deputy Cabinet ministers, were arrested at a Frankfurt hotel March 10 as they signed the $96-million deal to ship the agents 4,000 grenade launchers, 1,000 portable antiaircraft missiles and 73,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles, authorities said.

The plot’s reputed mastermind, Ronald James Hendron, 51, of El Toro, and its alleged financier, Jehmin Lah, 44, of Newport Beach, were apprehended in New York City a day later as they flew in from Europe, officials said.

“Our goal was to find people willing to sell arms to the Iraqis,” said Tanya Hill, the assistant U.S. attorney in Brooklyn who is prosecuting the case. “We found some.”

Such weapons sales are illegal under U.S. and German laws, and the arrests dramatize Western concerns that the financially strapped former Soviet Bloc countries have been stepping up sales of arms--one of their few easily negotiable commodities--to developing countries.

Not all the weapons were conventional arms: Hendron promised the undercover agents that he could provide uranium, bomb triggers and even nuclear bombs, according to federal court complaints.

Hendron, who describes himself as a licensed international arms dealer, denied any wrongdoing in a lengthy interview with The Times. He said the deal, as planned, was to send arms legally to the Philippines, not to Iraq.

He said once meetings began between the undercover agents and his group, the agents changed their story, and said the arms would be going to Iraq.

Hendron said that it was the undercover agents who demanded that the East Bloc officials supply nuclear weapons, including a nuclear bomb, but that they had never intended to do so.

Arrested in Germany were Jerzy Napiorkowski, deputy minister of finance in the last Polish Communist government; Wojciech Baranski, former deputy chief of staff in the Polish army; Jan Gorecki, a former Polish diplomat in Washington; Zbigniew Grabowski, former director of the Polish technology office; Jerzy Brzostek, former deputy minister of the Polish Housing Ministry; and Rajmund Szwonder, general manager of the Lucznik armament factory in Radom, Poland. The factory is the largest manufacturer of Kalashnikov assault rifles in Eastern Europe.

U.S. officials have filed papers seeking to extradite the six to face export-law violation charges in the United States. The story of the sting, pieced together through documents and interviews, was also detailed in today’s editions of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s largest newspaper.

In January, 1991, customs agents made their initial contact with Hendron, who told them that his El Toro-based company could provide a variety of weapons from East European sources. This contact led to eventual introductions to several Polish arms firms, including an arms broker called ATS, a manufacturer called Radom Group that was selling Kalashnikov assault weapons and a third concern, called Urbil, that offered a range of hardware.

In November, Hendron allegedly placed a $43,000 order for a “trial shipment” of 100 Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles to demonstrate that he could deliver the weapons.

The rifles were shipped from Bulgaria through Rotterdam to New York, where they arrived in wooden crates that identified them as “technical equipment.” They were seized by customs inspectors.

But the shipment was only the prelude to the far bigger deal that the undercover agents hoped to complete with the arms dealers at the Frankfurter Hof hotel two weeks ago.

Most of the arms for the final deal were to come from weapons stocks that the Soviet army had built up in Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.

The arms dealers planned to send the shipment with papers that described the cargo as bound for the Philippines.

Hendron’s business partner in Poland, a Polish-born American named Stan Kinman, and other arms dealers introduced the undercover agents to a German sea captain, Heiko Luikenga, whom they said they had used “many times in past deals,” according to court papers.

Two Polish arms dealers at the meeting promised “that the ship would incur no interference because the highest levels of Polish government were involved in the transaction,” documents show.

Prosecutor Hill declined comment when asked about evidence that any officials of Poland’s current government were involved in the case. Officials of the Polish Embassy in Washington could not be reached for comment.

Court papers describe how one of the undercover agents, at a March 7 meeting in Frankfurt, asked why Grabowski was “so quiet”--and suggested that he might be an undercover agent of the FBI or CIA.

Hendron replied, according to the papers, that the former Polish technology chief was an adviser who had been involved in many similar deals and “has broken every law in Poland.”

Hill said it was unclear whether Hendron actually had access to nuclear weapons, as he claimed. “He may have just been puffing,” she said.

Hendron was charged with making false statements and conspiracy to violate the arms-export act. Conviction on the two felonies could bring 10 years in jail. Lah, who is a Korean-born resident alien, was charged with conspiracy to violate the arms-export law, which carries a maximum five-year penalty.

After their arrest March 11 at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, the two were jailed, but released the same day after they made bail. Preliminary hearings are scheduled for April 8, Hill said.

Gazeta Wyborcza, the Polish newspaper, today quoted the chairman of ATS, Jerzy Wojtysiak, as saying that four representatives of his company went to Frankfurt two weeks ago as “financial advisers” to broker a deal between the Radom arms factory and U.S. purchasers.

But he denied the company was a party to any deal to sell arms to the Iraqis.

Times staff writers Dan Weikel and Greg Crouch contributed to this report.

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